Growing interest rates, turning into rising costs of capital, have slowed investment activity across the commercial real estate spectrum, CBRE recently wrote. But the rain of pain hasn't fallen on the great and small alike. Instead, it has generally struck the biggest, not the smallest.

Various MSCI reports over the last two years have remarked on how transaction volumes of smaller deals have been hit less than those of larger deals. CBRE analyzed the MSCI Real Capital Analytics database of trades by quartile, saying that it helped determine "property value declines on top-tier pricing."

The differences were highly dependent on property type and were calculated as a change in 2024 annualized sales volume compared to volume in 2021.