British Columbia Real Estate Investment Review (Mid-Year 2020)
15 septembre 2020Investment in British Columbia’s commercial real estate market in the first half of 2020 slumped to its lowest level since 2015, a jolting end to a four-year run triggered by a global pandemic that temporarily halted institutional investment activity worldwide and wreaked havoc on national economies around the globe. Despite the substantial economic and societal turmoil wrought by COVID-19 since it was declared a public health emergency in BC in March 2020, there were 84 deals valued at $1.5B completed in the first half of 2020. While this marked a substantial departure from the dollar volume recorded in the first halves of the previous four years (first-half investment in office, retail and industrial assets surpassed $2.7B in each category between 2016 and 2019), deal velocity in first-half 2020 remained comparable to previous years and actually marked the fourth highest number of completed deals on record. Only the first halves of 2019 (85), 2018 (102) and 2017 (109) recorded a greater number of transactions than 2020 (84). The $1.5B figure does not include multi-family sales, commercial land or multi-family residential land sales, which Avison Young tracks separately. (Avison Young tracked retail, office and industrial deals valued at more than $5M for this report.)