Real estate mergers and acquisitions dropped in 2025 to the lowest annual total dollar value since 2012, but a pending megadeal in the data-center space and a liquid debt market have pros confident that 2026 will be a banner year.
Seven deals totaling $15.14 billion closed last year, down from nine deals worth a combined $34.09 billion in 2024, according to Real Estate Alert’s annual review of the sector. Looking ahead, however, a BlackRock partnership’s planned $40 billion takeover of Aligned Data Centers and several other pending deals are poised to triple last year’s volume and make 2026 the biggest year since 2022, when more than $100 billion of M&A deals closed.
Eastdil Secured, which led the race for top advisors at midyear, held on to first place in the full-year table. It’s the first time the firm has won the ranking, besting a second-place finish for full-year 2023. Eastdil last year worked on three deals totaling $11.45 billion, good for a market share of 76%. That edged out Bank of America, which advised on three transactions valued at $11.15 billion, for a market share of 74%.
Citigroup and Newmark tied for third place, with each having worked on two deals ($8.95 billion, 59% market share). Wells Fargo rounded out the top five with two deals ($6.20 billion, 41%). No other investment bank or brokerage had a market share over 33%.
In Real Estate Alert’s three-year ranking of investment banks, BofA is the winner with 10 deals totaling $67.18 billion, representing a 77% market share. JPMorgan Chase was second (nine deals, $62.03 billion, 71%), followed by Wells (12 deals, $54.02 billion, 62%), Citi (seven deals, $47.05 billion, 54%), Morgan Stanley (six deals, $34.89 billion, 40%) and Goldman Sachs (five deals, $34.76 billion, 40%). No other firm worked on more than $30 billion of transactions.
Some 24 deals totaling $86.99 billion closed from 2023 to 2025. By comparison, 36 deals worth a combined $201.6 billion closed in the prior three-year period.
The relative dearth of activity over the past few years has advisors feeling the pump is primed for a resurgence of dealmaking.
“Our pipeline … feels more robust than it was coming into ’25, so we are optimistic it will be a more active year,” Eastdil managing director Kristin Gannon said.
Cedrik Lachance, director of research at Green Street, the parent of Real Estate Alert, described the market as having two speeds.
“There’s a prospectively vibrant market for small-cap REITs and a much less enthusiastic market for bigger companies,” he said. “The small-cap companies are generally easier, obviously, to absorb.”
Several factors are responsible for the muted tally of the past few years. Last year volatility around tariffs played a large role.
“It’s hard to effectuate take-privates when you have this level of economic volatility,” said Andrew Warin, head of Newmark’s capital-markets strategic advisory group. “What’s the premium I should be paying?”
REITs continue to trade at discounts to their net asset values, and when an M&A transaction premium is applied, an entity-level deal may not provide enough of a return to justify the investment from a buyer. To that end, several REITs have executed what Steve Hentschel, a senior managing director and head of the M&A and corporate-advisory group at JLL, calls “breakup strategies.”
He pointed to Elme Communities, a multifamily REIT that is liquidating, as an example. Instead of executing an M&A deal, the REIT sold a $1.6 billion apartment portfolio to Cortland.
Aimco, another residential REIT, said in November that after hiring Morgan Stanley for a strategic review, it determined that selling its remaining assets in a series of transactions likely would “deliver superior value to shareholders, as compared to other strategic alternatives currently available or by maintaining
the status quo.”
“There’s not as much core capital from an equity perspective available in the system,” Hentschel said. “And so that’s leading to breakup strategies to maximize value. There usually are bids for a whole company, but they’re at a discounted price.”
Another headwind, said Green Street’s Lachance, is that opportunistic buyers could look at lenders selling distressed – and perhaps more importantly, written-down – debt as a more yield-driven approach to making real estate bets.
“We might have even more banks that are looking to unload assets that have become burdensome to them,” he said. “There are places that you’re probably better off looking at lenders.”
One point market pros agree on: The debt market is open for business. Despite what felt like a volatile year for the 10-year Treasury rate, it’s been remarkably steady for six months, despite geopolitical waves and public disagreements between the White House and the Federal Reserve.
“When there were 50- to 75-bp swings one way or the other over the course of a week, it made it hard for anything to transact,” JLL’s Hentschel said.
In addition, banks and life companies have become more active lenders, and CMBS debt, long a key for M&A deals, totaled $125.78 billion last year, the most since before the Great Recession. The average prediction from a panel of market pros surveyed by sister publication Commercial Mortgage Alert forecast a tally of $140 billion this year.
“Investors have every opportunity … to execute on a merger or take-private,” Eastdil’s Gannon said. “The ingredients are there.”
Real Estate Alert tallies acquisitions of entities that primarily own income-producing commercial properties in the U.S. It excludes single-property and portfolio transactions; sales of advisory, management or brokerage firms; roll-ups of investment vehicles; and other reorganizations involving affiliated entities in which ownership doesn’t change substantially.
Advisors are given full credit for transactions if they represent either the buyer or the seller. As a result, two or more advisors often receive full credit for a deal. Investment banks are given credit only when expressly named as “advisor” or “financial advisor” to a transaction. Advisors don’t receive credit if their duties are limited to providing fairness opinions.
