While the second year into the COVID-19 pandemic has been full of both hopeful and dispiriting turns—a largely successful mass vaccination campaign, the arrival of a highly contagious new variant just in time to disrupt the holiday season for an already pandemic-exhausted population—the outlook for the commercial real estate industry in 2021 turned decidedly brighter. A wave of distressed properties never materialized, even in the battered hotel and retail sectors. Corporate occupiers did not forswear the office en masse till the end of time. Multifamily and industrial sectors had one of their best years on record. Thought it all, we tried to use our galleries to give our readers a sense of what was going on throughout the country. Using both data from outside firms, including Yardi Matrix, CBRE and JLL, and our own interviews with industry insiders, we looked at which multifamily markets were set to see the biggest rent increases by the end of the year, where office landlords were still able to raise rental rates and how office tenants were handling their returns to the office, how various investors have been raising equity in an environment disrupted by COVID-19 and what the outlook is for commercial real estate in 2022. In the following slides, we review some of our most important galleries of the year.
