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The U.S. commercial real estate market released some pent-up energy in September after investors got the quarter-point federal funds rate cut they’d been hoping for.
Most notably, commercial property listings surged 25 percent across the country last month compared to August, according to research by property analytics firm LightBox.
Supply volume has returned to where it was around the end of the second quarter of 2025, before listings slumped over the summer, briefly stymying the flow of deals.
The flurry of new listings is one reason LightBox’s CRE Activity Index hit a new 2025 peak of 116.8 at the end of September compared to 104.4 the previous month. CRE activity is also up year-over-year from 102.7 in September 2024, according to the index, which measures listings, pre-transaction due diligence and lender appraisals against a baseline derived from the first quarter of 2021.
The data from all three categories show improved liquidity and rising confidence, said Manus Clancy, LightBox’s data strategy head, in a statement.
The August slowdown was most likely a “short-term lull, not a trend reversal,” as some had feared, Clancy said.
To get a pulse on pre-transaction due diligence activity, the researchers measure the volume of new Phase I Environmental Site Assessments filed across the country. That volume maintained a monthly growth rate of about 1 percent in September, slightly above the pace of filings in August and July, according to the report.
The third prong of the index is lender-driven commercial appraisals, which serve as a barometer of financing confidence and often directly reflect changes to the interest rate environment, according to the report’s methodology.
On that front, there was plenty of cause for optimism last month.
The volume of new property appraisals ordered by lenders ticked up by about 1 percent last month, likely in anticipation of the Federal Reserve’s first interest rate cut in nine months, when the federal funds rate dropped 25 basis points to between 4 and 4.25 percent.
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