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# The Buyer Is Back. Your Price Isn't.
- URL: https://www.christopherrising.com/the-buyer-is-back-your-price-isnt/
- Published: 2026-09-24T12:29:54.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-24T12:29:54.000Z
- Description: Volume is up, the private buyer is in the market, and it's still a terrible time for most sellers to sell. Both are true for the same reason.
- Author: Christopher Rising

Now that we're getting back into the conferences of the fall and the push toward the end of the year, I keep thinking about the cocktail conversations from the last few years. To me, the constant line has been: "there are no buyers." It was true in 2023\. It hasn't been true for a while, and the numbers have been pretty clear the last three quarters.

Volume is up. Industrial did about $32 billion in the second quarter, up better than a quarter from a year ago, and single-asset sales have grown by double digits four quarters running. July was the strongest July in twenty years. Lenders are back too, competing on spread rather than leverage, which is what a functioning debt market looks like. Anyone waiting for the buyer to return can stop waiting. They're here.

And it's still a terrible time to sell.

Both of those are true at once, and they're true for the same reason.

The headline volume is made of very few deals. Strip out the data centers and the three take-privates that closed in May, and July's "best in twenty years" was up about 1 percent. Deal count for the year is essentially flat. The dollars are moving in a corner of the market with almost no owners in it: a handful of REITs, a few data center platforms, the sovereign and pension money that writes billion-dollar checks. If you own one building, or six, none of that is your market. Your market is the private buyer. The 1031 exchanger, the family, the operator who wants a roll-up door and a yard. That buyer did about $71 billion in the second quarter against roughly $22 billion from institutions. They're in the market now, and they have a problem with your price.

The problem isn't the building. It's what that buyer can get without it.

The ten-year Treasury crossed 5 percent last week for the first time in three years, and the Fed hiked, with most of the committee penciling in another one before the year is out. A stabilized industrial building trades around a 6 cap right now, give or take. Office, wherever it trades at all, is priced off distress. So the private buyer looking at your warehouse is being asked to take leasing risk, roof risk, and a 57 percent loan-to-value for something like 100 basis points over what the Treasury pays them for doing nothing. In 2021 that same buyer was getting a 4 cap against a Treasury at a point and a half, and rents were growing 10 percent a year. The spread was 250 and the growth was free. Today the spread is 100 and industrial rent growth has settled near 2 percent. That's not a buyer strike. That's a buyer doing math.

We underwrite the same way. We'd be foolish not to. When we look at a multi-tenant industrial park in Texas or Nevada, the first number in the model isn't the seller's whisper price. It's the bond. Then the flat-rent case. Then the equity we have to bring because the lender is holding the line on leverage. What's left is the bid. Sellers hear that bid and think we're being aggressive. We believe we're just answering the market price.

Office is the same equation with a harder floor under it. About a third of the CBD square footage that has traded since 2024 traded distressed. The national average is around $205 a foot this year, and in Washington, D.C., roughly two-thirds of office sales last year cleared below their prior price. That matters even if your building is fine. The appraiser doesn't care that your tenant is a law firm with eleven lawyers and a twelve-year lease. She cares that the tower down the street sold for the land. Somebody else's distress becomes your comp.

So where are the green shoots? They're real, and they're in a specific place.

Industrial fundamentals turned in the second quarter. Net absorption beat new supply for the first time since 2022, vacancy ticked down for the first time in four years, and construction starts are the lowest in a decade. Small-bay, under 50,000 feet, sits near 4 percent vacant against 7 for the sector, the widest gap on record, and almost none of it is getting built because the math doesn't work below about 75,000 feet. Office is finally finding a floor because the distressed trades are clearing. Price discovery is ugly, but it's discovery. Debt is available, at a price.

Every one of those is a tailwind for the seller who can hold two more years. None of them helps the seller who needs the money in ninety days.

That's the split the volume numbers hide. The owner of well-leased infill industrial in a market with no land left, Los Angeles, Orange County, the older parts of Phoenix, has a bid today and better fundamentals tomorrow. They aren't selling, and they shouldn't. The owner with a 2027 maturity, an expired rate cap, and a building that needs a roof has a bid too. It's just the buyer's number, not theirs.

The seller who needs the money sells at the buyer's number. The seller who doesn't, doesn't sell. That isn't a frozen market. It's an honest one.

We're buyers of exactly this product, so read all of that knowing which side of the table we sit on. It doesn't change the arithmetic. It's the reason we trust it.

— Christopher C. Rising