Commercial real estate executives expect to make more money next year and feel worse about the business than they have since 2024. That is the split running through Deloitte’s 2027 Commercial Real Estate Outlook, published Sept. 24, which puts its overall business sentiment index at 57.8 out of 100 β down from 64.9 a year ago and 68.3 the year before that.
The revenue half of the survey tells the opposite story. Deloitte’s revenue sentiment index came in at 67.9, just under the 70.3 record set in 2025. Fifty-one percent of respondents expect revenue growth above 5%, and 41% put themselves in the 5% to 10% range β the largest share the survey has recorded in that band.
What is dragging the headline number down is the cost of doing deals. Asked to rank macroeconomic concerns, executives put cost of capital first, capital availability second and elevated interest rates third. Deloitte reports that respondents also expect slower rent growth and elevated vacancies, and plan to tighten spending on their own office space and on talent management.
The survey covers 950 C-level executives and their direct reports at commercial real estate owners and investment companies with at least $250 million under management. Deloitte fielded it in June and July 2026 across North America, Europe and Asia Pacific. Kathy Feucht, Sally Ann Flood and Tim Coy led the report.
Fix what you own
The clearest behavioral finding is a turn inward. Nearly 80% of respondents plan to upgrade or reposition assets in the next 12 to 18 months, and 38% call themselves highly active in repositioning. At the same time, 39% expect no conversion activity at all and 46% expect to sell nothing.
That combination β heavy capital spending on existing buildings, light trading β differs by who owns what. Office specialists are the most likely to convert, at 23%. Housing organizations are the most willing to divest, at 22%. Industrial and alternative-sector specialists lean hardest on upgrades.
Asked where the opportunities are over the same horizon, executives ranked logistics and warehousing first and digital-economy property second, with the top four clustered closely. The notable movers were neighborhood retail, which climbed from 11th place to fifth, and hotels and lodging, which fell from eighth to 13th.
The preference for logistics matches what the transaction market has shown, from EQT’s sale of a 46-building Southeast logistics portfolio to LBA Realty to CoStar’s projection that U.S. industrial demand will outpace new supply by late 2027.
Money is looking at the United States again
Among respondents naming preferred destinations outside their home countries, the United States was picked by 28%, up from 16% a year earlier, with the United Kingdom and India close behind. Deloitte attributes softer interest in continental Europe to a slower recovery there; it notes European transaction activity was down 10% year over year in the second quarter of 2026, while cross-border capital into commercial real estate globally rose 18% in the first quarter against the prior year.
Nearly 80% of respondents expect to increase real-asset investment by early 2028. Deloitte also notes that digital-economy and debt strategies accounted for more than two-thirds of capital raised in 2025 β a concentration that helps explain why so much of the sector’s growth conversation now runs through data centers and lending rather than traditional equity ownership.
Tax moves up the deal calendar
More than 90% of respondents said tax will be more central to investment decisions or as central as it is now, and 32% expect it to play a more central role specifically. More than 60% plan to shift capital toward jurisdictions or assets with stronger tax incentives.
Deloitte frames this against two U.S. changes: federal energy-efficiency building tax benefits closed to new activity after June 30, 2026, and a redesigned Opportunity Zone program is scheduled to begin Jan. 1, 2027. The survey suggests tax arrives late in the process β half bring it in during underwriting or investment committee review, and only 26% at deal origination.
Everyone is piloting AI; almost nobody has finished
Ninety-two percent of respondents are still piloting or researching artificial intelligence, and 8% describe their AI as integrated. Even so, 54% report incremental operational gains already, and close to half say they have agentic AI β software that executes multi-step tasks rather than answering questions β running in live production workflows.
The gap is in plumbing. Seventy-two percent have completed preliminary data mapping and source verification, but fewer than half have advanced process and security controls in place. Public companies are furthest along on data readiness at 78%, against 71% for institutional firms and 66% for private ones.
Spending is following: more than 90% plan to increase technology and data budgets, up from 76% a year ago, and 16% plan an increase of more than 10%. That tracks the adoption curve showing up elsewhere in the industry β the National Association of Realtors found this year that nearly half of Realtors use AI at least weekly.
The demographic problem underneath
Deloitte pairs the technology findings with a workforce one. The median age of a real estate industry worker is 48.9 years, which the report identifies as the highest among financial services sectors, and it says 40% of the U.S. real estate workforce is within a decade of retirement, including 59% of leadership positions.
Firms are not especially ready. Only 30% call themselves very prepared for C-suite transitions; 50% are informally developing internal candidates, 39% have identified and are cultivating successors, and 10% have limited or no succession plan. Sixty-seven percent named AI and data fluency the top capability for rising leaders β a requirement the current bench was not hired for.
Read together, the survey describes an industry planning to earn well in 2027 while assuming it will have to do so with expensive capital, fewer sales, older buildings it intends to fix rather than trade, and a leadership pipeline it has not built yet. For more from this beat, see RealtyWire’s commercial real estate coverage.
