A record median price usually signals a healthy market. This one signals the opposite. The pool of assets that can actually transact has narrowed to product that pencils — smaller, leased, well-located — while impaired and oversized assets sit frozen, uncleared and unpriced. The mix is moving up even as the market does not.

That older buildings are outpricing newer ones tells you replacement-cost logic has flipped: buyers are paying for in-place income and location, not for vintage. For underwriters, the aggregate index is now actively misleading. You cannot mark a frozen asset to a median set by the assets that escaped the freeze.

Trust granular comps, not headline indices. A ‘record price’ market where building sizes are shrinking is a market clearing only its best inventory — the distress is still ahead of the print, not behind it.

➤ TAKEAWAY

A 40-year-wide divergence does not close quietly. Expect the headline index to keep printing records as the cleanest slice of inventory changes hands — and expect that print to stay disconnected from the frozen majority until refinancings, forced sellers, and write-downs finally drag the impaired stock to market. The operators who win the next 18 months will underwrite to that two-speed reality: bid hard for the small, leased, well-located assets everyone wants, and price everything else as if the index does not exist. The recovery the median implies is not here yet — only the sorting is.

Source: Altus Group / CRE Daily — June 22, 2026