Commercial real estate coverage often spotlights distressed office towers and billion-dollar deals in major cities. But the market is also shaped by smaller properties and transactions spread across local communities. A Connect CRE article argues that these less-visible deals drive much of the industry—and that local knowledge can matter more than national averages when evaluating them.
Key takeaways
- Small properties and lower-value transactions make up a substantial share of commercial real estate activity.
- National benchmarks can miss local deals and obscure differences between neighborhoods and markets.
- REMAX Commercial says its broad broker network helps surface opportunities and connect clients across markets.
The smallest deals may attract less national attention, but they can support local businesses, housing and services. The article’s central point is that understanding commercial real estate requires looking beyond the biggest headlines to the conditions shaping individual properties and communities.
Smaller properties make up a large part of the market
The article cites several measures of the market’s local scale: properties with fewer than 50 units account for about two-thirds of multifamily housing, while retail spaces under 5,000 square feet represent roughly 80% of leases, according to CoStar. It also notes historically low vacancy among smaller industrial facilities and an average U.S. office requirement of about 3,500 square feet.
Transaction data points in the same direction. Altus Group reported that the typical commercial transaction remained below $5 million in the first quarter of 2026, despite median per-square-foot prices reaching new highs across major property types. Excluding hospitality, the typical deal was under $2 million. These figures include the kinds of purchases that can affect a neighborhood directly, from a small apartment building to a medical office or local warehouse.
Local conditions can be lost in national data
National price and capitalization-rate benchmarks can lean toward larger, institutionally reported deals, leaving smaller transactions out of the picture. That can make broad averages a poor guide for an owner considering a modest property: nearby tenant demand, zoning decisions and street-level conditions may matter more than trends in a distant metropolitan market.
Kristie Kimnach, executive director of REMAX Commercial, argues that brokers’ local relationships help them track changes that may not yet appear in published data, such as businesses seeking more space or landlords facing tenant challenges. The article also says owners must tailor spaces to prospective users, rather than relying on price cuts alone to attract tenants.
A distributed network seeks to find overlooked opportunities
REMAX Commercial says its brokers completed more than 65,000 commercial transactions across 76 countries last year, representing over $18.5 billion in sales and leasing volume. The network’s average transaction was approximately $1.2 million. Those figures illustrate the scale of its activity, though they describe the company’s network rather than the entire industry.
The article highlights assignments ranging from site selection for an expanding family entertainment company to the sale of a former medical office in Minneapolis. It also points to a roughly $240 million hotel complex listing in Makkah, Saudi Arabia, as an example of the network’s ability to connect local assignments with international investors. Together, the examples underscore the article’s argument: commercial real estate is shaped by both major cross-border opportunities and the smaller local transactions that keep communities operating.