Commercial real estate investment performance in Canada diverges among major property types, reports Manulife Investment Management in its second-quarter Canadian commercial real estate review and outlook.

According to Manulife, the industrial and multifamily sectors have shown resilience in transaction activity and are “more or less proven to be pandemic proof, the major drivers being a shift to a more online economy for industrial and growing unaffordability of residential homes for multifamily.”

The vacancy rate for Canadian industrial property dropped to 1.5 percent country-wide, and the second quarter had record-high net absorption of 16 million square feet of industrial space. Regarding the record-setting industrial absorption figures, Manulife notes, “To put this in perspective, if we stopped counting absorption for the rest of the year, 2021 would still be the second-strongest year of industrial absorption in Canada since tracking began in 2002.”