Brooklyn Investment Sales Jump 25% in 2025 to $2.1B: Report

While the American economy might be uneven, the Broolyn real estate market is undoubtedly doing just fine. 

A new report from CoStar found that Brooklyn’s volume of commercial real estate investment sales is up 25 percent in the first six months of 2025 from the first six months of 2024. From January to June this year, Brooklyn reported $2.1 billion worth of investment activity, compared to $1.7 billion in the first half of 2024, per CoStar. 

“It’s such a positive trend and the kind of thing you really want to see — you want to see momentum build year-over-year,” said Jared Koeck, CoStar’s associate director of market analytics, who led the research. “When it happens Q1 to Q2 that’s good, but seeing a first half comparison year-over-year, then it’s the case that the trend is your friend.” 

Brooklyn reported a whopping $930 million worth of investment activity in the second quarter of the year. While that number nearly doubled its first quarter activity, it’s still 20 percent below the trailing five-year squarely average.

“That’s down from the five-year quarterly average, but we’re starting to see momentum build  across investment sales transactions,” said Koeck. “We had a lot of volume.”

Multifamily transactions, particularly Class A apartments, mainly generate Brooklyn’s investment sales volume. Over the last five years, multifamily made up 43 percent of the borough’s sales activity, but those numbers jumped to 60 percent of overall volume in the first quarter of 2025, and 54 percent in the second quarter, for a total of roughly $500 million to start the year.  

“It correlates with what we see in supply and demand data, and that is demand is very strong in Brooklyn,” said Koeck. “There, we see a vacancy rate of 3.3 percent, which is very low relative to most markets across the country. [8.1 percent vacancy is the national average for multifamily]. The demand is really there and it’s occurring in high-quality assets.”

Retail held firm, especially in the commercial-rich neighborhood of Williamsburg, with a $275 million quarterly sales volume. Over the last five years, the average quarterly share of retail sales in Brooklyn has been 29 percent, and that number stayed steady at 25 percent in the second quarter of 2025. 

One area of investment sales volume that saw substantial, if not surprising, declines was industrial. Due to the amount of warehouses and access to the New York metropolitan area’s network of highways, industrial is normally a backbone of Brooklyn’s economy, comprising nearly 20 percent of total sales volume. But, in the second quarter of 2025, only 6 percent of sales were of industrial assets, according to CoStar.

“Part of that is related to tariff policy economic uncertainty, but we’re seeing a slowdown in the industrial sector across the country,” said Koeck. 

As for the much beleaguered office sector, the investment sales volume in Brooklyn came out to 11 percent in the second quarter of the year, right along the five-year quarterly average of 10 percent. Brooklyn’s office vacancy rate stands at 15 percent, a bit higher than New York City’s overall office vacancy rate of 13.6 percent. 

“Generally, office doesn’t have as big a volume share in Brooklyn, because when people think of New York City metro office buildings, they usually go to Manhattan,” said Koeck. 

While Koeck insisted he and CoStar don’t have a crystal ball, the data points to a resurgence in Brooklyn’s commercial real estate sales now and in the future, mainly on the back of strong multifamily metrics, even as a decline in consumer spending threatens retail and Trump’s tariffs hold industrial captive. . 

“Demand for investment sales has been improving; we’ve seen momentum start to build,” said Koeck. “Ideally we’d love to see that continue over the next six to twelve months.”

Brian Pascus can be reached at bpascus@commercialobserver.com.