Columbia CompStak (CCRI) Rent Index National Update: July 14, 2026

Commercial real estate rent data is only as useful as the methodology behind it. That’s why CompStak partnered with Columbia Business School faculty to build the Columbia CompStak Rent Index (CCRI), the first quality-adjusted CRE rent index tracking constant-quality net effective rents across U.S. office, retail, and industrial markets, both nationally and across major MSAs.

Unlike traditional rent benchmarks that track asking rents or simple averages, the CCRI controls for quality mix and incorporates concessions, giving investors, lenders, occupiers, and capital allocators a cleaner read on where rents are actually moving. Each month, CompStak publishes a national update powered by its database of verified lease transactions, one of the largest and most comprehensive in commercial real estate.

Below is a breakdown of what the latest data shows across all three property sectors at the national level, as of July 14, 2026.

See the live data on columbiacompstak.com

Constant-Quality Net Effective Rent Indices

Nationally, office effective rent growth has been rebounding over the past year, but the positive momentum stalled in April. Industrial 1Y rent growth is +3.3% nationally, but has strengthened recently. Retail was the strongest performer in April with 4.8% growth.

All three sectors are up over the trailing year. Office is +4.9% over 1Y to end of May, but every growth assessment on a shorter horizon since then suggests that office recovery has stalled.

On the other hand, retail shows positive and accelerating rent growth. Industrial’s growth rates have become more muted at recent horizons.

Constant-Quality NER Index Growth Across MSAs

Manhattan office effective rents rose 17.45% over the year to 2026.Q1. The gain is heavily concentrated in the most recent quarter, where 2026.Q1 alone delivered +10.15%.

Since ours is a constant-quality index, this is genuine repricing of office space rather than a composition shift toward trophy buildings; all components of effective rent contributed, with starting rents rising and concessions (TI and free rent) falling.

Constant-Quality NER Index Growth Across MSAs: Rates

Exhibits 3-5 rank every MSA we observe by the average quarter-over-quarter growth of its constant-quality NER index over the four quarters to 2026 Q1.

Kansas City (+10.3% per quarter), Bridgeport-Stamford (+9.1%), Minneapolis-St. Paul (+8.2%), and Milwaukee (+8.2%) top the office table, but each clears under $4M of quarterly leasing. Among the markets that actually carry the national index, growth is positive but far more muted: New York (+3.5%/qtr on $566M of quarterly volume, or about 15% over the year), Dallas (+3.3%), San Francisco (+2.7%), Washington (+2.2%), and San Jose (+2.2%). Houston (+6.5% on $15M) is the one sizeable market posting genuinely outsized gains. On the downside, Portland (−2.9%), Cincinnati (−2.4%), and Austin (−2.1%) lag, but the declines that carry weight are Chicago (−2.0% on $41M), Boston (−1.2% on $74M), and Los Angeles (−0.4% on $124M). Out of 38 office MSAs, 25 have positive NER growth over the past four quarters.

Retail is the most dispersed of the three sectors, spanning −6.6% to +13.7% constant-quality rent growth per quarter. The dispersion does not sort geographically: California alone runs from Sacramento (+5.3%) and San Francisco (+3.8%) to Riverside (−2.7%), and the Midwest from Cincinnati (+8.9%) to Detroit (−6.6%).

The markets that carry weight are close to flat: New York, at $95M of quarterly volume and an order of magnitude more liquid than any other retail market we observe, grew only +1.6% per quarter, and Los Angeles ($25M) fell −1.7%.

Miami (−4.7% on $15M) is the one reasonably deep market with a substantial decline. Out of 33 MSAs, 17 have positive rent growth. The sector-level read is therefore closer to “flat, with small-sample noise in the tails” than to any genuine regional bifurcation.

See the live data on columbiacompstak.com.

Industrial is both the tightest and the best-measured of the three. Setting aside Austin (−6.2% on $3.1M) and Seattle (−5.6%), most high volume MSAs sits within roughly °æ4% rent growth per quarter, and 20 of 33 MSAs are positive; ten MSAs clear $45M or more of quarterly leasing, so these estimates carry the most weight of any sector in the report.

The headline is that the two deepest industrial markets in the country—Los Angeles ($227M) and Riverside ($215M)—are both mildly negative, at −0.5% and −0.6% respectively, as is San Diego (−2.2%). The Southern California warehouse complex that drove the 2021–22 industrial boom is now flat-to-declining on a constant-quality basis.

Growth has migrated instead to secondary distribution markets: Sacramento (+6.5%), St. Louis (+6.1%), Charlotte (+6.1% on a substantial $15M), Denver (+5.1%), Washington (+4.5%), and Indianapolis (+4.0%). Among the remaining large markets, Chicago (+2.8% on $87M) and Miami (+2.8% on $46M) are strongest, while New York (+0.7%), Dallas (+0.6%), and Atlanta (+0.2%) are nearly flat. Seattle (−5.6% on $24M) is the only large market whose decline is sharp enough that it cannot be dismissed as noise.

Constant-Quality NER Index Growth Trends

Exhibits 6–8 place each MSA in a 3 °ø 3 grid. The row is year-over-year index growth, which we treat as the underlying condition of the market; the column is the most recent quarter-over-quarter growth, which we treat as recent momentum. Each MSA is assigned to the Low, Middle, or High tercile of the pooled historical distribution of that growth rate for its own space type, so the labels are relative to a sector’s own history rather than to a common cutoff.

The off-diagonal cells carry the information. Rebounding markets have a weak trailing year but strong recent growth; Cooling markets have the opposite. Strengthening and Softening identify movement away from an otherwise middle-of-the-pack market, and Surging and Sluggish identify markets that are consistently strong or weak across both horizons.

The terciles are estimated separately by space type on every MSA-quarter observation prior to 2026.Q1. They differ enough across sectors that they have to be reported alongside the maps.

Three features of this table govern how the maps should be read.

Industrial “Low” does not mean declining. Industrial’s 33rd-percentile YoY threshold is +1.72% — a positive number. Rents rose in most industrial MSA-quarters of the sample (median

YoY +6.72%; the national index more than doubled over the decade), so the bottom tercile of industrial’s own history still contains markets with rising rents. An industrial MSA shaded Sluggish or Stabilizing may well have positive rent growth; what it does not have is growth at the pace the sector became accustomed to.

Retail’s thresholds are wide. Its middle QoQ tercile spans −6.04% to +7.14%, a 13.2pp band for a single quarter, against 5.1pp for office and 7.1pp for industrial. That width is related to thin-market coverage noise also visible in Exhibit 4.

Office is the sector where the labels map best onto intuition. Its 33rd-percentile YoY threshold is −0.31%, essentially zero, so for office Low really does mean falling rents and High means growth faster than 6.3%.

Applying the +6.32% and −0.31% YoY thresholds to Exhibit 3, the striking feature of office is that its middle row is nearly empty. Only about five MSAs (Miami, Raleigh, Tampa, Phoenix, and Salt Lake City) land in between. The office cross-section is bifurcated: markets are either clearly outrunning office’s own historical distribution or clearly falling short of it, with little in the middle.

Retail’s thresholds are wide enough that reaching a corner of the grid requires an extreme reading, and yet the sector still splits: roughly fifteen MSAs clear the +11.06% YoY threshold and about eleven fall below −4.70%. However, since nearly every MSA in those tails clears under $3M of quarterly leasing, these are the least stable classifications in the report: a few large leases can move a thin retail market across a tercile boundary. The classification that actually matters is New York’s. At $95M of quarterly volume it is the only deep retail market we observe, and its trailing-year growth of roughly +5.8% places it squarely in the middle row — which means its label is decided entirely by 2026.Q1 momentum, and it is the one retail reading worth acting on.

Industrial is where the threshold caveat bites hardest. Because the lower YoY cutoff sits at +1.72%, roughly fourteen of thirty-one MSAs fall into the bottom row — and several of them have positive trailing-year growth. Atlanta (≈ +0.3% YoY), Philadelphia and San Antonio (≈ +1.3%) are shaded as weak markets not because rents are falling but because they are rising more slowly than industrial has risen for most of the last fifteen years.

Los Angeles (≈ −2.1%) and Riverside (≈ −2.7%) — the two deepest industrial markets in the country — are also in the bottom row, and here the label is unambiguous: the Southern California warehouse complex is genuinely repricing downward.

Ten MSAs clear the +11.08% upper threshold, led by Sacramento, St. Louis, Charlotte, Denver, and Washington, with Miami and Chicago sitting within a percentage point of the cutoff. New York (≈ +2.3%) and Dallas (≈ +2.2%) clear the lower threshold only narrowly and sit in the middle row, so their labels turn entirely on the latest quarter.

See the live data on columbiacompstak.com.