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

See the live data on columbiacompstak.com

Constant-Quality Net Effective Rent Indices

All three sectors are up over the trailing year. Office is +8.8% over the year to July, but the data suggest that this growth has slowed. On the other hand, retail shows an accelerating decline in the last 1M, 3M, and 6M, compared to the positive performance at longer horizons. Recent industrial rents show a decline, but suggest stability relative to the last year.

Constant-Quality NER Index Growth Trends

Exhibits 6–8 place each MSA in a 3 × 3 grid. The row denotes the year-over-year index CCRI growth, which we treat as the underlying condition of the market; the column is the most recent quarter-over-quarter CCRI growth, which is an indicator of 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.Q2. 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 +1.50%, a positive number. Rents rose in most industrial MSA-quarters of the sample (median YoY +6.38%), 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 −6.14% to +7.66%, a 13.8pp band for a single quarter, against 5.51pp for office and 7.16pp 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 −0.62%, essentially zero, so for office Low really does mean falling rents and High means growth faster than 6.22%.

Applying the +6.22% and −0.62% YoY thresholds to Exhibit 3, the office cross-section concentrates equally between the high and low rows, with 10 MSAs in the middle. Since 22 of 39 MSAs posted positive trailing-year growth and some of those cleared double digits, 14 office markets land in the High row, while 15 markets (such as San Francisco, Denver, and Cincinnati) anchor the Low row.

Retail’s thresholds are wide enough that reaching a corner of the grid requires an extreme reading, and yet the sector still splits: 8 MSAs clear the +10.59% YoY threshold (Boston, Detroit, Miami, Nashville, Riverside, San Antonio, San Francisco, San Jose) and 9 fall below −4.88%. The classification that actually matters is New York’s. At $407.5M of annual volume it is by far the deepest retail market we observe, and its trailing-year growth of +2.6% places it in the Middle, one of the few large-market readings in retail worth paying attention to.

Industrial is where the threshold caveat bites hardest. Because the lower YoY cutoff sits at +1.5%, even New York falls into the bottom row despite mildly positive trailing-year growth. In terms of shares, a quarter of the MSAs fall in the middle row, with roughly equal halves of the remaining 75% split between the high and low rows.

See the live data on columbiacompstak.com