After several subdued years for investment, European real estate is looking beyond the sale of single buildings to free up capital. CBRE’s European Real Estate Market Outlook Midyear Review 2026, published in August, expected more platform sales, recapitalisations and trading in secondaries over the second half of the year, and it said such a pick-up would mark a market adapting to release money and put it back to work at scale.
European investment volumes rose 10% in the first half of 2026 compared with a year earlier. In the living sector, CBRE recorded more big-ticket deals than it had expected, platform sales among them. In offices, deals above €100 million made up 49% of investment in the first half, which CBRE said was the highest share since 2022.
Three Routes Back to Liquidity
A platform sale transfers an operating business along with its buildings. The buyer takes on the portfolio together with the management team, the leases, the systems and the relationships with tenants and lenders, and gains scale in a sector in a single transaction. In the Fund Manager Survey 2026 published in June by ANREV, INREV and NCREIF, 40% of European fund managers said acquiring operational platforms formed part of their investment strategy.
A recapitalisation leaves the buildings in place and changes the money behind them. New equity or debt comes into the business, often to repay a maturing loan, fund a refurbishment or allow some existing investors to leave, while day-to-day operations carry on unchanged. The existing owner often keeps control, although the incoming investor may take a board seat or a share of future profits in return.
Secondaries work at the level of the investment itself: investors sell their stakes in existing funds to new buyers, or sponsors move selected assets into fresh vehicles, known as continuation funds, backed by new capital. For a sponsor, a continuation fund offers a way to keep hold of assets it believes still have value to add while giving existing investors the option to cash out. Across private markets as a whole, where real estate sits alongside private equity, infrastructure and credit, secondary trading reached an estimated $124 billion in the first half of 2026, a first-half record and about 28% more than a year earlier, according to Lazard’s interim secondary market report published in August. Buyers entered the second half with $77 billion earmarked for sponsor-led deals alone.
The Timing Behind the Shift
During the downturn, global real estate assets under management fell for three consecutive years from their 2021 peak of €4.1 trillion. They recovered to €3.8 trillion at the end of 2025, a 5.7% rise on the previous year, the Fund Manager Survey found. Uncommitted capital thinned over the same period. By the end of 2025, global dry powder stood at €179 billion, less than at any point since INREV started measuring it in 2020.
Many owners were left holding assets they wanted to keep, their investors wanted some of their money back, and fresh capital for new commitments was scarcer. Recapitalisations and secondaries answer each of those pressures without forcing a sale of the underlying buildings, and platform sales let a buyer deploy a large sum in one move once values have stabilised.
Counterparties Read the Structure
In a recapitalisation or a platform sale, an institutional counterparty underwrites far more than property: it assesses how the business is governed, who controls its strategy, whether the interests of management and capital are aligned and how quickly the business can act once a deal closes. Complex ownership, with joint venture partners, minority holders or layered fund interests, tends to lengthen that diligence and can require consents from several parties, and institutions generally price the extra time and uncertainty into the terms they offer.
The process moves faster when a business sits with a single owner that also runs it, because a counterparty can see at once who makes the decisions and whose money is first at risk, and that clarity often carries through into the terms the business is offered.
Separate accounts, in which a single investor owns real estate directly through a dedicated mandate, took 43% of the capital raised for European single-country strategies in 2025, up from 20% a year earlier, as investors looked for a bigger say over which assets they hold and how their portfolios are built, according to the INREV, ANREV and NCREIF Capital Raising Survey published in April 2026.
Lazard expected full-year secondary volume across private markets to reach $275 billion in 2026. European fund managers, meanwhile, held 83% of their allocations in core strategies at the end of 2025, the highest share in more than five years, according to INREV. Investors with that much capital committed to core strategies need stabilised, well-structured businesses to buy. Platform sales and recapitalisations offer a way to supply them at scale.
David Prior
David Prior is the editor of Today News, responsible for the overall editorial strategy. He is an NCTJ-qualified journalist with over 20 years’ experience, and is also editor of the award-winning hyperlocal news title Altrincham Today. His LinkedIn profile is here.
