Two important trends are becoming increasingly evident across real estate markets, reflecting broader structural shifts in the way investors manage liquidity and deploy capital.
First, investors are increasingly pursuing portfolio, platform and M&A-led transactions, underlining the growing importance of scale as a source of competitive advantage.
Second, investors and fund managers are seeking alternative routes to achieve liquidity. Secondary markets continue to expand, allowing ownership interests to change hands without requiring the sale of underlying assets. Joint ventures (JVs) and partial stake sales are also becoming more common, enabling fund managers to share risk, recycle capital and recapitalise existing assets.
Investors are adapting. Rather than waiting for a broad-based recovery in single-asset trading, they are exploring routes to liquidity and growth that are better suited to this higher-rate, more operationally intensive market.
Portfolio and platform deals are on the rise
This adaptation is visible in the growing share of portfolio and platform-level transactions. As deal sizes rise and operating requirements become more demanding, investors are using consolidation strategies across both private and public markets to access operational real estate capability, build sector exposure and deploy capital more efficiently.
Global Real Estate Portfolio and M&A Activity
Source: Savills Research using MSCI RCA. Excludes development sites
JVs and partial stake investments are an important part of this shift. As real estate platforms and portfolios become larger, full ownership is not always practical or necessary. These structures allow investors to participate in larger-scale opportunities, while enabling existing owners to bring in fresh capital and expertise.
Priorities change as investors seek liquidity
At the same time, investors are repositioning their portfolios towards sectors aligned with long-term structural themes, including data centres, healthcare and senior living. This is creating greater pressure to recycle capital into new opportunities. According to PERE, around 20% of capital raised by global real estate funds since the beginning of 2025 has targeted data centres, for example, compared with an average of around 6% during the previous five years. This combination of limited liquidity and changing investment priorities is encouraging fund managers to return capital to investors wherever possible.
However, it is not only about finding new ways to exit today. It is also about how investors build greater resilience in the future. Traditional fund models treat liquidity as an end-of-cycle event. By contrast, JVs and partial stake ownership structures can create multiple liquidity points throughout the lifecycle of an investment. This helps mitigate the risk of adverse business-cycle timing, reducing the reliance on a single exit event that may coincide with a market downturn.
Global acquisitions by JV partnerships or partial stakes investments
Source: Savills Research using MSCI RCA. Excludes development sites
This changes the strategic question for owners and fund managers. Exit planning needs to begin before a portfolio reaches maturity. That means assessing who can provide follow-on capital, which interests can be transferred and how to share future upside. Effective exit planning can bring fresh capital into a portfolio earlier in its lifecycle, while giving existing managers the resources and risk-sharing capacity needed to deliver the next stage of growth.
The benefits of scale
Larger platforms are often better positioned to deliver that growth. They can spread fixed costs across larger portfolios, centralise administrative functions and access capital more efficiently. As technology becomes more embedded within real estate operations, these advantages are likely to become more pronounced.
Scale is becoming particularly valuable in sectors where operating capability is as important as the underlying real estate. Acquiring a stake in an established platform can provide immediate access to sector expertise, occupier networks and growth opportunities that would take years to replicate by acquiring assets directly. In many cases, value comes as much from acquiring capability as from purchasing the underlying real estate.
JVs and partial stake sales allow capital to participate in larger portfolios and platforms that may otherwise be too large to acquire outright. Data centres provide perhaps the clearest example. Partnering with an established operator through a JV or platform investment is a faster and more effective route to market than acquiring individual assets and building operational capabilities from scratch. More than 40% of data centre transactions since 2023 have been capitalised through JV structures, according to MSCI data.
Direct single-asset acquisitions will remain central to the market, particularly as asset selection continues to be an important driver of returns over broader sector allocation strategies. Individual transactions are also essential for price discovery. However, the traditional model of raising pooled capital, acquiring assets and exiting them one by one within a predefined fund life appears to be evolving.
The result is a market increasingly defined by the dual search for liquidity and scale. Whether through portfolio acquisitions or platform investments, JVs or partial stake transactions, investors are seeking not only real estate exposure but also operating capability, flexibility and multiple pathways to liquidity.
