Real Assets in Focus: US Still a Magnet for Canadian Investors

Canadian commercial-property investors must often look outside their home country to deploy capital as it is a small, wealthy country with little turnover of assets held by investors. The U.S. is a natural first destination for much of this capital given its proximity and the size of its property market. At the start of the year, turmoil around political changes in the U.S. raised fears that Canadian capital would divert elsewhere in the world. The story of investment since then has put some of those concerns to rest.

Investors headquartered in Canada were the second-largest source of cross-border capital for the global property markets for the year through the third quarter, and the single largest destination for this capital was the U.S., which pulled in 30% of Canada’s outbound capital. Asset availability in the U.S. proved to be an enduring attraction.

2025 data through Q3. Acquisition volume of deals USD 10 million and greater. Long-term outbound capital since 2007.

The other countries where Canadian investors have been active for the year so far include familiar destinations such as the U.K. and Australia, where their shares of acquisitions for 2025 are about on par with their long-term averages. Since 2007, 11% of outbound Canadian capital has purchased assets in the U.K., while in 2025 so far the share is 13%. Australia is down slightly for the year but still close to the long-term share. Hong Kong stands out with more activity relative to the long term. 

Still, while the U.S. represents the largest destination for Canadian capital for the year, it is down as a share compared to the long term. Since 2007, purchases of assets in the U.S. have represented 56% of all outbound Canadian capital. One might see this falling share and assume that the decline is about politics, but sector allocations are at play as well.

Canadian investors have been targeting a different set of property types globally over the last three years. From 2015 to 2022, the office sector was their largest focus when putting capital to work in other countries, drawing 26% of outbound capital. The apartment sector was close behind at a 24% share, and industrial held a 17% share. 

2025 data through Q3. Global acquisitions, deals USD 10 million and greater.  “Other” category includes self-storage, mobile/manufactured housing and development sites. 

Office investment allowed Canadian investors to deploy significant amounts of capital efficiently in fewer deals. Offices are larger single assets than what is generally available in the apartment and industrial sectors. The pullback from office investment has also been met with an increasing focus on data centers.

As with offices, data centers are typically larger deals, making capital deployment more efficient than in sectors with small lot sizes. Small deal sizes increase the transaction costs involved in sourcing deals and due diligence. Combined with the growth story for data centers, the degree to which these investors have jumped into the sector is not surprising.

2025 data through Q3. Global acquisitions, deals USD 10 million and greater. 

Data centers have represented 40% of all Canadian outbound capital from 2023 through to the third quarter of 2025. Offices, by contrast, are now down to a 4% share, mirroring the 2% share that data centers captured in the years from 2015 to 2022.

Of the capital deployed in the U.S. and the U.K., much of it has focused on data centers. In the third quarter alone, such assets represented 50% of all Canadian acquisitions in the U.S. For the U.K., this figure stood at 60%. Again, the markets of these countries are familiar to Canadian investors. Beyond familiarity, however, the data-center sector is more developed in these countries.

Our annual look at the size of the global investable market for commercial property showed that North America represented 42.7% of all investable assets worldwide. Much of this North American share is concentrated in the U.S. With such a high concentration of assets, Canadian and other global investors looking to deploy capital worldwide have simply needed to continue targeting U.S. investments. The political changes in the U.S. may be troubling to these investors, but so far asset availability trumps the political situation.