Canadian CRE Investors Shrug Off Trade War, Spend $9B On U.S. Assets

The United States and Canada are in an all-out trade war, but if the first half of the year is any indicator, cross-border commercial real estate investment has been spared any strife.

The pace of U.S. asset purchases from Canadian firms accelerated in the second quarter. The dollar total remains below the five-year average, but the data suggests that Canadian real estate buyers of all sizes have shrugged off the escalating tariffs and souring relationship between the two neighbors.

“We are not an export industry. We don’t build apartments to sell them to Japan,” said Adam Jacobs, the head of Canada research at Colliers. “Everything is local and more tied to local demographics and local job markets.”

Canadian firms spent $9B on U.S. real estate over the 12 months ending in June, up from the $5B rolling average at the end of the prior quarter. They’re also sending more of their total capital toward their southern neighbor. 

Canadian firms sent 32% of the capital raised for global acquisitions to the U.S. in the year through June, up from 19.3% for the rolling 12 months a quarter earlier.

Across all global investments, Canadian firms deployed 32% of capital toward multifamily, 27% to industrial assets and 18% toward offices. Japan, the UK, Spain and Australia were other top destinations for Canadian firms sending capital to work abroad. But the combined $4.9B invested into those countries over the last 12 months through June is still just behind the total outbound capital to the U.S. alone. 

The data from Colliers’ Global Capital Flows report doesn’t cover investment volume in the last couple of months, as the trade war between the United States and Canada ramped up with new tit-for-tat tariffs. But Jacobs doesn’t expect that the escalation will have much of any impact on investment decisions. 

“When we’re talking about big investors with $50B looking at diversifying their portfolio or getting into an alternative asset, I don’t think that because there’s tariffs on molasses and motorcycles it is necessarily stopping those deals from happening,” Jacobs said. 

The U.S. has long been the top destination for Canadian capital looking for global real estate, and the trend has held throughout President Donald Trump’s second term. The U.S. is also attracting a larger share of global capital as 2026 goes on.

It pulled in $28.3B in the most recent period available in Colliers data, beating out and trading places with the UK, which squeaked past the U.S. to lead the list three months ago by just $25M in inbound capital. By June, the U.S. was leading the UK as the place to deploy capital globally by $3.4B.

Part of the U.S. pull is its sheer scale and the wide availability of investment opportunities, Jacobs said. 

“The U.S. is a very deep and diversified market. If you really want to make a huge bet on student housing facilities, there aren’t that many countries that have that many student housing facilities, including Canada,” he said.

Data centers are another sector where investors are pouring massive amounts of capital, and the U.S. is significantly further ahead in the development cycle that artificial intelligence adoption has kicked off.

The uptick in southbound capital flows from Canada is in line with global trends, with cross-border investment up 21.2% from the prior year through June, a 6-percentage-point increase from the period ending in March.

The U.S. saw overall inbound capital increase 21.5% from the prior year, putting the volume being deployed just under the country’s five-year average.

In Canada, campaigns to avoid American products have gained momentum as the trade war deepens and Prime Minister Mark Carney makes a pitch globally that his country is the safer bet in North America. 

Carney hosted an investment summit alongside the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and the Public Sector Pension Investment Board this month to court global investors. Capital from at least 11 countries was represented, including from countries with large sovereign wealth funds like Norway and the United Arab Emirates, along with 33 American firms, Wealth Professional reported.

CPPIB is still deploying billions of dollars into the U.S. as it courts capital to Canada, partnering with Brookfield Asset Management, part of another Canadian giant, to take LXP Industrial Trust private in a $5.2B all-cash deal in July. That same month, BAM purchased a 49% stake in a $2.1B medical office portfolio owned by Denver-based REIT Healthpeak Properties.

“Investment in the U.S. was kind of the default for a lot of global investors, and I think it’s fair to say some global investors — Asian, European, whatever — are starting to see Canada as a way to still be in North America and the Anglo world but to not necessarily be in the U.S.,” Jacobs said.