Hawaii’s commercial real estate market saw its strongest performance in four years in 2025 with $2.9 billion in sales volume across 279 transactions, driven by four blockbuster deals.
Two land sales by the trustees of the Estate of Bernice Pauahi Bishop, or Kamehameha Schools — the $510 million sale beneath the Royal Hawaiian Hotel to Daisho Co. Ltd. and the $400 million sale beneath the Four Seasons Resort Hualalai to BDT & MSD Partners — alone totaled nearly $1 billion.
They were followed by Newage Ko Olina LLC’s $216 million purchase of the land beneath the Atlantis Resort Development Site from Oceanwide Resort HI LLC and the Steiner Family Trust’s $215 million sale of the land beneath the Hyatt Regency Waikiki to Montgomery Street Partners LP, according to a fourth quarter 2025 investment market report released today by Colliers Hawaii.
If not for those four major land sales, Hawaii’s commercial real estate sales would have trailed the 2023 and 2024 commercial real estate sales performances, according to Mike Hamasu, Colliers’ consulting and research director.
“These are land parcels that have never come up before” that alone accounted for 60% of the 2025 commercial real estate sales volume, Hamasu said.
Colliers expects even more “megadeal” sales to come in 2026, leading it to forecast a 20% increase this year despite high interest rates and rising fuel prices driven by America’s ongoing war with Iran, which has strangled the export of oil through the Straight of Hormuz as Iran retaliates for the aerial bombardment by the U.S. and Israel.
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The International Energy Agency has called Iran’s shipping blockade of oil exports through the Strait of Hormuz the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market.
In its investment report, Colliers only referred to “changing federal policies” that “contributed to market volatility.”
With an uncertain economy, including stock market uncertainty, Hawaii’s “commercial real estate is pretty solid and steady” for investors looking to diversify their portfolios, said Mark Bratton, Colliers’ senior vice president who specializes in capital markets and investing.
“There’s a lot of money sitting on the sidelines,” Bratton said. “Blackstone and groups like that have literally been raising billions and billions of dollars to go into real estate funds and it’s been kind of hard for them to put that money out the past 24 to 36 months. So you’ve got a lot of demand for the properties that we have here.”
Blackstone, whose real estate business was founded in 1991 and manages $319 billion in investor capital, owns and operates commercial real estate assets across major global markets and sectors, including logistics, residential, office and hospitality.
The firm is part of the buying group behind Alexander & Baldwin’s pending $2.3 billion acquisition, which would represent the largest commercial real estate portfolio sale in Hawaii history. Earlier this month, A&B shareholders approved initial steps toward the transaction.
Shareholders agreed to the deal with Tropic Purchaser LLC, the joint‑venture buyer formed by MW Group, funds affiliated with Blackstone Real Estate, and DivcoWest and its wholly owned Hawaii-based subsidiary, Tropic Merger Sub LLC.
If it goes through, the sale would represent the last vestige of Hawaii’s “Big Five” plantation era, which included the founding of A&B in 1870 as a sugar growing partnership. A&B is the last publicly traded survivor of Hawaii’s “Big Five” growers, which also included C. Brewer, Castle & Cooke, Amfac, and Theo H. Davies.
A&B’s portfolio, according to its 2025 annual report filing, includes 22 retail centers, 14 industrial properties and four office buildings totaling about 4 million square feet of leasable space, along with 145 acres of commercial land in Hawaii, most of it under urban ground leases.
The pending A&B sale is priced at 4.5 times the cost of 2025’s largest Hawaii commercial real estate investment deal — the land beneath the Royal Hawaiian Hotel. Kamehameha Schools CEO Livingston “Jack” Wong said in an October statement about the trust’s five-year plan through 2030 that land remains central to its mission to educate Hawaiian children, while also emphasizing the need to generate “competitive financial returns.”
Real estate consultant Stephany Sofos called November’s sale of the land beneath the Royal Hawaiian Hotel by Kamehameha Schools “definitely an anomaly. … Things have not been moving.”
But Sofos does not share Colliers’ optimism for increased sales for this year.
“I’m a contrarian,” she said. “People are going to be looking and there are going to be properties for sale. But I don’t believe we’re going to increase in sales. And if we do, it will be very marginal. It won’t go down, but I think it’s going to be static because there’s too many unknowns.”
2025 TOP COMMERCIAL REAL ESTATE DEALS
>> Royal Hawaiian Hotel land: Sold for $510 million by Trustees of the Estate of Princess Bernice Pauahi Bishop.
>> Hualalai Four Seasons Resort land: Sold for $400 million by Trustees of the Estate of Princess Bernice Pauahi Bishop.
>> Atlantis Resort Development Site land: Sold for $216 million by Oceanwide Resort HI LLC.
>> Hyatt Regency Waikiki land: Sold for $215 million by Steiner Family Trust.
>> Kahala Kua land: Sold for $90 million by the Roman Catholic Church.
Source: Colliers Hawaii
