Commercial real estate has emerged as an asset class.(Investment Strategies)

Byline: Robert Brunswick

Some time in 2002, when the Standard & Poor's 500 stock index had bottomed from its technology bust, investors went back to the drawing board and wondered how they could get off the roller coaster.

Amid this search for answers, investors began to discover how the commercial-real-estate industry had emerged from the cocoon where it had slept for most of the 1990s.

The situations and conditions for the sector have improved so much in recent years that institutional and high-net-worth investors, both domestic and foreign, hav