Overseas investors were the biggest buyers and sellers of commercial real estate in Australia last year with $8.4 billion in deals, but Australian owners were net sellers for the ninth successive year in a row. 
JLL's head of international investments for Australia, Simon Storry, said recent volatility in equity markets had reinforced the defensive characteristics of real estate.
"Australia is a beneficiary of pension funds adopting a higher allocation to real estate and a higher allocation to Asia Pacific," Mr Storry said. "As a result, new sources of capital will emerge for core assets in 2016."
The 2015 year was a record for offshore buying, which accounted for 53.8 per cent of transaction volumes.
JLL's head of office investments, Rob Sewell, said investors were taking advantage of low borrowing costs to use conservative leverage and push equity returns into the low double-digit territory.
JLL's head of strategic research Andrew Ballantyne said the effective rent recovery in Sydney and Melbourne had also provided an additional ingredient to the investment thesis.