Real estate returned 8.75% over nine years – INREV index

Global real estate returned 8.75% on average between 2005 and 2014, according to INREV, the real estate fund association for Europe.

The association’s Global Investor Real Estate Performance Index was launched at the body’s annual conference in Vienna today.

In total, 19 investors across eight countries and managing just under €108bn in real estate assets contributed data to the initial stage of the index.

Henri Vuong, INREV’s director for research and market information, said the index would be launched officially this summer.

She said it was “the first time investor performance has been displayed in an index”.

Neil Harris, the new chairman at INREV and senior vice-president at GIC Real Estate International, said: “Common benchmarks and more transparency are very important to make it easier for people to go across borders in real estate investments – but currently the necessary depth in the level of analysis is often missing.”

The new tool will allow a comparison between peer-groups at the regional, sectoral and investment-style levels.

Once the sample of funds feeding data into the index is larger, “there will also be a breakdown according to investors”, Vuong said.

A further new “but natural” step for INREV towards more transparency is the development of asset-level performance indices.

Vuong said this was the first time asset-level indices would be linked to fund-level indices.

“Over the much longer term, we hope to be able to provide a global database on asset-level indices,” she said.

From a fund manager point of view, the new asset-level data will help “attribute outperformance and underperformance to certain regions and aid in setting a strategy”, said Nick Blakemore, portfolio analysis manager at M&G and member of INREV’s Performance Measurement and Benchmarking Committee.