Abstract: Over the past decades, the European institutional non-listed real estate fund market has matured into an investment category that consists of almost 340 funds, representing well over 200 billion euro of gross asset value. In this paper, we use the Global Real Estate Sustainability Benchmark (GRESB) as a means to enhance our understanding of performance of these non-listed funds. By combining the data of GRESB and INREV, we learn three valuable lessons within a market in which information is still scarce. First, we learn about fund agility and strength by observing the diffusion of GRESB participation, as early adopters differed greatly from the late adopters both on firm characteristics and performance. Second, the GRESB total score helps us to better understand the cross-sectional variation in non-listed fund performance, as GRESB score and INREV returns move together. And third, we need to allow for lagged relationships to grasp the full and positive impact of GRESB scores on fund performance, as GRESB information is released with delays.

Citation: “Sustained Insights in Private Equity Performance”, working paper (2017)