Non-Traded REIT Performance: A Response to Mallett and McCann

In their Winter 2021 article, “Further on the Returns to Non-Traded REITs,” Joshua Mallett and Craig McCann claimed to have found significantly lower performance for non-traded real estate investment trusts (REITs) as compared to the performance that investors would have earned in a portfolio of traded REITs. The authors’ analysis suffers from at least four fundamental errors. First, the article erroneously compares the performance of non-traded REITs to a mutual fund that is closed to new investors and that tracks an index of publicly traded REITs. Second, it inappropriately combines data about two types of non-traded REITs: “lifecycle REITs” and “NAV REITs.” Third, it uses a limited time period ending before the COVID pandemic. Fourth, the article arbitrarily discounts the appraised value of the non-traded REITs in its sample.