The sun has set on real estate’s “era of acquisition” and it has risen on the “era of execution.” In other words, from 2008 to 2011, there was money to be made by acquiring assets whose value was temporarily decimated by the global financial disaster. Today, though, investors must create value. That means the investment strategy of the current era is value-add.

That is the assessment of a report issued by CenterSquare Investment Management and authored by Jeffrey Reder, senior vice president of the company’s acquisition group, and P.J. Yeatman, head of private real estate.

Reder and Yeatman point out that, since 2009, investors have flocked to core assets, driving prices skyward. Meanwhile, the opportunity for increasing yield is limited with core. By way of contrast, they write, value-add assets can be bought relatively cheaply and redeveloped into core-like assets, su