Performance metrics are being ever more assiduously applied to the institutional investment and management of money, and the real estate sector is no exception. Fees, and especially bonus compensation, are increasingly becoming tied to results — results for investors, that is.

Some investment platforms — securities are the most obvious example — lend themselves readily to performance metrics, indeed even to endless tweaking to measure relative risk, or to adjust for asset class, or to compare results against peers.

It helps that in the world of securities, the market value of a stock or bond is usually beyond dispute. The price of a security at the quarter’s closing bell is generally not open to interpretation. And securities are liquid every trading session.

But real estate, as a class and in discrete investments, is sui generis.

No office building, warehouse, shopping mall or parcel of undeveloped land is exactly comparable to another,