Whether you’re an investor, investment manager, consultant or private wealth adviser, benchmarking your real estate portfolios has become increasingly important for most of you reading this column.

A number of benchmarks are available to you today, including the NCREIF Fund Index – Open End Diversified Core Equity (NFI-ODCE), used by so many of you today who are attempting to benchmark the performance of your US private market real estate portfolios.

The Nareit index is among the several standards many real estate securities investors now use to benchmark the performance of their US REIT securities portfolios. And the FTSE EPRA Nareit Global Real Estate Index, likewise, has become the standard that many real estate securities investors use to benchmark the performance of their European real estate securities portfolios.

NCREIF, of course, stands for the National Council of Real Estate Investment Fiduciaries, a Chicago-based nonprofit membership organisation