Real estate is an essential component of diversified portfolios, offering key investment benefits — stable income, potentially attractive long-term real returns, resilience to inflation and portfolio diversification — that may be valuable to individual and institutional investors. What was once a private market geared toward institutions and wealthy individuals investing directly in individual properties is now dominated by various types of professionally managed pooled investment vehicles operating at scale across sectors and geographies.

Over time, real estate has grown as the traditional core sectors of office, retail, residential and industrial have been joined by a wide range of extended sectors, including self-storage, healthcare, data centers and telecommunications. In the past decade alone, the size of the professionally managed global real estate market has doubled to $13.3 trillion, according to MSCI Real Estate Market Size in July 2023.

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