Preliminary numbers are in for real estate investment funds closing in first quarter 2018, and they look … interesting. At this time last year, Institutional Real Estate, Inc.’s FundTracker database had recorded only $12.4 billion raised by the 18 funds that closed in first quarter 2017. As of early April, the database has tracked $27.4 billion raised by 21 funds closed in first quarter 2018.

We need to be a bit careful with our hopes and extrapolations because we are looking at very early numbers, but we might be seeing the start of an upswing in fundraising. That preliminary total of $12.4 billion in first quarter 2017 eventually grew to $16.6 billion raised by 25 funds, as additional data was captured. It is reasonable to assume the 2018 first-quarter numbers also will increase as data is added, so we might very well be looking at the beginning of a very good year, despite continuing investor jitters.

During the past four years, about 24 percent of the total cap