The performance of real estate assets within any given market is rarely uniform. Even within the same country, sector, and time period, individual assets can generate returns that diverge materially from one another. This dispersion in returns is not merely statistical noise.
INREV's latest paper, 'Dispersion in returns: variation in asset level performance across European real estate', dives into the INREV Asset Level Index data to illustrate how the scale and character of return dispersion impacts how investors construct and manage portfolios. Covering the Q4 2014 to Q2 2026 period, it looks at how widely returns vary across residential, office, industrial/logistics and retail assets in Europe, the Netherlands, the UK, Germany and France.
Key highlights:
- Office recorded the highest average return dispersion of any sector (2,700 bps) and residential the lowest (1,900 bps), with industrial/logistics and retail in between.
- The United Kingdom showed the widest spread among the geographies analysed (2,600 bps). The Netherlands had the most compressed distribution (2,100 bps).
- Dispersion widened sharply around market turning points, most notably during the post-2022 repricing and the subsequent recovery. Top performing assets tend to rebound earlier and faster, while weaker assets stay under pressure.
Download the paper and Excel supplement below.
Dispersion in returns: variation in asset level performance across European real estate
Published on 27 Oct 2026