Swiss institutional real estate managers rarely look at their figures in isolation. Investors, boards and investment committees want to know how a portfolio compares with the market. That comparison draws on several external reference points, each built for a different purpose.
Who provides what
- Listed real estate funds. SIX publishes the SXI Real Estate indices, which track Swiss real estate funds and real estate shares listed on its exchange.
- Investment foundations. The KGAST Immo-Index tracks the performance of the real estate investment groups of Swiss investment foundations (Anlagestiftungen).
- Market data and valuation. Consultancies such as Fahrländer Partner (FPRE) and Wüest Partner publish property market data, price and rent indices and valuation models, which many managers and valuers use for market comparison.
- International comparison. MSCI provides real estate benchmarks for managers who compare against other markets.
None of these is a reporting standard that a manager submits to. They are reference points. The reporting obligations themselves come from regulation, under the Collective Investment Schemes Act and FINMA supervision, and from industry guidance.
A comparison is only as good as the data behind it
A benchmark compares your figures with someone else's. If your figures rest on different definitions, the comparison says very little. In Swiss portfolios, four differences come up again and again.
Vacancy. Property managers often report vacancy by unit count. Performance comparisons usually rely on a revenue-based measure, such as the rental loss rate. A property with one large vacant unit and five small occupied ones looks very different under each measure, and converting between them needs unit-level rent data that not every régie provides.
Capex classification. Maintenance spending flows through the income statement. Value-enhancing investment is capitalised. Property managers do not always split the two in the same way, so the asset manager's team ends up reclassifying lines by hand each period.
Lease data. WAULT depends on current start dates, end dates, break options and contracted rent. That data sits in the property manager's system. Delivered as a quarterly PDF or a non-standard extract, it is hard to keep accurate.
Market value timing. If a revaluation happens part-way through a period, the value change has to be treated consistently. Otherwise income return and capital return are not comparable from one period to the next, let alone with an index.
Why manual reconciliation stops scaling
Many teams handle these differences by hand. A senior analyst maintains the mapping between each régie's categories and the fund's own structure, updates lease-based figures each quarter and reconciles income and capital return in a workbook.
That works for a while. It tends to break when the portfolio grows or when a second property manager with different conventions is added. The reconciliation stops being one person's quarterly task and becomes a week of coordination across several people and several rounds of correction.
The risk grows with it. A reconciliation done under deadline pressure, in a shared workbook with several contributors, is exactly where classification errors and formula mistakes build up unnoticed.
What to put in place first
The most important step is not technology. It is a clear specification of what each property manager should deliver, in what format and on what schedule, agreed with them rather than imposed on them.
The second is a documented classification mapping: how each régie's cost categories translate into the fund's own structure. In many teams this mapping has never been written down. It lives in the head of the analyst who has done the work for years.
The third is validation at the point the data arrives, so that differences are caught and resolved with the source before they reach a report or a benchmark comparison.
Where STREETS fits
STREETS harmonises the data received from different property managers into a common portfolio and accounting structure, validates it, and reports from that one dataset. It calculates portfolio KPIs such as WAULT, vacancy, rental loss and cost ratios, and each figure can be traced back to its source.
STREETS does not provide market benchmarks, indices or valuations. Those come from the providers above. What it gives you is a consistent, validated set of your own figures to compare with them.
Consistent data before any comparison
STREETS consolidates and validates the data your property managers deliver and reports from one dataset, in English, French and German. We agree the scope and validate the mappings with you before anything goes live.
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