Managerial Skill and European PERE Fund Performance

Institutional investors often select private equity real estate (PERE) funds based on the belief that some of the managers possess skill. In this paper, we study skill of PERE general partners (GPs) from two perspectives: performance persistence and limited partner (LP) reinvestment. We first risk-adjust fund returns by controlling for fund characteristics and obtain abnormal returns that are driven by managerial skill. We then use pooled OLS and probit regressions on abnormal returns to show that managerial performance persists in our sample, and that skilled managers continue to deliver winning risk-adjusted performance, while for mediocre managers performance does not persist in terms of neither performance correlation nor probability of repeating performance. We also provide evidence that LP reinvestment can serve as a signal of skill, as reinvested funds perform better than non-reinvested ones. This positive effect of reinvestment also applies to the predecessor loser and non-winner funds, suggesting that poor performance does not always indicate the lack of skill, but can be a result of random events.