Smoothing Bias in In-House Appraisal-Based Returns of Open-End Real Estate Funds

Appraisal-based real estate return series often exhibit little variation, which is referred to as smoothing bias. This paper discriminates between in-house and outside appraisals as sources of smoothing bias in appraisal-based returns. There is reason to expect that in-house appraisal-based returns of open-end real estate funds are smoothed. For a large open-end real estate fund listed at the Amsterdam Stock Exchange, an unusually detailed set of data is available, including observations of both in-house and outside appraisals. The empirical findings suggest that in-house appraisal-based returns are smoothed, whereas those based on independent outside appraisals are not.