Guidelines

INREV aims to improve transparency and promote best practice and professionalism in the sector. INREV members have encouraged and strongly supported the establishment of industry guidelines over the past few years and developed an integrated set of principles and recommendations including tools and examples and standardised templates for investors and investment managers of non-listed real estate vehicles. The objectives of the INREV Guidelines are:

• to ensure that investors in non-listed real estate vehicles obtain consistent, understandable, easily accessible and reliable information that can be compared across investments and between different periods;
• to establish requirements and best practices within the industry and to help investment managers implement them in practice.

The INREV Guidelines are presented in an online format, allowing visitors to easily navigate and search through and view tailored guidelines for example for open end funds.

It is possible to download a full version of the Guidelines or to create a custom version module by module in a PDF format in our Guidelines section.

The INREV Guidelines are organised into ten modules.

The Guidelines are embedded in an Adoption and Compliance Framework which allows investment managers and investors to evaluate their implementation of the INREV Guidelines, module by module. To determine ways of implementation and add a hierarchy to the guidelines’ requirements and best practices it is important to understand the underlying terminology:

Principles
Principles serve as a basis for the requirements and best practices.

Best practices
Best practices have been developed by INREV to enable investors and investment managers to design vehicle products with an effective governance framework aligned with industry best practices and relevant to their specific needs. Investment managers should evaluate themselves, using the self assessment tool against such best practice frameworks and disclose their level of adoption.

Standardised templates 
The Due Diligence Questionnaires (DDQs) and the Standard Data Delivery Sheet (SDDS) are standardised templates that complement the INREV Guidelines but they are not part of its formal structure. These are used for information exchange between industry participants. 

Tools and Examples
Tools and examples are meant to assist in the application of the INREV Guidelines. Tools support market participants in assessing specific situations and in complying efficiently with the INREV Guidelines. Examples serve as a pattern to be followed by market participants to illustrate a certain standard.

Definitions
INREV definitions (‘Global Definitions’) were developed to achieve consistency of meaning and terminology within the non-listed real estate industry. Global definitions are being created via the collaboration with the NCREIF PREA Reporting Standards and can be found in the Global Definitions Database. They are gradually replacing the INREV Definitions.