Most stocks are judged by indicators such as Price/Earnings, revenue growth, profit growth and Enterprise Value/Revenue.

Here the Enterprise Value is equal to the sum of the market value and the total debt minus the cash. The ratio Enterprise Value/Revenue is a measure for how fast a company earns money compared to its total value. Nowadays the Enterprise Value/Revenue is around 1 for many companies. But not for real estate funds. For these funds this ratio is typically between 5 and 10 in the US.

So what's the difference between real estate funds and other companies ? Most companies do not have much illiquid assets. They rent their stores and offices, have small inventories and so on. So the book value of these companies is small compared to the Enterprise Value. This is different for real estate companies, since their business it taking the risk of owning buildings.

So what is a good indicator for real estate companies instead of Enterprise Value/Revenue ? I would still call it Enterprise Value/Revenue but then with a different definition of Enterprise Value. For real estate companies the Enterprise Value can be defined by sum of the market value and the total debt minus the cash and the fair market value of their buildings. This is much more difficult to compute because real estate companies do not always report a correct market value of their assets. Sometimes the Book Value may be a good replacement for the fair market value of the assets.

By the way: something similar applies to other companies with lots of illiquid assets such as car lease companies and companies owning container ships.