Data sourced from Dakota Private Markets, the private fund performance platform powered by Dakota. Learn More | Request Access
The 2021 vintage of private real estate funds carries a 1.10x median TVPI, a respectable number three years into a typical hold period. Its median DPI is 0.22x. Roughly 80% of the reported value in that vintage is still a mark, not cash returned to LPs. That gap between what a fund says it's worth and what it's actually paid out, not the headline IRR, is the number driving re-up decisions in private real estate right now.
The Vintage Curve Shows a Reset, Not a Recovery
Median net IRR tells a clean story on the surface. It ran 6.5% to 8.8% across the 2015-2018 vintages, fell to 7.9% in 2020, then dropped sharply to 5.7% in 2021 and 4.3% in 2022, the two vintages that deployed capital into peak pricing just as financing costs rose and transaction volume slowed. The 2023 vintage shows a 7.6% median, an encouraging bounce, but it's an early mark on a young portfolio and shouldn't be compared to seasoned vintages on equal footing.
The dispersion underneath the median is the more useful signal. Bottom-quartile IRR went from a positive 2.5% in 2020 to -1.0% in 2021 and -0.7% in 2022, while the top-to-bottom quartile spread widened from 7.6 percentage points to 10.9 and 10.3 points over the same span. That widening spread is the clearest evidence that manager selection, not market beta, is now doing the work that cheap debt and cap-rate compression used to do.
TVPI Is the Headline, DPI Is the Verdict
Liquidity is where the real estate reset shows up hardest. Median DPI has been at or below 0.24x for every vintage from 2019 onward, and it drops to 0.12x for the 2020 vintage and 0.10x for 2022. Compare that to the 2018 vintage, which already carries a 0.57x median DPI at a comparable point in its life. Funds are holding value, they're just not returning it.
The 2021 vintage is the starkest example: a 1.10x median TVPI against just 0.22x DPI means roughly 0.88x of value, or about 80% of what's reported, is still unrealized. This is more than normal J-curve seasoning. It reflects a transaction market that's still catching up to where valuations need to reset before sellers and buyers agree on price. This is exactly the kind of dispersion Dakota Private Markets' custom benchmarking dataset is built to isolate, tracking net IRR, TVPI, and DPI at the vintage level rather than blending everything into a single headline number.
Strategy Is Splitting Outcomes Inside the Same Vintage
Opportunistic strategies have generally outpaced value-add through the reset, and the gap is wide enough to matter for underwriting. In the 2022 vintage, opportunistic funds generated a 6.0% median net IRR against 2.5% for value-add. In 2023, the gap widened further: 8.4% for opportunistic versus 3.1% for value-add. Flexible mandates that could buy into dislocation, rather than business plans underwritten on pre-reset debt and construction costs, have had more room to maneuver.
These figures come from Dakota Private Markets' Q2 2026 Real Estate Benchmark Review, which tracks vintage-level Net IRR, TVPI, and DPI across the full 2004-2024 range. The underlying dataset is LP-reported net-of-fees performance, including public pension FOIA disclosures, LP portfolio reports, and direct member submissions, with the most recent reported quarter retained for every fund and vintage.
What Outperformance Actually Looks Like
The median tells you where the market sits, but individual fund records show how wide the range really is. These five funds, drawn from the same recent-vintage dataset, illustrate the property-type and strategy themes above. They aren't a ranking or an endorsement, just individual records as of 1Q26.
|
Fund
|
Vintage
|
Investment Focus
|
Net IRR
|
|
NREP Nordic Strategies Fund V
|
2022
|
Value-add real estate
|
21.6%
|
|
Strategic Partners Real Estate VIII
|
2022
|
Real estate secondaries
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20.4%
|
|
FPA Core Plus Fund VI
|
2022
|
Core-plus real estate
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15.2%
|
|
Kayne Anderson Real Estate Partners VI
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2021
|
Value-add real estate
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14.6%
|
|
Dalfen Last Mile Industrial Fund IV
|
2020
|
Last-mile industrial
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12.4%
|
| |
|
|
|
Every one of these sits well above its vintage's median net IRR. That's the point: the label on a fund, "2022 value-add" or "2021 value-add," tells you almost nothing on its own. Manager selection inside a strategy and vintage explains more of the spread than the strategy label does.
Bottom line: TVPI tells you what a real estate fund says it's worth, DPI tells you what it's actually paid out, and right now that gap is wider than at any point since the Global Financial Crisis vintages. Underwriting a re-up on TVPI alone means underwriting a bet on an exit market that hasn't shown up yet.
Dakota Private Markets
Dakota Private Markets is built for exactly this kind of scrutiny. It carries verified Net IRR, TVPI, DPI, and RVPI on private fund records so allocators, consultants, and GPs raising a follow-on fund can see how a vintage or a strategy is actually performing, not just how it's marked. Custom benchmarking cuts by vintage, strategy, and property type let you build the comparison set your own portfolio or pipeline actually needs.
Request access to see the full benchmark dataset behind these numbers.
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