This paper studies the value added arising from the skills of active real estate portfolio managers by exploring a database of listed property companies for Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States. We develops three indicators of portfolio management intensity, and investigates whether these indicators are related to various market- and accounting-based performance measures. Our empirical results suggest that it is difficult to explain variations in outperformance on the basis of the management intensity indicators developed in this paper. This suggests that even if commercial real estate markets do exhibit the persistent inefficiencies often attributed to them by practitioners, these inefficiencies are not big enough to compensate for the additional trading costs associated with the intensive portfolio strategies investigated in this study.