Since the mid 1990s, in a generally strongly performing property market, there has been huge growth in the aggregate size and number of global property funds in both listed (REIT) and unlisted formats. Fund managers have been able to raise capital for funds which reward them with performance fees without clear evidence of historic out-performance against market benchmarks or targets, but in a more challenging market this may not be the case. It will be increasingly possible to assemble performance records, and following this there will need to be more analysis of those records. Potential analytical performance systems will include traditional attribution methods but will also need to cover the concepts of alpha and beta widely used in other alternative asset classes. This paper will examine issues related to this. What is beta, and what is alpha in real estate investment? How can it be measured and isolated? Can performance records and performance fees adequately distinguish between these drivers?