The last three decades have seen substantial change in real estate portfolios of financial institutions. This paper begins by first charting this restructuring of the institutional real estate portfolio between industrial, offices and retail classes over the last thirty years in the UK. This restructuring will be disaggregated over different timescales from say decades down to individual years. The research will therefore seek to distinguish short term, medium term and long term temporal patterns of investment change. It will then assess to what extent these components are linked or can be explained by reference to the internal dynamics of property market cycles, levels of transactions activity and investment returns. Time lags in causal relationships will also be assessed. The empirical analysis will be based on the IPD database. Finally some general conclusions will be drawn.