The quality of and access to firm-level information is essential to reduce market information asymmetries between a company’s insiders and stock market investors. In this context, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) aims to enhance information transparency for investors in publicly listed firms. Common SEC comments received by REITs relate to inconsistencies between the FFO disclosed by real estate companies and NAREIT’s definition, or missing information on the Net Operating Income (NOI) or AFFO calculation. The SEC also increasingly requires REITs to discuss commercial real estate market conditions and risks in more detail. A REIT has 10 days to respond to the SEC letter. Since 2005, SEC has publicly disclosed comment letters shortly after a completed review. Considering that SEC comment letters represent an external audit of REIT financial statements and letters contain information about, amongst others, a REIT’s operational performance measurement, business operations and relevant real estate market conditions, the question arises as to whether SEC comment letters have informative value to REIT investors that help reduce information asymmetries. Previous studies find that additional or enhanced firm disclosures have been found to reduce information asymmetries (Kohl and Schaefers 2012; Leuz and Verrecchia 2000; Welker 1995). Investigating the informational value of SEC comment letters to stock market investors, we in particular analyze the impact of SEC’s comment letters received by REITs on information asymmetries, as measured by the bid-ask spread (Anglin et al. 2011; Bozanic et al. 2014; Johnston and Petacchi 2017), over the period from 2005 to 2017. To collect the content and frequency of comment letters, we use Audit Analytics database. To our knowledge, this is the first large-sample study investigating the impact of SEC comment letters on information asymmetries perceived by REIT investors. We explicitly take into account REITs special accounting measures by focusing on SEC’s real estate-relevant reviews like comments on non-GAAP metrics (e.g. NOI, FFO and AFFO).