my accountant said "you're not invested in real estate, you're invested in the paperwork" and i keep turning it over

he meant it as a criticism. i'm not sure i disagree with him, but i also don't think that's the whole picture. i've been in four non-traded REITs since 2019, two of them NAV-based, and what i've noticed is that the K-1 complexity scales faster than the return does. the 2022 K-1 from my industrial-weighted position had seven supplemental schedules. the annualized return that year was 5.8%. my CPA charged me $340 just for that one form. so when you net that out against a $47k position it starts to feel like he has a point. the paperwork is not incidental to the investment, it sort of is the investment, at least in the sense that understanding what you own requires you to actually process all of it. i read every K-1 myself before i hand it over. i've caught two errors that way, one in 2021 that affected my basis, one in 2023 that had a foreign tax credit sitting in the wrong box. neither was huge but both mattered. what i don't know is whether most LPs in these vehicles do any of that, or whether they just hand the envelope to someone and trust that the number comes out right. i think about that more than i probably should.