My advisor said "if you're buying a private REIT, you're buying a story" and I cannot shake it

Your advisor is not wrong, but there is a version of that observation that leads somewhere useful and a version that just keeps you frozen. The prospectus is a story, yes, but the underlying assets are not. What I started doing before committing to any private vehicle is requesting the actual property-level rent rolls, not the aggregated summary they front the deck with. If the sponsor will not send you actual unit-by-unit or suite-by-suite occupancy and lease expiry schedules, you are buying the story version. If they send you 47 pages of granular data you have to work to read, that is a different product. I put 60k into a private industrial fund out of Kraków-adjacent logistics corridor about 18 months ago and what gave me enough conviction was that I could trace individual tenant names to public filings. That is not the same as walking a hallway in Wrocław but it is not nothing either.

The thing your whole post skips over though: what is the liquidity window on this specific REIT, and does that window line up with anything in your actual life plan? Because the "I cannot see what I'm buying" discomfort is one thing, and it is legitimate, but the thing that actually bites people with conservative backgrounds who step into private vehicles is that they need liquidity in month 14 and the redemption gate does not open until month 36. Your three units, you could sell one if something went sideways. A private REIT in a bad quarter can simply suspend redemptions and there is nothing you can do about it. That asymmetry is the real underwriting question, not the story problem.