Does managing buildings actually help you weight a REIT sleeve, or does it just make you overconfident?

I manage a bit over 300 units across a handful of owners. I can tell you which of those buildings will have a bad year, roughly when, and why, usually before the owner knows.

None of that has told me whether the listed apartment names are cheap.

The case for tilting off operating knowledge: you see things before they reach a quarterly report. Insurance renewals, turnover creeping up, the concessions your competitors start offering, the pipeline of what's actually getting built versus what's been announced. That's the same input a REIT analyst is trying to reconstruct from a distance, and you get it for free.

The case against: your five submarkets are not a national portfolio, and the thing that will move your sleeve over the next 18 months is far more likely to be a rate move than anything you noticed on a lease-up. You can be completely right about your buildings and still have the tilt add nothing except tracking error. There's also the problem that being close to a sector makes you like it, and I'm not sure I can separate judgment from habit.

So where does the room land. Curious whether the capital-leaning people here weight this differently from the operators.