Phasing into a REIT trough over eight quarters against funding the sleeve now

Take an allocator with a target of about 12 percent to listed real estate and roughly 400k to move into it. The default instinct is a slow build, equal tranches over eight quarters, because nobody should trust themselves to call the bottom of a valuation gap already described as historically wide. What should bother that allocator is that the argument for deploying here is specifically about a discount closing. If the discount closes in two quarters, a phased build puts most of the money in after the move, and the allocator has paid for comfort with the entire thesis. If rates back up 100bp first, the phased build looks smart. So the phasing decision is really a bet on the shape of the rerating rather than the direction. Two things are hard to resolve. First, the dividend yield keeps accruing while the money sits in cash, and the spread between a REIT sleeve's yield and short-term cash is thinner than it usually is in a trough, which weakens the cost of waiting argument. Second, if the build is phased, does each tranche go into the same sector weights, or do the tactical tilts (data centers, industrial) wait for later tranches while the boring diversified core goes first? Has anyone built a rule for this that survived contact with a quarter where prices moved 9 percent before the next tranche date?