This doctor level dissertation is broken down to two chapters, where in the first chapter I address the performance implication of limited partner network, a phenomenon that emerges because of growing market competitiveness in the real estate private equity space yet has received relatively little attention in the academia. Our analysis of more than 2,000 private equity real estate (PERE) funds over three decades reveals abnormal performance among PERE funds dominated by institutional investor cliques. Specifically, investor cliques with a more extensive history of joint investment are associated with superior fund performance that is not explained by common fund characteristics. Such correlation is not predicted by a simple Bayesian update without access to private information, implying that investor networks may be a channel through which limited partners identify and access better-performing fund managers. We also provide evidence that Limited Partner (LP) networks are not a mere result of rational herding by showing that the clique-level Herfindahl-Hirschman Index for investor AUM does not positively predict greater abnormal return. We further observe that investor cliques prolong the time needed to reach maximal commitment. As General Partners (GP) are known to utilize a subscription line of credit to borrow against committed capital to boost return, we infer more financing discretion granted to GPs by cliques. The second chapter zooms in on a representative type of commercial property, hotels, where the effectiveness of hotel management contract design at compensating for manager’s ability is studied. We find that there is a positive and significant correlation between our estimated managerial ability and management fees received. Incentive management fee, which ties the money amount to profit margin, is more sensitive to managerial ability. This set of findings reflects the effectiveness of the current tiered structure of hotel management contracts in the market. Coming with the findings are two more discoveries: 1) Larger managers are associated with lower ability measures. 2) Yet larger managers are associated with a higher likelihood of receiving an incentive management fee. These two findings lead us to conjure whether certain managers possess more power in contract negotiation so that terms such as incentive threshold are more favorable. We then hypothesis that manager-level characteristics such as size, type and age are factors that affect contract negotiation between property owner and manager. We find that larger managers on average receive less compensation, possibly due to them allocating less resources to individual properties. Older managers on average receive more compensation, implying that property owners may be willing to pay for more experienced managers. Brand managers have no statistically meaningful difference from non-brand managers.