Private equity funds that specialize in real estate are attracting regulatory scrutiny over hiring that can boost the firm’s fees while sticking investors with higher expenses, Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Mary Jo White said.

SEC examiners are looking into poorly disclosed business relationships that benefit advisers to private equity funds, White said at a speech in New York. The inspections open a new front in oversight by the SEC, which this year won multi-million-dollar settlements with Blackstone Group LP and KKR & Co. over fee arrangements.

Real-estate funds are hiring businesses they control to do work for portfolio companies in cases where unrelated firms might have done the work at lower cost, White said at the Managed Funds Association’s Outlook 2015 conference. Fund advisers may have made misleading disclosures about the contracts, she said.

“Disclosure about these arrangements may be non-existent or potentially misleading, particularly with regard to whether or not the related parties charge market rates,” White said, citing concerns expressed by SEC staff.

Blackstone Group LP, the world’s largest private-equity investor in real estate, agreed last week to pay almost $39 million to settle claims that it failed to fully inform investors about fees and business discounts that benefited the company. New York-based Blackstone gained “substantially greater” discounts on legal work than was reflected in rebates applied to its funds, which are mostly owned by investors, according to the SEC’s complaint.

The SEC has focused particular scrutiny on lump-sum fees that private equity firms extract when they sell a company or take it public. The fees pull cash from portfolio companies and reduce returns for investors, but haven’t been clearly disclosed, the SEC found. Blackstone ended its practice of collecting the lump-sum fees in October 2014 after the SEC criticized it.

White said Friday that SEC examiners “continue to observe advisers collecting millions of dollars” in the fees without disclosing the practice.

In June, KKR & Co. agreed to pay $28.5 million to settle allegations that some investors, including the firm’s executives, weren’t charged for some costs tied to unsuccessful corporate buyouts. The SEC’s investigation found that KKR didn’t disclose in investor agreements that $17.4 million of “broken deal” expenses were not imposed on investors who got favorable treatment.