Industry Performance

Financial markets have been troubled by a decline in corporate profits. Earnings per share of the S&P 500 fell 7.6 percent in the first quarter of 2016 compared to last year, prompting a drop in equity prices and concerns about the outlook. But trends are going the other direction in real estate.

Investment real estate values declined by -0.32 percent during April 2016 according to the FTSE NAREIT PureProperty® Index Series, which provides the earliest measurement of changes in the market values of properties held for investment purposes. 

Here’s a comment that was much more common when I started this job in 2006 than it is today: exchange-traded equity REITs, people used to say, are essentially “just small-cap value stocks,” implying that they didn’t offer any significant diversification benefit that you couldn’t get simply by holding a mutual fund or ETF focused on the small-cap value segment of the stock market.

Stock exchange-listed Equity REITs have historically provided not merely strong long-term total returns and steady current income, but also several forms of diversification.

 If you’re a day-trader, average returns during long historical periods are irrelevant. For those with long horizons, exchange-traded Equity REITs have proven themselves over and over again.

As an asset class, stock exchange-traded equity real estate has provided higher returns than other public equity investments over most significant historical periods. The outperformance by exchange-traded Equity REITs for long holding periods has not been limited to just a small set of property types.

Both volatilities and correlations have come down and are now firmly within their long-term normal ranges. Estimated REIT volatilities were above 21.9% only from January 21st through February 19th, and was most recently estimated at 11.8% using data through April 15th.