Are REITs a good investment for beginners?
Are REITs Good Investments? Investing in REITs is a great way to diversify your portfolio outside of traditional stocks and bonds and can be attractive for their strong dividends and long-term capital appreciation.
Since they aren't publicly available and don't register with the SEC, it's difficult to pinpoint specific investment minimums. However, investment firm Edward Jones says minimum investments for private REITs can range from $1,000 to $50,000.
Risks of investing in REITs include higher dividend taxes, sensitivity to interest rates, and exposure to specific property trends.
Individuals can invest in REITs in a variety of different ways, including purchasing shares of publicly traded REIT stocks, mutual funds and exchange-traded funds. REITs also play a growing role in defined benefit and defined contribution investment plans.
REITs generate a steady income stream for investors but offer little capital appreciation. Most REITs are publicly traded like stocks, which makes them highly liquid, unlike real estate investments.
Payments can be made monthly, quarterly, once every six months, or even less frequently. There are companies whose investors receive no dividends at all because not every company is a dividend-paying one. REITs (real estate investment trusts) are funds that promise their investors no less than 90% of their earnings.
Getting out of a non-traded real estate investment trust, or REIT, can often be rather difficult and expensive. Once a REIT is closed to new investors, the board of directors of the REIT can suspend the redemption policy.
In most cases, REITs utilize a combination of debt and equity to purchase a property. As such, they are more sensitive than other asset classes to changes in interest rates., particularly those that use variable rate debt. When interest rates rise, REITs share prices can be prone to volatility.
Any increase in the short-term interest rate eats into the profit—so if it doubled in our example above, there'd be no profit left. And if it goes up even higher, the REIT loses money. All of that makes mortgage REITs extremely volatile, and their dividends are also extremely unpredictable.
REITs historically perform well during and after recessions | Pensions & Investments.
What is the average return on a REIT?
| REIT SUBGROUP | AVERAGE ANNUAL TOTAL RETURN (1994-2023) |
|---|---|
| Retail | 11.2% |
| Office | 10.1% |
| Lodging/Resorts | 9.0% |
| Diversified | 7.9% |
| Symbol | Fund name | 1-year return |
|---|---|---|
| BRIIX | Baron Real Estate Institutional | 13.13% |
| RRRRX | DWS RREEF Real Estate Securities Instil | 9.65% |
| CSRIX | Cohen & Steers Instl Realty Shares | 8.93% |
| AIGYX | abrdn Realty Income & Growth Instl | 8.53% |
But historically, the best entry points for listed REITs have been during early cycle recoveries. And the very best returns come when you transition between a recession and early cycle, when REITs have historically delivered next 12-month returns of more than 20%.
The truth is that most investors won't have the money to generate $1,000 per month in dividends; not at first, anyway. Even if you find a market-beating series of investments that average 3% annual yield, you would still need $400,000 in up-front capital to hit your targets. And that's okay.
An eye-popping yield likely inspired Jeff Yass of Susquehanna to buy 1.4 million shares of AGNC in the third quarter. Yass isn't the only billionaire placing bets on this mortgage REIT. John Overdeck and David Siegel of Two Sigma Investments scooped up 1.2 million shares.
To generate $5,000 per month in dividends, you would need a portfolio value of approximately $1 million invested in stocks with an average dividend yield of 5%.
Non-traded REITs generally have high up-front fees. Sales commissions and upfront offering fees usually total approximately 9 to 10 percent of the investment. These costs lower the value of the investment by a significant amount. Most REITS pay out at least 100 percent of their taxable income to their shareholders.
In some cases, REITs use lots of debt to finance their holdings. Some trusts have low amounts of leverage.
REITs and stocks can both pay dividends, usually on a monthly, quarterly, or yearly basis. Some investments will also offer special dividends, but they're unpredictable.
A lot of REIT investors focus too way much on the dividend yield. They think that a high dividend yield implies that a REIT is cheap and a good investment opportunity. In reality, it is often the opposite, and the dividend does not say much, if anything, about the valuation of a REIT.
Can you become a millionaire from REITs?
At that rate of return, a monthly investment of $300 in REITs would grow into $1 million in about 30 years. If you invested more money into REITs or those producing a higher average annual return, you could become a millionaire even faster.
But since REITs are invested in property, there's more protection against the horror show of having shares crash to $0. By law, 75% of a REITs asset must be invested in real estate. The market value of the property owned by the REIT offers a bit of protection, as long as the value of the property doesn't go to zero.
Because the REITs aren't publicly traded, the only way to withdraw money is to redeem shares.
But interest rates have still been rising, so you wouldn't expect REITs to begin rebounding yet. As this chart shows, REITs perform poorly during periods of rising long-term interest rates, such as we are in right now. They perform even more poorly relative to non-REIT equities.
Often, the bulk of REIT dividend payouts consists of the company's operating profit. As a proportional owner of the REIT company, the shareholder receives this payout as ordinary income and will be taxed at the investor's marginal income tax rate as nonqualified dividends.
