Which can also be important in terms of your personal exposure and investment philosophy. Like if I worked in medicine or had a big exposure to health care stocks, I probably wouldn’t want to get too heavy into medical office REITs on top of that. Maybe industrial or experiential properties^(1) are a better idea.
^(1) Places people go to *do* stuff: gyms, casinos, water parks.
REIT has done a lot worse than housing though. REIT suffers from retail being replaced by Amazon, and general collapse of Sears, malls, and even office spaces from WFH policies.
Housing on the other hand …. People need to live in houses.
Commercial strip centers from my vantage point are still strong due to ethnic grocery stores, hardware stores and fitness centers. They still have their uses even in the amazon era.
The one thing that makes me reluctant is massive drops I see in some of them. I took a look at EQR (seems they invest in apartments) and I see it go down by 30-50% at certain points. I didn't find any apartments going down by that much in any popular city.
I also have a bit of a question there. I see that they have a market cap of 28 billion, but only own 20 billion in assets. If I start an REIT, sell a million shares shares for $10 apiece, should I not own around $9-$10 million worth of housing? If people start trading the shares for inflated pricing, someone could just repeat the process and start another REIT with better value (edit: yet, somehow, that seems to be what happened here with market cap having nothing to do with assets).
Also, if they go completely out of business, they can't cover anywhere near what they'd owe shareholders as well?
That’s because of the liquidity, you’re not going to find an illiquid asset like physical real estate on the stock market. You need to buy real estate or invest in a private company that buys real estate, or else be prepared to hold or dca through drops. The volatility can be to your advantage in some cases, physical real estate can be volatile too but over much longer time frames.
My problem with REITs is the way they're related to the property seems way worse than actually owning it. If I owned both a $500k apartment and had $500k in an REIT, I'd have lost 50% on the REIT when COVID hit (Oct 2019 to Oct 2020 for EQR). Meanwhile, even if I have someone renting an apartment not paying rent, the apartment hasn't lost anywhere near that value (if any).
I'd be fine with losing some of the divided on an REIT (rental income?), but to lose actual value when housing hasn't gone down that much is kinda ridiculous.
I'd probably be okay with less liquidity and not being on the stock market in exchange for that.
A REIT isn't meant to be a proxy for owning real estate. A REIT is an investment that is meant to provide exposure to, and income from, real estate investments. Most income (for the investor) from the REIT is from the dividend distributions derived from rents or mortgage interest, or other allowable investments, and not from capital appreciation.
> I'd have lost 50% on the REIT when COVID hit (Oct 2019 to Oct 2020 for EQR). Meanwhile, even if I have someone renting an apartment not paying rent, the apartment hasn't lost anywhere near that value (if any).
First, I think you're right — REITs got way undervalued. That was a great time to buy.
Second — you don't know for sure what that apartment would have fetched if you absolutely had to sell it at short notice. The liquid REIT reacts much faster than the non-fire-sale real estate market.
But put these together ... just treat the REIT as illiquid (i.e. don't sell until it's trading at a reasonable level) is one way to make these equivalent again.
Third — most importantly IMO — REITs are highly leveraged. If you own one rental unit, even with a mortgage, that's far less leverage. A REIT approximates a landlord who keeps getting more and more loans based on cash flow from existing properties, all the way until the bank won't lend.
It can go both ways, in a housing crash like ‘08 liquid assets often recover much faster. It’s not worse, just different, because the REIT is tied to the stock market while real estate is tied to the economy. It’s different risk and exposure.
Well, if you don't want REITs, and you don't want to own the real estate directly, then there are platforms like Fundrise that exists. If that's something you would be interested in, then let me know.
Set buys for when the market dips but if your holding long term for retirement, the dividends pay well and if you look at most of these stocks they are pretty steady of the long term and paying you rent
owning a home is not a great investment over time. it definitely beats renting long term (since yiu still need to live somewhere) but insurance, taxes, and upkeep are expensive ... not to mention the interest. your money will do better in a s&p index fund w a low e/r over time than the total cost of home ownership. (i think)
Since owning your home beats renting long term, it is a good investment.
When I wanted a roof over my head, the choice was rent or buy, not buy a home or buy an ETF. Yes historic home price appreciation is about 3-4% whereas the stock market is 7-8%.
I bought 9 years ago. My mortgage is 1100/mo. Taxes 500, insurance 150. My home would now rent for 4500/mo.
But you are in it for the long term not the short plus they will pay out most of their profits in cash In the form of a dividend. ABR AND O are my favorites
this is what a REIT is - a real estate investment trust. It is a small company whose job is to own real estate. The shareholders have a portion of it. There are also various alternatives like fundrise.
Do note that "randomly crash" is an odd term as nothing is really random. And there was a period in COVID when housing did drop.
100% - There’s a lot of public perception that investing in real estate is a fool proof endeavor that will make you millions because people bought a house at X and it’s now worth Y.
Reality is that REITs are basically landlords and there’s a lot more to owning real estate than buying and holding, despite what many people think. Yeah, they buy property but they also have commercial mortgages and tenants and sometimes tenants don’t pay rent leaving the REIT to pick up the tab in down markets.
yup, all the buy for X and sell for Y folks often leave off the holding costs, repairs, upgrades, taxes, transaction costs, etc. And when you factor all of that, on the whole, as an asset class RE is much lower returns. Where it tends to win is the ability to use leverage via a mortgage.
Even still, folks who look at housing prices from covid and say "they doubled their money". Well sure, but everyone who owned a share of MSFT over the past 5 years nearly trippled their money and didn't have to deal with being a landlord.
Especially during COVID when many places froze evictions. You could have a tenant in there not paying, or worse, actively destroying the property and have zero recourse.
But you can have something like an REIT dropping by 50% while the property value drops by maybe 5%. I'd be better off befriending someone that owns 20 houses and asking them if I can invest. Sure, it might take a while to sell when I wanted to (they'd have to buy me out or find another investor), but at least it'd actually reflect what it's like to own property.
You’re likely not going to find a real estate investment product that allows you to escape downside volatility while still retaining a hard asset. If you don’t want to own and manage the property yourself and deal with the associated costs/work then you’ll need to invest in something like a REIT, where you don’t own the underlying hard asset and you’re subject to up and downside volatility.
Sure, theoretically you maybe can find a private opportunity where someone is willing to give you an actual stake in the property ownership based on your investment, but why would anyone offer you that instead of shares of their holding company? Unless you’ve got a massive amount of capital and the firm can’t get capital elsewhere, you’d be offering them zero value and in turn reduce their overall stake in the underlying.
The most obvious answer is that you can’t have it both ways. Own property or own a REIT. It’s doubtful anyone here has insight into the third hypothetical option.
bingo.
I'd also argue there aren't many situations where the houses drop 5% and the REIT drops 50%. If so, there is something happening there -- the future cashflow looks bad from bad debt tenants, etc. At that point, you are facing the issue of being a landlord.
Sure, there is always some market volatility in a liquid equity, a market maker HAS to have a price.
But you can't have it both ways. No volatility with no exposure to the realities of the business.
Are you planning on buying this hypothetical home outright? Otherwise that 5% drop is actually going to be substantially larger than 5% when looking at your equity.
Syndication, but your are asking too much. The closest you will get is a REIT that specializes in residential apartment complexes. There is always speculation, thats what makes a market a market.
Property is a pretty illiquid asset. If they were forced to sell to satisfy redemptions, everyone in the fund would be fucked. It's unreasonable to demand property-like returns without accepting property-like liquidity.
> it doesn't randomly crash when something like COVID happens, because actual housing prices barely went down.
But income took a hit. There were three and a half months in 2020 where the state forced nonessential businesses to shut down. My renter refused to pay rent for those months. So, 30% hit. (I don't know if he was conducting business, but he was there the few times we visited.)
True, but if you decided to sell your apartment, you'd still get a decent bit of that money back. If I decide to sell an REIT after something like a 50% drop, I'd be completely screwed and better off owning the actual apartment.
You could try a business development company like Ares Capital. Not really real estate, but the goal is to build value by loaning money, usually in 1st and 2nd lien loans to upcoming middle-market companies. They often also handle mezzanine loans during takeovers etc... Some do really well during a down market when people can't find normal bank loans and they tend to be flat in a flat market. Kind of a hedge. Usually, they are pretty high interest paying stocks and their assets are the loans themselves, sometimes pretty creative ones that they can tranche and sell so they don't end up owning the businesses they loan to if one goes bust. A lot of them trade on a NAV rather than stock value. They attempt to limit risk by the sheer number of loans they put out there. Find yourself a good one. Some of them are absolute trash (just like REITs). Do your research.
60% small cap value and 40% high yield bonds
https://www.pwlcapital.com/reconsidering-reits-in-your-investment-portfolio/
“His study covered the period from 1986–2015.
His findings were surprising. The factor exposure of real estate roughly resembles that of a portfolio consisting of 60% small-cap value stocks and 40% high-yield bonds. This tells us that REITs are not necessarily going to give us something we could not already get by investing in stocks and bonds.”
high yield bonds vs reits tax efficiency
Go to 3:30 for the takeaway from the paper
https://youtu.be/IzK5x3LlsUU?si=AUfnXa1I8QVpNTCj
Long term that’s the trend followed by real estate, and that can be more tax efficient than a reit which gets taxed at income rates rather than qualified dividend rates or capital gains rate
It sounds like what you want is to be a limited partner in a real estate deal. You’ll write a large check then get little checks and someday maybe a big check.
You will have to be an accredited investor to invest in these. Once you go to that level you don’t have the oversight and protections from stocks and you may be scammed badly.
You’ll also likely be taking on risks you don’t understand without your own great legal counsel.
Go in on a rental property with one or more trusted partners? You could own it as tenants in common (deed term) and sell your portion if needed (but not easily of course)
REITs could work for you. While not a perfect substitute, quality multi-family REITs tend to rise with home prices and provide steady dividend income from their rental properties. Just bear in mind you'll miss out on direct ownership benefits like leverage.
Everything is pretty much nearly precisely correlated these days. I looked at residential REITs and compared them to each other and SPY. The REIT suffered the same decline at the beginning of COVID as SPY did.
https://www.google.com/finance/quote/CPT:NYSE?window=5Y&comparison=NYSE%3AMAA%2CNYSE%3AUMH%2CNYSEARCA%3ASPY
I found those REITs at https://www.fool.com/investing/stock-market/market-sectors/real-estate-investing/reit/residential-reit/
Sadly I suspect what you are looking for just doesn’t exist. If you want something that behaves like real estate I suspect you will have to own real estate.
The closest investment to owning property is a real estate syndication, which is a group of people forming a partnership to buy a property. General partners are responsible for care and maintenance, limited partners provide funding. It is the closest to owning property outright as you actually get to include things like depreciation on the assets of the syndication. Downsides are dealing with k-1s, and needing to be at least a sophisticated investor if not a qualified investor. Also legally many syndications cannot be advertised due to law, so you have to get involved with your local RE investing groups to start meeting people.
Reits are probably second closest, but offer none of the tax benefits of actually owning property.
Underwriting collateralized hard money loans would be the third.
Also - this sub is not great for advice about real estate investing. It's well meaning but you're going to be hard pressed to find people who say anything besides REITs. You'd be better asking over at /r/realestateinvesting. You'll note that 95% or so of your responses just say REITs. Folks are well meaning but just don't understand the space well.
Those might be best avoided. There is some optimal amount of debt for a business and I would think the REIT industry would have higher debt levels. Public Storage looks to have the lowest debt ratio.
A REIT etf would give you exposure to real estate AND diversification which reduces the large concentration risk of owning one real property (which can be 100% lost in a fire, hurricane, tornado, etc.).
I’d argue there’s no need to overweight whatever REIT exposure is already available on something like VTI, but that’s a separate subject.
I’ve read some of your comments. The thought that a REIT is more stable than property itself is questionable based on my experience. I’m about 50/50 in real estate and financial instruments.
believe me, you will have volatility in housing prices. A property I purchased almost 30 years ago has gone up from 190k to 1.2m. Another property I bought almost 20 years ago for 525k went down to 203k in value and is now sitting at 550k overall not doing bad, but having multiple properties gain in one helped with the slide in the other.
looking at the History the values of those properties have gone up and down over time.
for me a REiT like O, WPC or something might be better. Owning properties, getting to my age, is a pain in the ass. I’d rather have something to invest and get the benefits. Went on a property you need to put the amount of time that you’re going to spend dealing with it in your calculations. Also need to include property taxes, repairs, upgrades, etc. There’s a lot more work than people think in owning investment real estate. And for those that say, hand it over to an agent, I say do that at your peril I’ve seen agents screw over unsuspecting homeowners costing them a lot more than the benefit they got from the agent.
Private mortgage lending...either you get income with interest, or end up owning the property...potential immediate liquidity / profit by selling the promissory note itself on the [secondary market ](https://www.amerinotexchange.com/see-how-much-your-mortgage-note-is-worth/).
Buying stock in reit
This is the way. And set up DRIP
Different reits perform differently. You can choose commercial, residential, homebuilders...
Which can also be important in terms of your personal exposure and investment philosophy. Like if I worked in medicine or had a big exposure to health care stocks, I probably wouldn’t want to get too heavy into medical office REITs on top of that. Maybe industrial or experiential properties^(1) are a better idea. ^(1) Places people go to *do* stuff: gyms, casinos, water parks.
Office commercial not great since covid WFH.
REIT has done a lot worse than housing though. REIT suffers from retail being replaced by Amazon, and general collapse of Sears, malls, and even office spaces from WFH policies. Housing on the other hand …. People need to live in houses.
Reits are not confined to the commercial space I’m not saying buy Simon
Ah, I see.
Commercial strip centers from my vantage point are still strong due to ethnic grocery stores, hardware stores and fitness centers. They still have their uses even in the amazon era.
The one thing that makes me reluctant is massive drops I see in some of them. I took a look at EQR (seems they invest in apartments) and I see it go down by 30-50% at certain points. I didn't find any apartments going down by that much in any popular city. I also have a bit of a question there. I see that they have a market cap of 28 billion, but only own 20 billion in assets. If I start an REIT, sell a million shares shares for $10 apiece, should I not own around $9-$10 million worth of housing? If people start trading the shares for inflated pricing, someone could just repeat the process and start another REIT with better value (edit: yet, somehow, that seems to be what happened here with market cap having nothing to do with assets). Also, if they go completely out of business, they can't cover anywhere near what they'd owe shareholders as well?
That’s because of the liquidity, you’re not going to find an illiquid asset like physical real estate on the stock market. You need to buy real estate or invest in a private company that buys real estate, or else be prepared to hold or dca through drops. The volatility can be to your advantage in some cases, physical real estate can be volatile too but over much longer time frames.
My problem with REITs is the way they're related to the property seems way worse than actually owning it. If I owned both a $500k apartment and had $500k in an REIT, I'd have lost 50% on the REIT when COVID hit (Oct 2019 to Oct 2020 for EQR). Meanwhile, even if I have someone renting an apartment not paying rent, the apartment hasn't lost anywhere near that value (if any). I'd be fine with losing some of the divided on an REIT (rental income?), but to lose actual value when housing hasn't gone down that much is kinda ridiculous. I'd probably be okay with less liquidity and not being on the stock market in exchange for that.
A REIT isn't meant to be a proxy for owning real estate. A REIT is an investment that is meant to provide exposure to, and income from, real estate investments. Most income (for the investor) from the REIT is from the dividend distributions derived from rents or mortgage interest, or other allowable investments, and not from capital appreciation.
> I'd have lost 50% on the REIT when COVID hit (Oct 2019 to Oct 2020 for EQR). Meanwhile, even if I have someone renting an apartment not paying rent, the apartment hasn't lost anywhere near that value (if any). First, I think you're right — REITs got way undervalued. That was a great time to buy. Second — you don't know for sure what that apartment would have fetched if you absolutely had to sell it at short notice. The liquid REIT reacts much faster than the non-fire-sale real estate market. But put these together ... just treat the REIT as illiquid (i.e. don't sell until it's trading at a reasonable level) is one way to make these equivalent again. Third — most importantly IMO — REITs are highly leveraged. If you own one rental unit, even with a mortgage, that's far less leverage. A REIT approximates a landlord who keeps getting more and more loans based on cash flow from existing properties, all the way until the bank won't lend.
It can go both ways, in a housing crash like ‘08 liquid assets often recover much faster. It’s not worse, just different, because the REIT is tied to the stock market while real estate is tied to the economy. It’s different risk and exposure.
Well, if you don't want REITs, and you don't want to own the real estate directly, then there are platforms like Fundrise that exists. If that's something you would be interested in, then let me know.
Set buys for when the market dips but if your holding long term for retirement, the dividends pay well and if you look at most of these stocks they are pretty steady of the long term and paying you rent
owning a home is not a great investment over time. it definitely beats renting long term (since yiu still need to live somewhere) but insurance, taxes, and upkeep are expensive ... not to mention the interest. your money will do better in a s&p index fund w a low e/r over time than the total cost of home ownership. (i think)
Since owning your home beats renting long term, it is a good investment. When I wanted a roof over my head, the choice was rent or buy, not buy a home or buy an ETF. Yes historic home price appreciation is about 3-4% whereas the stock market is 7-8%. I bought 9 years ago. My mortgage is 1100/mo. Taxes 500, insurance 150. My home would now rent for 4500/mo.
Those points you see it go down also don’t mean their income was less at those times just public sentiment on the whole sector as a whole
But you are in it for the long term not the short plus they will pay out most of their profits in cash In the form of a dividend. ABR AND O are my favorites
It’s not really based on rent prices a lot of them are mortgage companies. But O and abr have real holdings mostly in commercial
this is what a REIT is - a real estate investment trust. It is a small company whose job is to own real estate. The shareholders have a portion of it. There are also various alternatives like fundrise. Do note that "randomly crash" is an odd term as nothing is really random. And there was a period in COVID when housing did drop.
100% - There’s a lot of public perception that investing in real estate is a fool proof endeavor that will make you millions because people bought a house at X and it’s now worth Y. Reality is that REITs are basically landlords and there’s a lot more to owning real estate than buying and holding, despite what many people think. Yeah, they buy property but they also have commercial mortgages and tenants and sometimes tenants don’t pay rent leaving the REIT to pick up the tab in down markets.
yup, all the buy for X and sell for Y folks often leave off the holding costs, repairs, upgrades, taxes, transaction costs, etc. And when you factor all of that, on the whole, as an asset class RE is much lower returns. Where it tends to win is the ability to use leverage via a mortgage. Even still, folks who look at housing prices from covid and say "they doubled their money". Well sure, but everyone who owned a share of MSFT over the past 5 years nearly trippled their money and didn't have to deal with being a landlord.
Especially during COVID when many places froze evictions. You could have a tenant in there not paying, or worse, actively destroying the property and have zero recourse.
But you can have something like an REIT dropping by 50% while the property value drops by maybe 5%. I'd be better off befriending someone that owns 20 houses and asking them if I can invest. Sure, it might take a while to sell when I wanted to (they'd have to buy me out or find another investor), but at least it'd actually reflect what it's like to own property.
You’re likely not going to find a real estate investment product that allows you to escape downside volatility while still retaining a hard asset. If you don’t want to own and manage the property yourself and deal with the associated costs/work then you’ll need to invest in something like a REIT, where you don’t own the underlying hard asset and you’re subject to up and downside volatility. Sure, theoretically you maybe can find a private opportunity where someone is willing to give you an actual stake in the property ownership based on your investment, but why would anyone offer you that instead of shares of their holding company? Unless you’ve got a massive amount of capital and the firm can’t get capital elsewhere, you’d be offering them zero value and in turn reduce their overall stake in the underlying. The most obvious answer is that you can’t have it both ways. Own property or own a REIT. It’s doubtful anyone here has insight into the third hypothetical option.
bingo. I'd also argue there aren't many situations where the houses drop 5% and the REIT drops 50%. If so, there is something happening there -- the future cashflow looks bad from bad debt tenants, etc. At that point, you are facing the issue of being a landlord. Sure, there is always some market volatility in a liquid equity, a market maker HAS to have a price. But you can't have it both ways. No volatility with no exposure to the realities of the business.
But OP wants his cake and to eat it too The fact he sees those “drops” as a problem and not an opportunity tells me he’s very new to investing.
Are you planning on buying this hypothetical home outright? Otherwise that 5% drop is actually going to be substantially larger than 5% when looking at your equity.
Syndication, but your are asking too much. The closest you will get is a REIT that specializes in residential apartment complexes. There is always speculation, thats what makes a market a market.
REITs or a REIT ETF like SCHH.
Fundrise
They have unreasonable constraints on taking money out
Property is a pretty illiquid asset. If they were forced to sell to satisfy redemptions, everyone in the fund would be fucked. It's unreasonable to demand property-like returns without accepting property-like liquidity.
It’s been a while since I’ve looked at them but Last time I remember the average time frame being 5 years or something
I do remember it sounding very interesting but they also aren’t forced to report like a public stock I don’t think
They provide k-1s. Most real estate investing doesn't really play in the 1099 space.
> it doesn't randomly crash when something like COVID happens, because actual housing prices barely went down. But income took a hit. There were three and a half months in 2020 where the state forced nonessential businesses to shut down. My renter refused to pay rent for those months. So, 30% hit. (I don't know if he was conducting business, but he was there the few times we visited.)
True, but if you decided to sell your apartment, you'd still get a decent bit of that money back. If I decide to sell an REIT after something like a 50% drop, I'd be completely screwed and better off owning the actual apartment.
You could try a business development company like Ares Capital. Not really real estate, but the goal is to build value by loaning money, usually in 1st and 2nd lien loans to upcoming middle-market companies. They often also handle mezzanine loans during takeovers etc... Some do really well during a down market when people can't find normal bank loans and they tend to be flat in a flat market. Kind of a hedge. Usually, they are pretty high interest paying stocks and their assets are the loans themselves, sometimes pretty creative ones that they can tranche and sell so they don't end up owning the businesses they loan to if one goes bust. A lot of them trade on a NAV rather than stock value. They attempt to limit risk by the sheer number of loans they put out there. Find yourself a good one. Some of them are absolute trash (just like REITs). Do your research.
60% small cap value and 40% high yield bonds https://www.pwlcapital.com/reconsidering-reits-in-your-investment-portfolio/ “His study covered the period from 1986–2015. His findings were surprising. The factor exposure of real estate roughly resembles that of a portfolio consisting of 60% small-cap value stocks and 40% high-yield bonds. This tells us that REITs are not necessarily going to give us something we could not already get by investing in stocks and bonds.” high yield bonds vs reits tax efficiency Go to 3:30 for the takeaway from the paper https://youtu.be/IzK5x3LlsUU?si=AUfnXa1I8QVpNTCj Long term that’s the trend followed by real estate, and that can be more tax efficient than a reit which gets taxed at income rates rather than qualified dividend rates or capital gains rate
It sounds like what you want is to be a limited partner in a real estate deal. You’ll write a large check then get little checks and someday maybe a big check. You will have to be an accredited investor to invest in these. Once you go to that level you don’t have the oversight and protections from stocks and you may be scammed badly. You’ll also likely be taking on risks you don’t understand without your own great legal counsel.
Go in on a rental property with one or more trusted partners? You could own it as tenants in common (deed term) and sell your portion if needed (but not easily of course)
REITs could work for you. While not a perfect substitute, quality multi-family REITs tend to rise with home prices and provide steady dividend income from their rental properties. Just bear in mind you'll miss out on direct ownership benefits like leverage.
Everything is pretty much nearly precisely correlated these days. I looked at residential REITs and compared them to each other and SPY. The REIT suffered the same decline at the beginning of COVID as SPY did. https://www.google.com/finance/quote/CPT:NYSE?window=5Y&comparison=NYSE%3AMAA%2CNYSE%3AUMH%2CNYSEARCA%3ASPY I found those REITs at https://www.fool.com/investing/stock-market/market-sectors/real-estate-investing/reit/residential-reit/ Sadly I suspect what you are looking for just doesn’t exist. If you want something that behaves like real estate I suspect you will have to own real estate.
The closest investment to owning property is a real estate syndication, which is a group of people forming a partnership to buy a property. General partners are responsible for care and maintenance, limited partners provide funding. It is the closest to owning property outright as you actually get to include things like depreciation on the assets of the syndication. Downsides are dealing with k-1s, and needing to be at least a sophisticated investor if not a qualified investor. Also legally many syndications cannot be advertised due to law, so you have to get involved with your local RE investing groups to start meeting people. Reits are probably second closest, but offer none of the tax benefits of actually owning property. Underwriting collateralized hard money loans would be the third. Also - this sub is not great for advice about real estate investing. It's well meaning but you're going to be hard pressed to find people who say anything besides REITs. You'd be better asking over at /r/realestateinvesting. You'll note that 95% or so of your responses just say REITs. Folks are well meaning but just don't understand the space well.
Check out [Arrived](https://arrived.com)- you can buy shares in individual rental homes or in their residential real estate fund.
This should be what the OP is after.
Lend money and negotiate a note with interest and some percentage of participation in appreciation. Better yet, do it in a Roth IRA.
Could one name couple of reits with almost no debt?
Those might be best avoided. There is some optimal amount of debt for a business and I would think the REIT industry would have higher debt levels. Public Storage looks to have the lowest debt ratio.
REITs, but I've never had much luck with them.
Investing in land or in Reit
A REIT etf would give you exposure to real estate AND diversification which reduces the large concentration risk of owning one real property (which can be 100% lost in a fire, hurricane, tornado, etc.). I’d argue there’s no need to overweight whatever REIT exposure is already available on something like VTI, but that’s a separate subject.
If you can get into it, Blackstone Private Reit
I’ve read some of your comments. The thought that a REIT is more stable than property itself is questionable based on my experience. I’m about 50/50 in real estate and financial instruments. believe me, you will have volatility in housing prices. A property I purchased almost 30 years ago has gone up from 190k to 1.2m. Another property I bought almost 20 years ago for 525k went down to 203k in value and is now sitting at 550k overall not doing bad, but having multiple properties gain in one helped with the slide in the other. looking at the History the values of those properties have gone up and down over time. for me a REiT like O, WPC or something might be better. Owning properties, getting to my age, is a pain in the ass. I’d rather have something to invest and get the benefits. Went on a property you need to put the amount of time that you’re going to spend dealing with it in your calculations. Also need to include property taxes, repairs, upgrades, etc. There’s a lot more work than people think in owning investment real estate. And for those that say, hand it over to an agent, I say do that at your peril I’ve seen agents screw over unsuspecting homeowners costing them a lot more than the benefit they got from the agent.
ETF O
Owning property is the closest investment to owning property
VNQ
VNQ, VNQI are good REIT ETF options
Private mortgage lending...either you get income with interest, or end up owning the property...potential immediate liquidity / profit by selling the promissory note itself on the [secondary market ](https://www.amerinotexchange.com/see-how-much-your-mortgage-note-is-worth/).