Since publishing an introduction to real estate ETF’s in February, we’ve received many questions regarding the differences between each of these ETF’s and while it would take a lot of time to go into each of these ETF’s in depth, we decided to publish a report describing the main REIT ETF’s that should be considered when building a long term portfolio. You read it well, these picks are for long term investing. I did include the leveraged ETF’s in the table at the bottom of this post because they can be viable short term options but even then. I can understand investing short term on commodities which move according to very well defined criteria’s such as inventories, supply, demand, etc. But Real Estate is much more of a macro-economic, long term investment, especially when made at a broad level like all ETF’s that are currently available.
Maybe at some point some more specialized real estate ETF’s will be available such as New York Real Estate. I could imagine such an ETF moving quite a bit more when certain events take place. But how much do real estate prices move during a period of a few days? I would say not very much.
Real estate prices have been very very volatile and have suffered quite a collapse in recent months/years. You can get some reliable data of the valuations of real estate in the US on the Standard & Poors website here. Just take a look at this chart of the Schiller Price Index which tracks real estate prices in the major US cities:
So without further wait, here are the top REIT ETF’s by category:
REIT ETF: Top Return in the past year: IFNA 83.97%
IFNA is an ETF that tracks the FTSE EPRA/NAREIT North America Index
REIT ETF: Top Return in 2010: REZ +16,40%
REZ is an ETF that tracks the FTSE NAREIT residential index, an index that includes REIT stocks on US exchanges. You can read more about the index here.
REIT ETF: Lowest Fees & Most Assets under management: VNQ 0.12
VNQ’s goal is to closely track the return of the MSCI® US REIT Index, a gauge of real estate stocks.
Ticker Name Price PE Ratio PE Next Year Return YTD Sales Growth Book Value Beta Revenue/Share Sales 5Y Avg Gr. EPS 5Y Gr.
NILE Blue Nile Inc 34.06 38.23 29 -9.4 5.22 1 0.84 38.99 10.39 4.54
TRIP TripAdvisor Inc 69.69 45.62 30.95 -18.49 31.9 9.2 1.55 8.71 24.67 N/A
for more information on debit cards, visit DebitCard.com
[…] a large variety of asset and subasset classes. Any trader can get involved in small or large caps, real estate (REIT), bonds, gold, oil, other commodities and many many more. I hope you noticed the distinction though, […]