NUTS & BOLTS
STRATEGIES: REITs
AClass of Its Own TO MANY OBSERVERS, IT’S ABOUT TIME REAL-ESTATE INVESTMENT TRUSTS GOT THEIR OWN SECTOR CLASSIFICATION.
by Lawrence Fassler
I
further behind at a 7.9 percent annual return rate, and large- cap stocks rang in at just 4.1 percent. The Journal faulted the nearly 40 percent of large-cap core mutual funds that had avoided REITs because of their different analytical character. It cited recent Goldman Sachs research that indicated that real estate has recently outperformed both its former “financials” sector and the S&P 500 as a whole.
nvestment yields across many asset classes have lately been disappointing, but a recent report seemed to show that real estate investment vehicles outperformed most other asset classes over the last 15 years.
A GOOD ALTERNATIVE IN A LOW-YIELD ENVIRONMENT?
THIRTYGLORIOUS YEARS Total real returns, average annual % increase*
Many commentators have argued that we are returning to historical patterns that had been in place for years prior to the more recent experience of relatively high interest rates and the resultant higher yields on bonds and other investment types. “We’re returning to normal, and it’s just taken time for people to realize that,” said Bryan Taylor, chief economist of Global Financial Data, which scours old records to calculate historical financial data. “I think interest rates are going to stay low for several decades.” Investment returns come from two sources: income and capital gains. The income portion is much lower than it used to be. The yield on long-dated Treasury bonds 25 years ago was more than 8 percent, but now the yield on the 10-year Treasury bond is just 2.3 percent. Yields on corporate bonds, which pay a spread over government debt, have fallen in tandem. Corporate profits have also been affected. “Fourth-quarter profits at S&P 500 companies fell by 3.6 percent year on year. Even without financial and energy stocks, profits would be up by just 0.1 percent. In the absence of higher profits, stock markets need higher valuations if they are to generate positive returns. But Wall Street started 2015 on a cyclically adjusted price-earnings ratio of 26.8, compared with the historical average of 16.6.” According to Professor Robert Shiller of Yale University, it should end the year at nearly the same figure. Low (and sometimes negative) yields on cash and govern- ment bonds mean that the stock market can seem like the only plausible source of decent returns. But many wonder whether the bull run in equities, which began in 2009, can be main- tained in the face of a sluggish economic recovery and faltering corporate profits. The Economist reported that “McKinsey reckons that, in a slow-growth environment, real annual re- turns from equities over the next 20 years may be 4-5 percent, well below the average of the past 30 years; real bond returns may be just 0-1 percent. Even a rebound in American growth to 2.8 percent a year might generate real equity returns of only 5.5-6.5 percent, below the average of the past three decades.”
1915-2014 1965-2014 1985-2014
REITS OUTPERFORMING OTHER LIQUID ASSETS?
UNITED STATES
A recent Wall Street Journal article remarked on the planned move by Standard & Poor’s to create a new real estate sector in its classification systems and pointed to a report out of J.P. Morgan Asset Management asserting that, since 2000, REITs have returned an average of 12 percent annually. The next major category, high-yield bonds, was reported to have been
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8
REAL ESTATE COMING INTO ITS OWN AS AN ASSET CLASS?
Equities
Giving real-estate investment trusts their own sector clas- sification will put the grouping alongside technology, health care, utilities and the like. REITs will no longer be a part of the financial sector, where they
Bonds
have held an awkward place along- side banks and insurers since those sectors were created in 1999. In a way, it’s a wonder that the recategorization didn’t occur before. The famous (and success- ful) Yale Endowment model has long stressed the importance of alternative assets like real estate. “Investments in real estate provide meaningful diversification to the Endowment,” it said in its 2015 annual report. “A steady flow of income with equity upside creates a natural hedge against unantici- pated inflation without sacrificing expected return. … While real estate markets sometimes pro- duce dramatically cyclical returns, pricing inefficiencies in the asset class and opportunities to add value allow superior managers to generate excess returns over long time horizons.”
EUROPE
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REALOVERSIGHT Real estate has beaten the market recently, but many fund managers have missed out by favoring other shares
Equities
Index Performance
Fund Underweights Index Performance
Financials
Real Estate
S&P 500
Financials
Bonds
50%
2%
*Measured against a three-year average of returns in start and end years. SOURCES: McKinsey Global Institute; Economist.com
40%
0%
30%
-2%
Meanwhile, “commercial real estate fundamentals—such as demand, occupancy and rents—remain strong, which has kept property values up in the private market,” said Steven Marks, a managing director at Fitch Ratings who specializes in U.S. REITs. Indeed, “the long-term returns from property look very respectable; in the 10 years to last September, American commercial property delivered a total annualized return of 7.9 percent, according to IPD, a property-information group.”
20%
-4%
10%
-6%
0%
-8%
-10%
-10%
2014
2015
2016
2014
2015
2016
DIRECT PARTICIPATION VEHICLES VS. REITS Although the Journal article focused on REITs because those are the publicly traded vehicles that most mutual funds
*Goldman Sachs indexes of stocks heavily owned and less owned by mutual funds. SOURCES: FactSet; Goldman Sachs Global Investment Research
32 | think realty magazine september :: october 2016
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