Wednesday, April 24, 2013

Investing in REITs Instead of Property: Our Pick

news.goldseek.com / By Dennis Miller
I get a lot of questions from readers about holding real estate as an investment. Indeed, many are in response to another newsletter editor who was recently advocating that the only way for retirees to make decent income was to own property.

Personally, I wouldn’t hold physical property in our portfolio for three reasons.
First, it’s very illiquid; that makes it an instant failure on our Five-Point Balancing Test.
Second, you won’t get yield from a property for three to five years, but will instead pay to own it.
And third, depending on the size of your portfolio, an investment in physical real estate could throw off your balance. Allocating too much of a portfolio to a single industry is never a good idea. With a piece of property worth $100K, $200K, or more, you can suddenly find your retirement very dependent on the outcome of a single asset class.

However, at the same time, it’s hard to ignore that something is happening in real estate. The post-crash taboo around it is starting to disappear as prices increase. Are we so bullish on real estate that we would buy properties in Las Vegas? No, we’re not there; but at the same time, we wouldn’t mind dipping our toe into the shallow end of the pool with some more conservative opportunities.
Furthermore, rather than invest in physical properties directly, we’d rather invest in real estate investment trusts (REITs), which are traded on stock exchanges like any other stock. REITs are corporations that buy, sell, and rent real estate for their shareholders.

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