How Reits Benefit Asset Allocations Building More Efficient Portfolios, Accessing Alternative Investment Opportunities and Enhancing Private Real Estate Holdings
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Real Estate How REITs Benefit Asset Allocations Building more efficient portfolios, accessing alternative investment opportunities and enhancing private real estate holdings Jason A. Yablon, Senior Vice President and U.S. Senior Portfolio Manager • REITs have historically been effective diversifiers, delivering strong, low-correlated returns, attractive dividends and inflation- hedging characteristics. • The listed REIT market is continuously evolving and expanding, providing access to a diverse global opportunity set led by new-economy property types. • Integrating listed REITs with private real estate investments may provide benefits to implementation and return potential. For U.S. Investment Professional Use Only—Not for Use With the Public Executive Summary Four Ways REITs May Improve Portfolio Potential • Total return: Real estate securities have historically outperformed broad stocks and bonds over the long run, benefiting from stable business models typically focused on generating recurring revenue from leases. • Income: REITs have a history of paying attractive dividends due to their cash flow business models and the requirement that they distribute nearly all taxable income to shareholders. • Diversification: REITs historically appear to react differently to market conditions than other businesses and asset classes, potentially helping to smooth portfolio returns. • Inflation protection: REITs are an investment in tangible assets with inherent inflation-hedging characteristics. Access to Next-Gen Property Types in a Diverse Global Market • REITs are global: Widespread adoption of REIT structures has led to substantial growth for global listed real estate, from a market capitalization of just over $300 billion in 2002 to $1.5 trillion in 2020. • Alternative sectors: The REIT market, once dominated by offices and retail, is now led by property types such as cell towers, data centers, industrial logistics, health care and self storage facilities. • High alpha potential: The diverse characteristics of REIT sectors and geographies offer the potential for skilled specialists to add meaningful value, demonstrated by the superior rate of outperformance among REIT managers compared with their generalist equity and fixed income counterparts. A Liquid Complement to Private Real Estate • Access: REITs offer distinct implementation benefits over private real estate, in our view, enabling geographically diversified portfolios and providing access to alternative property types that are not represented in most core private real estate funds. • Arbitrage: The lead/lag relationship of listed and private real estate valuations can create opportunities to capitalize on dislocations in listed-market values. • Advantages of public markets: REITs have access to both public and private capital, offer daily liquidity, and often have dominant sector-specific platforms that private funds with finite investment horizons cannot easily replicate. On the cover: Many of today’s industrial warehouses are high-tech automated distribution centers, designed specifically to fulfill the growing need for e-commerce logistics. For U.S. Investment Professional Use Only—Not for Use With the Public Four Ways REITs May Improve Portfolio Potential Over the long run, REITs’ return profile is driven primarily by the performance of their underlying property holdings, delivering key diversifying characteristics sought by real estate allocators, wrapped in a liquid security. 1. Strong Return Potential REITs have historically delivered superior long-term returns relative to other asset classes, outperforming stocks and bonds over the past 20 years, both in the U.S. and globally (Exhibit 1). We believe there are strong fundamental reasons for real estate securities’ performance track record: • REITs tend to have stable business models focused on acquiring and developing high-quality assets that produce a recurring stream of rental income tied to leases. Stable and growing cash flows have historically attracted long-term investment capital. • Management teams will often seek to drive additional growth by continuously improving leasing and development operations, redeveloping assets to command higher rents and engaging in other potentially value-creating activities. • A process of natural selection over decades has driven the adoption of best practices in corporate governance, investment strategy and alignment with shareholder interests. 2. High Current Income REITs are known for paying attractive dividends due to their cash flow –oriented businesses and the fact that they are required to distribute nearly all taxable income. (For example, U.S. REITs must pay out at least 90% of their annual net income.) REITs also do not pay corporate taxes, allowing them to efficiently pass through income to shareholders, who in turn pay taxes based on their tax status. These characteristics have historically resulted in above-average dividend yields (Exhibit 2). Dividends historically tend to be a more consistent source of returns than price appreciation, and reinvested dividends serve as a form of dollar-cost averaging—a dividend check buys more shares when prices are lower, and fewer shares when prices are higher. REITs also have a built-in dividend growth mechanism: in order to remain above the minimum distribution level required by law, companies must typically increase payouts as rents increase over time, historically resulting in steady dividend growth. Exhibit 1: 20-Year Annualized Total Returns, USD Exhibit 2: Current Yields U.S. Global U.S. Global 10.1% 4.2% 7.9% 3.7% 5.9% 5.1% 4.9% 4.6% 2.2% 1.9% 1.3% 1.0% REITs Stocks Bonds REITs Stocks Bonds REITs Stocks Bonds REITs Stocks Bonds At June 30, 2020. Source: Morningstar, Cohen & Steers. Data quoted represents past performance, which is no guarantee of future results. The chart above is for illustrative purposes only and does not reflect information about any fund or other account managed or serviced by Cohen & Steers. There is no guarantee that any historical trend illustrated above will be repeated in the future, and there is no way to predict precisely when such a trend will begin. An investor cannot invest directly in an index and index performance does not reflect the deduction of any fees, expenses or taxes. Index comparisons have limitations as volatility and other characteristics may differ from a particular investment. Dividend yield used for equity indexes; yield-to-maturity used for fixed income indexes. See page 16 for index associations, definitions and additional disclosures. For U.S. Investment Professional Use Only—Not for Use With the Public 3 How REITs Benefit Asset Allocations 3. Diversifying Correlations REITs have historically served as effective diversifiers, as they tend to react to market conditions differently than other asset classes and businesses, potentially helping to smooth portfolio returns. They share aspects of both stocks and bonds—responding to economic growth like equities, but with yields and lease-based cash flows that give them certain bond-like qualities. REITs are subject to real estate cycles based on supply and demand, with the added stability of commercial leases. They also tend to be more sensitive to credit conditions due to the capital-intensive nature of real estate. These distinct performance drivers have resulted in low long-term correlations with stocks and bonds. Since 1991, U.S. REITs have had a 0.57 correlation with the S&P 500 and a 0.21 correlation with U.S. bonds (Exhibit 3). Global REITs have also exhibited diversifying correlations, albeit to a more modest degree, due largely to higher correlations of Asia’s real estate market with both Asia and U.S. equities. Over short periods, REITs may correlate more closely with the broader stock market, as seen during the global financial crisis and, more recently, in the COVID recession. Similarly, sudden changes in bond yields can have a meaningful influence on short-term REIT performance. However, such periods tend to be temporary. In the long run, REIT returns are driven primarily by the distinct cash flows and growth profiles of the underlying property markets and the added stability of leases, providing the potential diversification benefits of an allocation to real estate. Exhibit 3: Differentiated Behavior Rolling 5-Year Correlations Long-Term Correlations U.S. REITs Global REITs 1.0 COVID 1.0 Correlation vs. Global Financial Crisis Recession Global Stocks 0.8 0.8 0.78 Correlation vs. 0.73 0.77 U.S. Stocks 0.6 0.57 0.6 0.47 0.4 0.4 0.36 0.41 0.2 0.21 0.2 0.0 Correlation vs. Start of monetary 0.0 Correlation vs. U.S. Bonds tightening cycle Global Bonds -0.2 -0.2 1996 1999 2002 2005 2008 2011 2014 2017 2020 1996 1999 2002 2005 2008 2011 2014 2017 2020 At June 30, 2020. Source: Morningstar, Cohen & Steers. Data quoted represents past performance, which is no guarantee of future results. The chart above is for illustrative purposes only and does not reflect information about any fund or other account managed or serviced by Cohen & Steers. There is no guarantee that any historical trend illustrated above will be repeated in the future, and there is no way to predict precisely when such a trend will begin. An investor cannot invest directly in an index and index performance does not reflect the deduction of any fees, expenses or taxes. Index comparisons have limitations as volatility and other characteristics may differ from a particular investment. Correlation is a statistical measure of how two data series move in relation