Commercial real estate trusts create options.
By: George Frey
Real estate has always been one of the safest investments, but for the average person with a mortgage and bills to pay, purchasing a condo, office building, or retail space downtown may seem like a distant dream.
There is, however, another way to get your hands on real estate: investing in a Real Estate Investment Trust. "I can’t buy the building I’m looking at across the street," said Jonathan Weller, president and CEO of the Pennsylvania Real Estate Investment Trust in Philadelphia, which owns several retail properties in New Jersey. "But I could own the stock of a company that owns that building and others like it, formed as a mutual fund for investment."
Like a mutual fund, REITs let an investor dabble in the real estate market, often with good returns. And as a REIT investor, you won’t have any of the headaches that come with being a landlord.
In a REIT, an investor buys stock of a real estate company with returns based on performance of different properties. REITs generally provide a stable and consistent return on their investment, with returns that often outperform the stock market.
Mr. Weller said the typical year-to-year return on REITs has been strong often around 7 or 8 percent because REITs can only be run under specific federal guidelines and are not taxed at the entity level. On that condition, they must pass 90 percent of their profits to their shareholders, something which historically has been very high income, Mr. Weller said.
A REIT’s popularity, beyond a payout, often stems from the security perceived through the high percentage of trustee ownership in the REIT, Mr. Weller added. Officers of REIT companies often hold a significant stake in their companies. At PAREIT, the trustees own about 10 percent of the shares, and some REITs have up to 30 percent trustee ownership, something Mr. Weller says is a key to look for if investing. The remainder of the companies are bought approximately 80 percent by retail investors and 20 percent by managed institutional accounts, he said.
Another reason REITs show year-to-year returns is because the buildings are often more consistently occupied than real estate in the private market. REIT properties also generally hold longer leases than buildings that are under private ownership, Mr. Weller said.
PAREIT, according to Mr. Weller, is one of the original REITs, formed in 1960, with a current $1.2 billion in capitalization. That makes it a mid-size REIT company. PAREIT recently announced it will sell its residential property business for $420 million to an affiliate of Morgan Properties of King of Prussia, Pa. Residential properties comprised about 30 percent of PAREIT’s business.
The firm also recently announced it would purchase six shopping malls in the Philadelphia area, including the Cherry Hill and Moorestown malls in New Jersey, from the Rouse Company. Upon completion of the Rouse transaction, PAREIT will have a total of four properties located in New Jersey, comprising 14 percent of the company’s holdings of 28 total properties, a spokesperson for the firm said. The four properties will represent 3.6 million square feet of gross leasable area, or 20 percent of the total of 17.4 million square feet. On completion of the deal, PAREIT will become the largest owner-operator of retail space in the Philadelphia area.
One local REIT is Boston Properties of West Windsor, (www.bostonproperties.com), which owns much of Carnegie Center on Route 1.
Micky Landis, a senior vice president and regional manager with the company, said only about five percent of Boston Properties’ holdings are in the Princeton area. The rest of the firm’s properties are in the Boston, New York, Washington and San Francisco markets. In its fourth quarter 2002 results, the company said its holdings consisted of 142 properties comprising more than 42 million square feet, including six properties under development totaling 2.8 million square feet. Boston Properties also has plans to expand Carnegie Center with more buildings in the future, he said.
The great thing about investing in a REIT, says Mr. Landis, is that they are usually more recession proof than other markets, and the investment in properties has real intrinsic value.
"REIT stock is a sort of hedge against a bad market," he said. "They’re not going to have dramatic growth. They’re going to have conservative growth."
Mr. Landis stressed investors should always have a broad portfolio, avoiding asset concentration in one area. Over the last several years, he said, the Morgan Stanley REIT Index has consistently outperformed the S & P 500 something that is further underscored by their solid value bases.
"REIT share prices are not very high relative to the earnings most REIT companies see every year," he said.
There is also a big advantage for tenants in finding space with a REIT like Boston Properties, Mr. Landis said. Other private, smaller-scale landlords might not have as much experience working with commercial properties and tenants, or may not have as many resources available to them that REITs have, he noted.
"You’re working with the best in class," Mr. Landis said. "From the very highest levels in the company on down, the message is very clear: Treat the tenants the best that we can. Not only is this best for tenants, but it’s best for us. Nothing costs as much as down time when a property is vacant."
The REIT remains somewhat of an unexplored investment area for many, experts say. The total investment in the industry is still less than $200 billion less than the total capitalization of Microsoft.
In fact, REIT holdings in commercial real estate not including retail or residential stands at only about 15 percent of the total nationwide, according to the National Association of Real Estate Investment Trusts in Washington.
According to another organization, the CoStar Group Inc., a Bethesda, Md. electronic commercial real estate information company, the total rentable space in New Jersey in office, flex-space and industrial real estate stands at 1,120,965,551 square feet. Of that, 67,777,519 square feet, or 6.5 percent of the total square footage, is owned by REITs, a CoStar spokesperson said. The figure also includes space that is still in the development stages.
As for investment advice, Mr. Weller said investors should look for management teams that have a good track record and know what the fund’s performance record has been over time.
"It’s good to know about the fund’s assets and where they are," he said. "If an investor knows of a fund’s shopping centers, and knows that they are well-trafficked and know the property’s offices are filled, then that might be a good REIT to invest in.
"Try to put your money in a cross-section of companies, ones that invest into different types of real estate," Mr. Weller advised.
Some companies he likes: General Growth Properties, (www.generalgrowth.com) a Chicago-based REIT that holds a lot of shopping centers; Kimco of New Hyde Park, New York (www.kimcorealty.com), and of course, his own firm, PAREIT, (www.preit.com).
"I have a lot of confidence in PAREIT. I have a lot of money invested into the company."