Should real estate investors be rushing for the exit?

Should property investors be rushing for the exit?

Contrarian Investor David Stevenson examines the potential headwinds facing UK-listed REITs after several years of strong performance.

The publicly-listed property real estate investment trust sector in the UK has had a cracking last few years. Remember that these myriad funds are supposed to be defensive assets, focused on providing safe dividend cheques whilst also giving investors some inflation protection. REITs are, nevertheless, equities and that means that over the short term they can't help but be closely correlated with underlying stock market returns. But, over the long term, this relationship should begin to fade and the underlying real asset fundamentals re-assert themselves. In this latter scenario, i...