Investing in REITs: Real Estate Investment Trusts, 4th Edition

Changing Attitudes toward REITs

For many years in the past, REITs were regarded as odd and uninteresting investments. They even had a strange name—REIT—that many investors couldn't even pronounce properly. Bruce Andrews, the former CEO of Nationwide Health Properties, noted that the term trust, as in real estate investment trust, implies that REITs are oddities, that they are not like normal public corporations whose shares are traded on the stock exchanges. But, more substantively, one of the main reasons that REIT stocks were suspect for so long is that many people who traditionally invested in real estate didn't trust—or bother to understand—the stock market, while most people who invested in stocks were uncomfortable with, or had little understanding ...