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Serenity Alternative Investments Blog - How REITS Can Provide Protection Against Inflation
October 2019
Serenity Alternative Investments Blog - How REITS Can Provide Protection Against Inflation
As most investors know, inflation is the enemy of fixed income. When inflation accelerates, bond yields tend to rise, denting the value of fixed income holdings within a portfolio. But what if you could get fixed income like exposure, with protection against inflation and a growth component? The REIT market offers exposure to multiple types of real estate that can do just this.
Source: Nareit | Repost Serenity Alt 10/30/19
REITs provide natural protection against inflation. Real estate rents and values tend to increase when prices do, due in part to the fact that many leases are tied to inflation. This supports REIT dividend growth and provides a reliable stream of income even during inflationary periods.
A practical way of measuring the inflation protection provided by REITs is to directly compare REIT dividend growth per share with inflation. In all but two of the last 20 years, REITs’ dividend increases have outpaced inflation as measured by the Consumer Price Index.
In 2002, dividend growth failed to edge out inflation by just half a percentage point. The only other time in recent history dividend growth fell below inflation was just after the financial in 2009, when dividends dropped for the only time this period. Over the twenty-year period, average annual growth for dividends per share 9.6% (or 8.9% compounded) compared to only 2.1% (2.2% compounded) for consumer prices.
One of the difficulties in assessing REITs’ performance during periods of high inflation is that there haven’t been any such periods since the 1980s, before the modern REIT era. The U.S. had periods of high inflation in the 1970s and 80s when it was as high as 13% annually, but since 1990, the inflation rate has rarely gone much over 3%. Looking at the historical inflation rate since REITs’ inception in 1972, as shown in Chart 2, the U.S. has had two periods of high inflation, and several periods of moderate or low inflation.
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