Keep tabs on your favorite ETFs with a personalized weekly tracker. Create a Watchlist now →

Advertisement
Contributor

State Of REITs: REITweek Recap

REITs remain stuck amid high rates, but optimism is rising as supply slows and acquisition opportunities emerge.

David-Auerbach-Headshot
By David Auerbach · June 17, 2025
Share
REITWeek

Keep up with what matters in ETFs

Get timely ETF insights, market trends, and top ideas straight to your inbox.

Your newsletter subscriptions with us are subject to ETF Central's Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions.

State Of The REIT Nation

In our State of REIT Nation report, we analyze the recently released NAREIT T-Tracker data. Earlier this month, we published our REIT Earnings Recap which analyzed Q1 results on a company-by-company level, but this report will focus on higher-level macro themes affecting the REIT sector at large.

ETF Central Weekly Newsletter

Like what you're reading?

Stay in the loop — get the latest ETF insights: trends, analysis, and expert picks.

After signing up, you will receive occasional emails from ETF Central and its partners. See our Terms of use.

REITWeek Recap

REITweek, the annual REIT industry conference, was held this week in New York City. Humbled by frustratingly persistent interest rate headwinds and historic stock price underperformance relative to the broader equity market over the past three years, the venue halls were quiet once again this year. While attendance from the investor community was understandably sparse given how out-of-favor REITs remain - underscored by the record-sized underweight position in REITs among active investors - the overall tone was more upbeat than recent years, with a comparatively more "opportunistic" than "defensive" focus. Tariffs were a major discussion topic, with the overall sense that REITs should be relative winners on the trade policy-front given their almost exclusive domestic-focus. Several REITs also highlighted that REITs should be relative winners under the tax policy framework currently being debated in Congress, with the QBI deduction for REIT dividends (199A) proposed to be increased and made permanent - lowering the effective tax rate by several percentage points - and also liberalizing several REIT IRS rules.

Tariff Sensitivity

Many REITs highlighted that stalling supply growth - the silver lining to the three-year REIT "bear market" - is increasingly supporting property-level fundamentals and more-than offsetting marginal demand cooling. While this theme has been at play for several years in the retail space - which is now enjoying record-high occupancy rates and double-digit rent growth resulting from a near-shutdown in new shopping center development - we're seeing supply constraints begin to develop in the industrial and multifamily space as the boom in starts from 2022-2023 gets completed. Office REITs were also notably upbeat on the three-to-five year horizon given the net loss in office square footage in recent years via redevelopment and minimal starts. Over the past two years, real construction spending on commercial properties (adjusted for the cost inflation) has seen its steepest decline since the Great Financial Crisis, pulling back roughly 5% in 2024. Real spending on residential properties, meanwhile, dipped more than 12% in 2023 before recovering in recent months as mortgage rates pulled back from 30-year highs. Combined, supply growth has effectively declined by about 3% over the past 24-months, during which time Real Gross Domestic Product – which has a strong correlation with real estate demand – has increased by roughly 7%.

Construction Spending

Frustratingly, REITs remain "stuck in first gear" on the external growth-front as the "Rates Up, REITs Down" dynamic has again pressured equity valuations following a promising start to 2025. Looking back, real estate markets were an easy transmission mechanism of the Fed's swift monetary tightening cycle that began in March 2022, which resulted in the largest increase in the Federal Funds rate in any two-year period since 1981. Concern about real estate is warranted given that the two prior rate hike cycles that exceeded 400 basis points – the late 1980s cycle that sparked the Savings & Loan Crisis and the mid-2000s cycle that sparked the Great Financial Crisis – resulted in significant distress and disruption within the real estate industry. This concern has resulted in a nearly one-to-one correlation between REIT valuations and the 10-Year Treasury Yield. The tariff-related rebound in interest rates has erased the early-year REIT oupterformance, and again widened the performance gap between the Equity REIT Index (VNQ) and the S&P 500 (SPY) to nearly 50 percentage points since the initial Fed rate hike in March 2022. Several REITs noted that distressed private market-owned properties are ripe for the picking - particurally after the latest tariff-driven jump in benchmark interest rates - but remain slightly out-of-reach at the current cost of capital until REITs can sustain a 10-15% rebound to close the lingering NAV discount.

REIT Rates up Rates down

Sector Specific Notes

  • Residential: Rents starting to firm again after two years of weakness as supply boom moderates. Single-Family REITs seeing 4% blended rent growth this year – up from low of 2.5% in late 2024. Apartments REITs seeing 2% rent growth this year – up from 0% in late 2024.
  • Industrial: Seeing only minimal slowdown from tariffs per latest updates. Strength in Midwest & East Coast offsetting weakness out West. REITs highlighted that onshoring is net positive for warehouse demand.
  • Hotel: Slowdown in current demand remains very marginal, but leads on future group bookings has slowed more signficantly. TSA Throughput: +1% Y/Y in 2025 After Record Year in 2024. Hotel REIT stock prices have been hit, but not necessarily warranted.
  • Retail: Still enjoying near record-high occupancy rates, double-digit leasing spreads. Nobody has built a mall this decade – supply now limited. Marginal slowdown in retailer expansion, but still working through backlog.
  • Healthcare: Senior Housing showing no signs of slowing yet. 4% rent growth every year since 2022. Upbeat commentary from Skilled Nursing on policy impacts - more muted than feared. Lab space remains weak, but ARE has been among most active in stock buybacks.
  • Office: Fundamentals still far from great, but hasn’t been getting worse. Still seeing the flight to quality with NYC & Sunbelt doing well. Encouraged by better trends in CMBS markets of late - defaults may have peaked.
  • Net Lease: Acquisition environment is still not ideal given the cost of capital, but good enough for most of these REITs to become more aggressive. Most REITs pacing ahead of full-year acquisition guidance.
  • Data Center: Booming AI demand, still early innings. More demand than power needs can meet. AI has helped to diversify tenant base away from reliance on hyperscale giants - better dynamic than prior status quo.
  • Cell Tower: Strong pushback on satellite risk - not seeing Starlink as altering the competitive dynamic (we disagree). Less upbeat on recent carrier demand trends than expected.

State of REITs - As Unloved As Ever

REITs are as "unloved" as they ever have been – but is it justified? A theme we'll emphasize throughout this report, valuations – not necessarily fundamentals – are responsible for the vast majority of the underperformance during this "REIT Dark Age", setting the stage for a sustained REIT rebound in the quarters and years ahead as benchmark interest rates normalize. Perhaps most notably, REITs reported that "same-store" property-level operating income ("NOI"), on average, was 16.8% above pre-pandemic levels in the first quarter. The residential, industrial, and technology sectors have been the upside standouts during this period, with most of these REITs reporting NOI levels that are over 25% above 2019 levels. Retail REITs – which were struggling before the pandemic – have posted some of the more impressive property-level performance in recent quarters, while Senior Housing REITs have also enjoyed a swift NOI rebound since bottoming in early 2023.

REIT Same Store NOI

That said, a real estate portfolio is only as good as the balance sheet that finances it. And while public REITs may own the best house in the neighborhood with balance sheets that are the envy of the institutional real estate world, they are certainly not immune to the impacts of the lingering rate-driven distress around them. "Hope" has been the only strategy for many highly levered property owners amid a dearth of buying interest and limited capital availability – "hope" that interest rates recede before their "debt clock" expires. And for an increasing number of borrowers – especially those reliant on high-cost variable-rate debt – the clock has hit midnight. Trepp reported this month that it's the Special Servicing rate for CMBS loans – a forward indicator of potential future loan deliquencies – topped 10% in April a third-straight month, but has retreated slightly from the peak in February. Of note, the office delinquency rate - while still historically high - moderated for a second-straight month in the latest Special Servicing report, suggesting that we may finally be through the worst of it for the office sector. Apart from office, the only other segment that has seen a material jump in loan distress is multifamily – a function of the high variable rate debt utilization rate resulting from its relative ownership skew towards smaller "mom and pop" investors.

Commercial Real Estate

Consistent with the "recovery" phase of the real estate cycle, commercial property values have stabilized in recent quarters following a substantial drawdown during the "recession" phase. Green Street Advisors' data shows that private-market values of commercial real estate properties dipped 22% from the April 2022 peak to the December 2024 bottom, and have recovered steadily since then, posting a +4.8% increase in 2024 and have been flat so far in early 2025. By comparison, the peak-to-trough drawdown in this valuation index during the Great Financial Crisis was 30%. We've noted that the 20-25% drawdown level is a critical "capitulation threshold" – a level that matches the maximum Loan-to-Value ("LTV") ratio accepted by conventional commercial real estate lenders. With real estate valuations still hovering around the 20% drawdown threshold – and steeper within some property sectors, including office – distress will remain elevated within the most highly levered segments of private markets. Defaults tend to peak in the final stage of the "Recession" phase but remain elevated into the early stages of the "Recovery" phase, a period that is generally fertile with acquisition opportunities for entities with access to equity capital.

Commercial Property Prices

Of course, the interest rate and property valuation headwinds become very "real" when the underlying properties are financed with debt – particularly copious amounts of variable rate debt and secured debt collateralized by this (declining) value of the property. With the scars of the Great Financial Crisis still visible, most public REITs were "preparing for winter" for the last decade, often to the frustration of some investors who turned to higher-leveraged and riskier alternatives in recent years. Private market players and non-traded REIT platforms were willing to take on more leverage and to finance operations with shorter-term, variable-rate, and secured-debt debt – a strategy that worked well in a near-zero rate environment but quickly crumbles when financing costs double or triple in a matter of months. NAREIT reported earlier this year that nearly 50% of private real estate debt is priced based on variable rates, compared to under 8% for public REITs. We've observed significant pain inflicted on the handful of public REITs that entered this period with variable rate debt loads in the 20-30% range – still relatively low compared to typical private equity firms – resulting in double-digit percentage point drags on Funds from Operations ("FFO").

REIT Debt

Access to long-term debt is perhaps the most distinct competitive advantage of the public REIT model, but it's an advantage that hardly gave public REITs much of an edge when debt capital was cheap and plentiful in the "zero-rate" economic environment of the 2010s. Compared to private institutions, publicly traded REITs had far greater access to fixed-rate unsecured debt – which is usually in the form of 5-10 year corporate bonds. This allowed REITs to lock-in these fixed rates on 90% of their debt while simultaneously pushing their average debt maturity to nearly 7 years, on average, thus avoiding the need to refinance during these highly unfavorable market conditions. Even with the significant pullback in financing activity in recent months, the average term-to-maturity for public REITs is still over 6 years – well above the pre-GFC highs of around 4 years – and significantly above the weighted average term-to-maturity of around 3 years for private real estate assets. Hence, for many of the highly levered players that lacked access to long-term capital, the trends observed in the chart below are magnified by a factor of 2-3x.

REIT Balance Sheet

While REIT stock prices don't yet reflect it, we believe that macroeconomic conditions are evolving in an ideal manner for public REITs to finally exploit their competitive advantage – access to nimble equity capital and long-term fixed rate debt – which was of little advantage in the "lower forever" environment. And while past periods of tight lending conditions were remembered as those of distress, they can rightfully also be remembered as periods of a significant revolution and rebirth that spanned many of the public REITs that exist today. The S&L Crisis of the late 1980s – which resulted in the failure of nearly a third of community banks and resulted in significantly constrained access to debt capital – spawned the dawn of the 'Modern REIT Era.' A second wave of REIT IPOs followed in the aftermath of 9/11 and again after the Great Financial Crisis as the limited access to (and high cost of) debt capital, combined with a lift in equity market valuations of public REITs – pushed otherwise distressed highly levered private portfolios into the public equity markets, a theme that we could well see repeat in coming quarters.

REIT IPO Activity

Deeper Dive: REIT Fundamentals

As noted, the pockets of distress are almost entirely debt-driven – and further isolated largely to the office sector – as nearly every property sector reported "same-store" property-level income above pre-pandemic levels. REIT company-level metrics have tracked this rebound in property-level performance relatively closely throughout the pandemic, with the exception of the highly levered REITs that expect sharp FFO declines this year even as property-level cash flows remain healthy. REIT FFO ("Funds From Operations") has fully recovered the sharp declines from early in the pandemic, and in the first quarter, FFO was 20% above its 2019 pre-pandemic level on an absolute basis, and roughly 8% above pre-pandemic levels on a per-share basis. On a year-over-year basis, FFO/share was down -0.8% in Q1, however, resulting primarily from a drag from higher interest expense. Same-store Net Operating Income ("NOI"), meanwhile, was roughly 3.2% higher on a year-over-year basis in the first quarter, and 16.8% above the pre-pandemic level.

REIT Fundamentals: FFO, Dividends, NOI

After recording the largest year-over-year decline on record in 2020 – which dragged the sector-wide occupancy rate to 89.8% – REIT occupancy rates rebounded since mid-2020 back to around 93% – toward the upper-end of its 20-year average of 90-94%. By comparison, occupancy levels dipped as low as 88% during the Financial Crisis and took three years to recover back above 90%. Retail REITs have been the noted upside standout on the occupancy-front, as store openings have significantly outpaced store closings over the past three years – a sharp departure from the "retail apocalypse" trends of the 2010s. Residential REITs have continued to report near-record-high occupancy rates in recent quarters – despite record levels of multifamily supply growth. Industrial REITs reported a moderation in occupancy rates to around 94% in Q1 from their record highs of nearly 98% in late 2022. Office REIT occupancy, meanwhile, has seen substantial declines since the start of 2020 and remained 600 basis points below pre-pandemic levels at 85.5% in the first quarter.

Occupancy Rates

Powered by more than 120 REIT dividend hikes in both 2021 and 2022 – and another 80 dividend hikes in 2023 and 2024 – dividends per share have finally fully recovered from the wave of pandemic-era dividend cuts in 2020. In 2024, we tracked 85 dividend increases, and 2025 is pacing slightly ahead of 2024 in the early goings with dividend hikes from 43 REITs thus far. With FFO growth significantly outpacing dividend growth since the start of the pandemic, REIT dividend payout ratios remained at around 74% in the first quarter on a trailing twelve month basis – well below the 20-year average of around 80%. With a relatively healthy dividend payout ratio, the average REIT has built up a buffer to protect current payout levels if macroeconomic conditions take an unfavorable turn. The sector average does mask some elevated payout ratios across several sectors: Mortgage REITs pay out about 100% of EPS.

REIT Dividend Payout Ratio

Deeper Dive: REIT Valuations & Growth

The extended stretch of REIT underperformance since early 2022 – combined with the nearly 20% increase in FFO during this time – pulled REIT valuations to the lowest level since the end of the Great Financial Crisis, but REITs aren't quite as "cheap" now as they were at "bottom" last June. For REITs, being "too cheap" can be a problem. Over most long-term investment horizons, "cheap" REITs tend to stay cheap via underperformance, and "expensive" REITs tend to stay expensive via outperformance. Valuations are a reflection of these REITs' cost of capital: highly valued REITs have access to cheap capital, while cheaper REITs must pay more to access capital. While modern equity REITs are more "dynamic" than a conventional bank, these "spreads" between cost of capital and return on capital are still critical. The average REIT now trades at an estimated 10% discount its Net Asset Value – as implied by current private market valuations – after briefly trading at a NAV premium in early 2025 for the first time since late 2021. Equity REITs currently trade at an average forward Price/FFO multiple of around 16.5x using a market-cap weighted average, which is below the post-GFC average of 18.0x.

REIT Price/FFO Valuations

Equity valuations can and do play an important role in the ability of REITs to grow accretively: when REITs trade at persistent discounts to their private market-implied Net Asset Value ("NAV"), the "flow" of real estate tends to be from public markets and to private markets. Alternatively, when REITs trade with NAV premiums, the flow is positive- REITs are able to accretively acquire private market assets. The market-cap-weighted average, however, is somewhat distorted by the massive weight of a handful of mega-cap REITs and higher-valued technology REITs. On an equal-weight basis, REITs trade at a 14.0x median P/FFO multiple, which is near the lowest levels since the early 2000s and trade with an average NAV discount of closer to 20%. Consistent with the deeper discounts offered by smaller-cap REITs, we note that Equity REITs pay a dividend yield of 4.1% on a market-cap-weighted basis, but this dividend yield climbs to over 6.5% on an equal-weight basis, and roughly 8.5% when including mortgage REITs.

REIT Valuations & Metrics

Distress for some is an opportunity for others, and we've begun to see – on a limited scale – public REITs with balance sheet firepower start to take advantage of capitulation from highly levered players – a trend that will gather steam if debt markets remain tight and REIT NAV premiums can hold for at least several quarters. REIT external growth comes in two forms – buying and building. Acquisitions have historically been a key component of FFO/share growth, accounting for more than half of the REIT sector's FFO growth over the past three decades, with the balance coming from "organic" same-store growth and through ground-up development and redevelopment. With a historically large "bid-ask" spread for private real estate assets, REITs were historically quiet on the portfolio-level M&A front in 2024 with gross purchases of only $7B last year – the slowest annual total since late 2018 – but REITs have picked-up the pace slightly in early 2025. REITs reported $11.2B in gross acqusitions in Q1 and $5.4B in dispositions, resulting in a "net buy" of $5.8B, which was the strongest net haul since Q3 of 2023.

REIT Sector Net Acquisitions

Distress for some is an opportunity for others, and we've begun to see – on a limited scale – public REITs with balance sheet firepower start to take advantage of capitulation from highly levered players – a trend that will gather steam if debt markets remain tight and REIT NAV premiums can hold for at least several quarters. REIT external growth comes in two forms – buying and building. Acquisitions have historically been a key component of FFO/share growth, accounting for more than half of the REIT sector's FFO growth over the past three decades, with the balance coming from "organic" same-store growth and through ground-up development and redevelopment. With a historically large "bid-ask" spread for private real estate assets, REITs were historically quiet on the portfolio-level M&A front in 2024 with gross purchases of only $7B last year – the slowest annual total since late 2018 – but REITs have picked-up the pace slightly in early 2025. REITs reported $11.2B in gross acqusitions in Q1 and $5.4B in dispositions, resulting in a "net buy" of $5.8B, which was the strongest net haul since Q3 of 2023.

REIT Acquisitions & Dispositions

Company-level M&A trends have remained historically quiet this year, however, with no major REIT privatizations thus far following a wave of private equity acqusitions of public REITs in the preceeding three years. Blackstone scooped up another trio of public REITs last year, acquiring Tricon Residential, Apartment Income, and Retail Opportunity for a combined $17B. From 2020 through 2024, Blackstone and its affiliates acquired ten public REITs with a combined enterprise value of over $105B, paying an average premium of 35% relative to these REITs' prior closing price. Outside of these Blackstone-involved deals, M&A activity within the REIT sector has been almost non-existent since late 2023 - a year that was notably active with REIT-to-REIT mergers. The 2023 merger wave was headlined by net lease REIT Realty Income's acquisition of Spirit Realty, healthcare REIT Healthpeak's (DOC) acquisition of medical office REIT Physicians Realty, and Extra Space's (EXR) acquisition of Life Storage. We also saw two smaller-scale consolidations in the strip center space: Regency Centers (REG) acquired small-cap Urstadt Biddle, while Kimco Realty (KIM) acquired mid-cap RPT Realty, along with a handful of mortgage REIT mergers.

Notable REIT Mergers & Acquisitions

REITs have become some of the most active builders in the country over the past decade and – despite the slowdown in recent quarters – REITs still have over $40B of active development in the pipeline. Favorably, much of this pipeline is in the final stages of construction, as new groundbreakings have been few and far between over the past few quarters given the unfavorable rate environment. The swelling of the development pipeline to the record-highs seen in 2023 was fueled by three property sectors – data center, industrial, and self-storage, but some of this inflated pipeline is the result of higher construction costs and lingering supply chain delays that prolong the development timeline. Retail REITs, on the other hand, have engaged in minimal development activity over the past several years – which has fueled the recent occupancy increases – while the pipeline in office has also pulled back materially over the last several quarters, as expected.

REIT Development Pipeline

Deeper Dive: REIT Balance Sheets

The ability to avoid "forced" capital raising events has been the cornerstone of REIT balance sheet management since the GFC – a time in which many REITs were forced to raise equity through secondary offerings at "firesale" valuations just to keep the lights on, resulting in substantial shareholder dilution which ultimately led to a "lost decade" for REITs. While REITs entered this tightening period on very solid footing with deeper access to capital, the same can't necessarily be said about many private market players that rely on short-term borrowing or continuous equity inflows to keep the wheels spinning. Much the opposite of their role during the Great Financial Crisis, many well-capitalized REITs are equipped to "play offense" and take advantage of compelling acquisition opportunities if we do indeed see further distress in private markets from higher rates and tighter credit conditions.

Why this time is different for REITs

Even as benchmark interest rates doubled from a year earlier and even with market values of REITs lower by 20-30% during that time, REITs balance sheets remain healthy by historical standards, merely giving back the incremental pandemic-era improvement. Debt as a percent of Enterprise Value still accounts for less than 35% of the REITs' capital stack, down from an average of roughly 45% in the pre-recession period – and substantially below the 60-80% Loan-to-Value ratios that are typical in the private commercial real estate space. Interest coverage ratios (calculated by dividing EBITDA over interest expense) have seen a shaper erosion over the past several quarters from its all-time highs set last year, however, but still stand at 4.1x, which roughly matches the coverage ratio at the end of 2019 and compares very favorably to the 2.75x average in the three years before the GFC period.

REIT Balance Sheet

That said – not all REITs are created equal, and the broad-based sector average does mask some of the intensifying issues in several of the more at-risk sectors and among REITs that have been more aggressive in their balance sheet management. A handful of small and mid-cap REITs – some of which would be considered as having a rather strong balance sheet relative to similar private equity portfolios – have incurred significant charges to "fix" their floating rate debt exposure, while others have continued to roll the dice by maintaining a sizable chunk of variable rate debt. The BofA BBB US Corporate Index Effective Yield – a proxy for the incremental cost of real estate debt capital – has surged from as low as 2.20% in late 2021 to as high as 6.67% at the October 2023 peak and now sits at 5.42%. On a percentage basis, this represents a nearly 200% increase in interest costs on variable rate debt. The cost of equity – which we compute based on average FFO yields – is now 6.4% for the average REIT, up from a low of 4.4% in late 2021 but down from a peak of nearly 9% at the "bottom" of the REIT selloff in late 2023.

REIT Cost Capital

So naturally, REITs "hunkered down" in recent quarters as stock price valuations remained low by historical standards and in relation to private market-implied valuations, but have started to rebound in recent quarters. On an annual basis, the amount of capital raised in 2024 was up about 17% from a year earlier. REITs raised roughly $72B in capital through equity and debt offerings, with the majority of this capital raised coming via long-term debt offerings, which accounted for roughly 65% of the total capital raised in 2024 – above the historical average of around 50%. The largest common equity offering of 2024 was Lineage Logistics (LINE) $5.4 IPO, followed by the American Healthcare' (AHR) $773M IPO. Industrial REIT Prologis (PLD) was the most active REIT with roughly $5B in capital raising in 2024, followed by cell tower REIT American Tower (AMT) with over $3B raised. By property sector, industrial REITs accounted for the largest share of total capital raised in 2024, followed by data center and healthcare REITs.

REIT Capital Raising

The modest rebound in activity in recent quarters follows a truly forgettable three-year period for real estate equities dating back to the start of the Fed's rate hiking cycle – a period that's seen historically low levels of "dynamism" across the sector, including the slowest three-year period ever for REIT capital raising activity (as a percent of market cap), the fewest number of REIT IPOs since the late-90s recession, and the only time ever in which the total number of publicly listed REITs declined for three consecutive years. Today, there are 196 REITs in the FTSE Nareit All REITs Index, down from 222 at the start of 2021 and down from the peak of 225 in 2015. After increasing its weight in the S&P 500 in 17 of 20 years from 2000-2019, REITs' sector weighting in the major equity benchmark declined for a fourth-straight year in 2024, and stands at just 2.2% today. Further, per the BofA Fund Managers Survey, REITs are the single-most "unloved" asset class across global markets, with investors underweight REITs in a magnitude not seen since the peak of the GFC in 2009.

REIT Forgettable Years

Takeaways: Silver Linings After Dark Ages

REITs are as "unloved" as ever following a truly forgettable three years dating back to the start of the Fed's rate hiking cycle. But stalling supply growth - the silver lining to the three-year REIT "bear market" - is increasingly supporting property-level fundamentals and more-than offsetting marginal demand cooling. Public REITs enter this "recovery" phase with historically cheap valuations compared to the broader equity market. REITs have underperformed the S&P 500 by a whopping 48 percentage points since the start of the Fed hiking cycle in 2022 – a historically remarkable underperformance gap. Importantly, it is valuations – not property-level fundamentals – that are responsible for the vast majority of this underperformance. But properties are only as strong as the balance sheet that supports them, and the uncomfortable unwind will continue for many highly-levered private portfolios. Macroeconomic conditions are aligning in an ideal manner for low-levered entities with access to "nimble" equity capital – conditions that maximize the competitive advantage of public, which these entities have been unable to exploit in the "lower forever" environment.

REIT Equity vs Mortgage

About the Author

David Auerbach boasts over two decades of experience in the securities industry, specializing as an institutional trader with a focus on Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs), Equity and Preferred stocks, MLPs, ETFs, and Closed End Funds.

Based in Dallas, TX throughout his entire career, David currently serves as the Chief Investment Officer for Hoya Capital, managing the Hoya Housing 100 ETF (Ticker: HOMZ) and The High Yield Dividend ETF (Ticker: RIET). Previously, David held the position of Managing Director at Armada ETF Advisors, the sub-advisor for the Residential REIT ETF (Ticker: HAUS) and The Private Real Estate Strategy via Liquid REITs ETF (Ticker: PRVT).

Additionally, he acts as a consultant with IRRealized, LLC, focusing on corporate access in the REIT industry. David's industry journey includes roles at World Equity Group, Esposito Securities, and Green Street Advisors where he got his start in the REIT industry.

At Esposito Securities, he played a crucial role in building the REIT/Real Estate platform and worked extensively with institutional investors, Equity REITs, and ETF issuers.

Throughout his career, David has been quoted by reputable publications such as Bloomberg, WSJ, Financial Times, REIT.com, and GlobeSt.com. He has also made notable appearances as a featured guest on networks like Yahoo Finance, TD Ameritrade, and Bloomberg.

David holds a BBA in Finance from the University of Texas at Austin (May 1999) and an MBA in Finance from Southern Methodist University (May 2005). He maintains FINRA Series 7, 24, 55, and 63 registrations.

In his leisure time, David is an avid traveler, often found crisscrossing the country in pursuit of attending as many Phish concerts as possible.

Disclaimer

Please note this article is for information purposes only and does not in any way constitute investment advice. It is essential that you seek advice from a registered financial professional prior to making any investment decision.

Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
ETF U
Become a better investor with NYSE: The Home of ETFs
Visit the ETF U homepage
ETF Guides
Advertisement

Recent educational content

Investors Can Fight Healthcare Inflation with Newly Launched ETFs

Asset TV

The ETF Show - Investors Can Fight Healthcare Inflation with Newly Launched ETFs

Adam Schenck, Principal and Managing Director of Fund Services at Milliman joined The ETF Show to discuss Milliman's first ETFs designed to hedge against rising healthcare inflation.

Asset TV
By Asset TV · April 22, 2026
Tidal ETF Industry KPIs

ETF Trends

ETF Industry KPIs April 20, 2026

The ETF Industry saw 14 New Launches, 1 Ticker Change and 16 closures last week.

Tidal
By Tidal · April 22, 2026
The ETF Show - Investors Run to Cash Alternatives as Markets Remain Volatile

Asset TV

The ETF Show - Investors Run to Cash Alternatives as Markets Remain Volatile

Jason England, Portfolio Manager and Fixed Income Strategist from Simplify joined The ETF Show to discuss investor allocations to fixed income as markets continue on their rollercoaster ride.

Asset TV
By Asset TV · April 15, 2026
Tidal ETF Industry KPIs

ETF Trends

ETF Industry KPIs March 30, 2026

The ETF Industry saw 33 New Launches, 1 Ticker Change and 9 closures last week.

Tidal
By Tidal · March 31, 2026

Browse all educational columns

Advertisement
ETF INVESTOR TOOLS

Build and Analyze Your ETF Portfolio Like a Pro

Create your own ETF portfolio in minutes and instantly see allocations, exposures, performance, and risk. Visualize diversification across asset classes, regions, and sectors. Stress-test ideas, compare benchmarks, and refine your strategy with professional-grade analytics.

Portfolio Builder