--- title: REITs & Real Estate Funds description: Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) and real estate funds allow individuals to invest in large-scale, income-producing properties. Learners will understand how these investment vehicles operate, evaluate their performance metrics, and build a diversified real estate portfolio. category: finance-economics subcategory: real-estate-investing difficulty: beginner, intermediate, advanced url: /subject/reits-and-real-estate-funds --- # REITs & Real Estate Funds Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) and real estate funds allow individuals to invest in large-scale, income-producing properties. Learners will understand how these investment vehicles operate, evaluate their performance metrics, and build a diversified real estate portfolio. ## Available Resources 2 Books • 4 Websites • 2 Papers ## Websites ### 1. Dividend.com REITs REIT dividend trackers and comparisons, popular among r/REITs users. **Difficulty:** Beginner | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://www.dividend.com/reits-sector/ ### 2. What's a REIT? — Nareit Reference Hub **Author:** Nareit Reference hub from the US REIT trade association covering the legal structure, the ninety percent taxable-income distribution requirement, equity versus mortgage REITs, listed versus non-listed versus private vehicles, and the property sectors from data centers to net lease. **Difficulty:** Beginner | **Language:** English | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://www.reit.com/what-reit **Tags:** reits, reit-structure, reit-taxation, property-sectors, mortgage-reits ### 3. SEC Investor Bulletin: Non-traded REITs **Author:** SEC Office of Investor Education and Advocacy SEC Office of Investor Education bulletin on REITs that register with the Commission but do not list on an exchange. Details illiquidity, front-end fees reaching fifteen percent, distributions funded from offering proceeds or borrowings, valuation opacity, and external-manager conflicts. Non-traded REIT risk is one of the topic's stated key concepts, and it is the single area where the internet is most compromised: nearly all 'education' about non-traded REITs is published by the sponsors selling them. This is the only authority with no conflict. **Difficulty:** Beginner | **Language:** English | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://www.investor.gov/introduction-investing/general-resources/news-alerts/alerts-bulletins/investor-bulletins-89 **Tags:** non-traded-reits, reits, investor-protection, fees-and-costs, liquidity-risk ### 4. reit.com REIT.com is the official site of the National Association of Real Estate Investment Trusts (Nareit). It offers industry news, data and research, investor education, and policy updates about REITs and the real estate investment trust sector. **Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://reit.com **Tags:** websites, business-entrepreneurship, investing ## Papers ### 1. Valuing Real Estate — Investment Valuation, Chapter 26 (Damodaran) **Author:** Aswath Damodaran Chapter from Damodaran's Investment Valuation arguing real estate and financial assets obey the same discounted cash flow principles. Works through estimating property cash flows, risk premiums and discount rates for illiquid real assets, and the relationship between cap rates and intrinsic value. **Difficulty:** Advanced | **Language:** English | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/pdfiles/val3ed/c26.pdf **Tags:** real-estate-valuation, discounted-cash-flow, cap-rates, risk-premiums, commercial-real-estate ### 2. Nareit Funds From Operations White Paper — 2018 Restatement **Author:** Nareit The REIT trade body's authoritative restatement of Funds From Operations, the industry's standard non-GAAP earnings measure. Specifies which gains, losses, impairments, and depreciation adjustments enter the calculation, with worked examples and the reasoning behind each treatment. Every blog post, calculator, and course that explains FFO is downstream of this one document. **Difficulty:** Advanced | **Language:** English | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://www.reit.com/sites/default/files/2018-FFO-white-paper-(11-27-18).pdf **Tags:** ffo, reits, non-gaap-metrics, reit-accounting, financial-reporting ## Books ### 1. Investing in REITs: Real Estate Investment Trusts (4th Edition) **Author:** Ralph L. Block Block invested in REIT shares for four decades and wrote the field's long-standing reference. Fourth edition covers REIT history and cycles, property-sector economics, balance sheet and dividend safety analysis, valuation using FFO, AFFO and NAV, and portfolio construction. Data stops at 2011. **Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Paid **Link:** https://www.amazon.com/dp/1118004450?tag=edmonddante07-20 **Tags:** reits, ffo, nav-valuation, dividend-investing, property-sectors ### 2. Educated REIT Investing: The Ultimate Guide to Understanding and Investing in Real Estate Investment Trusts **Author:** Stephanie Krewson-Kelly, Glenn R. Mueller Krewson-Kelly spent fifteen years as a sell-side REIT analyst and now runs investor relations at a listed REIT; Mueller is a real estate professor. Covers industry structure, FFO and AFFO mechanics, NAV, leverage and debt maturity analysis, and sector-by-sector characteristics. **Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Paid **Link:** https://www.amazon.com/dp/1119708699?tag=edmonddante07-20 **Tags:** reits, ffo, affo, nav-valuation, reit-analysis --- *This content is part of Dantes.io - Your Treasure Map to Knowledge* *Curated by humans at Dantes.io. Personal study use welcome; republishing this curation requires permission (team@dantes.io).* View this page online: https://dantes.io/subject/reits-and-real-estate-funds