Investing For Income In A World Without Any
Billions of dollars have poured into real-estate investment trusts this year.
3 min
What’s often regarded as a substitute for bonds and is up nearly 30% so far this year?
Real-estate funds, that’s what.
Before you join the hordes of investors who have poured billions into them this year, you should realize that you won’t be getting in on the ground floor—and the elevator is already crowded.
Real-estate investment trusts own, operate or finance income-producing commercial or residential properties. More than 100 mutual funds, closed-end funds and exchange-traded funds invest primarily in REITs and similar assets. Together they manage more than US$224 billion, according to Morningstar.
With interest rates still in the cellar and fears of inflation heating up, investors have flocked to these funds, whose income over time has tended to exceed rises in the cost of living.
Another reason for real-estate funds’ sudden popularity? Returns have gone through the roof thanks to price appreciation, even though dividend yields have fallen.
As of Sept. 15, nearly two dozen REITs had total returns of greater than 100% over the past 12 months, according to REIT.com.
Leading ETFs, including iShares U.S. Real Estate and Vanguard Real Estate, are up 27% to 29% so far this year, including reinvested dividends, well ahead of the S&P 500’s 20%.
Much of the rise is driven by the elation of recovery from near-death. For many REITs, 2020 was the year from hell, as millions of people lost their jobs and stayed home, cutting off revenue from hotels, offices, shopping centres and other properties.
The FTSE Nareit All Equity REITs index fell 5.1% last year, including dividends. That was its worst return since 2008, when the index lost 37.7%. (Equity REITs own real estate; mortgage REITs lend against it.)
In March 2020 alone, REITs specializing in apartments lost 22.6%; hotels and resorts, 36.6%; retailing, 42.7%; regional malls, 54%.
Real-estate owners and operators had little choice but to hoard cash. Dividends at equity REITs, which had hit a total $14.7 billion in the fourth quarter of 2019, fell by almost one-third to $10.1 billion in the third quarter of 2020. (They’ve since rebounded by about 10%.)
More than one-third of U.S. equity REITs have suspended or reduced their dividends since Covid-19 hit, according to Cohen & Steers Inc., an investment firm in New York that manages approximately $100 billion, mostly in real estate.
Even so, for all the talk about how the pandemic would change everything, it didn’t.
Even the hardest-hit sectors are recovering. People are staying at hotels and shopping at stores; individuals and businesses alike are paying rent again. In 2021 “demand is coming back pretty much across the board,” says Calvin Schnure, senior economist at the National Association of Real Estate Investment Trusts.
Misery tends to be followed by euphoria, and money always chases returns. In 2020, investors pulled $2.1 billion out of ETFs investing in U.S. REITs and real estate. Through Sept. 13 of this year, however, these funds have attracted $10 billion in new money, according to FactSet—nearly as much as they took in over the preceding five years combined.
That means more than one-eighth of the $75 billion in total assets at these ETFs has come in over the past 12 months.
“We’re trying to temper expectations,” says Jason Yablon, head of U.S.-listed real estate at Cohen & Steers. The return on REITs “won’t be what it once was,” he adds. “Don’t expect the 30% we just got.”
The enthusiasm has even reached the backwaters of the stock market. Closed-end funds, those old-fashioned crossbreeds between a stock and a mutual fund, often specialize in real estate, and they’re hot too.
As investors take fees and differences in managerial skill into account, share prices at closed ends can be greater or less than the value of their portfolios. Over the past decade, closed-end real-estate funds have traded at an average discount to net asset value of nearly 10%. So you typically could buy a dollar’s worth of real-estate assets for about 90 cents.
This year that discount has shrunk to less than 5%, according to Refinitiv Lipper. That’s the lowest level since 2013.
The average equity REIT’s shares recently traded at more than 24 times funds from operations, a common measure of earnings. That’s an all-time high, far above the average ratio over the past two decades of 15 to 16 times.
That’s largely because earnings over the past year are still artificially depressed. It’s also partly because investors are desperate for income. To get it, they’ve bid up the prices of real-estate assets, driving down yield as a result.
At equity REITs, dividend yields—annual income distributions divided by share price—averaged 2.7% in August, down from 3.8% one year earlier.
Those payouts should rise a bit as REITs keep recovering and sharing more income with investors. The days of huge returns and fat dividend checks, however, are probably over.
Real estate makes sense as one of the lifelong cornerstones of a diversified portfolio. What doesn’t make sense is rushing to buy it because of an unsustainable hot streak.
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Food prices continue to rise at a rapid pace, surprising central banks and pressuring debt-laden governments
4 min
LONDON—Fresh out of an energy crisis, Europeans are facing a food-price explosion that is changing diets and forcing consumers across the region to tighten their belts—literally.
This is happening even though inflation as a whole is falling thanks to lower energy prices, presenting a new policy challenge for governments that deployed billions in aid last year to keep businesses and households afloat through the worst energy crisis in decades.
New data on Wednesday showed inflation in the U.K. fell sharply in April as energy prices cooled, following a similar pattern around Europe and in the U.S. But food prices were 19.3% higher than a year earlier.
The continued surge in food prices has caught central bankers off guard and pressured governments that are still reeling from the cost of last year’s emergency support to come to the rescue. And it is pressuring household budgets that are also under strain from rising borrowing costs.
In France, households have cut their food purchases by more than 10% since the invasion of Ukraine, while their purchases of energy have fallen by 4.8%.
In Germany, sales of food fell 1.1% in March from the previous month, and were down 10.3% from a year earlier, the largest drop since records began in 1994. According to the Federal Information Centre for Agriculture, meat consumption was lower in 2022 than at any time since records began in 1989, although it said that might partly reflect a continuing shift toward more plant-based diets.
Food retailers’ profit margins have contracted because they can’t pass on the entire price increases from their suppliers to their customers. Markus Mosa, chief executive of the Edeka supermarket chain, told German media that the company had stopped ordering products from several large suppliers because of rocketing prices.
A survey by the U.K.’s statistics agency earlier this month found that almost three-fifths of the poorest 20% of households were cutting back on food purchases.
“This is an access problem,” said Ludovic Subran, chief economist at insurer Allianz, who previously worked at the United Nations World Food Program. “Total food production has not plummeted. This is an entitlement crisis.”
Food accounts for a much larger share of consumer spending than energy, so a smaller rise in prices has a greater impact on budgets. The U.K.’s Resolution Foundation estimates that by the summer, the cumulative rise in food bills since 2020 will have amounted to 28 billion pounds, equivalent to $34.76 billion, outstripping the rise in energy bills, estimated at £25 billion.
“The cost of living crisis isn’t ending, it is just entering a new phase,” Torsten Bell, the research group’s chief executive, wrote in a recent report.
Food isn’t the only driver of inflation. In the U.K., the core rate of inflation—which excludes food and energy—rose to 6.8% in April from 6.2% in March, its highest level since 1992. Core inflation was close to its record high in the eurozone during the same month.
Still, Bank of England Gov. Andrew Bailey told lawmakers Tuesday that food prices now constitute a “fourth shock” to inflation after the bottlenecks that jammed supply chains during the Covid-19 pandemic, the rise in energy prices that accompanied Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and surprisingly tight labor markets.
Europe’s governments spent heavily on supporting households as energy prices soared. Now they have less room to borrow given the surge in debt since the pandemic struck in 2020.
Some governments—including those of Italy, Spain and Portugal—have cut sales taxes on food products to ease the burden on consumers. Others are leaning on food retailers to keep their prices in check. In March, the French government negotiated an agreement with leading retailers to refrain from price rises if it is possible to do so.
Retailers have also come under scrutiny in Ireland and a number of other European countries. In the U.K., lawmakers have launched an investigation into the entire food supply chain “from farm to fork.”
“Yesterday I had the food producers into Downing Street, and we’ve also been talking to the supermarkets, to the farmers, looking at every element of the supply chain and what we can do to pass on some of the reduction in costs that are coming through to consumers as fast as possible,” U.K. Treasury Chief Jeremy Hunt said during The Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council Summit in London.
The government’s Competition and Markets Authority last week said it would take a closer look at retailers.
“Given ongoing concerns about high prices, we are stepping up our work in the grocery sector to help ensure competition is working well,” said Sarah Cardell, who heads the CMA.
Some economists expect that added scrutiny to yield concrete results, assuming retailers won’t want to tarnish their image and will lean on their suppliers to keep prices down.
“With supermarkets now more heavily under the political spotlight, we think it more likely that price momentum in the food basket slows,” said Sanjay Raja, an economist at Deutsche Bank.
It isn’t entirely clear why food prices have risen so fast for so long. In world commodity markets, which set the prices received by farmers, food prices have been falling since April 2022. But raw commodity costs are just one part of the final price. Consumers are also paying for processing, packaging, transport and distribution, and the size of the gap between the farm and the dining table is unusually wide.
The BOE’s Bailey thinks one reason for the bank having misjudged food prices is that food producers entered into longer-term but relatively expensive contracts with fertilizer, energy and other suppliers around the time of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in their eagerness to guarantee availability at a time of uncertainty.
But as the pressures being placed on retailers suggest, some policy makers suspect that an increase in profit margins may also have played a role. Speaking to lawmakers, Bailey was wary of placing any blame on food suppliers.
“It’s a story about rebuilding margins that were squeezed in the early part of last year,” he said.
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