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Real estate investment trusts are saying so long to being bundled with "financials" in their industry classification, getting their own new category called, no shocker here, "real estate," as of Aug. 31, according to an article in Bloomberg by Rani Molla.
HousingWire first reported on this at the end of last year. After a ho-hum 2015 that saw investors crammed by market compartmentalization, the people behind the S&P 500 revealed an idea to put a little surge back into the stock market.
The change was predicted to stir interest among investors who might currently overlook real-estate investment trusts.
Here’s why this break out makes sense. From the article:
The change, which expands the ranks of S&P Dow Jones Indices and MSCI Inc.’s stock classifications to eleven, is more than cosmetic. Having a home of their own means that REITs will see a flurry of fresh investor attention. In particular, money managers who have to reorder their portfolios to make sure they adequately reflect the make-up of certain indices their funds track are likely to embrace them as well.
Real estate stocks and financial stocks have behaved differently, historically, so they've made for awkward bedfellows. REITs, which make up the majority of the S&P 500’s real estate sector, for example, secure their earnings from rent collection and pay out their taxable income as investor dividends. Financial stocks trade more on interest margins and have lower dividend yields.
