Why Real Estate?
Total Return
Strong Portfolio Returns — REITs Outperform Major Indices
Adding REITs to a portfolio can provide income and growth, potentially increasing the overall return of stock-and-bond-only portfolios. In fact, despite the recent REIT market correction, for the past 30 years, the National Council of Real Estate Investment Fiduciaries (NCREIF) Property Index (NPI) — an index commonly used to measure the performance of direct commercial real estate — has generally outperformed the S&P 500®, Russell 2000, NASDAQ Composite and Dow Jones Industrial Average.
Index Returns 1
as of June 30, 2010
1 Source: Standard & Poor's, Russell Investments, Yahoo! Finance and NCREIF (National Council of Real Estate Investment Fiduciaries). Past performance is not a guarantee of future results. The NCREIF Property Index (NPI) is an index of quarterly returns reported by institutional investors on investment grade commercial properties owned by those investors and is presented without leverage or fees. The NPI is used as an industry benchmark to compare an investor’s own returns against the industry average. The S&P 500 Index is an unmanaged index of the 500 largest stocks (in terms of market value), weighted by market capitalization and considered representative of the broad stock market. The Russell 2000 Index is an unmanaged index of the smallest 2,000 securities in the Russell 3000 Index, and considered representative of the U.S. small-cap equity universe. The Dow Jones Industrial Average is a price-weighted average of 30 significant stocks traded on the New York Stock Exchange and the NASDAQ. These indices are used in comparison to the NPI in order to illustrate the differences in historical total returns generated by direct commercial real estate, stocks and bonds.
2 Time period is based off of trailing Four-Quarter Annualized Returns from 2Q10.
3 Price-only returns are listed for the NASDAQ Composite.