REITs impact on typical investment portfolio – further evidence of the sector split importance

The REIT (Real Estate Investment Trust) returns demonstrate a time-varying linear correlation with various equity indexes, therefore they are fit for multi-asset portfolio enhancement. On the one hand, each REIT sector is characterised by a unique set of return properties, and on the other, companies within those sectors remain homogenous. The aim of this research is twofold: firstly, to verify the earlier studies on how adding REITs to mixed equities/bonds portfolios affects their risk and return characteristics, and secondly, to contribute to these studies by examining the impact of adding different REIT sectors to such portfolios over a relatively long and more up-to-date sample, i.e. the period of 1990–2019. The results indicate that, in contrast to what some previous studies suggested, adding the REIT index exposure leads to a limited portfolio enhancement only. More significant and consistent effects can be achieved by the inclusion of individual REIT sectors in an investment portfolio. Apartment REITs offered diversification benefits across the entire spectrum in all the periods, while Industrials were useful across the curve in 1990s and 2010s. Self-storage exposure, on the other hand, improved the investment portfolio performance in each of the studied decades. In general, it was enough for investors who strived for portfolio improvement over the three decades between 1990 and 2019 to have a small portion of their Value holdings replaced with the REIT sector exposure to obtain a positive impact on both the returns and the risk.