ICF News and Press, iShares Cohen & Steers REIT ETF From 05/07/19

What a difference plunging mortgage rates make! That's our initial reaction to seeing what's happening in the West region of the U.S. housing market, where the combination of very high existing home sale prices and rising mortgage rates had been killing the real estate market in these stat...

After reading a recent article, it got me thinking about REIT ETFs. I wanted to examine REIT ETFs that select their holdings and have a strategy involved that does not simply use market cap as the main criteria. In the table below are five REIT ETFs that have a unique selection process or stra...

A recent note from Brookings on the nature of the ongoing housing crisis in America has opened up with a bombastic statement: Over the past five years, median housing prices have risen faster than median incomes (Figure 1). While that's generally good news for homeowners, it puts additiona...

Real Estate Weekly Review Pushing their 2019 total returns back near 20%, REITs ( VNQ and IYR ) continued their strong performance, climbing for the 15th of the past 17 weeks. Helping to power this remarkable run of performance has been the ‘Goldilocks’ economic backdrop of l...

The Census Bureau recently published the 2019 first-quarter numbers on the housing stock. Homeownership rates had bottomed out in 2016 at 62.9%. That was one quarter which was probably an anomaly. Generally, the bottom appears to have been about 63.5%. It had generally risen since then, up t...

But other construction segments are hot. Residential construction is starting to make folks nervous. Total residential construction spending - 99% is "private" rather than "public" spending - dropped 8.4% from a year ago, the sixth month in a row of year-over-year declines, to a seasonally a...

Condo prices fall year over year in New York. In San Francisco, SoCal and Seattle, year-over-year price gains shrink to nearly nothing. Despite the hype, Boston prices decline. Denver, Dallas and Atlanta eke out records. After seven months in a row of month-to-month declines, prices of sin...

US-listed REITs performed very well year to date. Does this leave the sector overvalued or is there more room to run? In what follows, we will compare the valuation of real estate with its own history, with other equity sectors, with private real estate markets and fixed income. Valuation...

REIT Rankings: Manufactured Housing In our REIT Rankings series, we introduce and update readers on each of the residential and commercial real estate sectors. We analyze REITs within the sectors based on both common and unique valuation metrics, presenting investors with numerous option...

Background Information In this article, I provide a short and succinct review of the iShares U.S. Real Estate ETF ( IYR ). I will lay out the major characteristics that I screen for and at the end, provide some comparison between IYR and several of its peers in the U.S. real estate ETF ...