The data center REIT sector had a rough year in 2018. For the first time ever, its total return, -16.1% on an equal-weighted basis and -13.7% on a market cap weighted basis, was more than 650 basis points (or bps) behind the -4.5% and -7.1% total returns of the MSCI US REIT Index (Bloomberg: RMS G) and the S&P 500 (Bloomberg: SPX), respectively.* What happened, and should long-term investors in the space be concerned?
In late 2018, we posed these questions to the publicly-traded data center companies and many large dedicated and non-real estate dedicated