Currently more than 80 million Americans invest in REITs directly or through REIT mutual funds or exchange-traded funds (ETFs). This is not surprising when you know that the easiest way to outperform markets in the past 30 years would have been to overweight REITs in your portfolio.
REITs have consistently generated greater total returns and paid higher dividends, all while being less risky than most other stocks:
Counting out the last 3-year period, the return differential is even more important:
From 1997 to 2016, REITs generated up to 4x higher total returns than