Tuesday, November 11, 2008

REITs

The stock market has been brutual to me this year. However, I think it is signficantly undervalued. I have been buying a lot of reits lately. I bought HPT and HRP in the last week. HPT is right now yielding over 30% and after todays results, it seems the divident is safe. HPT owns hotels and leases them out to big companies such as HOST, TA etc... For the lease, they get paid a minimum yearly rental and a percentage of revenue. As a result, in bad times and in good times, their revenus is somewhat more constant. Also the companies that lease from them put down a deposit just in case they cannot meet their yearly rental. HRP leases office space. Usually their contracts span on average 6 years and also its biggest tenant is the US Government. So, they should be somewhat shielded from the current economic crisis. Both of these companies trade at a significant discount to their NAV. And they should be able to maintain their yield.