Article originally posted on Phoenix Business Journal on January 14, 2019
After years of being overshadowed by the likes of Apple and Alphabet, real estate funds have lately edged ahead of the overall stock market by betting mainly on old-fashioned assets like office buildings, malls and warehouses.
In the fourth quarter, when the stock market really started to jitter and slide, the S&P 500 sank 13.52 percent, including dividends, but the FTSE Nareit All Equity REITs Index, a leading index composed of publicly traded real estate investment trusts, lost only 6.1 percent. For all of 2018, as the S&P 500 lost 4.4 percent, including dividends, the FTSE Nareit index lost only 4 percent.