My brother thinks REITs are fake real estate and I used to say the same thing
We grew up on the idea that real estate means you own something you can walk through, swing a hammer at, argue with a contractor about. Nine doors, every one of them touched by my hands and his. So when people talked about buying a ticker and calling it real estate exposure I genuinely thought they were describing something else, something closer to a stock. Last spring I started actually reading the underlying portfolios on a few names, industrial ones mostly, and the buildings are real, the leases are real, the vacancy numbers are the same ones I track on my own stuff. What changed for me was sitting with a 48k gap between what I needed for my next acquisition and what I had, and watching that pile do nothing in a MMDA for eleven months. I put 30k of it into two positions in February, one diversified industrial name and one that concentrates in the Sun Belt, and between the dividends and where the shares are now I'm at roughly 9.2 percent on that money since February. That is not life-changing but it is not nothing either, and the money came back liquid when I needed to move fast on a fourplex in April. My brother still calls it fake. I stopped arguing and just showed him the brokerage statement.
