Tag Archives: capital-gains

REITs Provide A Surprisingly Big Head Start Over Real Estate Direct Investment

If you’ve decided you want to allocate some of your savings to real estate, you may want to compare the merits of publicly listed REITs, like BlackRock’s REIT ETF (NYSEARCA: IYR ), versus investing in buildings directly through private investment partnerships. 1 The many individual benefits of REITs add up to a surprisingly big head start over private investment vehicles. While discerning private investors should be able to identify individual properties with higher returns than the average REIT-owned property, they need to generate returns about 4% higher just to catch up with the efficiencies of REITs. As detailed in the table below, this 4% comes from four main sources: higher costs, higher taxes, less diversification and lower liquidity of private investments. This 4% hurdle translates into an 8% hurdle for return on equity when the property investment is 50% leveraged with debt. 2 A major worry of REIT investors is that it’s impractical to analyze all of the REIT’s individual holdings, resulting in the risk of buying real estate at a substantial premium to fair Net Asset Value [NAV]. Unfortunately, US REITs are not required to give an estimate of their NAV and so we have to rely on several specialist research companies to make those estimates. As you can see in the chart below, over the past 25 years, REITs have averaged a 4% premium to NAV, within a wide range of a 45% discount in 2009 to a 35% premium in 1997. Given the enormity of the task of valuing thousands of properties without specific, inside details about each property, we shouldn’t expect these third party NAV estimates to be very accurate. Indeed, it appears that the divergences may be exaggerated by the NAV estimates lagging public market price moves. Making a simple adjustment for this lag reduces the volatility of the divergence from NAV by about 40%, and brings the average to a 1% premium, as shown by the black bars. I didn’t list this as a cost or benefit of REITs vs. private holdings, because, depending on timing, this could reduce or enhance returns. To flesh out a plausible negative scenario, let’s assume an investor bought REITs at a 10% premium and sold them 15 years later a 10% discount. That would cut the REIT head start of 4% a year down by only about 15%, in terms of the required return on the underlying unleveraged property investment. The return reduction could turn out to be even less than that, because when REITs trade at a premium to NAV, it is possible for them to add to their property portfolios by issuing shares to private sellers, and thus the premium to NAV can come down without harming returns. I’d be remiss if I didn’t list any benefits of holding property directly. Some argue that illiquidity can be a blessing in disguise, forcing investors to hold for the long term. Ignorance of daily price fluctuations may make the private investing experience more blissful too. Indeed, it may be that many large fortunes have arisen from people feeling ‘locked’ in to the companies they built or the properties they bought. Property investors also derive comfort and psychic value from the tangibility of their property investments, and the ability to touch and see their investments may make their investments feel less risky than more abstract and indirect holdings through REIT ETFs. Finally, while REITs may be the dominant structure for delivering passive real estate exposure 3 , private capital may remain the preferred structure for certain activities such as development and aggregation, even if ultimately for sale to REITs. The benefits of REITs are already well known. Investors have been enthusiastically voting for REITs with their investment dollars for a long time, bringing the value of REITs close to $1 trillion. REITs currently own about 1/8 of commercial real estate in the US, up from less than 1% in 1990. 4 REITs are on track to own over 50% of all US commercial real estate by 2040 even if these trends slow down by half. I hope this note has been helpful in cataloguing and attempting to quantify the relative merits of REIT vs. private ownership, summing up to a 4% hurdle that privately owned properties need to exceed relative to REITs. At Elm Partners, we use REIT ETFs, particularly Vanguard’s (NYSEARCA: VNQ ), for property exposure in our globally diversified portfolios. In a future note, I’ll address the more fundamental question of the long-term expected return of real estate given today’s valuation levels. Table: Comparison of REIT vs. private real estate investing 0.7% Avoiding transactions costs . Typically, when buying a building, an investor will incur about 5% as brokerage, legal, transfer tax and other fees, and loan arrangement fees of 2%, which together equate to about 0.6% pa over the 15-year investment horizon we assume throughout this analysis. 5 When investing in a REIT, these costs have already been paid. 0.5% REITs typically have lower borrowing costs. I assume REITs can borrow about 1% more cheaply from banks than private borrowers on individual properties. 0.9% REITs generally benefit from lower management costs due to economies of scale, and lack of carried interest. This calculation assumes REITs have 0.5% lower management fees and no 15% carried interest. The cost savings can be much higher in the case of small properties managed by the investor, if the investor were to accurately bill himself for the value of his time. 0.6% Tax savings will vary depending on the characteristics of the investor and the site of the property. One benefit of ownership through a REIT is that income that is passed out as dividends are not subject to state (or city) tax, in most states. For high tax sites, like NY or CA, this can amount to a tax saving of 10% of income, assuming that the ultimate investor is in a low or no tax state. REITs allow for longer-term holding than private investments, as the manager usually has an incentive to realize gains to be paid his incentive fee. A further potential saving is that private ownership structures usually throw off miscellaneous itemized deductions which many high rate US taxpayers cannot deduct. 6 For non-US investors, the tax savings of REITs over direct investments might be 0.8% greater. 7 1.0% Substantial diversification is provided by REIT ETFs, such as SCHH and RWR , which hold over 100 individual equity REITs. These REITs in turn provide ownership in thousands of properties in different locations and of different types, many of them large properties in prime locations that would be hard for most investors to access through private ownership. I estimate this effect perhaps over-simplistically by assuming a private portfolio will be 25% riskier than a diversified REIT ETF, and so the investor would need to get 25% more return for bearing that risk. 0.5% Liquidity : REITs are liquid. Private property takes time to transact, and the decisions to buy or sell may depend on the desires and personal circumstances of the manager of the property or other investors in the private deal. REITs are easily marginable, which allows investors to efficiently raise temporary liquidity. Listed options markets that have developed around REITs give investors even greater flexibility. An overview of the academic literature on pricing illiquidity [link prompts PDF download; see page 27 especially] by A Damodaran of NYU suggests a number much higher than 0.5%, but I am sympathetic to the notion that liquidity is valuable but overpriced by the market. 4.2% Total Head Start of REITs vs. Private Ownership Click to enlarge Notes 1 In this note, I am using the term REIT to refer to publicly traded equity Real Estate Investment Trusts in the US. There are other types of REITs and also there is a large and growing non-US REIT market. 3 REITs are one of the most indexed of all market segments, with Vanguard, BlackRock and StateStreet owning about 30% of the large REITs, twice the ownership level in other large US equities, mostly for their index broad market and REIT index offerings. StateStreet recently created a new sector fund just for real estate, XLRE. Expense ratios for REIT ETFs range from 0.07% for Schwab’s to 0.43% for iShares. 4 Size of US commercial real estate market according to this study was $10T in 2009, which I assume has grown to $12T today. Size of REIT market cap and leverage ratio from reit.com . REIT market ownership from 1991 based on the rate of growth of market cap of REITs being 22% and the NAREIT REIT price index growing at 4.7% pa over the period. 5 Further assumptions are 5% initial property yield, growing 2% a year, and leverage of 50% at a rate of 4%. 6 For this calculation, I assumed 5% lower tax rates and that 33% of management expenses are non-deductible for the private investor. 7 Investing through a REIT ETF such as IDUP LN can eliminate capital gains tax, reduce the income tax rate by over half to 15% and eliminate the drag of non-deductible miscellaneous itemized deductions. This should not be taken as tax advice. Acknowledgments Thanks to Chip Parkhurst, who did much of the research for this note as a summer intern at Elm Partners; my friend Larry Hilibrand, for invaluable help from start to finish; and my colleagues at Elm Partners. Disclosure: I am/we are long VNQ, IYR, VNQI. I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it. I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article.

Is SPY’ing Worth It In The Long Run? Why ETFs Beat Mutual Funds

An old business school case study tells the story of how the benefits of the telephone over the telegraph were not appreciated at the time that the telephone was invented. It’s hard to believe, but Western Union (NYSE: WU ), the dominant U.S. telegraph company, thought the best use of this new invention would be to link telegraph offices and have operators read telegraphs to each other over the telephone. They turned down an offer to acquire the full patent from Alexander Graham Bell for $100,000, $2mm inflation adjusted today, putting them in the running for worst business decision of all time. Twenty-five years after the arrival of the SPDR S&P 500 Trust ETF (NYSEARCA: SPY ), the fund that got things rolling, I think many experts are showing a similar lack of foresight when they view the ETF as an innovation offering little benefit over traditional mutual funds. Investors do see their merits (at Elm Partners we use ETFs extensively), pushing assets invested in ETFs through the $3 trillion milestone, with SPY, the largest ETF, at close to $200bb of market cap. 1 Click to enlarge Often cited advantages of ETFs like SPY are that they can be easily traded continuously all day, options markets form around them, and they are easily marginable, allowing the active investor to raise cash when needed for other investments. At Elm Partners, we invest on an unleveraged basis, with a long-term horizon (see my recent Seeking Alpha note on expected long-term real equity returns ), and we believe that ETFs have at least three less publicized advantages for long-term investors like us: Tax efficiency, Lower cost, and Insulation of long-term holders from the trading costs induced by investor turnover. Jack Bogle and Larry Fink, the founders of the two biggest ETF sponsors, argue that many of the nearly 6,000 available ETFs do not have the desirable features we should expect from passive, index oriented products– such as low cost, diversification, transparency and simplicity — and I agree that it does make sense to avoid ETFs with labels such as “synthetic,” “actively managed,” “leveraged” and “inverse.” However, I disagree with Bogle when he states that ETFs are “just great big gambling, speculative instruments that have definitely de-stabilized the market.” 2 To the contrary, I believe the ETF structure is a source of financial stability, and is better for long-term investors, as compared to traditional mutual funds. Here’s why. Tax efficiency: First, taxes matter a lot to the long term return investors earn. ETFs like SPY are much more tax efficient than typical open ended mutual funds. 3 U.S. mutual fund tax accounting means that realized capital gains triggered by redemptions are allocated to all investors who hold the fund at year end, even though those remaining were not responsible for causing the capital gain. The tax basis of their holding will be increased, so there won’t be a double counting of capital gains, but the acceleration of their tax liability and the potential of being allocated higher-taxed short-term capital gains is unpleasant, and unfair. With ETFs, redemptions do not trigger sales that generate capital gains. Instead they cause the fund manager to deliver a basket of the underlying fund assets to the Authorized Participant who in turn gives shares of the ETF to the fund manager for redemption. The tax efficiency can be further enhanced by the fund manager delivering the lowest basis tax lots held inside the fund to the Authorized Participant. The ETF tax advantage, over a long term horizon, can be worth as much as an extra 0.5% of annual return on an after-tax basis for U.S. taxable investors. 4 Cost efficiency: Second, ETFs are typically cheaper to run than mutual funds, and this cost saving tends to get passed on to investors. ETFs usually have lower marketing, distribution, accounting and administration (including KYC and AML) expenses. This probably explains why Vanguard charges higher fees on its mutual funds than it does on its ETFs. 5 Investing in an ETF does involve paying the bid-offer spread, although for SPY that amounts to less than 0.005%, and for small trades, that can be more than offset by the low commissions on ETFs as compared to mutual fund trade charges (roughly $9 vs $30 respectively, at many brokers). There’s the risk that the price of the ETF declines in relation to NAV, but for long term investors this is less of an issue, and may even present an opportunity. Insulating long-term investors from transactions costs of subscriptions/redemptions : In a traditional mutual fund, the costs of having to buy or sell securities to accommodate incoming or departing shareholders are borne by the investors who remain in the fund, rather than by the investors who trigger those costs. In normal times, these costs can add up to as much as 0.10% of extra annual cost for long term mutual fund investors. 6 For the case of SPY, the cost difference would be less than 0.10% in normal times, but for funds investing in less liquid underlying assets– such as the iShares iBoxx $ High Yield Corporate Bond ETF (NYSEARCA: HYG ), the iShares Russell 2000 ETF (NYSEARCA: IWM ), the iShares U.S. Preferred Stock ETF (NYSEARCA: PFF ), and the iShares National AMT-Free Muni Bond ETF (NYSEARCA: MUB )– or with indexes that are quite dynamic– such as the iShares Select Dividend ETF (NYSEARCA: DVY ), the iShares MSCI Emerging Markets ETF (NYSEARCA: EEM ), the iShares U.S. Real Estate ETF (NYSEARCA: IYR ), the SPDR Dow Jones Industrial Average ETF (NYSEARCA: DIA )– ETFs can provide substantial cost savings. Particularly in times of crisis this flawed design feature is exploited by sophisticated investors who make a concerted rush for the exit, so that they can get out at the mid-market net asset value, NAV, price, leaving the remaining investors to bear the heavy cost of the liquidations the leavers instigated. Regulators have been expressing their concern about this a lot lately. By contrast, in an ETF competing brokers create and redeem ETF shares in exchange for the basket of individual securities that comprise the ETF. 7 No trades take place, and hence no costs are incurred inside the ETF as investors enter or exit. Existing ETF investors are thereby insulated from the costs of buying or selling securities to accommodate subscriptions and redemptions. Click to enlarge In turbulent times, this mechanism protects long-term investors while accommodating investors who want to exit at a fair, non-subsidized price. True, an ETF which is based on underlying assets that are not very liquid, such as high yield bonds, can give investors a false sense of liquidity. If many holders want to sell, not only will the price of the asset class fall dramatically, but the arbitrage mechanism will not stop the price of the ETF going to a substantial discount to NAV, and even to a discount to the bid side of the underlying assets. While this isn’t a pleasant scenario for the holder of that ETF, it is better than what happens with an open-ended mutual fund structure. With ETFs there is no incentive for investors to be first out the door, as each investor bears her own marginal cost of increasing or decreasing the fund size. Click to enlarge Furthermore, direct trades in the ETF between buyer and seller can bypass the basket entirely. This is referred to as the ETF ‘liquidity layer,’ which can lead to an ETF trading at a much tighter bid-offer spread than the underlying market, further reducing the total cost of investor turnover. So where does this leave us? Perhaps the most broadly voiced criticism of ETFs remains so far unanswered: that they tempt investors to become active, short term traders, which has been shown to cost investors a lot in the long term. Jack Bogle is joined by Warren Buffett, the Bank of England’s Andrew Haldane and many others on this one. Responding to their founder’s concerns, the researchers at Vanguard wrote a report, aptly titled, “ETFs: For the Better or the Bettor?” (July 2012). While we’d like to see all investors succeed (at Elm Partners we are not engaged in zero sum investment management), we agree with the Vanguard researchers’ conclusion that the temptation effect “is not a reason for long-term individual investors to avoid using appropriate ETF investments as part of a diversified investment portfolio.” So, whether your horizon is short term or long term, ETFs like SPY have significant benefits over their traditional mutual fund cousins. Notes: Globally, including ETPs, according to www.ETFGI.com . For simplicity in this note, we’ll use the term ETF to include ETPs in terms of overall marketplace description. Zweig, 2011. Just to be clear, I am not offering tax advice. Please consult your tax advisor. Based on a 24.4% effective marginal tax rate for long-term capital gains, a 3% dividend yield and long-term growth of 3.5% pa. This is generally the case for Vanguard’s U.S. listed Investor shares vs ETFs, and also the case for their Irish listed fund and ETF products. For example, for a fund with 50% annual unmatched investor turnover (which can include net subscriptions), and underlying assets with a 0.20% average bid-ask spread. The sponsor can also accept cash or partial baskets, and if the sponsor is not careful, some of the costs can slip into the ETF. Generally, we’ve found that for the biggest ETF sponsors, they are very careful. Also, we should mention that many of Vanguard’s U.S. listed ETFs are a hybrid structure, which has features of both a mutual fund and an ETF. A detailed treatment of this hybrid structure is beyond the scope of this short note. Disclosure: I am/we are long SPY, HYG, MUB, EEM, IWM. I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it. I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article. Additional disclosure: This article should be construed as tax, or investment advice.