I own NLY, CIM, DX, IVR, CYS, HCP, VTR, and ORC.
This is about 15% of my stache.
If you're gonna buy that many REIT's then why didn't you just invest in VNQ the index fund????? To pay $160 more in transaction costs (buy and sell)?
The answer is the dividend.
VNQ has a dividend of 3.72%.
The dividends for what I have are below, at todays price. Some were higher at the prices I paid.
CYS=11.9%, DX=12.77%, CIM=12%, IVR=10.9%, ORC=15.6%, NLY= 10.4%,
HCP=5% and VTR=4.6%.
I'm not making any recommendations, these have been good to me. But things do happen.
I'm down $7k in HCP in the last month after a sale of a bunch of their properties, I had a large gain so, I'm still slightly ahead on share price, and it's starting to come back.
ORC has been great, I bought it paying 18% dividend, I now have 27% share price gain. On the other hand, I'm down 24% in IVR.
I do find these are volatile, and can go up or down 2% or 3% in a day.
I think I'm learning that you should take the cap gains when you have them, because they do seem to cycle, now if only I could put that into practice. :-)
I'm finding it hard to sell a stock that pays a large dividend.
Also note, I'm not relying on these for income, we are still working and have plenty
to put into more investments, if they went down I will be OK. YMMV.
Another option is the prefered stock of the REITS, ~ 7% to 8% returns, a little safer,
but more thinly traded, so if you need to sell, you could get caught on a bad day.
Re: the cost, I pay $14 round trip commission, on a $35k transaction, that's only
.04% right in there with Vanguard.