Follow-up
REITs account for up to 30% of my portfolio, so as you can tell, I greatly appreciate them. I invest primarily in equity REITs - those that invest in physical property. My current portfolio includes EPR, O, OHI, UBA, and WPC. The income provided by these are very stable and they all have fairly conservative balance sheets with reasonable amounts of debt to avoid large losses when property values are falling. The yields currently range from about 4.75 to 6.5%. I tend not to buy mortgage REITs unless I'm considering the preferred shares. If you are investing primarily for current yield and don't need price or dividend appreciation you can consider buying the preferred shares of some mortgage REITs. There are a lot of details to trading preferred stock but in general you need to understand that they are similar to bonds in that they pay a coupon rate which must be paid to shareholders before any dividends can be paid to common stock. Since REITs are mandated by law to pay out 90% of their earnings to shareholders that means your dividends are well protected as long as the fundamentals of the company are stable. There are other details of preferred stock to be aware of, including the fact that they are callable by the issuer. Still, if you are interested you can research AGNCB, AGNCP, ANHpC, NLYpA. The yields are closer to 8%.