Hirrs Business Blog

Jerry LeBlanc was an Investment advisor for nine years and sold his company, Sentinel Investments, to Blake Carpenter so that he could pursue starting a REIT.

A Real Estate Investment Trust or REIT is a tax designation for a corporation investing in real estate that reduces or eliminates corporate income taxes. In return, REITs are required to distribute 90% of their income, which may be taxable, into the hands of the investors. The REIT structure was designed to provide a similar structure for investment in real estate as mutual funds provide for investment in stocks.

Like other corporations, REITs can be publicly or privately held. Public REITs may be listed on public stock exchanges like shares of common stock in other firms.

REITs can be classified as equity, mortgage or hybrid.

The key statistics to look at in a REIT are its net asset value (NAV), adjusted funds from operations (AFFO) and cash available for distribution (CAD). REITs face challenges from both a slowing economy and the global financial crisis, depressing share values by 40 to 70 percent in some cases.

Jerry LeBlanc

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 4th, 2010 at 4:54 pm and is filed under Business Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.