One of the main reasons that institutional and private investors alike are pursuing real estate investments right now is that they are chasing yields. Real estate returns are attractive compared to alternatives in stocks, bonds or even other commodities such as gold. One benchmark for measuring investments performance for a large pool of individual commercial real estate properties in the private market is the National Council of Real Estate Investment Fiduciaries (NCREIF) Property Index, which measures the performance of an immense pool of individual commercial real estate properties on an unleveraged basis.

The NCREIF Index reported an annual return of 12.7% in 2015, which bested other key indexes such as the S&P 500, Dow 30 and Russell 2000. On a longer-term view, the NCREIF Index has reported an average annual return of 8.8% over the past 15 years, which is 200 basis points above the average performance of the S&P 500 for the same period.

If you would like to further explore real estate as an investment option, you can reach me at MSBRealty.com or markbounds@msbrealty.com.