Has anyone else looked at the global x etf VPN? Its less than a year old, and It’s not a pure REIT etf, but the holdings make a lot of sense to me looking at the coming years (% is of etf holdings):
CCI: Crown Castle Int’l (cell tower) 13.88%
AMT: American Tower Corp (cell tower) 13.62%
EQIX: Equinix Inc. (data centers) 12.62%
DLR: Digital Realty Trust (data centers) 9.37%
SBAC: SBA Communications (cell tower) 4.92%
COR: Coresite Realty (data center) 4.52%
CONE: CyrusOne (data center) 4.14%
QTS: QTS Realty Trust (data centers) 3.84%
788: China Tower Corp (cell tower) 3.70%
NXT AU: NextDC (data centers) 3.15%
10/25 holdings listed above
Other notable holdings include smaller data center and tower REITs, but also companies outside the realm of real estate set to benefit from industry growth like server hardware and microchip manufacturers. The current split is 70% real estate 20% IT 10% Comm. Services with 80% of the holdings domestic (US)
What do you think? The market share captured within those REITs is pretty much all of the investable options for data centers and cell towers, and the expense ratio isn’t horrible at .50 but I’m also pretty green to real estate investing so any feedback is appreciated!
link to the fund page on global x with full holdings listed
I did a ton of research into data centers so I really like DLR. Good that they invest almost 10% into them, but I think it would be better to just buy DLR.
Like you said, you’re green to RE so it’s probably a good idea to not pick individual REITs. However, if you want to spend some time on it, you can easily filter out a few of them. A bit of history, QTS is being acquired and will no longer be part of that list. CONE had a few issues in the past. SBAC has recently become a REIT. CCI is local only AMT global (19 countries). EQIX is not the owner of all properties, it owns around 60% (it’s grown every year, it was 21.4% in 2015). Each of them has a history and if you’re not interested in any of that it’s probably best to go down the ETF route. Plus, ETF will give you access (irrelevant by % though) to foreign holdings.
If you want to go deeper, use this screener tool already filtered for Data Centers and Infra:
Data Center Sector:
Infra Sector:
Hope that helps.
Aren’t data center REITs really overpriced right now? I have a little CONE and COR is all – CONE seems relatively cheap. But I am somewhat new to REITs so I could be wrong.
They’re good, but I think DLR is even better since it is a direct investment in data centers.
Yes, DLR. They gave us an expensive quote, but they were the best.
I appreciate the response and context, thank you