Our REITs report includes an interview with David Wigginton of Macquarie Capital (USA), Inc. he gave us his take on the sector:

“REITs sometimes get unfairly grouped with the overall commercial real estate industry. While they are commercial real estate owners and operators, unlike a lot of the smaller, private operators, they are much better capitalized, they have greater access to capital and typically own the better properties in the markets in which they oper­ate. I’m speaking from a retail perspective only here. I think you can say there are signs of life, but they are faint. When looking at prop­erty fundamentals, vacancy rates are increasing and rental rate growth is declining. In addition, you’re facing macro headwinds in the form of high unemployment rates, declining consumer spend­ing, negative consumer sentiment and stagnating wages in general. The federal stimulus package helped prop things up a little bit, but it’s still hard to get a clear read on what the run rate will be going forward.”

Mr. Wigginston breaks his coverage into two areas mall REITs and  strip center REITs and has some top picks for each section but you will have to read that on our TWITTER

This entry was posted on Friday, July 31st, 2009 at 8:12 am and is filed under Financial Services Stocks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.