Thomson Reuters’ “Top Stock Picker” in Equity Real Estate Investment Trusts Reveals his 2019 Favorites

May 13, 2019

Jim Lykins is a Vice President and Research Analyst at D.A. Davidson & Co. and joined the company in November 2015 to expand coverage of the real estate sector, focusing on retail.  Mr. Lykins was named Thomson Reuters’ “Top Stock Picker” in Equity Real Estate Investment Trusts in 2017.

In his 1,979 word interview, exclusively for the Wall Street Transcript, he picks the best REITs in the sector, here’s just one:

“Another name we like right now is UMH (NYSE:UMH). Again, there is an affordable housing crisis right now. And this is a value-add play. These guys will go out, buy properties that are as low as 50% to 60% occupied.

They’ve been doing this for decades; they know what the secret sauce is. They go in, they make improvements, they will typically take about three years to take a property from that 50%, 60% level to 90%-plus occupancy, and then wash, rinse, repeat. That’s the strategy in a nutshell.”

A familiar them for Mr. Lykins is the lack of housing in the US:

“Manufactured housing, one of the nice things about that sector right now is we have — it sounds bad, but one of the nice things about that space is, we have an affordable housing crisis right now, so there is plenty of demand for their product.”

And there is always a good case to be made for opportunistic turn around story stocks:

“Another name we like right now is Braemar Hotels & Resorts. They have a different strategy than the rest of the group; they’re focusing on the luxury segment. A couple of catalysts for them: Their Ritz-Carlton in the Virgin Islands is undergoing a significant renovation due to hurricane damage, so that one should be fully back up and running later this year.

They are up-branding a couple of Courtyard hotels to Autograph Collection hotels, so there are a couple more catalysts that should help accelerate FFO growth later this year.

They’re also up against easy comps this year. Last year, it was kind of the perfect storm; they had headwinds from several nonrecurring events like hurricanes, wildfires, red tide, low snowfall, so they’re up against much easier comps this year…”

Get the full detail on many other stocks in the complete 1,979 word interview with Jim Lykins, Thomson Reuters’ “Top Stock Picker” in Equity Real Estate Investment Trusts in 2017.