By guest contributor Jeremy Jiang, analyst, Atchison Consultants
Australian real estate investment trusts (AREITs), as represented by the S&P/ASX 200 REIT index, returned 1.7% in December, outperforming the S&P/ASX 200, which returned -0.1% over the month.
Over the 12 months to December 2018, AREITs posted a total return of 2.9%, which was 5.7% higher than the S&P/ASX 200. December featured announcements from a number of AREITs regarding portfolio evaluations and also saw merger and acquisition (M&A) activities pick up.
Sector Performance
Table 1 below shows the performance of the AREIT sector for various periods ending 31 December 2018.
The medium-to-long-term performance of AREITs continues to be relatively strong. Over 5 years ended 31 December 2018, the sector produced a total return of 12.3% per annum. From a shorter-term perspective, total returns for periods of 3 months and 6 months were weak at -1.9% and -0.1% respectively.