We recently spoke about inflows in one of the largest U.S. Equity REIT based ETFs, IYR (iShares Real Estate, Expense Ratio 0.48%), and today (Friday) the fund seems to be technically breaking out, trading at its highest levels since early November of last year.
In the trailing one month period, IYR has reeled in about $417 million net, but has seen a portion of that flow out earlier this week, likely as a result of the wholesale selling that went on across global equities. Speaking of global, we would like to change the dial to Global REITs today as opposed to U.S. based ones, and the largest fund in the sub-category is currently RWX (SPDR DJ International Real Estate, Expense Ratio 0.59%).
The fund has about $4.1 billion in assets under management while averaging about 458,000 shares traded daily, and has its greatest exposure to Japan (21.34% of the portfolio), followed by notable allocations to the United Kingdom (12.87%) and Australia (12.62%), Hong Kong (9.9%), France (9.26%), and so on.
Continents including Europe, Asia, Australia, Africa, and both North and South America are represented within the index holdings in RWX, and funds like this will likely appeal to those managers that seek REIT exposure with an international flavor.
There are a number of funds that compete with RWX, namely VNQI (Vanguard Global ex-U.S. Real Estate, Expense Ratio 0.32%), which holds a bit north of $1 billion in AUM currently. VNQI tracks an S&P index as opposed to one from Dow Jones as in RWX’s case and has a similar portfolio allocation in terms of countries and continents where it invests in REITs.
SPDRs also publicly lists RWO (SPDR DJ Global Real Estate, Expense Ratio 0.50%) which tracks a different underlying index than that of RWX and thus the slightly different fund name as well. RWO currently holds about $987 million in assets in its own right, so the fund has also been met with some success in terms of appealing to ETF investors.