Hunter Hopcroft - In Defense of REITS (and Marty Whitman!)

Hunter Hopcroft, Managing Director, Portfolio Solutions at Armada ETF Advisors, stops by The Business Brew to primarily discuss REITs. Hunter is quite a thinker and the conversation veers into other parts of markets such as AI, how the economy is changing and more. You can find Hunter's writing here: https://www.lewisenterprises.blog/

Bill pinged Hunter after someone (on the Twitter machine, so you know it's factual) made a comment that REITs are inherently bad investment vehicles. We hope this episode is informative and realistic about the investment vehicles. You may learn:

• The vast difference between market cap weighted public REIT allocations and private sector real estate allocations
• Why public market REITs have less leverage than their private peers
• A theory about why Blackstone bought $AIRC and what the true cap rate was
• Whether dividends are better than academia believes

As always, we hope you enjoy the show. Thank you for your time!

PS. Reach out if you are interested in sponsoring the show. You can contact Bill at bill@thebusinessbrew.com.

Detailed Show Notes:

3:00 - Hunter transitioned his career around an interest in REITs

7:00 - Private and public markets own basically the same assets

10:00 - How private markets create a lock in for RIAs that may help the RIAs' multiple when they sell the business

11:00 - Negative features of REITs

17:00 - The downside scenarios for multifamily housing

20:30 - What can dividend growth do for a portfolio?

27:30 - How Hunter thinks about the different REIT asset classes.

30:00 - The difference between private real estate allocations and public market market cap weighted allocations

41:00 - The different valuation methodologies to analyze $AIRC

48:00 - Why are private market cap rates still healthy relative to public markets?

52:00 - Hunter's view on markets and where they are right now

56:00 - Some riffing on AI

1:04:00 - In defense of Marty Whitman!