No. of Recommendations: 19
I think there are some folks around who know a lot more about UK investing than I do, so I'd be interested to hear their thoughts.
I've been looking at a couple of the the very-much-unloved large UK REITS, specifically British Land (BLND:LSE) and Land Securities (LAND:LSE).
The basic investment case is simple: sort of an income play, or perpetual bond substitute. In short, barring a blow-up, their lofty dividends might reasonably be expected to rise roughly with inflation over time, so the yields on offer are "real" yields.
They are registered REITS, so there is 20% withholding tax on their very high dividends for those not based in the UK.
If you are in a tax treaty country, you will generally get that as a credit on your tax return, so it's not a problem, you get their current yields of 7.11% and 6.19%.
For those in non-treaty countries, and even after the 20% withholding tax they're paying 5.0% and 5.6% right now.
Reaching for yield (and in fact yield investing in general) is generally an extremely bad habit, but sometimes things do get oversold when the pessimism pendulum goes a bit too far. I don't see any really good case for value generation sufficient to cause the price to offer much return over time. But they are down a lot, so maybe "up a little" is a bit more likely than "down a lot"? They are both trading down about 30-38% from their highs about three years ago.
Certainly for those who think that office life is gone for good, a concentration in London offices is not good, but I am not strongly in that camp. Their revenues are of course in sterling, but all the Brexit press seems to have caused observers to ignore the fact that the pound has been very slowly rising on a trade weighted basis for eight years now, and is now higher than its fairly steady range 2009-2013 well before the Brexit vote.
I haven't done much reading yet on these specific firms, this is just a "might want to look here" thought. Does anyone have any insights?
Jim
