I have probably only broke even or made a little over 6 years of investing in reits on a total basis, meaning including the dividends. This is a bad outcome. We don't have many 6 years of experimenting. 
Upon reflection, i realize that investing in reits is really about trusting the people managing the property portfolio are good at their jobs and most importantly, having as little of the principal-agent problem as possible. 
(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); In my opinion, reits suffer a lot issues related to the principal- agent problem as the underlying properties are rather illiquid and the range of valuation of a property can be very wide and rather subjective. Unit trust ( and for the matter all investments) do have such agent issues too but since the underlying are securities traded on exchanges, there is more transparency in a sense. The more opaque or illiquid the...