You’re a Real Estate Tycoon. You Just Didn’t Know It.

By Tim Travis, T&T Capital Management. Prices and yields as of the September 23, 2026 close.

A lot of our clients owned rental property at some point. Some still do. Almost all of them tell me the same two things: they loved the check, and they did not love the rest of it – the 2 a.m. call about the water heater, the month it sat empty, the property tax bill, the tenant who stopped paying.

When a client sells a rental, the check stops. One of the ways we replace it is with real estate investment trusts – REITs. Companies that own and lease out real property, and by law pay out most of their income as dividends.

Here’s what that means if you own the REITs in this letter. You’re a landlord to Caesars Palace, the MGM Grand and the Venetian on the Las Vegas Strip. You collect rent from 3,774 convenience stores, car washes and restaurants. You own a piece of tens of thousands of apartments across the Sun Belt, plus warehouses and factories leased for years at a time. That’s a real estate empire – and you’ve never had to fix a single toilet.

Think of it as a slice of the portfolio

Here is the way I’d suggest thinking about it. Your real estate holdings are your rental property. The only question is how big a slice of the portfolio you want it to be.

Here is what that slice pays, per month, at a 6% yield:

• On a $1 million portfolio: 10% in real estate pays about $500 a month. 15% pays $750. 20% pays $1,000.
• On a $2 million portfolio: 10% pays about $1,000 a month. 15% pays $1,500. 20% pays $2,000.
• On a $3 million portfolio: 10% pays about $1,500 a month. 15% pays $2,250. 20% pays $3,000.

On a $2 million portfolio, a 15% slice is $300,000 – about what a rental house costs in a lot of markets. But instead of one house with one tenant, it’s a piece of thousands of properties across the country: apartments, stores, warehouses, casinos, cell towers. No repairs. No vacancies to cover. No property tax bill. And if you need the money, you can sell a slice of it in a day, not a slice of a house.

What some of our REITs pay today

• VICI Properties (casinos and entertainment on long leases): 7.8%, paid quarterly
• NNN REIT (single-tenant retail): 6.0%, quarterly
• W. P. Carey (industrial and retail): 5.7%, quarterly
• Mid-America Apartment Communities (Sun Belt apartments): 5.2%, quarterly
• Camden Property Trust (apartments): 4.3%, quarterly

The long leases have rent increases built in, some of them tied to inflation, and apartment rents reset every year. That’s the part of owning a rental you’d want to keep.

Why the yields are this high right now

Higher interest rates have pushed real estate prices down. Every one of those five is trading 14% to 28% below its high of the last 12 months. VICI is the clearest example: $33.01 a year ago, $23.70 today. It trades at about 9.6 times the cash flow it expects to earn this year, against an average of about 14.5 times since 2020 – while the dividend was just raised again.

When prices fall and the rent keeps coming in, the yield goes up. That’s what you’re being paid today to own real estate. We went through seven of these companies in detail in our September 14 newsletter if you want the stock-by-stock case.

What to keep in mind

REIT prices move every day – more than a house seems to, only because nobody quotes your house every day. Higher rates can keep pressure on them for a while. Dividends are not guaranteed and can be cut; we’ve seen that happen, and it’s why we own a spread of property types rather than one. And most REIT dividends are taxed as ordinary income, which is one reason we often hold them in IRAs.

What doesn’t change is the job they do. For a retiree living on a portfolio, a steady monthly check that doesn’t depend on selling shares is worth a lot – especially when the stock market as a whole pays about 1%.

If you’d like to know how big your real estate slice is and what it pays you each month, just reply and we’ll send it over.

Tim