Whats the future hold for REITS?
REIT Laws were passed in 1960. Federal Realty was founded in 1962. And so the public has had the ability to buy real estate in the form of stock since 1960. But the reality is, it was such a small industry for so very long that I really view our industry, the public real estate industry, as new. In a real sense, it started only in the early 90’s. And the reason it started then was simple: the last real estate depression of 1989, 1990, and 1991 meant that a lot of individuals who owned shopping centers and office complexes were in trouble, and they used the public market to bail them out. If you look at the number of REITs that were formed in ’92, ’93, ’94, and ’95, it’s enormous. And it was the first time there was enough supply in the investment world for investors to start figuring out what a REIT is. When I came to Federal in 1998, I myself had no idea what a REIT was. What’s happened, particularly over the past five years, is people started to understand what public real estate is.
