cowcockie,#1 extreme volatility is where its at at the moment,...

cowcockie,

#1 extreme volatility is where its at at the moment, so you have to put some cement in your coffee mate. Its good you are doing a bit of the financial advising yourself, a lot of advisers don't do that good a job.

#2 which other ones are good? Well, can of worms.

I guess it depends on what you think is good. Some people chase a high headline dividend rate (eg; people saying CWT were at 30% p.a. divs), others are looking for REITs with other attributes - you could look at Lend Lease (LLC), Mirvac, Goodman Fielder, etcetera, because they are big and have a lot of financial muscle. Getting in to these ones is a bet that their market cap and size gives you protection from bankruptcy and loss of your investment on the theory that they can muscle their way through capital raisings to protect themselves.

You can also look at trust Loan to Value Ratios (LVR) because there's a fear that trusts will get into trouble if their asset values are written off and drop below the LVR covenant of their debt. This hasn't happened yet in any meaningful way, banks have been fairly accommodating, but it is still a danger especially because banks are coming under greater and greater pressure and can't cut these REITs so much slack nowadays. So, ones with low LVRs can include IOF, MOF, ABP, IEF and others. However, some of these also have lower headroom in their debt covenants than others. Eg, ABP has 43% leverage but a covenant of only 50%. Some other trusts have covenants of 60%.

Another way of looking at it is to get into trusts with high earnings yield - ie; interest cover. These trusts can meet their current debt even if their asset values breach the covenants, and are likely to receive a pass from the banks to keep trading - as long as their income level is steady. It may not remain steady, as office rents, etc, are coming down. Trusts like this can include IEF, IIF, etc. (i personally think this is a reasonable way to take bets on REITs but havent done the maths)

So, many ways to skin a cat, but I think that you can't escape the volatility, which will go in quarterly cycles around reporting of earning disasters in a whole-of-market context, and you can't escape the fact that you ARE taking a bet - and you should neccessarily avoid sinking all your eggs in one basket.

So, go back to your financial adviser and ask him to give you three options; one REIT which meets each of those criteria above. If he can do that, you know he's looking at the company information himself, and not just picking up a glossy brochure and accepting the REIT propaganda face value.

my 2c of "advice" on getting "advice". OF course, DYOR as well!