The Wall Street Journal is reporting boom in foreign real-estate funds:
It is getting easier to invest in Australian shopping malls and Norwegian office towers.
Financial-services firms are rolling out scores of foreign real-estate funds. In the past few weeks alone, Charles Schwab Corp. launched a global real-estate fund that is betting in part on strong rental growth in London office properties. WisdomTree Investments Inc. listed a new exchange-traded fund that tracks an index heavily weighted to Australia, Hong Kong and Japan.
Just this year, real-estate investment trusts were introduced in the U.K.
Several new closed-end funds, aimed at more-conservative investors, also have been launched, including Alpine Global Premier Properties Fund that began trading in April after raising $2 billion.
Investors have poured about $6 billion into foreign real-estate funds this year, substantially more than was invested in domestic property funds, according to Morningstar Inc. Those big inflows follow strong past returns for foreign real-estate-investment trusts, the main holdings of these funds, which rose nearly 31% a year in the three years ended April 30, according to Fidelity Investments. By comparison, U.S. REITs rose 22% in that period, while the S&P 500 was up 8.5%.