Real Estate

Real estate coverage spans residential and commercial property markets, the mortgage financing that supports them, and real estate investment trusts (REITs) that let investors gain property exposure without directly owning buildings. Housing activity is unusually sensitive to interest rates, since most home purchases are financed — a rise in mortgage rates directly raises monthly payments and can cool both home prices and transaction volume even without any change in the underlying value of the properties themselves. REITs, by contrast, trade like stocks and are valued partly on property fundamentals and partly on the same interest-rate sensitivity that affects dividend-paying equities generally.