Men More Likely to Invest in REITs Than Women

A survey from the real estate investing website Millionacres says women were more likely than men to list rental property as their main real estate investing method.

The survey was distributed to more than 650 newsletter subscribers earlier this month. 

Millionacres outlined the results of the survey in a post last week. Women and men were similar in how likely they were to list a vacation home or a second home as their primary real estate investing method. 

But men were much more likely to list real estate investment trusts as their primary investing method, while women were more likely to favor rental property, according to the survey. 

Compared to women, more men reported commercial real estate as their main real estate investment vehicle, according to the survey.

The survey also asked about gender diversity and whether they think their gender affects a person’s real estate returns and opportunities. According to the poll, the women were much more likely to say real estate investing is “severely” lacking in diversity.

The survey also found that more than a third of the women who responded reported feeling their gender impacts their real estate investing opportunities and about 23 percent reported it affects their real estate returns.

That observation appears to back up a recent report from professors at Yale University. 

When it comes to housing, single men earn 1.5 percentage points higher returns every year compared to single women, according to the study. To reach their conclusion, the professors used housing transaction data since 1991 from across the U.S.

“Women earn lower returns on housing partly because they tend to buy in locations when aggregate house prices are high and sell when they are low. However, a large gender gap persists even after accounting for market timing,” according to the report. “Among men and women who buy and sell in the same zip code and year-month, women still earn 0.8 percentage points lower unlevered annualized returns.”