Got $500? Buy This Stock and Relax
One of the best-performing asset classes this year has been residential real estate. If you look at the latest numbers out of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, home prices are rising at an 18.5% annual clip. While many investors might want to get involved in owning rentals and reaping that home price appreciation, it is generally capital-intensive to buy a property, get a mortgage, and rent it out. However, there is another way to create that sort of payoff: American Homes 4 Rent (NYSE: AMH).
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American Homes 4 Rent is a single-family rental real estate investment trust (REIT). It buys houses and rents them out. In many ways, this is one of the oldest businesses out there. Historically, single-family rentals were a mom-and-pop business where a landlord would have one or two properties, and would handle the property management issues themselves. Because maintenance like landscaping or minor repairs was such a local issue, single-family rentals weren't done at a national level. Enter Big Data. American Homes 4 Rent added the layer of data analysis that gives the company a leg up in the competitive residential real estate market, analyzing employment trends, home price appreciation trends, and supply and demand to determine the best places to place its bets.
Source Fool.com
