Money
Issue No. 52 - April/May 2010
Property, infrastructure stand up
by Pam Lipert
In the last edition of in-business, Prescott Securities outlined what it considered to be the 10 Best Investment Ideas for 2010. Throughout the year, we plan to expand on some of these ideas in an effort to raise awareness of the wide range of investment options available to in-business readers.
Property and infrastructure markets are offering some very attractive opportunities at the moment.
Usually these have been classed as defensive assets, but they offer good income streams. A fully tenanted building with a long-term lease will continue to provide rental income.
This type of investment will continue to pay good dividends to investors. Investors, however, should watch out for highly geared assets following on from the GFC.
The market has understandably punished those assets that are highly geared or have not arranged their financing suitably.
Most of the infrastructure and property companies have restructured their debt through capital raisings.
This makes them look rather cheap, however, they are still out of favour with the market. Now may be a good time to start placing some money in these asset classes, keeping in mind that markets will continue to be volatile and will react unfavourably even to small pieces of negative news.
Westfield
Westfield is an interesting case in hand at the moment, being an REIT (real estate investment trust) that owns shopping centres in Australia, New Zealand, the UK and USA. Its mar...
