I realise that 80% of the admin and nonsense I have to deal with stems from real estate.
In last week I had to deal with:
Have any of you just got fed up and sold everything?
No. I enjoy it most of the time. I like to investigate different options, finding best offers, beeing „forced“ to gain deep knowledge in different topics etc.
Yes, had a flat elsewhere in Europe and while I did appreciate the extremely low interest rate on my mortgage (even vs. Swiss standards!) as well as the city it was located in, it was just a big hassle. Selling it meant a lot of worries, to do’s, bills disappearing and the cash it freed up went into higher ROI investments.
I’ve concluded that the house I live in his real estate enough for me. Also targeting to sell off some RE funds I have (too many drama related to interest rates, German governmen policies, etc.). No more.
That’s what most people do once they reach a certain level of wealth. They either let a company run everything (although real estate agencies can be a nightmare), let family members run it and give them a job, or keep as little real estate as possible and invest the rest in stocks for comparable returns with more flexibility.
I did appoint an agent for one property, but I’m not sure it helped too much. The problem is I have single units/houses. A friend of mine has a 60 unit building and the scale/economics make more sense at that level.
Yeah. I was toying with the idea of selling and then investing into stocks, but then I’d be 100% stocks, which also sounds a bit risky.
I did spent quite some time and money in the last years renovating, so hopefully I have little work for the near term (so far it’s the case, fingers crossed). I am not fed up, I even need to remind myself not to buy more… maybe I understand RE better than stocks, so I am more engaged as a result.
This is why i prefer Direct RE funds. They provide decent post tax yield and since they have large scale, they are more efficient in management.
Any suggestions?
On topic, will never have more than one roof to my name.
I mainly use the following four direct RE funds to maintain some sort of regional diversity and also management diversity. But there are many more
Remember there is no wealth tax or income tax for these funds. So ictax yield is mostly tax free.
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Some other people simply use the full index like SRECHA but that includes a lot of indirect funds too
I’ve listed one apartment (Europe located) for sale this summer. I don’t have time for the admin work and repairs, tenant management etc. ROI is also not worth it. The problem is after I sell.. What to do with the cash? I would not want to invest at market highs (I know, I know 
)..
Cheers, I don’t know this world at all. How do you use them, I mean what role do they play in your portfolio?
My portfolio is multi asset. So I use them for Real estate allocation.
If you are having apartments in „Stockwerkeigentum“ I think it already takes some headache away if you own the majority of the apartments/the votes.
IMHO having owned a double digit number of rental units- yes, it creates a lot of headaches at times.
I sold most of it, not necessarily due to those headaches.
Moved the cash into stocks, just to see them drop 50% first. Thankfully, recovered it all.
The point is- RE management headaches look a lot more preferential when your stock portfolio headaches reach 50% 
Listed RE IMHO is very different from real world real estate. Physical real estate can be very beneficial through leverage, tax advantages, real world use etc. Listed RE has a very different volatility, leverage structure, liquidity, mark-to-market schedules etc. and for listed funds, the changes in premia/discounts are almost a trade by themselves. The underlying RE often moves very little, but the premia/discounts move a lot. Totally different trade.
The one thing that is a lot more easily done with unlisted real estate is acting on material, non-trivially-findable public information.
Cities/municipalities are very good at publishing detailed plans on infrastructure improvements, and their budgets (they have to 
). They are also very bad at making these easily accessible. Yes AI helps with search and digestion/summarizing, but there’s a lot of material information that you wouldn’t come across unless you knew precisely what you’d be looking for.
So far I’ve not found a comparable way to do this with other sectors (think tech, or food pharma finance).
So while there’s a material amount of headaches with directly held real estate (let’s face it, shit breaks or gets broken all the time, you’re fighting decay and entropy) there are interesting features that you can get compensated for.