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@gcr Check the SAC thread http://shareforum.co.za/shares/sac/ to find out about REITS and to see how they outperformed equities by a huge margin over the past 10 years and even this year.
Looks like you missed out on some great wealth creation for fear of paying tax. If you take something like NEPI or RES the outperformance is even higher.
NEPI = 15% withholding tax, so not added to taxable income. RES = locally registered with holdings in NEPI, Rockcastle, Fortress. As RES is not foreign listed income from distributions are added to income (so what ?) but there is no withholding tax.
Take some time to learn about the various REITS, which ones to avoid etc.

Backing up what I said (again).
Tax not a worry for me with  the right REITS.

I don't want to hijack this thread

Please do. As things are now I only write on here once a month to give my updates. This means after a month I have to go look for this thread. Helps me if you hijack this thread cause it means it will stay at the top where it is easy for me to find. Also, like I have said many times I am still a newbie. I am still learning and forming my strategy as I gain experience. Helps me a lot when someone more experienced like you come on here and ask questions that haven't even crossed my mind yet.

But now to the defense of REITs. Like Moonraker said, you just need to make sure you invest in the right REIT. SAC would seem to not be one of those so you were wise to get out of it. But a lot of others have performed really well.

As I also said in a different thread, I have always been interested in being invested in real estate. REITs gave me the opportunity to do that without having to go out and take out a mortgage. I avoid debt like the plague and I wouldn't touch a mortgage with a ten foot pole. With a REIT I can just buy into it as I get the funds. It is like buying a house one room at a time. REITs can also provide you with a much better income then a rental property as well as simplicity. With a REIT I don't have to bother with property taxes/levies, homeowners insurance, maintenance costs, an empty apartment cause I can't find someone to rent it out to, or even worse, a pain in the ass tenant.

Using your example and figures and R10,000 initially invested I get SAC +_ R5988 and WHL+-R6849 - 15% R5821. So as income stream you would have done better with SAC. Of course, you capital would have grown substantially with WHL around 500% and only around 25% with SAC.

So you would have been better off with WHL - but WHL has been a very good performer in equities - I am guessing in the top 20%( maybe 10%), and you comparing it a very boring REIT - definitely in the bottom half. A fairer comparison would be HYP -but am not going to go through all the sens to hunt dividends!

Of course, WHL has always been a decent divided payer and deserves a spot in a dividend paying portfolio anyway.

You can consider me in.

May I perhaps derail this already derailed thread, hope you don't mind Fawkes, but since we have a fair amount of foreigners here, and I myself plan to be a non-resident at some point in future, what happens to tax on a REIT when you're a foreigner?

Another month gone by and here is what happened. Not much. Except for a lot.

Not much happened in the sense that I did not do a lot of buying. In the beginning of the month I added a little bit to my TEX position and that was that. Not gonna do a lot buying in the next few months because sending money home means getting destroyed by bank charges on either side of the border. It costs me minimum R400(depending on how much money I send) every time I transfer money back home. So you can do the math. If I were to send money back home every month I will pay almost R5000 in fees over the course of a year. Thus I will only be sending money back home every three months which in turn would mean I can only buy shares every three months. The next planned transfer will only occur in February and thus I will not have much to report on except for portfolio performance until then.

A lot happened on the performance front. A lot of falling. Both TEX and RPL took nosedives over the course of the last month. From a dividend perspective I know I shouldn't be bothered about it falling as I do not intend to ever sell these shares. Didn't buy them to sell. Bought them for the income. And in fact I should be delighted that they have come down. It means I can continue buying them at a price that provides me with a good dividend yield. Or at least I WOULD HAVE been able to if I had the cash. Will talk again in February when that happens and see where they are then. But with that said it still stings like a maternal defiler seeing the overall worth of ones portfolio go down by that much. But what you gonna do? It is what it is. If there is one thing I learned, anyway, is that I should block out the white noise of short term volatility and keep my eye on the prize that older people refer to as the "long term." Whatever that may be.

So anyway, here is the current portfolio makeup(make-up?):

RPL 55.37%

TEX 40.78%

FDP 2.64%

Cash 1.21%

By how much did things fall this month? By this much:

Performance for Nov(divs incl): -4.28% 

Performance since inception(divs incl): -5.68%