Ladies first: REITs with female board members do better than their all-male counterparts

Wells Fargo report found companies get higher average prices and total returns

If you want to have a successful real estate investment trust, it would help to include women on the board.

A new study from Wells Fargo analyzing 165 equity REITs from 2006 to 2017 found that companies with an above average number of female board members had higher total returns and average price over the decade, according to the Wall Street Journal.

An average REIT had 15.5 percent female board members, and the share prices of REITs with a higher percentage of women than this outperformed the REITs with no female members by about 2 percent.

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REITs in the prison, advertising and energy-infrastructure fields had the highest percentages of female board members, according to the report, while healthcare, single-family residential and industrial REITs had the lowest percentages, and 34 of the REITs had no female members at all.

The Real Deal recently took an in-depth look at real estate’s gender divide in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal and national #MeToo movement. [WSJ] – Eddie Small