Dividend Dreams

Education Realty Trust, Inc. is a self-administered, self-managed real estate investment trust that owns, develops and manages high-quality student housing communities throughout the United States. Led by a team with over 200 years of shared industry experience, EDR is one of America’s largest owners and operators of collegiate student housing. The Company has ownership and management interests in 65 properties with 38,143 beds in a total of 21 states. Here are the stats:

Yield: 4%+ (after recent cut, so it’s likely safe)
Size: $275 million
Volume: 450,000
Beta: 1.5
Owned: 86% institutional

This Closed-End Fund is one of my favorites. It is one of three funds offered by Alpine. It is basically a basket of stocks containing companies related to real estate owners, developers and investors. It offers both U.S. and Non-U.S. coverage and is not leveraged  more than 5%.

Dividends are monthly and come only from earned income, not return of capital. This is very important and separates this fund from many others. They reduced the dividend a while back, but the yield is still over 5.5%. I think the new dividend is safe and should rise when the economy recovers. Any income not paid out during the year is dispersed at year-end.

Despite recent gains it is still trading at quite a discount to NAV. If you have any belief that the real estate market will recover I think this is a great fund and a good time to  jump in. Alpine management has been buying shares and insider buying can be a good indicator of their faith in the fund.