Top 5 REITs in Africa

One of our most successful REIT investments this year has been Helios Towers (HTWS / HTWSF), an African cell tower REIT that nearly doubled in value in the past 10 months:

As a result of this strong performance, it has now become our single largest foreign REIT investment, representing 11% of our International Portfolio.

This success motivated me to learn more about other potential African REIT investment opportunities, and even led to travel to several African countries over the past few months.

Here are the criteria that I used to screen down this universe:

• Internal management structure

• Clear focus on growth on a per-share basis

• Diversified across many African countries

• No “diworsification” outside of Africa

• Specialized in one property sector or strategy

• Leases in hard currencies or with inflation-protection

• Multinational tenants