Since they were first opened in the United States, real estate investment trusts became a very important part of American Industry, becoming a global phenomenon as they provide a large number of real estate investment opportunities to investors and even offer tax advantages for companies, buying or selling real estate property.

The current material cannot actually be referred to as a global analysis of real estate investment trusts as it won't be detailed enough, but will help you get a fairly clear picture of what this term really means and illustrates. There are actually many professionally written books on the subject, whose authors have studied the global economy and the market for years and are therefore able to clearly and undoubtedly explain the sophisticated and extremely complex mechanism of real estate investment trusts (also called REITs) as a whole.

There are many companies in this field, concentrating on income producing rental properties' investment, especially in large formats, thus providing unit holders with larger cash distributions.

There are, however three types of REITs (Real Estate Investment Trusts) - hybrid, mortgage, equity.

Hybrid REITs actually combine the investment functions and strategies of equity REITs and mortgage ones by investning not only in properties but also in mortgages.

Mortgage REITs loan money to owners of real estates in order to enable them to invest in mortgages /for example purchase mortgage backed securities/ . Mortgage Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs as mentioned previously) are responsible for the ownership and investmen of property mortgages as a whole.

So what is the exact role of equity REITs - they mainly own properties they have previously invested money in (in this way becoming responsible for the value or equity of the real estate assets, owned by the considered company) . The property rents, which are determined by equity REITs specialists, provide Real Estate Investment Trusts' revenues. However, there are also other sources of revenues which are less important.