Seven REIT stocks pass a strict financial screen, with dividends as high as 6.27%

Real estate investment trusts are generally considered income investments because they have tax benefits that require them to distribute the majority of their profits to shareholders through dividends. Any investor would be concerned about a potential dividend cut, which could cause the company’s share price to plummet. Here’s a screener of REITs that appear to be well-positioned to maintain or grow their dividends.

In the REIT industry, funds from operations (FFO) are often used to measure a company’s cash available for dividend distributions. This is a non-GAAP measure that adds depreciation and amortization back to earnings while subtracting proceeds from property sales.

Adjusted funds from operations (AFFO) takes this concept a step further by subtracting the cost of maintaining the REIT’s rental properties.

So if we divide the REIT’s annual AFFO by its share price, we get the AFFO yield, which we can compare to the REIT’s dividend yield to see if there’s room for more than the dividend yield. This can give investors comfort that the REIT can at least maintain its dividend and hopefully grow its payouts over time.

There are two broad categories of REITs. Equity REITs develop or own properties for rent or sale. Mortgage REITs invest in mortgage-backed securities or issue mortgage loans. Some REITs operate in both camps.

A pure-play mortgage REIT would not have an estimated AFFO figure because it does not spend money to maintain investment properties. This screen focuses on Equity REITs.

To delve deeper into the industry, we started with the 174 REITs in the Russell 3000 Index RUA, which itself aims to capture 98% of the market share of U.S. exchange-listed stocks.

Of the REITs surveyed by FactSet, 108 are covered by at least five brokerage and research firm analysts and for which consensus 2026 AFFO forecasts are available.

Of these 108 companies, 86 have an AFFO headroom of at least 1.00%, based on current dividend yields and consensus 2026 AFFO estimates.

There are two further tests, according to the advice of Lewis Altfest, CEO of Altfest Personal Wealth Management in New York, who warned MarketWatch in a previous interview that if a stock has a very high dividend yield, “there’s going to be problems.” High yields mean lower share prices, and investors anticipate dividend cuts as they shy away from them.

Altfest recommends avoiding REITs with declining earnings. Of the remaining REITs, 11 will experience annual revenue declines in 2025. This reduces our list of REITs to 75.

Since AFFO includes depreciation and amortization in earnings, Altfest asked whether these adjustments account for more than half of the REIT’s dividends. As a result, we sharply pared our list, removing companies with depreciation and amortization accounting for more than half of their dividend payments in 2025. That leaves us with 7 REITs.

Here’s the list, sorted by dividend yield:

Whenever you are considering investing in a stock, you should conduct your own research to form your own opinion on the company’s likelihood of remaining competitive over the next decade. One way to start the process is to click on a stock to get more information, including charts, financial data and analyst ratings.

read: Tomi Kilgore’s informative guide is available for free on the MarketWatch quotes page

The two REITs we screened failed to make the list because depreciation and amortization accounted for 51% of their distributed dividends in 2025. as follows:

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