5 ways to invest in real estate if you’re not rich

Real estate remains one of the most popular assets for U.S. investors. But most have a hard time buying because of the upfront dollars involved.

ETFs can be the next best thing for small-time investors looking for real-estate exposure:

Sure, those investors can always buy Real Estate Investment Trusts, or REITs, that allow anyone with a brokerage account and as little as a hundred bucks the ability to play different real-estate segments. But these stocks are a special class of company with unique accounting quirks, among them a mandate to deliver 90% of taxable income back to shareholders as well as the capital-intensive nature of purchasing and maintaining properties and the general notion that real estate as an asset that doesn’t depreciate like a piece of machinery. That means traditional Wall Street metrics such as earnings aren’t as helpful in assessing the health of a stock, and investors must learn new terminology and analysis of things like adjusted funds from operation to truly pick stocks in this sector...

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RSK: Some of these ETF`s yield between 5% to 8%. Not too bad if you do not want the risk of owning a property directly but the yields are much less with an ETF.