Real Estate Sectors

Definitions and classifications across the property sectors

This page defines and classifies the major real estate sectors, explaining what each property type is, how it generates income, and where it fits within the listed REIT market. Definitions cover residential sectors such as apartments, single family rentals, and manufactured housing alongside commercial sectors like office, industrial, and retail.

Technology and specialty property types are covered as well, including data centers, cell towers, self storage, healthcare, hotels, and net lease. Each section gives investors the vocabulary and context needed to read sector research critically and to compare companies within the right peer group.

For ongoing analysis of these sectors, the REIT sectors research hub publishes dedicated reports with fundamentals and outlooks, and the REIT database lets investors screen the individual companies within each classification and compare them on a common set of metrics.

Classification matters because real estate is not one market: an apartment landlord, a data center operator, and a timberland owner respond to entirely different economic forces. The definitions on this page give investors a shared vocabulary for those differences, covering what each property type owns, how its leases are structured, where its revenue comes from, and which economic variables matter most to its performance across a full market cycle. Each definition is written to stand alone as a quick reference.