7 Office REITs Near 52-Week Lows

If you're aiming to "buy low and sell high," then it makes infinite sense to start your search with bargain-priced stocks. Regularly reviewing a list of stocks trading near their 52-week lows can be a great first step.

Here, I'll try to do the initial legwork for you. To prevent us from being inundated with scores of disparate companies, I'll conduct my search by industry. This will allow us to make some initial comparisons among semi-related companies.

Today, let's look at office real estate investment trust stocks. Below, are the largest seven office REITs that are within 20% of their 52-week lows and above $200 million in market cap.

Company	Recent Price	52-Week Low	52-Week High	Price-to-Book	Dividend Yield
Mack-Cali Realty (NYSE: CLI  )	$33.14	$29.42	$35.96	1.5	5.4%
Corporate Office Properties Trust (NYSE: OFC  )	$29.63	$29.28	$39.85	1.7	5.5%
CommonWealth REIT (NYSE: CWH  )	$23.52	$22.89	$29.10	0.7	8.5%
Brandywine Realty Trust (NYSE: BDN  )	$11.61	$9.82	$13.08	0.9	5.1%
Government Properties Income Trust (NYSE: GOV  )	$26.06	$24.27	$28.53	1.4	6.4%
Franklin Street Properties (AMEX: FSP  )	$12.80	$11.00	$15.63	1.1	5.8%
Hudson Pacific Properties (NYSE: HPP  )	$15.45	$13.38	$17.04	0.9	3.2%

Sources: Capital IQ, a division of Standard & Poor's, and Yahoo! Finance.

REIT investors are usually interested in dividends. Since REITs are required to pay at least 90% of their taxable income as dividends, investors are frequently obliged. You can see that five of these seven office REITs have dividends above 5%. CommonWealth recently did a 1-for-4 reverse split, but it may be interesting because it sports the highest yield and the lowest price-to-book ratio. Brandywine is also interesting because it's the only one with a price-to-book ratio below one and a dividend yield above 5%.

Each of these companies has been trading in a fairly narrow band, but that doesn't mean there's not opportunity. If you are interested in continuing your research on a stock mentioned here, add it to My Watchlist to stay abreast of all of our Foolish analysis.