Fool contributor Brian Withers has an investment portfolio heavily weighted toward technology growth stocks. For this reason, it's rare that a real estate company would interest him. However, when recently learning more about Digital Realty Trust (DLR 0.49%), he realized it's a real estate stock that can't be ignored.
In this video clip from Motley Fool Live, recorded on July 13, Withers explains what he finds so compelling about an investment in Digital Realty today.
Brian Withers: I want to get back to streaming. One of the interest thing shows, one of my favorite shows that I did last week was The Rank where Matt Frankel, Anand Chokkavelu, and myself went through all of my 19 stocks. Well this Friday, we're going to do The Rank again and we're going to go through Matt Frankel's stocks. His stocks are completely different than mine. We only own one stock that we share is Square. But one of the stocks that I was looking at, could benefit from more bandwidth coming over the internet. That's when streaming comes out. It's just going to be to up the network here, and one of Matt's Frankel's top 20 stocks is Digital Realty, ticker DLR. And yes, I'm talking about a [real estate investment trust] REIT, a REIT with dividends.
Now, let me talk to you about what Digital Realty is. It owns, acquires, develops, and operates data centers. The company is focused on providing data center co-location, interconnection for domestic and international customers across a wide range of industry verticals -- cloud IT, communications social networking, financial services, manufacturing, energy, healthcare, consumer products, probably somewhere in there streaming services. This is a really cool picks-and-shovels play for the cloud. It owns and operates 290 data centers, for more than 4,000 companies in 47 metropolitan areas in every region except China. Super impressive customer list. Facebook, IBM, Oracle, Verizon, AT&T, a Fortune 50 software company, and a number of unnamed [Software-as-a-Service] SaaS companies. I get excited talking about these guys. It's an engineering matched up to Cloud, matched up to real estate. It's a really neat company. They are the sixth largest publicly traded REIT with 14 years of consecutively increasing dividends. Which is a nice bonus.
