Watching your kids may be a higher priority for you than watching the stock market, but that doesn't mean a busy parent has to miss out on the proven power of long-term investing in the form of buying and holding great stocks.
There are plenty of opportunities out there for buying shares of companies that don't require the close monitoring that goes into successfully navigating the very wide world of individual stocks. Better yet, some of them provide a nice flow of passive income, or money you generate from an investment while not actively managing it yourself. In this case, that income comes from dividends.
Three solid dividend investments to consider here are Agree Realty (O 0.95%), Stag Industrial (STAG -2.22%), and Mid-American Apartment Communities (MAA 0.82%).
Rolling forward with REITs
All three of these are real estate investment trusts (REITs), which means they own pools of income-producing properties and are mandated by tax law to pay at least 90% of their taxable income to shareholders in the form of dividends.
Dividends combine with movement in share price to produce a key metric called total return. The chart below shows how each of these REITs has performed in that regard over the past 15 years, since the onset of the Great Recession. Here we're using the Dow Jones Industrial Average as a benchmark and expressing the gains in terms of how much a $1,000 investment would have grown over that time assuming the reinvestment of dividends.
MAA Total Return Level data by YCharts
These three REITs share strong performance records but they're in very different businesses, adding diversity to that part of your investment portfolio.
1. Agree Realty
Agree Realty develops, owns, and leases properties to retailers, and has built a collection of 1,908 properties across 48 states.
A Who's Who of reliable tenants led by the likes of Walmart, Dollar General, and Tractor Supply provide a growing flow of recession-resistant income to Agree through net leases, a model in which the occupants pay such costs as insurance, maintenance, and real estate taxes. Over the years, this retail REIT has grown its reputation as a passive income machine, boosting its payouts by an average of about 6% a year for the past 10 years. At recent prices, Agree's stock is yielding roughly 4.3%.
2. Stag Industrial
Then there's Stag Industrial, a member of the industrial REIT sector. These trusts own warehouses, distribution centers, and manufacturing facilities. The logistics part of this business has been particularly hot since the pandemic supercharged e-commerce. Demand also remains strong for factory space in response to the onshoring of manufacturing that became imperative because of COVID-19-induced supply chain issues.
Stag Industrial currently owns 563 distribution centers, warehouses, and factories in 41 states, and its tenants include a wide variety of e-commerce shippers and manufacturers, including behemoths like Amazon. Stag stock is paying about a 4.2% dividend yield.
3. Mid-American Apartment Communities
Mid-American Apartment Communities, or MAA, is a residential REIT and it's one of the largest owners of multifamily properties in the country, with a portfolio of about 102,000 units. Those 300 apartment communities are largely in strong Sunbelt markets such as Nashville, Austin, Houston, Dallas, Orlando, Tampa, Charlotte, and Atlanta.
MAA has paid 117 straight quarterly cash dividends and has raised the payout for the past 13 years. The stock yields roughly 3.7% at recent prices.
Building wealth the Foolish way
Dividend investing is a proven way to build wealth over time, especially when the money is entrusted to well-run companies that have the means to continue their strong performance through good times and bad. In fact, that's a cornerstone of the Motley Fool's investing philosophy.
The three REITs above fit that bill, plus they provide a shot of income -- monthly, in the case of Agree and Stag Industrial -- and don't require a lot of monitoring, leaving you the time to pay attention to more pressing matters while you just let the nest egg grow.