7 REITs to Buy Now for Dividend Growth

Stocks and bonds have largely rewarded market denizens since the Great Recession's market nadir in 2009, but investors great and small may be pondering how much leg the current rally has left. Real estate investment trusts (REITs) might be the asset class investors need to thread the needle in this tenuous bull market.

This summer, prominent hedge-fund king Ray Dalio wrote that market paradigms are shifting, and the next decade's prospects are for slow growth and chronically soft interest rates. He believes the world's central banks, including America's Federal Reserve, "doing more of this printing and buying of assets will produce more negative real and nominal returns that will lead investors to increasingly prefer alternative forms of money (e.g., gold) or other storeholds of wealth."

While Dalio suggests investors might add gold to their portfolios, they might want to start researching REITs to buy, too. That's because real estate also has been a classic hedge against inflation, and it tends to benefit from low interest rates.

Another upside: REITs can throw off substantial income; gold does not. By law, real estate investment trusts must distribute 90% of taxable income to shareholders through dividends. But the ultimate hedge is finding REITs that reliably (and, when possible, aggressively) increase their payouts, as that will keep the dividend from actually losing value due to inflation over time.

Here are seven REITs to buy for investors who are interested in