Vanguard Real Estate ETF

What this fund is

Vanguard Real Estate ETF is an exchange-traded fund (ETF) from Vanguard, traded under the ticker VNQ (ISIN US9229085538). In a single purchase you get a diversified basket of holdings rather than a stake in just one business. In plain terms it is about owning listed property companies (REITs), which earn rent from buildings and usually pass much of it on to investors, spread across its target market. It passively tracks the Real Estate Spliced Index index — mirroring that market instead of paying a manager to pick winners, which keeps costs low, and its largest holdings include Vanguard Real Estate II Index Fund Institutional Plus Shares, Welltower Inc. and Prologis Inc..

With about 146 holdings (the ten largest ≈ 54.5%), your money is diversified rather than concentrated in a handful of names. By geography it is weighted towards ~99.4% United States and ~0.1% United Kingdom. By industry it concentrates most in ~84.2% Real Estate and ~0.1% Corporate. It is typically held as a diversifier — a slice that behaves differently from mainstream shares — rather than as a portfolio's main engine.

Its ongoing charge (TER) is 0.13% a year — about €13 a year on a €10,000 holding, taken automatically from the fund. It holds the underlying investments directly (physical replication); it is domiciled in the United States and trades in USD. Its price has swung about 14.1% over the past year, which describes how much its price tends to move rather than whether it is good. Like any investment, it can lose value as well as gain, and what it did before does not predict what it will do next. (Fund data sourced from Vanguard.)