MORT vs NURE

MORTBVanEck Mortgage REIT Income ETF

NUREBNuveen Short-Term REIT

In short

MORT Landlords collect rent. Mortgage REITs collect interest. MORT tracks an index of roughly two dozen of them, a pure play on the lending side of real estate that has been running since 2011.

NURE Most REIT funds pick buildings. NURE picks lease length: an index of apartment, hotel, self-storage and manufactured-home REITs, the corners of real estate where rents reset fastest.

Stated mandate

MORT The fund seeks to track, before fees and expenses, the price and yield performance of the MVIS US Mortgage REITs Index, representing U.S. mortgage REITs.

NURE The Fund seeks to track, before fees and expenses, the performance of the Dow Jones U.S. Select Short-Term REIT Index.

Why people hold it

• MORT Costs 0.43% a year, below the 0.51% median for real estate sector ETFs and well under niche peers like CLIM at 0.90%.
• Live since 2011, a long run for such a narrow slice of the market, and it still does one job: track the MVIS US Mortgage REITs Index.
• Rules-based and actively traded, so the holdings come from published index criteria rather than a manager's calls, and shares change hands readily.
• Distributions land on a quarterly schedule, in step with a segment whose businesses are built around interest income rather than rent checks.

• NURE The lease-duration slice is the whole idea. Nuveen's own description: short leases may make these REITs less price-sensitive to rate moves than long-lease landlords.nuveen.com
• 0.36%, below the real estate category median and the cheapest of the top-scoring peers here (MORT 0.43%, REM 0.48%, SRET 0.58%, CLIM 0.90%). No waiver propping that number up.
• No single REIT can exceed 5% of the index at a rebalance, so the roughly 29 float-weighted holdings don't get run by one landlord.sec.gov

Worth knowing

• MORT Concentrated by design at roughly two dozen names, so one company's stumble carries real weight in the fund.
• Mortgage REITs borrow to hold mortgage assets, which makes this corner more sensitive to rate and credit swings than a property-owning REIT fund.
• One country, one industry. Cheaper real estate options exist (NURE at 0.35%), but they buy the landlords, not the lenders.

• NURE Four property types, full stop. No offices, malls, towers, data centers or industrial, so it skips chunks of the market a broad REIT fund owns.nuveen.com
• A small fund that trades thinly. Spreads and market impact can matter more to your cost than the expense ratio does.
• Short leases cut both ways: hotel rooms reprice nightly, so rents can reset down as fast as they reset up.sec.gov

Full MORT profile⁠

Full NURE profile⁠