MORT vs REM

MORTBVanEck Mortgage REIT Income ETF

REMBiShares Mortgage Real Estate ETF

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.

REM Most real estate ETFs buy the landlords. REM buys the lenders: a few dozen US mortgage REITs that hold residential and commercial mortgage debt, packaged in one index-tracking ticker since 2007.

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.

REM The fund seeks to track an index of U.S. REITs that hold residential and commercial mortgages.

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.

• REM A genuinely different engine from the sector's giants: it tracks REITs that hold mortgages, not the equity-REIT landlords inside VNQ, SCHH or XLRE.
• Trading since 2007, so it has run through the housing crash and every rate cycle since on the same rules-based FTSE Nareit mortgage index.
• One ticker instead of hand-picking individual mortgage lenders, from the iShares shelf, moderately traded, with distributions paid quarterly.

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.

• REM At 0.48% a year it costs more than the typical real estate ETF (median 0.37%) and multiples of broad REIT funds like SCHH at 0.07% or VNQ at 0.13%.
• Concentrated by design: a few dozen names in one niche, so the largest mortgage lenders carry a big share of the fund.
• Not a stand-in for broad property exposure. It holds the mortgage side of real estate, so it moves with credit and rate conditions more than with rents.

Full MORT profile⁠

Full REM profile⁠