The elongated time factor stands out as the most repeated response from analyst veterans of the REIT sector when asked what has been the most unexpected development in the REIT market they've witnessed over the years.

"Everyone asks me if I thought the size of the REIT industry would be the size it is today. My answer to that is, ‘why did it take so long? It should have been this size years ago,'" says Michael Oliver, senior state investment officer for the Alaska State Pension Investment Board, but who became a REIT analyst in 1967 while working for Morgan Guarantee Trust Company of New York (J.P. Morgan Chase & Co.). Eventually Oliver moved to Alex Brown in 1972, where he recruited Robert Frank. Oliver plans to leave his current post on the Alaska State Pension Investment Board at the end of September.

"How did I get the assignment to become a REIT analyst? I have no idea," he laughs. "It was such a tiny field back then, mostly mortgage REITs."

His first job was to figure out how Morgan Guarantee's trust department should get into real estate. At the time the company couldn't go out and do real estate deals so "we went into publicly traded real estate securities," he says. That also included non-REITs like Kaufman & Broad, Tishman Realty and Forest City Enterprises (NYSE: FCE.A).

Having preceded even Robert Frank into the REIT analyst business, Oliver was lucky to be on hand for the first REIT boom, which preceded the first REIT bust a few years later.

"The stock market was terrible, and every time that happens investors look around for a way to make money and they found a couple of mortgage REITs (Continental Mortgage Investors and First Mortgage Investors) that had done extraordinarily well in the 1960s," Oliver says.

Between 1968 until the mid-1970s, there was a land rush of mortgage REIT initial public offerings. Then came the bust. In 1972, there were 46 REITs with a market capitalization of $1.8 billion. By the end of 1974 capitalization was down to $712.4 million.