While analysts spent much of 2016 evaluating the impact of higher interest rates on U.S. real estate markets, Latin American public real estate had one of its best years on record — surging more than 24 percent — and finished the year as the top-performing strategy in the Morningstar Global Real Estate category.

Measured by the Solactive Latin America Real Estate Index (LARE Index), a relatively new entrant to the real estate space, Latin American real estate is again leading the pack in 2017 and outperformed broad regional equity indexes for the year-to-date period through February 2017.

Global real estate investors may want to pay extra attention to this segment as a potential complement to U.S. real estate exposure because of the following factors: (1) Latin American REITs are experiencing very attractive revenue growth (with projected growth of more than 20 percent in 2017), including healthy expansion of funds from operations and dividends, all of which contra