Apartment Reit Dividend Yield History Data: Dataset Structure and Field Coverage

A dividend yield is annual cash distributed per share divided by share price, so a history of it needs two series that move together: declared distributions and prices, both stamped over time. For the multifamily cohort - EQR, AVB, MAA, UDR, ESS and CPT - those series live in three places with different depth. Sector-level yields reach back furthest: the Nareit REIT Market Data Reports Hub publishes a monthly workbook whose Dividend Yield columns run from December 1971 through June 2026. Per-ticker snapshots and price files come from Yahoo Finance, whose EQR price series starts at a first trade date of 1993. Audited distribution declarations sit in SEC EDGAR, commercial delivery terms and real time.

Datadory catalogs this slice as 14 pooled datasets - 3 primary and 11 related - and every primary is free, against a catalog where 82.4% of the 1,744 datasets Datadory catalogs are free. Only one of the three primaries is an official API: SEC EDGAR.

Below the aggregates sits a 28-row directory of residential REITs - AMH, CPT, EQR, INVH, UDR and peers - each row carrying ticker, HQ, a 1 Year Total Return percentage and stock price stamped "As of market close 08/21/2026". That roster is the bridge from a sector yield to a per-name screen, and the page is parseable server-rendered HTML, though plain HTTP clients hit an anti-bot client challenge.

A per-ticker yield series is a join job across four records, and the walkthrough produces one dated yield row per cohort member:

1. Fix the universe. Start from the 28-name residential roster on Nareit's sector page, widen it with the cross-sector Nareit directory (166 companies, filterable to the Residential property type) or Nasdaq's screener (284 real-estate rows), and snapshot the membership date - cohorts drift as companies list, merge or go non-traded.

1. Map tickers to filers. SEC EDGAR's company_tickers.json maps 10,387 registered tickers to CIKs, covering the whole cohort: EQR/931182, AVB/915912, MAA/912595, UDR/74208, ESS/920522 and CPT/906345. Re-base your list before joining anything: Yahoo surfaced the corporate action "EQR is trading under new symbol VMRK effective Aug. 18, 2026" after the AvalonBay merger created Vivmark Residential.

1. Pull declared distributions from EDGAR. The submissions API returned 1,006 recent filings for CIK 0000906107, eleven of them 10-Ks back to 2015, and companyfacts exposes 593 us-gaap concepts in one JSON call of about 4.8 MB - dividend-related facts included - all commercial delivery terms. Hold to the fair-access policy: a declared User-Agent with contact information and no more than 10 requests per second.

1. Or buy sanctioned plumbing. Alpha Vantage's keyed TIME_SERIES_DAILY_ADJUSTED returns 20-plus years of adjusted daily bars in one call, and Tiingo's end-of-day rows carry divCash and splitFactor next to adjClose under CRSP adjustment methodology; Tiingo's free Starter tier allows 50 requests per hour and 500 symbols per month. Divide each day's dividend by that day's close and the history is done.

The five records sort by job rather than by quality score alone. EDGAR carries the highest Datadory rating in the slice at 10 of 10; Yahoo's 6 reflects ToS friction rather than thin fields - it still ships roughly 16 summary fields plus about 20 statistics fields per ticker, including Forward Dividend & Yield (2.81, 4.26% on EQR) and an Ex-Dividend Date of Jun 29, 2026. The table below is the working map.