FTSE Nareit Health Care Sector Returns: The Series, Delivered

Three stacked layers, and knowing which one a question needs is most of the work.

Layer one, the live sector panel. An Overview view sourced to FTSE and dated 7/31/2026 counts 18 health care REITs in the FTSE Nareit US Real Estate Indexes, a 2.37% dividend yield, a 24.59% year-to-date total return, a 3.64% July monthly return, and a 28.45% total return for full-year 2025. This is the layer that answers "where does the sector stand right now."

Layer two, the history. Monthly index values and returns run from December 1971 - 665 monthly observations across 42 series columns. Annual property-sector returns carry paired Health Care total return and price return columns from 1994, and monthly component series split each sector-month into income and price halves across 21 property sectors and subsectors. This is the layer that answers "how has the sector behaved across rate cycles."

Layer three, the roster. Roughly 22 public and non-traded health care REITs - Welltower, Ventas, Diversified Healthcare Trust, Alexandria Real Estate Equities, Sabra, Strawberry Fields REIT among them - each with ticker, headquarters, sector label, one-year total return and last-close price.

Datadory delivers all three layers as one maintained, analysis-ready feed. See what the health care sector panel contains, then request a sample shaped exactly like the rows below.

Rows arrive in three shapes, all landing on the same typed spine:

```mono # Layer 1 -- sector aggregates, FTSE Nareit health care panel, dated 7/31/2026 reits_classified 18 dividend_yield 2.37% total_return_ytd +24.59% total_return_july +3.64% total_return_fy2025 +28.45%

# Layer 2 -- annual property-sector row, paired return columns from 1994 period 2025 property_sector Health Care total_return 28.45% price_return <paired column> income_contribution total minus price, by construction

Read layer two and the sector's character falls out as subtraction: the gap between the total-return and price-return columns is the income contribution, which is why health care reads as a yield story in flat years and a growth story in repricing ones. Read layer three and the average dissolves - between August 2025 and August 2026 one skilled-nursing-weighted trust returned +128.21% while a life-science landlord returned −27.48%, a 155-point spread inside a single property sector that the aggregate number flattens away.

Four clocks run at once, and mixing them up is the most common error in a sector study.

Index values start in December 1971, so the monthly series spans nearly 55 years - 665 observations through July 2026. But its six headline blocks stop at All REITs, Composite, Real Estate 50, All Equity REITs, Equity REITs and Mortgage REITs: no property detail. The complete monthly history record documents that ceiling precisely.

Investment-sector annuals run 1972-2025 in the annual index values and returns collection.

Property-sector annuals begin in 1994 - which means the health care-specific annual series offers 31 rows against roughly 55 for the industry-wide series. Both express values as percentages with index levels rebased to 100 at inception, so splicing them needs the basis stated, not assumed.

Constituent archives reach back to 1991 through 36 annual membership editions packaged with the REIT indexes and market performance collection, letting you track when names entered and left the health care classification.

State which clock any chart is drawing from. A "50-year health care REIT history" claim is almost always the industry-wide series wearing the wrong label.

Parsing the FTSE Nareit Classification Structure settles the question outright. Health Care appears as its own investment-sector index beside Self Storage, Residential, Retail, Lodging/Resorts, Office, Industrial, Data Centers, Single Family Homes and Mortgage REITs (FNMR, itself split into Home Financing and Commercial Financing) - beneath the headline indices FNAR (All REITs), FNCO (Composite), FNR5 (Real Estate 50), FNER (All Equity REITs) and FNRE (Equity REITs). Roughly 40 classified indices sit in the workbook, all documented under the FTSE Nareit US Real Estate Index Series.

A second taxonomy runs parallel to it. Nareit's REIT sectors overview defines 14 property sectors including health care, treating mortgage REITs as a financing category rather than a property one - so a screen built on one taxonomy will not reconcile cleanly against a screen built on the other until the mapping is explicit.

The practical consequence: health care is both an investment sector (with return history from 1994 at property grain) and a property sector (with a defined constituent set), and the two definitions overlap but do not coincide. Name which one a model consumes.

Two roster quirks matter for anyone joining tickers to returns. Non-traded vehicles such as CNL Healthcare Properties and Terravet REIT appear with N/A tickers, so any join keyed on symbols silently drops them. And at least one Canadian-listed constituent rides along (Vital Infrastructure Property Trust, TSX: VITL.UN) - the classification is not strictly NYSE/Nasdaq-only.

For the cross-check, the Nareit REIT and public real estate company directory carries 166 company rows with ticker, headquarters, property type, one-year total return and last-close price, filterable across the 14 property types including Health Care - reconciliation at portfolio grain rather than sector grain. Per-ticker quote histories for the listed names come through the Yahoo Finance health care REIT quote pages, keeping the equity-native layer beside the index layer.

API, files, or your warehouse. Daily, weekly, or hourly.

The point of the delivery layer is that the three layers of this page travel together under one schema, keyed on period and sector. Each new month appends beside the prior 664 instead of overwriting them, so a health care return series accumulates history rather than resetting at every release - and the aggregate panels, the annual splits and the roster stay join-ready on the keys you would guess: period, sector, ticker.

Spreadsheet-era publishers remain the norm in real estate - roughly 410 of the 1,744 datasets in the Datadory catalog ship XLSX against only 86 shipping Parquet - so format conversion is handled upstream of your warehouse, not inside it. Request a sample first: name the vintages and the constituents, and the extract arrives shaped identically to the standing feed, so anything prototyped on it survives into production unchanged.

Ranked by how directly the series answers their day job:

1. Investors and quants trade the dispersion, not the average: a 155-point one-year spread between the best and worst performer inside a single property sector is the signal, and ticker-keyed rows make the screen reproducible month after month. See investors & quants.
2. Corporate development teams at senior-housing, hospital and skilled-nursing operators read which landlords are compounding (Welltower +45.10%) versus which are repricing (Alexandria −27.48%) before walking into a capital conversation with either.
3. Portfolio and risk analysts decompose the sector into income and price contributions from 1994 onward, then stress the income half against T-Tracker payout aggregates - the piece that breaks first when refinancing walls hit.
4. Data scientists and ML engineers get a clean panel for regime work: 665 monthly observations of headline series, 31 annual property-grain rows, and a constituent roster whose entry and exit dates are archived back to 1991 - survivorship made testable rather than assumed.
5. Journalists, academics and analysts cite the association's canonical series when health care real estate becomes a story; the method is worked through in citation-grade research.

The health-care-reits data guide is the pillar post: the full pooled record for the industry scored and grouped by workflow.

For the numbers behind this page, the Nareit health care REIT sector profile and performance table carries the live aggregates, the roster and the T-Tracker panels as one feed. The best health-care-reits datasets list turns the shortlist into a request queue, and the health care reits data hub ties the sector together with every adjacent slice.