What if you bought Prologis (warehouses) in 2000?
Real estate · REIT. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play5.5× · S&P 500 same money: $4,626
$1,000 in Prologis (warehouses) at the start of 2000 would be worth about $5,500 today — 5.5 times your money, and ahead of the S&P 500 over the same stretch.
The story
Prologis owns warehouses: big, boring boxes near ports, highways and cities where goods wait between factory and doorstep. In the early 2000s it was a steady real estate trust that also built speculative warehouses with borrowed money, a habit that looked clever right up until 2008. When credit froze, the development pipeline turned into a pile of unfinished projects and maturing debt, and the shares fell by roughly four-fifths. The company sold assets, raised equity at painful prices and merged with rival AMB Property in 2011.
Then the boring box became fashionable. E-commerce needs several times more warehouse space than store-based retail, because every returned sweater and next-day parcel has to sit somewhere. Amazon became a major tenant, rents climbed through the 2010s, and the pandemic online-shopping surge pushed vacancy to record lows. By the 2020s Prologis was one of the largest real estate companies in the world, a quiet winner of a trend that most investors associated with flashier names.
The lesson: The best way to own a megatrend is sometimes the landlord rather than the star, but only if the balance sheet survives the downturn before the trend arrives.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2000 | $20.00 | $5,500 | $4,626 | 5.5× |
| 2003 | $25.00 | $4,400 | $7,727 | 4.4× |
| 2005 | $42.00 | $2,619 | $5,763 | 2.6× |
| 2007 | $60.00 | $1,833 | $4,789 | 1.8× |
| 2008 | $62.00 | $1,774 | $4,626 | 1.8× |
| 2010 | $14.00 | $7,857 | $6,071 | 7.9× |
| 2012 | $29.00 | $3,793 | $5,312 | 3.8× |
| 2015 | $43.00 | $2,558 | $3,301 | 2.6× |
| 2018 | $65.00 | $1,692 | $2,519 | 1.7× |
| 2020 | $90.00 | $1,222 | $2,092 | 1.2× |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
Best entry point in our set: 2010, turning $1,000 into $7,857. The S&P 500 from that same year: $6,071.
Now try it without hindsight. The wheel decides the year and the asset class, you pick the position, ten seconds a pick, and we simulate to today. Prologis (warehouses) is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
Play Sixty-40More in Real estate
- What if you bought Average US house?
- What if you bought Amsterdam apartment?
- What if you bought Detroit house?
- What if you bought Tokyo apartment?
- What if you bought London house?
- What if you bought Miami condo?