When you are looking at passive income stocks, you have to balance yield against other factors or you risk getting caught up in a dividend cut. In fact, lower-yielding investments with strong dividend growth histories are often the better option if you tend to think in decades when you buy a stock. That's why dividend investors will like real estate investment trust (REIT) industry bellwethers like AvalonBay (NYSE: AVB) and Prologis (NYSE: PLD) despite their more moderate yields.

Over the past couple of decades the REIT sector has seen a big change. It has matured from an obscure Wall Street niche to become a mainstream option. There are still a lot of small companies in the space, but increasingly there are a small number of clear industry bellwethers. These are the companies that have proven they can operate successfully in both good and bad environments.

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Source Fool.com