"After falling below $20 per share in March 2009, the iShares Real Estate ETF (IYR), an exchange traded fund that holds 75 REITs and real estate companies, finished 2009 trading at $45.92 per share--a gain of more than 130% from its March lows," he says.

However, IYR is unchanged in the first 10 trading sessions of 2010."The lack of movement reflects the uncertainty investors still face,"Ruffy says.

The REIT market is not necessarily headed for a linear path of higher growth, but it has likely put the worst behind it, NAREIT economist Bob Case tells GlobeSt.com. "We are seeing signs of institutional investors moving back into REITs and even a tremendous amount of interest from investors that have been burned by the illiquidity in the private markets," he says.

REIT real estate cycles tend to last 18-years; with the downturn starting two years ago, that leaves the industry with 16-years of bullish growth, he concludes. REITs' resilience are illustrated in NAREIT's latest data, which finds that investors who put money into US REITs at the beginning of 2000 earned higher returns by the end of the decade than they realized in other equity market benchmarks.

Specifically, in the 10-year period ended Dec. 31, 2009, the FTSE NAREIT Equity REIT Index delivered an average annual total return of 10.6%, and the FTSE NAREIT All REITs Index provided an average annual total return of 10.1%. Over the same period, the average annual total return from the S&P 500 was a -0.95%, and from the NASDAQ Composite, it was a -5.67%.

So an investor who put $10,000 into the FTSE NAREIT Equity REIT Index at the beginning of the decade finished it with $27,454, according to NAREIT's calculations. Investors who chose the S&P 500 to invest $10,000 finished the decade with just $9,090.