State Street Unveils International and Global Real Estate Fund  

May 13, 2008

SAN DIEGO (ETFguide.com) - State Street Global Advisors (SSgA), the investment management arm of State Street Corporation (NYSE: STT) unveiled  two new SPDR exchange-traded funds (ETFs) yesterday on the American Stock Exchange (Amex).

The new funds are the SPDR DJ Wilshire Global Real Estate ETF (Ticker: RWO) and the SPDR S&P International Mid Cap ETF (Ticker: MDD).

RWO includes more than 240 commercial and residential real estate companies domiciled in 23 countries across the globe, including the U.S. The fund’s annual expense ratio is one half percent.

State Street also manages the SPDR Dow Jones Wilshire International Real Estate ETF (Ticker: RWX), which is a pure-play international real estate fund. Unlike RWO, the fund excludes real estate companies based in the U.S.

So far this year, international real estate has underperformed domestic real estate stocks. RWX has declined by 2.4 percent since the beginning of the year compared to a 8.7 percent gain for U.S. based real estate companies (Ticker: RWR).

MDD focuses on companies with market sizes between $2 and $5 billion. The underlying index contains more than 850 companies in 25 developed countries outside the U.S. The fund’s annual expense ratio is 0.45 percent.

“Offering a level of international diversification that has not been readily accessible in the past, the new SPDR S&P International Mid Cap ETF was developed to meet increasing investor demand for more high quality international portfolio management tools,” said James Ross, senior managing director at State Street. He adds, “With the addition of the SPDR DJ Wilshire Global Real Estate ETF, our family of SPDRs ETFs now provides investors with distinct exposure to the domestic, international, and global real estate markets.”

State Street Global Advisors is one of the largest ETF providers in the United States and globally. At the end of March, assets in the firm’s ETF lineup totaled more than $148.2 billion – up from $103.3 billion year over year. 

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