Top 7 Real Assets to Buy Now in 2026 for Fast Gains?

Understanding Real Assets and Why They Matter

Real assets sit at the intersection of the physical economy and long-term wealth building, because they represent tangible or infrastructure-backed sources of value rather than purely contractual claims. When people talk about owning something “real,” they often mean assets tied to land, buildings, commodities, equipment, or essential networks such as power generation and transportation. Real assets typically have an intrinsic utility: a property provides shelter and rent potential, farmland produces crops, timberlands yield wood, and an energy pipeline transports fuel. That utility can translate into cash flow, inflation sensitivity, and durability across market cycles. Unlike many paper instruments whose value depends primarily on investor sentiment, real assets are anchored to demand for essential goods and services, which can remain resilient even when financial markets become volatile.

At the same time, real assets are not a single category with uniform behavior. A downtown office tower, a toll road concession, and a basket of industrial metals respond to different economic forces, interest-rate environments, and regulatory pressures. Understanding the “why” behind each type helps investors and business owners avoid oversimplified assumptions, such as believing all tangible holdings automatically hedge inflation or that all infrastructure is low risk. Real assets often involve higher transaction costs, more complex governance, and a greater need for specialized expertise than a broad stock index fund. Yet they can also provide diversification, income potential, and exposure to long-lived, mission-critical systems. The core appeal is straightforward: real assets can connect capital to productive, physical activity in the real economy, while offering a return profile that is not perfectly correlated with traditional equities and bonds.

Key Categories of Real Assets: Property, Infrastructure, Commodities, and Natural Resources

Real assets generally fall into a few major buckets, each with distinct drivers. Real estate is the most familiar: residential rentals, multifamily buildings, industrial warehouses, retail centers, and specialized segments like data centers or self-storage. Value comes from location, replacement cost, tenant demand, lease structures, and the ability to improve the asset through renovation or better management. Infrastructure includes assets that provide essential services, such as airports, ports, power grids, renewable generation, water systems, rail networks, and telecommunications towers. These can generate stable cash flows, especially when revenues are regulated, contracted, or tied to long-term usage agreements. Commodities typically refer to raw materials like oil, natural gas, copper, wheat, or gold. They don’t always produce income, but they can respond quickly to supply shocks, geopolitical events, and inflation expectations.

Natural resources overlap with commodities but often emphasize ownership of productive land or reserves: timberland, farmland, mineral rights, and energy reserves. These holdings can blend operational cash flow with commodity-price exposure. For example, timberland can be managed by timing harvests to favorable pricing while trees continue to grow biologically, potentially smoothing returns. Farmland may generate income through leases or crop sales, influenced by yields, input costs, and global food demand. Within real assets, there are also “real-asset-like” segments such as inflation-linked leases, long-term contracted renewable projects, and certain specialized equipment leasing businesses. Grouping these categories together is useful for allocation discussions, but practical decisions should account for liquidity, leverage, operational complexity, and the reliability of projected cash flows. A well-built approach recognizes that different real assets can play different roles: income generation, inflation sensitivity, diversification, or long-duration compounding tied to population and productivity growth.

How Real Assets Can Respond to Inflation and Changes in Purchasing Power

One of the most cited reasons for holding real assets is their potential relationship with inflation. When the general price level rises, the replacement cost of tangible property and infrastructure often increases, and in many cases revenues can adjust upward over time. Real estate may benefit when market rents rise, though the speed and magnitude depend on lease terms, local supply constraints, and tenant affordability. Infrastructure assets sometimes have explicit inflation escalators in contracts or regulated pricing frameworks that incorporate inflation measures. Certain natural resources can also reprice with inflation, especially when they are inputs to broader economic activity. Commodities, in particular, can respond sharply to inflation surprises because spot prices may adjust faster than contractual cash flows.

However, inflation protection is not automatic. Real assets can be hurt by rising interest rates that often accompany inflationary periods, especially when valuations rely on discount rates and when leverage is high. A property with long, fixed leases may not reprice quickly enough to keep pace with rising costs. Infrastructure projects with high operating costs can face margin compression if expenses rise faster than allowed tariff increases. Commodities can be volatile and can fall during economic slowdowns even if inflation remains elevated. The practical takeaway is to focus on the specific mechanisms that link revenue to inflation: lease escalations, pricing power, scarcity value, regulated pass-throughs, or exposure to global supply constraints. When those mechanisms are present and supported by prudent balance sheets, real assets can offer a credible way to maintain purchasing power over long horizons, while still requiring careful underwriting and risk control.

Income Potential: Cash Flow, Yield, and Contract Structures

Many investors look to real assets for income, but the type and reliability of that income can vary widely. Income-oriented real estate might include multifamily, industrial, or single-tenant net lease properties where tenants cover taxes, insurance, and maintenance. The stability of cash flow depends on occupancy, tenant credit quality, lease duration, and local market dynamics. Infrastructure often appeals to income seekers because revenues can be supported by long-term contracts, regulated returns, or essential-use demand. For example, a renewable energy project may have a long-term power purchase agreement that provides predictable revenue, while a utility-like asset may earn a regulated return on invested capital. Farmland and timberland can provide income through leases, harvest schedules, or integrated operations, though yields can be more variable due to weather and commodity pricing.

Contract design is central to how real assets behave. Leases with inflation escalators, percentage rents, or frequent resets can help revenues track price levels, while long fixed leases can provide stability but reduce responsiveness. Infrastructure concessions may include availability payments (paid for making the asset available rather than for usage volume), which can lower demand risk but increase reliance on government or corporate counterparties. Commodity-linked royalties and resource leases can offer asymmetric upside but also expose owners to price cycles. Investors evaluating yield should look beyond headline cap rates or distribution yields and examine maintenance capex needs, refinancing risk, and the true durability of cash flows. A high yield can be a sign of underinvestment, tenant weakness, regulatory uncertainty, or an overleveraged structure. Well-selected real assets can provide attractive, growing income, but the quality of that income depends on legal terms, asset condition, and the economic resilience of the underlying demand.

Diversification Benefits and Correlation to Traditional Markets

Real assets are often used to diversify portfolios dominated by stocks and bonds. The logic is that tangible holdings can respond to different drivers than corporate earnings growth or central bank policy alone. Real estate values may be influenced by local supply constraints, demographic trends, and the cost of construction. Infrastructure can be tied to long-term usage patterns and essential services rather than discretionary spending. Natural resources may respond to global supply-demand imbalances, weather events, and geopolitical disruptions. Commodities can have their own cycle based on inventory levels and production capacity. Because these drivers can differ from those that move broad equity indexes, real assets may reduce overall portfolio volatility when sized appropriately and when the holdings are truly diversified across sectors and geographies.

Correlation, though, is not static. During periods of market stress, many assets can become more correlated as liquidity tightens and investors sell what they can. Publicly traded vehicles that hold real assets—such as listed REITs or infrastructure stocks—can behave more like equities in the short term even if their underlying assets are long-lived and stable. Private holdings may show smoother return patterns partly because appraisals lag public market repricing, which can mask volatility rather than eliminate it. Effective diversification comes from understanding what risks are actually being added: interest-rate sensitivity, credit and refinancing exposure, regulatory risk, commodity price exposure, and operational risk. Real assets can diversify, but only when the portfolio construction avoids concentrating the same macro bet in multiple wrappers, such as owning highly leveraged property, rate-sensitive infrastructure equities, and long-duration growth stocks all at once.

Risks Specific to Real Assets: Liquidity, Leverage, and Operational Complexity

Real assets bring unique risks that are easy to underestimate. Liquidity is a major one: selling a building, a stake in an infrastructure fund, or a parcel of farmland can take months, and transaction costs can be substantial. Appraisal-based valuations may not reflect current market clearing prices, especially when financing conditions change quickly. Another key risk is leverage, which is common in real estate and infrastructure. Debt can amplify returns, but it can also force sales or dilutive recapitalizations when cash flows soften or when refinancing becomes expensive. Even well-located properties can become problematic if the capital structure is too aggressive, because value is sensitive to interest rates and credit spreads.

Operational complexity also matters. Physical assets require maintenance, insurance, regulatory compliance, and competent management. Deferred maintenance can quietly erode value and raise future capital expenditure needs. Infrastructure assets can face political and regulatory shifts that alter allowed returns or operating permissions. Natural resources can be exposed to environmental restrictions, water rights disputes, and climate-related disruptions. Commodities can be subject to storage constraints and roll costs when accessed through futures-based strategies. There is also headline risk: a pipeline incident, a data center outage, or a tenant bankruptcy can quickly change the investment profile. Managing these risks typically requires deeper due diligence than buying a diversified equity fund. Successful owners of real assets treat them as businesses, not just tickers: they model downside scenarios, stress-test financing, plan for capex, and maintain flexibility to adapt to changing demand and regulation.

Valuation of Real Assets: What Drives Pricing and How Professionals Underwrite

Valuing real assets involves combining financial modeling with an understanding of physical realities. For income-producing property, investors often use capitalization rates (cap rates), discounted cash flow models, and comparable sales. The cap rate reflects the relationship between net operating income and price, but it is influenced by interest rates, expected growth, asset quality, and perceived risk. Infrastructure valuation can rely on discounted cash flow with scenario analysis around demand, regulation, and contract renewals. Natural resources may be valued using a mix of land comps, expected yields, and commodity price assumptions. Commodity exposure, when held through physical inventory or futures, is often valued by market pricing but requires attention to storage, insurance, and the term structure of futures markets.

Professional underwriting goes beyond a base-case forecast. It examines the durability of demand, the competitive position of the asset, and the realism of growth assumptions. For real estate, that means analyzing tenant rollover schedules, local construction pipelines, absorption rates, and replacement costs. For infrastructure, it means evaluating counterparty credit, regulatory frameworks, and the sensitivity of revenues to volume changes. For farmland and timberland, it means understanding soil quality, water access, climate patterns, and operational capabilities. Across real assets, the cost of capital is crucial: when financing becomes more expensive, buyers demand higher yields, which can pressure valuations. Conversely, when capital is abundant, pricing can become aggressive, compressing future returns. Sound valuation practices also incorporate capex reserves and lifecycle costs, because physical assets wear down and must be reinvested in to remain productive.

Real Assets in a Portfolio: Allocation Approaches for Different Goals

How real assets fit into a portfolio depends on goals such as income, inflation sensitivity, long-term growth, or liability matching. A retiree focused on stable distributions might prefer income-oriented property with conservative leverage, or infrastructure with contracted cash flows. An investor worried about purchasing power might blend real estate with inflation-linked infrastructure and selective commodity exposure, recognizing that each responds differently to inflation surprises. An endowment-style approach might allocate across private real estate, private infrastructure, and natural resources for long-duration compounding and diversification, while keeping sufficient liquid assets to meet spending needs and rebalancing opportunities.

Implementation details matter as much as the headline allocation. Public market vehicles can provide liquidity and transparency, but they can also introduce equity market volatility. Private funds can offer access to specialized deals and operational improvements, but they come with lockups, fees, and reliance on manager skill. Direct ownership offers control and potential tax advantages, but it requires expertise and operational bandwidth. Geographic and sector diversification can reduce idiosyncratic risk: spreading exposure across multifamily, industrial, and specialty property; balancing energy and transport infrastructure with digital infrastructure; mixing farmland regions; and avoiding overconcentration in a single regulatory regime. The most resilient portfolios treat real assets as a toolkit rather than a single bet, aligning each holding with a specific role and ensuring that liquidity needs, risk tolerance, and time horizon are consistent with the underlying characteristics of the assets.

Access Methods: Direct Ownership, Funds, REITs, Listed Infrastructure, and Commodity Vehicles

There are multiple ways to gain exposure to real assets, each with trade-offs. Direct ownership of real estate, farmland, or operating infrastructure can provide control, the ability to use leverage strategically, and opportunities for value-add improvements. It can also create concentration risk and demands hands-on management, from tenant relations to maintenance planning. Private funds and syndications can pool capital to acquire larger assets and hire specialized operators, but they typically involve multi-year lockups, layered fees, and limited transparency. Manager selection becomes critical because outcomes depend on acquisition discipline, operational execution, and risk management.

Public vehicles offer accessibility. REITs provide exposure to diversified property portfolios and are required in many jurisdictions to distribute a significant portion of taxable income, which can appeal to income-focused investors. Listed infrastructure companies and funds can provide exposure to utilities, pipelines, towers, and transport networks, though equity market sentiment can dominate short-term pricing. Commodity exposure can be obtained via physical holdings (where feasible), commodity-producing equities, or futures-based funds; each behaves differently. Producer equities introduce company-specific risks like cost overruns and balance-sheet leverage, while futures strategies must manage roll yield and collateral returns. For many investors, a blended approach can make sense: liquid public exposure for flexibility and rebalancing, complemented by selective private or direct holdings for targeted cash flow and potential idiosyncratic return sources. Matching the access method to the desired role—income, inflation sensitivity, or diversification—helps prevent misalignment between expectations and actual behavior. If you’re looking for real assets, this is your best choice.

Tax, Regulation, and Legal Considerations for Real Assets

Tax and legal structures can significantly influence net returns from real assets. Real estate often comes with depreciation benefits that can shelter some income, while also introducing complexity around passive activity rules, recapture, and local property taxes. Infrastructure investments may have concession agreements, regulated tariff frameworks, or public-private partnership contracts that define revenue rights and responsibilities. Natural resources can involve mineral rights, water rights, conservation easements, and environmental compliance obligations. These legal features can create durable value when rights are well-defined, but they can also create uncertainty if regulatory regimes shift or if community opposition changes project economics.

Investors should also consider entity structure: direct ownership, partnerships, REITs, and fund vehicles each have different reporting requirements and tax implications. Cross-border investments add another layer, including withholding taxes, treaty considerations, and political risk. Insurance is a practical legal-adjacent consideration as well; rising premiums and changing coverage terms can materially affect property and infrastructure cash flows, particularly in regions exposed to climate risks such as floods, wildfires, or hurricanes. Environmental regulations can require capex upgrades or limit development options, affecting land and industrial assets. Because real assets are rooted in physical places and governed by local rules, due diligence should include not only financial analysis but also a review of permits, title, zoning, contractual obligations, and potential liabilities. Strong legal foundations and thoughtful tax planning can improve resilience and reduce unpleasant surprises that erode long-term returns.

Trends Shaping Real Assets: Energy Transition, Digitization, and Climate Adaptation

Long-term trends are reshaping the opportunity set for real assets. The energy transition is driving capital toward renewable generation, grid modernization, battery storage, and electrification infrastructure such as charging networks. These assets can have long-duration contracted revenues, but they also face technology risk, evolving regulation, and interconnection constraints. Digitization is fueling demand for data centers, fiber networks, and cell towers—often categorized as digital infrastructure—where growth is linked to cloud computing, AI workloads, and mobile data consumption. Industrial real estate has been influenced by e-commerce and supply chain reconfiguration, increasing the value of logistics hubs near population centers.

Climate adaptation is becoming a central underwriting variable across real assets. Properties in high-risk zones may face higher insurance costs, stricter building codes, and changing buyer preferences. Water scarcity can affect farmland values and crop choices, while extreme weather can disrupt infrastructure operations and maintenance schedules. Investors are increasingly focused on resilience upgrades: flood defenses, energy efficiency retrofits, backup power, and materials that reduce lifecycle costs. At the same time, policy incentives and carbon markets can create new revenue streams for certain natural resources, such as improved forest management or soil carbon practices, though measurement and permanence standards must be evaluated carefully. These trends create opportunities, but they also widen dispersion between well-positioned assets and those facing obsolescence. Success with real assets increasingly depends on anticipating how technology, regulation, and climate realities will interact with local demand and the long-term cost of owning and operating physical systems.

Practical Due Diligence Checklist for Selecting Real Assets

Choosing real assets responsibly requires a disciplined process that blends market research with asset-level inspection. Start with the economic purpose of the holding: identify who pays, why they pay, and what alternatives exist. For property, analyze neighborhood fundamentals, tenant demand, local supply pipelines, and the condition of the building systems that drive capex—roof, HVAC, elevators, and structural components. For infrastructure, study the revenue framework: regulated returns, contracted cash flows, or volume-based exposure. Evaluate counterparties, renewal terms, and any step-in rights or performance obligations. For natural resources, review the quality of the land or reserves, operating plans, and sensitivity to commodity prices, weather, and input costs.

Next, stress-test the capital structure. Model higher interest rates, lower occupancy or volumes, cost inflation, and delayed refinancing. Confirm that debt maturities align with cash flow stability and that covenants allow room for volatility. Validate assumptions through third-party reports where appropriate: engineering assessments, environmental studies, appraisals, and title reviews. Consider governance: who makes decisions, what fees are charged, and how conflicts are handled. For fund investments, examine track records across cycles, not just during favorable markets, and scrutinize how valuations are determined. Finally, plan the exit: understand liquidity constraints, potential buyer pools, and what capex might be needed to sell at an attractive price. Real assets can reward patience and operational excellence, but only when the initial underwriting is conservative and the ownership plan accounts for real-world friction such as maintenance, regulation, and changing demand.

Building Long-Term Wealth with Real Assets: Putting the Pieces Together

Long-term outcomes with real assets are usually driven less by short-term market timing and more by purchase discipline, prudent financing, and ongoing stewardship. Paying a sensible price relative to durable cash flow, maintaining adequate reserves for capex, and avoiding overreliance on refinancing can matter more than finding the perfect sector theme. Diversifying across types—income-oriented property, essential infrastructure, and selective natural resources—can reduce reliance on any single macro scenario. Investors who treat tangible holdings as operational businesses often find more consistent results: they monitor tenant quality, manage expenses, invest in resilience, and adapt to changing technology and regulation. They also recognize that physical assets can surprise on the downside when maintenance is deferred, insurance costs spike, or policy changes alter economics.

At their best, real assets provide a practical bridge between capital and the essential systems people use every day: housing, transportation, energy, communication, and food production. That connection can translate into resilient demand and the potential for cash flows that evolve with the economy over time. Building a thoughtful allocation means matching each holding to a clear purpose—income, diversification, or inflation sensitivity—while respecting the realities of liquidity, governance, and operational execution. When chosen carefully and managed well, real assets can complement traditional portfolios and support long-horizon financial goals without relying solely on paper claims. For investors seeking durability, tangible utility, and exposure to the physical economy, real assets can be a compelling component of a balanced strategy.

Watch the demonstration video

In this video, you’ll learn what real assets are and why they matter in a portfolio. It explains common types—like real estate, infrastructure, commodities, and farmland—how they can help hedge inflation, and the key risks to watch. You’ll also see how real assets differ from stocks and bonds and ways to invest in them.

Katherine Adams

real assets

Katherine Adams is a senior real estate strategist and investment advisor with over 15 years of experience in global property markets. She focuses on building diversified real estate portfolios, identifying emerging opportunities, and guiding investors through sustainable wealth strategies. Her content blends in-depth market research with practical investing frameworks, empowering readers to make informed decisions in the evolving real estate landscape.