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If you buy and hold a stock for many years, you'd hope to be making a profit. Furthermore, you'd generally like to see the share price rise faster than the market Unfortunately for shareholders, while the Easterly Government Properties, Inc. (NYSE:DEA) share price is up 32% in the last five years, that's less than the market return. Zooming in, the stock is actually down 8.6% in the last year.
See our latest analysis for Easterly Government Properties
To quote Buffett, 'Ships will sail around the world but the Flat Earth Society will flourish. There will continue to be wide discrepancies between price and value in the marketplace...' One imperfect but simple way to consider how the market perception of a company has shifted is to compare the change in the earnings per share (EPS) with the share price movement.
During five years of share price growth, Easterly Government Properties actually saw its EPS drop 8.1% per year.
Essentially, it doesn't seem likely that investors are focused on EPS. Since the change in EPS doesn't seem to correlate with the change in share price, it's worth taking a look at other metrics.
We note that the dividend is higher than it was previously - always nice to see. It could be that the company is reaching maturity and dividend investors are buying for the yield. The revenue growth of about 25% per year might also encourage buyers.
The company's revenue and earnings (over time) are depicted in the image below (click to see the exact numbers).
We know that Easterly Government Properties has improved its bottom line lately, but what does the future have in store? So it makes a lot of sense to check out what analysts think Easterly Government Properties will earn in the future (free profit forecasts).
What About Dividends?
It is important to consider the total shareholder return, as well as the share price return, for any given stock. Whereas the share price return only reflects the change in the share price, the TSR includes the value of dividends (assuming they were reinvested) and the benefit of any discounted capital raising or spin-off. So for companies that pay a generous dividend, the TSR is often a lot higher than the share price return. In the case of Easterly Government Properties, it has a TSR of 68% for the last 5 years. That exceeds its share price return that we previously mentioned. And there's no prize for guessing that the dividend payments largely explain the divergence!
A Different Perspective
Investors in Easterly Government Properties had a tough year, with a total loss of 4.6% (including dividends), against a market gain of about 26%. However, keep in mind that even the best stocks will sometimes underperform the market over a twelve month period. Longer term investors wouldn't be so upset, since they would have made 11%, each year, over five years. It could be that the recent sell-off is an opportunity, so it may be worth checking the fundamental data for signs of a long term growth trend. It's always interesting to track share price performance over the longer term. But to understand Easterly Government Properties better, we need to consider many other factors. Case in point: We've spotted 3 warning signs for Easterly Government Properties you should be aware of, and 1 of them is concerning.