33 Dividend Increases: February 19-23, 2018 (Part 1: Real Estate and Financials Sectors)

Companies that regularly raise their dividends show confidence in potential growth of future earnings. Monitoring dividend increases for stocks on my watch is one way I identify candidates for further analysis.

In the past week, 33 companies on my watch list decided to increase their dividends, including two of the stocks I hold in my portfolio.

Part 1 provides a summary of dividend increases announced by stocks in the Real Estate and Financials sectors. Part 2 will cover dividend increases from Consumer Discretionary and Materials sector stocks, while Part 3 will cover the remaining sectors.

Four stocks in the Real Estate and Financials sectors announced double digit percentage increases and two more are within a rounding error of a 10% raise!

The top increase is from Cohen & Steers (CNS), a global investment manager that specializes in liquid real assets, including real estate securities, listed infrastructure, commodities and natural resource equities, and preferred securities. CNS announced an increase of 17.9% and the stock now yields 3.30% at $49.97 per share.

The runner-up is Assured Guaranty (AGO) with a 12.3% increase. AGO provides credit protection products to public finance, infrastructure, and structured finance markets in the United States and internationally. The stock now yields 1.85% at $36.67 per share.

To see details of last week's dividend increases announced by stocks in the Real Estate and Financials sectors, please read this article at Seeking Alpha. I include three F.A.S.T. Graphs to illustrate the impressive earnings and dividend growth rates of some of these stocks.

As a bonus, I'm including a summary of ex-dividend dates for the next two weeks. Scan the list of stocks to see if there's a stock you want to pick up before the ex-dividend date so you can grab the next dividend.

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