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“Only buy something that you’d be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for 10 years.”

— Warren Buffett

The Warren Buffett investment philosophy calls for a long-term investment horizon, where a decade-long holding period, or even longer, would fit right into the strategy. How would such a strategy have worked out for an investment into Healthpeak Properties Inc (NYSE: DOC)? Today, we examine the outcome of a decade-long investment into the stock back in 2015.

Start date: 07/24/2015
$10,000

07/24/2015
  $8,526

07/23/2025
End date: 07/23/2025
Start price/share: $38.02
End price/share: $19.05
Starting shares: 263.02
Ending shares: 447.44
Dividends reinvested/share: $14.66
Total return: -14.76%
Average annual return: -1.58%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $8,526.99

As shown above, the decade-long investment result worked out poorly, with an annualized rate of return of -1.58%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $8,526.99 today (as of 07/23/2025). On a total return basis, that’s a result of -14.76% (something to think about: how might DOC shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that Healthpeak Properties Inc paid investors a total of $14.66/share in dividends over the 10 holding period, marking a second component of the total return beyond share price change alone. Much like watering a tree, reinvesting dividends can help an investment to grow over time — for the above calculations we assume dividend reinvestment (and for this exercise the closing price on ex-date is used for the reinvestment of a given dividend).

Based upon the most recent annualized dividend rate of 1.22004/share, we calculate that DOC has a current yield of approximately 6.40%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.22004 against the original $38.02/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 16.83%.

One more investment quote to leave you with:
“Though tempting, trying to time the market is a loser’s game.” — Christopher Davis