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“Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.”

— Warren Buffett

The Warren Buffett investment philosophy calls for a long-term investment horizon, where a twenty year 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 twenty year investment into the stock back in 2005.

Start date: 11/21/2005
$10,000

11/21/2005
  $19,752

11/20/2025
End date: 11/20/2025
Start price/share: $26.62
End price/share: $17.40
Starting shares: 375.66
Ending shares: 1,136.11
Dividends reinvested/share: $33.86
Total return: 97.68%
Average annual return: 3.46%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $19,752.01

As shown above, the twenty year investment result worked out as follows, with an annualized rate of return of 3.46%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 20 years ago into $19,752.01 today (as of 11/20/2025). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 97.68% (something to think about: how might DOC shares perform over the next 20 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that Healthpeak Properties Inc paid investors a total of $33.86/share in dividends over the 20 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 7.01%. 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 $26.62/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 26.33%.

Another great investment quote to think about:
“The intelligent investor is a realist who sells to optimists and buys from pessimists.” — Benjamin Graham