Multiple REITs (21 underperformers)
Land & Buildings names 21 REIT CEOs who trail their own proxy peers on 1-, 3-, and 5-year TSR yet collect multi-million packages — shareholders should vote against say-on-pay and the comp committees.
Thesis
Land & Buildings analyzed REITs over $1bn that filed 2026 proxies through mid-April and identified 21 companies whose CEOs underperformed their own self-selected proxy peers on a trailing 1-, 3-, and 5-year total-shareholder-return basis. Despite this consistent underperformance, boards awarded multi-million-dollar packages — including $14.9m to American Tower's Steven Vondran, $14.2m to Crown Castle's Christian Hillabrant, $14.0m to VICI's Edward Pitoniak, and $10.3m to Easterly's Darrell Crate — often well above peer-group averages. The report names every comp-committee member at each issuer and urges shareholders to vote AGAINST say-on-pay and AGAINST those directors at meetings clustered between April 22 and May 21, 2026. The framing: if a CEO can't beat the comparators the board itself chose, the pay-for-performance pact has failed in its most basic purpose.
SCQA
REIT boards justify generous CEO pay by benchmarking against self-selected proxy peer groups, with say-on-pay votes scheduled at 21 issuers between April 22 and May 21, 2026.
At 21 REITs over $1bn market cap, CEOs trailed those very peers on trailing 1-, 3-, and 5-year TSR — yet were still paid multi-million packages, collapsing the pay-for-performance justification.
Vote AGAINST say-on-pay and AGAINST the named compensation-committee members at each of the 21 upcoming annual meetings, and engage boards to demand structural compensation reform.
Restoring genuine pay-for-performance alignment across the REIT sector and signaling to boards that chronic relative underperformance cannot be rewarded with above-peer compensation.
The three reasons
- 1
21 REIT CEOs trail their own self-selected proxy peers on 1-, 3-, and 5-year TSR
- 2
Boards still paid these CEOs multi-million packages despite chronic underperformance
- 3
Shareholders can punish misalignment via say-on-pay and comp-committee votes this proxy season
Primary demands
- Vote AGAINST the advisory say-on-pay vote at upcoming annual meetings
- Vote AGAINST the members of the compensation committees that approved these pay packages
- Engage directly with boards to demand structural reform of compensation programs
KPIs cited
Pattern membership
Where this document fits across the library's 12 rhetorical / structural patterns.
Notable slides (5)
Notes
Sector-wide governance broadside rather than a single-company campaign — Land & Buildings names 21 REITs whose CEOs underperformed their own self-selected proxy peers on 1-, 3-, and 5-year TSR. Each company gets a templated one-page 'Proxy Compensation Spotlight' with the same five bullets: chronic underperformance, CEO name + 2025 total comp, peer-average comparison (where shown), annual meeting date, and a list of comp-committee directors to vote against. Cover dated April 2026; meetings span April 22 - May 21, 2026. L&B discloses positions in WY, COLD, RLJ, PSA, AMH, MAA, SHO, INVH, AMT, DOC and CPT in the legal disclosure. Footnotes flag 'created with the assistance of AI'. No single thesis_company so target_company is the universe of 21 REITs.