Private equity REITs?

[jason]

I have heard of private equity REITs that pay out 10 to 12% per year, practically every year.  How do these compare to publicly traded REITs?  I've never heard of a publicly traded REIT that paid out this much. 
I'm thinking about taking the cash portion of my PP (which is earning practically nothing) and putting it all in private equity REITs (spread out over as many separate REITs as possible to maximize diversification among REITs).  I know if the economy and/or real-estate crashes, it could be ugly, but I could really use the income, and I think it's probably worth the risk.  Thoughts?

[mathjak107]

they suck !  stay away. i once owned one.

they are not transparent at all and have hidden expenses every year.

that nice juicy payout ended up being borrowed money and our own money that was supposed to be used to buy more property.

i ended up  getting no where near that dividend whan share price was considered at the end and that reit went public too .

most are like that , they are not subject to sec accounting rules and unless you can read a balance sheet they are a mind field .  mine was one of the biggest if not the biggest un-traded reit , the apple hospitality reit .

it went public in may where i bailed out after being trapped for 8 years  . it trades under aple and i think shows almost a 6 or 7% dividend .

but if business falls off they just return your own capital which was earmarked for buying more property  or borrow the money to pay you .

there is no such thing as a free lunch with these .

a public reit over the same years would have tripled .

[jason]

I've spoken to a couple of friends recently that have been doing amazing with private real estate investments.  One told me he has been averaging over 20% per year returns investing with a company that buys distressed apartment buildings and fixes them up.  I spoke to the CEO of the company and he said the average investor return over the past 20 years (since he started) has been over 15%.
I spoke to another company that does the same thing with single-family homes, and their average investor return over a long time has been over 11%.  I think, for the VP, this type of real-estate investing is one of the safer investments with potentially high returns.
My preference would be to invest a smaller amount with a fairly large number of these companies rather than put a large chunk of cash with just one or two, but I don't know where to find reputable companies like these.  I called Fidelity and they said they couldn't help me.  Is anyone aware of a resource where I can find reputable companies I can invest with that buy lower grade houses and/or apartment buildings and fix them up? 
Thanks!

[Sam Brazil]

I've spoken to a couple of friends recently that have been doing amazing with private real estate investments.  One told me he has been averaging over 20% per year returns investing with a company that buys distressed apartment buildings and fixes them up.  I spoke to the CEO of the company and he said the average investor return over the past 20 years (since he started) has been over 15%.
I spoke to another company that does the same thing with single-family homes, and their average investor return over a long time has been over 11%. 

This sounds very much to my naive ears like the kind of thing you hear when real estate is reaching a top -- when prices of RE are rising, everyone comes out of the woodwork with tales of how they're making amazing money fixing and flipping. If the RE market changes, would these people be doing so well? Would they even be solvent? How leveraged are they to get those kinds of returns and what kind of downturn would do them in?