O data by YCharts This brings up another important issue: The types of companies that occupy Simon assets are inherently different from those that fill Realty Income's properties. That's a multiple you'd expect to hear for a technology company, not an income stock (REITs are designed to return value to shareholders via dividend payments) that's focused on safety and slow growth. To put that statement into perspective, dividends have grown around 4.5% annually over the past decade -- beating the roughly 3% historical rate of inflation, but not by enough to justify such a lofty price-to-AFFO multiple.