Gerard,
The funds we recommend are taxed under the gross roll up regime with a notional exit tax every 8 years on exactly the same basis as the Standard Life fund. We also typically recommend funds which are domiciled in Ireland.
Our brokers would charge 0.125% to buy and sell an exchange traded fund so the round trip to buy and sell would cost a quarter of 1% in transaction fees.
There is also a bid ask spread and based on live prices today this is 0.45278%
That would imply transactions costs of around 0.7% for a round trip buy and sell.
For annual fees, I prefer a Total Expense Ratio (TER) measure since this includes additional costs such as custody and administration which are not included in the annual management fee. As you are probably aware Irish funds do not typically publish TERs
The UK OEIC version of the Standard Life REIT has a TER of 1.56% and I would suggest that this would be a reasonable reflection of the real cost of investing in the Irish fund (excluding expenses born by the fund such as trading costs, brokerage commissions stamp duty etc) although "mirror funds" can work out more expensive - you would really need the audited report and accounts and I suspect they are not easy to get hold of.
For comparison, the fund we typically recommend has a TER of 0.59%pa.
So, that would suggest an annual difference in fees of just shy of 1%pa.
For reference, assuming a 6.5%pa compound return, a 1% difference in fees equates to a difference of €938.52 per thousand over a thirty year period.
Taytoman,
I tend to use the S&P Global REIT index mainly for research. Investors can gain access to the REIT market through a variety of low cost index funds which track the FTSE/NAREIT index.
If you would like a review of your portfolio, please contact me directly.
All the best,