Property & Infrastructure Funds Listed or Unlisted Property Trust

Some more detail for you:

A listed property trust (LPT) as Glebe mentioned, is listed on the stock exchange ... this gives it one very important attribute that unlisted property trusts don't have ... liquidity. This means that you can easily buy and sell your shares in the LPT at pretty much any time the market is open.

Unlisted trusts usually have an offering period during which you can invest, and then limited opportunities to redeem units in the future (sometimes not at all until the trust is wound up ... it varies). Unlisted trusts usually invest in one or two buildings and you just can't sell a part of a building to fund withdrawal requests. There is also rarely a secondary market for unlisted units, so you can't usually trade them to other investors.

The downside with LPTs is that the amount you have to pay to invest in them will vary based on market sentiment. Unlike managed funds and other unit trust based investments which are valued purely based on net assets ... a LPT is valued based on what the market is prepared to pay ... and will sometimes be at a premium to the trust's net asset value. However, there is a flipside to this in that sometimes LPTs are sold at a discount to net asset value, effectively allowing you to buy into the LPT cheaply ... so it works both ways.

You can generally get good leverage from margin lenders against LPTs, but unlisted trusts rarely offer external leverage - or if they do, it's a structured product offered as part of the initial investment.