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Jeffrey Hutton is a Morningstar contributor.

Next year may see a renaissance of Australian real estate investment trusts (REITs), as steady yields woo investors, including superannuation funds, keen on relative safe havens in continuing volatile markets.

Since 2009, REITs have been paring pack debt piles following the global financial crisis and simplifying their business structures so that distributions, which sometimes exceeded the money they took in from tenants, are more realistic and sustainable.

Now, REITs such as GPT Group (GPT), Colonial Property Office Fund (CPA) and Westfield (WDC) may be poised to reap the benefits of years of hard work to become, well, boring.

"All the REITs have taken a back-to-basics strategy," says Michael Frearson, whose position as a portfolio manager at Macquarie Private Portfolio Management includes overseeing REIT investments.

"It has taken time for investors to get comfortable with the fact that management have been executing their strategy."

John Freedman, a real estate analyst at UBS, points to consensus estimates for gains across asset classes next year.

The table shows earnings per share may grow on average 11.3 per cent in 2012 for equities in general, while REITs will see an increase of only 2.6 per cent.

But volatility stemming from continuing debt woes in Europe could shave as much as 600 basis points off the projected earnings per share growth for equities. For REITs, it's more like 50 basis points, Freedman says.

That's in part because falling interest rates are making projected yields from REITs more attractive. Falling interest rates also bode well for retail sales and therefore shopping-mall tenants as consumers, who may be feeling more flush, stream back into stores.

"At this point, when we are looking into 2012, notwithstanding that we see Australia as a very defensive REIT market globally ... it seems to us that 2012 looks to be a year where the cyclical pressures are declining for retail and residential," Freedman says.

REITS such as Westfield Retail Trust (WRT) used to be passed over by clients, Freedman recalled at a media briefing this week in Sydney. The Reserve Bank of Australia's (RBA) decision to lower interest rates in recent months has prompted investors to have a second look.

"Investors would say 'yes John, I know Westfield is cheap, but no thank you, I don't want to be there,'" Freedman recalls.

"What we're seeing with the RBA reversing direction in the last two to three months is that investors are saying 'okay, obviously the outlook for office employment is not exceptionally hot at the moment, quite the opposite, so we'll probably trend away from stocks with those types of exposures and we want to move to stocks that might benefit from rates being cut," he says.