A dividend is the corporate profits after all expenses and New Capital Investments (new propertys or current property improvements) split between all shareholders in the company. So, lets say the company had 100 million dollars of profit, and there was 100 million shares outstanding at dividend time, that would give each share 1 dollar as a dividend. Now if you have 1 share you get $1 dollar, but if you have 10,000 shares you get $10,000. Pretty simple. Hope this helps.