BlackRock Inc. on Tuesday announced it will add two exchange-traded funds to its existing lineup of 22 iShares Core products. Both funds are expected to commence trading on November 3, with one focused on REITs and the other on intermediate-term bonds.

The existing iShares Real Estate 50 ETF (FTY) will become the iShares Core U.S. REIT ETF (USRT) and will track a new index—the market cap-weighted FTSE NAREIT Equity REITs Index that measures the performance of U.S.-listed equity real estate investment trusts, excluding timber, infrastructure and mortgage REITs. The expense ratio will be 0.08 percent.

The FTY fund currently has nearly $76 million in assets, an expense ratio of 0.48 percent and a distribution yield of 3.72 percent. It has tracked the FTSE NAREIT Real Estate 50 Index composed of 50 of the largest U.S. real estate equities.

The index for the new USRT fund has nearly 160 constituents and a sharper focus on U.S. pure play REITs that don’t deal with trees, bridges or commercial financing.

The iShares Core 5-10 Year USD Bond ETF (IMTB) is an entirely new intermediate-term bond fund that fills a hole between the iShares Core 1-5 Year USD Bond ETF (ISTB) and iShares Core 10+ Year USD Bond ETF (ILTB).

The IMTB fund will carry an expense ratio of 0.08 percent and track the Bloomberg Barclays US Universal 5-10 Year Index. The three largest sectors in that index are securitized assets (49 percent), followed by Treasuries and corporates (both 18 percent). High-yield corporates, emerging markets and government-related bonds fill out the remainder.

In October, BlackRock trimmed the expense ratios of 15 iShares Core ETFs by two to five basis points, a move it said was aimed at helping financial advisors maneuver within the confines of the new U.S. Department of Labor fiduciary rule for retirement accounts that's set to go into effect next April.

Those price cuts, along with ETF fee reductions by other major asset managers including Vanguard, State Street, Fidelity and Charles Schwab, are part of an ongoing price war that is shrinking the expense ratios of index-based funds to low single digits and, in some cases, pretty darn close to zero percent.