Who am I?
I don't sell anything on this site or have affiliations that directly benefit me, I am sharing this just because it wasn't all easy to find and some folks had asked me to share. I have an MBA and 20+ years of real estate experience but I am not trained to advise others on how to invest, nor do I know your personal situation so consider this site an agnostic dictionary of pointers.
I spent over 10 years professionally managing high volume industrial real estate ground lease acquisitions while also directly owning small multi family. During that time I ran teams that evaluated, engineered, priced, negotiated and closed on over 800 properties. In the last few years however I sold most of my property, am spending more time with kids, have some rapidly expanding hobbies and have started slowly accepting/realizing that as a limited partner one can still achieve the amazing returns experienced in direct Real Estate investing but without the hassles of direct ownership.
Why Funds/Syndications/Partnerships?
This took a lot of research but I have done a 180 on this topic. If you have ever owned an operated a real estate investment directly you may know the level of dedication and consideration it takes to do well... its hard to consider that someone else could do it better or with as much focus. What I didn't appreciate initially was that although, yes, I took my personal investments seriously, I actually wasn't focused on it 24/7. I had family priorities, I took vacations, I let some maintenance slide if I had competing needs for the capital, I had days when I just didn't want to deal with city council on whatever re-zoning effort etc. etc. Certainly no one cared about my property like I did, but that is a skewed and biased perspective, focused on the wrong metric.
Caring, doesn't equal outcomes. Understanding market forces and executing well on an informed business plan creates outcomes. There is tremendous value in having a full time accountable and audited team of professionals driving a narrow business plan based on past success in multiple market cycles with deeply entrenched networks for lending, supplies, services and marketing
As I became more interested in passive income strategies I spent hours doing all kinds of long tail searches in Google, looking at investor sites, and tracking press-wires but I just couldn't for the life of me figure out how to get a solid flow of deals to review that weren't the same old offerings I found on crowdfunded platforms. Plus, I had no way to scale my knowledge, there just wasn't enough time to deeply review these offerings with my day job, kids etc.
Then over the course of 2 weeks three separate unrelated individuals suggested I talk to this one particular operator. I set up a meeting with the founder and he suggested I join an investor dinner that was coming up in my city. I was a bit concerned about walking willingly into what could have been a timeshare style pressure sale but decided to go anyway.
This dinner was the turning point for my investment journey. First of all, the sophistication of the other investors, they were all late career high net worth investors who were not impressed by a steak dinner. To my right was a broker who had been working in real estate across multiple states for 30 years and to my left was a doctor and the owner of a startup who had been investing in partnerships for many years and so on around the table. They had really good questions, and the operator had really good answers. The operator didn't have a pitch, they brought us together to answer any questions but also they clearly understood the value of giving us investors time to consort amongst ourselves. I took the opportunity to ask as many questions as I could of my fellow investors. Many of the key pointers they gave me led to the learnings I have documented in this site.