Real estate funds, syndications and passive income strategies

This site is Focused primarily on private real estate funds that are available to Accredited Investors or Qualified Purchasors that won't be found advertising, promoting or even available on the web. I had a long career in direct Real Estate but I was a complete beginner when it came to funds and syndication's. It took time and luck to sort out how to find, evaluate and invest in these deals so I made this site to share what I found. Lastly, I whipped this site out and so admittedly its not great on mobile but looks decent on a larger screen.

Learnings

• Operators and Funds create investor opportunities through partnerships. Investors join as "Limited Partners"/ LP through capital contribution which the operator will use to execute the business plan and repay the LP a profit.
  

• The best operators and funds seem to be highly specialized in a narrow field of real estate and will have a thesis that could be summarized as follows: "Purchasing, expanding, improving, packaging and selling triple net lease industrial buildings in tertiary sun belt growth markets". In short, they know what they do, where and how they do it. This clarity drives their ability to master the acquisition and execution phases while giving investors decently clear expectations from a cash flow and timing standpoint.
  

• These operators are all over the map in terms of business plan and track records. Some show consistent returns across multiple economic cycles, others not so much.
  

• It is not uncommon to find an organization that has historic returns on numerous funds that are above 20% annualized IRR. This really took me aback and instantly reminded me of every asshole who had ever said 'The first million is the hardest'.
  

• Deal flow can be a real challenge. Once I started looking for deals to review I realized it was a struggle to find deals, must less, deals that came from good operators. This became a decent focus of time, until I got deeper into the investment community which I will talk a bit about below.
  

• Build a practice of having virtual meetings with operators, attending investor meetings and working with veterans in the space. This is when I started to see the most interesting risk adjusted offerings from deeply vetted, highly reputable organizations.
  

• Joining an alternative investment club/group/circle whatever you want to call it was a very important piece of advise because its there that I was able to see how little I actually knew. Also it solved my deal flow problems as these groups bring and cross examine deals in the forums with deep expertise allowing me to learn what is important and see the risk assessments I was unqualified to make.
  
  Many of the best deals are just inaccessible to most investors. The most exclusive deals are built to invest funds from the ultra wealthy and have $1M or more minimum buy-ins. This means that in all likelyhood it is only working with entities that have at least $10-100M or more to invest. The way to get access to these funds is to join a highly organized group of investors that can pool their money and negotiate to gain access by insuring a minimum contribution and a single point of contact etc to the fund. In this way you are able to get access to vehicles that have the absolute highest controls, the most seasoned teams, the most scrutinized business plans and the best terms.
  
  Minimum buy in's for these funds are still high, often $200K, but many will have placements in the $50K range.
  
  From what I have seen, deals roughly are presented as follows:

  • • Initial investment of $50-200K

    • Hold periods range from 4 to 12 years

    • Over that time you can expect to get an annual return of anywhere from 6 to 12% with a lump return at the end resulting in 1.5 to 3X or more the initial investment amount.

    • Again this is just based on what I have seen- these metrics vary wildly depending on the objective of the fund and the associated risk.) This is where I had to spend quite a bit of time educating myself because initially it was just overwhelming.
      

How to educate yourself