Question for experienced real estate people out there... If you're trying to start a new opportunistic REPE firm from the ground up and you're looking to pick up say 2 deal guys to help you and your 1 other cofounder get going, with their primary focus being on sourcing and executing deals, where would you look to hire?
Let's say you can offer a decent salary as well as a small amount of equity and a significant portion of carry guaranteed for the first several deals/funds, but you can't offer significant bonus prospects or high salary for the first several years. Let's say your strengths as cofounders include high-level industry contacts, academic and pro background at top schools/firms, significant deal evaluation experience, access to institutional and HNI money, etc., but that you are not necessarily the most connected with brokers or a savage on the ground deal guy that can claw it out to access off-market deal flow and the like... you need guys that can. Clearly hiring people from the likes of BX or Starwood is going to be tough given your financial constraints, and you don't necessarily care as much about their background from a prestige standpoint as you believe you already bring a lot of that which can help sway potential LPs... what you need is market access / deal flow at a reasonable price and guys that are hungry AF... they should have solid resumes that are worthy of throwing up on your website and in your pitch books, but this is second priority.
Where would you guys look? I'd be interested to hear what you think in both (a) US context and (b) Asia context.
haha, while I wish you the best, this not the first time I've seen you pose such a high-level question to a forum of 23 year old kids from Tufts.
I would like to make a suggestion for kicks, though. I would actually consider someone from the brokerage side. You didn't mention anything about hardcore underwriting skills or rigorous investment discipline. Nor do I think that should be #1 concern. Pipeline is everything. Without a pipeline you are just hot air and ideas. Excel skills do not create a pipeline. Just my (uneducated) 2 cents.
I think starting a PE fund is kind of a ridiculous idea. I know one guy who is doing this and he has been syndicating deals for 20+ years and he is sitting on 10 mil in cash. I would syndicate a ton of deals first before i orginize my group into a fund. If you can find some good deals the money is almost guaranteed to follow. There is significantly more capital then deals to invest in and its easy to raise money if you have good opportunities
Agreed, why deal with the headache of operating a fund?
Because it's stressful to have to worry if you will have money for every deal. A fund provides a capital base while you are deploying it. Also, surety of close..a seller may not sell to you if you don't have surety of close - and a syndicator, on the surface, has less surety of close than a fund which has a base of capital which it needs to deploy.
Fees.
Although I agree that it makes no sense to adopt the fund model out of the gate
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