Curious if anyone here has done this successfully or has hired someone on this type of basis.
Background is institutional CRE across acquisitions, asset management and lending, most recently in a senior investments role on the principal side. I've since moved into doing deals independently and have been building my own investment platform. I'm continuing to pursue acquisitions, but obviously there is downtime between deals and I'm looking at whether it makes sense to use some of that bandwidth doing fractional / outsourced work for other firms.
Initially I was thinking simply underwriting, modeling, IC memos, deal screening, etc. But the more I've thought about it, I don't know that competing for one-off modeling assignments is really the best use of my background. Seems like the bigger opportunity may be broader fractional acquisitions / AM support for smaller sponsors, family offices, lenders, etc. that need another experienced person but don't necessarily need another full-time hire.
Could be monthly financial reviews, budget vs. actuals, tracking performance against underwriting, PM oversight, lender/investor reporting, covenant compliance, refi / hold-sell analysis, lease audits, CAM recs, special projects, etc.
The part I keep coming back to is trust/confidentiality. If I'm a principal handing someone my models, rent rolls, financials, investor information and live deal pipeline, I probably care as much about knowing who I'm dealing with and trusting them as I do about whether they're technically capable.
For anyone who has done this:
- Where have you actually found clients?
- Are most engagements one-off underwriting/modeling jobs or have you been able to turn them into recurring monthly work?
- How are you pricing it - hourly, per project, monthly retainer?
- For anyone on the hiring side, what would make you comfortable outsourcing this vs. just hiring another analyst/associate?
Not looking to turn this into some huge consulting business or stop investing. More so looking at whether this can be a good complementary business while continuing to build my own portfolio.
Interested to hear from anyone who's actually done it.
