Family Office vs. Fund

"Hellnah" Hey all,

I've been working at a family office for quite some time now, and I want to know what the differences are between working at a fund vs. family office. In order to have this discussion efficiently, let me provide some more details: I work at a billion dollar family office who concentrates on NNN industrial but also has a handful of multi family, retail, office and aviation properties. We finance our acquisitions post transaction, we haven't entered into a JV since one went sour a few years back and typically are the only equity in the deaI. I know I'm touching on a lot of points, but I'm attempting to spark the conversation. Lastly, our "investment committee" is essentially our president, the operational family member, who decides whether or not we send an LOI. Our strategy differs per situation. We have invested in vacant office in non target markets, developed 300+ unti multi family and have acquired core NNN. Please let me know how this differs from funds.

Other peoples money vs. proprietary. Funds need to place capital and have timing constraints, FO's don't have either.

FO's are often yield junkies, especially in the NNN world. Depending on a funds equity, that can vary.

I've worked at a fund and an FO. I would say the biggest difference is that funds need to deploy capital and realize investments to justify their existence. FO's are not bound by either of those restrictions.

In my experience, most funds have a formal corporate structure and approval process. FO's can range from an unorganized mess where everything depends on a family member's sign off, or a very formal almost institutional investment process. I say almost institutional because fund's usually have well-defined investment criteria in their legal docs, where FO's are not bound by those same restrictions and can quickly pivot to new property types, MSA's, investment strategies, etc.

FO's can vary wildly from one office to the next so it's hard to describe them succinctly.

I worked at a FO that was one of the bigger ones. I now work at a fund with about 5x AUM.

Som of the major differences, I've seen are

• All of the other stuff besides real estate disappeared. at the FO we had investments going every which way

• Reporting, soo many reports need to go out to investors and teasers for the next fund, reports conveying our ideas to whoever we need to. At an FO we just talked through it and all came to the same conclusions most times. At our FO we just got reports from our partners and if they were wrong we just sent them back.

• Hold periods, we didn't have a time frame we were bound to whatever, we could flex muscles if a operator wanted to tell us differentl.

• MOIC is the metric that mattered nothing else really did, which is interesting because all partners get paid on promotes that deal with IRR.