How do deals get to you - Acquisitions

Question basically in the title. I run Acquisitions at a small family shop in southern California. 5 man team. Most deals, if not all are sourced by me, either through a relationship or hitting phones to property owners, then underwritten by me. 

For Acq guys at bigger shops

A. Do you guys have "sourcers" who just bring you potential deals all day?, also, how many of the deals you look at are listed and how many are "off market"?

My firm writes to a 6.0% RoC and basically will not look at an OM from a broker for longer than 5 minutes. Most every deal we move forward on is off market to some degree. 

Curious to learn the workflow of you Acq guys at bigger firms. Let me know!

6 Comments
 

Get a lot of deals from brokers, but also a lot from other players in our industry who are looking to offload properties quickly and quietly and don't want to pay a broker or go through the marketing process.  Certainty of close matters so it's a limited pool of real buyers anyway.

If you have an edge on your competitors, broker blast deals aren't the end of the world.  If you do the same thing as everyone else, you probably need a different way of sourcing deals.  Years ago when I bought a couple small MF properties I was basically driving around neighborhoods in NYC/Northern Jersey and eyeballing assets that looked interesting, or blocks that seemed to be on the outside edge of gentrification, and then hired a junior broker to cold call everyone they could find to see if anyone was willing to sell.  Time intensive, insanely low hit rate, but... worked once!

 
Most Helpful

Mix of off market and brokers (we have deep relationships so a substantial portion are actually off market or limited marketing deals from brokers).

Our shop has people all over the spectrum. We have a few guys who are paid a base plus a fee for each deal they bring in and their entire focus is sourcing off market (they still get broker OMs but so do the rest of us so they don't spend much time on it). These guys spend most of their time driving the market, calling owners, and building relationships. A lot of guys who cut their teeth in brokerage.

We also have guys from more institutional backgrounds who are less purely focused on sourcing - they're the ones who go through broker OMs and spend time on the phones with brokers, but they're also managing analysts and the underwriting process, working on securing debt, putting together investor memos and fundraising packages, strategy & execution, etc etc

 

We're 4 deals into our latest fund (1 year) - 100% off market. But we have a very narrow and specific acquisition criteria, so it's unlikely anything marketed will really fit. It's a mix of direct and broker relationships. We sometimes partner with brokers to help us get off market deals (i.e. we identify property, and if broker has relationship they approach seller to help effectuate a deal). 

 

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