Are funds more beneficial than syndications for the investors? Are they better for the sponsors? How to approach investors when you have a deal? How to find a great partner in the industry? Brian Spear, Principal at Sunrise Capital shares his experience.

You can read this entire interview here: https://bit.ly/3vjvOGa

Why do you recommend people creating a fund instead of syndications to be begin with?

I wouldn’t say that, with absolute assurance, everyone should always create a fund, but I do believe that funds are better structure for both parties involved. Selfishly from the general partner side, it ‘s more flexibility of capital, it affords you the opportunity to be able to move at a moment’s notice. If every time that we stumbled upon a given transaction that we wanted to acquire, we had to roll out a brand new syndication. Then we would miss some deals, some opportunities in a hot market such as this, when you have to compete against other people. The brokers want to know where your equity derives. If you don’t have the ability to say, “I’ve eight figures sitting in the bank right now and I can close on this next week if we really need it to”, then you’re going to be at a little bit of a disadvantage, especially in this crazy environment where there’s so much capital chasing deals. The fund affords you to have that capital ready when those opportunities arise so that you can act and move faster, that expediency helps tremendously. 

Funds will afford you to provide outsized IRRs as well. Depending upon the scale of your respective fund, you may be able to garner some lines of credit, which would afford you to be selective about when you bring capital in and leveraging that provides your investors with a higher internal rate of return. In addition, you get diversification across the various different assets.

I’m assuming that you recommend people doing a syndication first, because it’s probably very hard to raise for a fund first?

Yes, you want to use your own capital to go out and prove the business model. To have a simple, scalable, and repeatable one prior to rolling out a fund. It would be imprudent to just launch a fund from scratch, you need to go out and prove yourself first. There’s nothing wrong with that. But I do think that ultimately, the fund structure provides more benefits for everybody involved. I would pose to you that’s why the likes of Blackstone, Carlyle Group, Apollo, all the guys on Wall Street, don’t run out and do individual deals specific syndications. They do fund structures without fail for all those reasons.

How do you approach an investor when you have a deal?

The question of how you approach investors when you have a deal begins well in advance of when you have a deal. You’re never going to reach out to somebody, and hard sell them on wiring you $100,000 one day after you have a deal, come under contract, and all of a sudden need to scramble to get that capital. What you need to do is develop that relationship with the prospect or the potential investor many days, weeks, months or years in advance of that opportunity arising. If you intend to scale actively in this business, you’re going to need to build a substantive Rolodex. And you’re going to need to begin providing that Rolodex with valuable content that provides them with insight and knowledge that you are an authority in your industry and are worthy of their time, energy, effort, and ultimately capital, to partner with you on deals as you progress.

Brian Spear

www.parkinglotprofits.com

www.sunrisecapitalinvestors.com

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