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CRE Insights Blog

Family Office Industry in Georgia and Former Soviet Union FSU countries

Hello, this is Richard C. Wilson, founder of the Family Office Club, and Centimillionaire Advisors LLC. I’m in the Middle East this week in Tel Aviv, in the country of Georgia at a city called Tbilisi. At this conference as a keynote speaker on family offices and ultra-wealthy families. I wanted to create this quick video for just one or two minutes on the current state of the family office industry, and the country of Georgia. Then, the Stan countries, there’s Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Armenia, Turkey, et cetera. I wanted to say that it essentially does not exist here. So that’s why it’s going to be a short video. There are families that are billionaire families. There’s many centimillionare families, but many of them don’t have a formalized family office. There are no multifamily offices, that I’ve been able to identify. I was invited here by one of the top leasing and investment banking companies, and kind of a data provider, like a Bloomberg. Reporting on company data and financial stats, is very tuned into the market, and grew up here and lived here their whole life. He’s never heard of any multifamily office operating here. The whole region is very few, if any multifamily offices. In addition to that, the whole term single family office, the term family office is not really existing in their culture, at this point. So I think it’s an extreme variation away from, Western Europe, United States. In the middle you have countries that might not be in Western Europe but are in the EU, where the term is becoming more familiar. You have places like Brazil, China, et cetera, where people are familiar with the term, but it’s not as developed as it is in the United States or in the UK, for example. Then you have places like, this where the term really doesn’t exist yet. But in 10, 15, 20 years it will be inevitable, that multifamily offices will open a division. Some local wealth management firm, private wealth advisor, will leave the big private bank, open up their own multifamily office. Those who hear about the model, will want their own single-family office. As more wealth is created in the area, then there’ll be more need for these solutions. But there’s a need for it right now. It just hasn’t gotten here yet. So it’s interesting, because that the family office space itself is kind of a frontier idea. It’s really not a mature market at all. It’s new things being created and developed all the time. Just as here in the country of Georgia, or in Uzbekistan or Kazakhstan et cetera in the area, they’re really frontier economies, where things are just being privatized now. Things are opening up for the first time, and there’s more opportunity because of that. I think in general, entrepreneurs and family offices are always looking at where there’s their inefficiency. Where is their opportunity, where is their an arbitrage? Where can the most value be created or added? So I hope this is interesting to some of you who are from the area, or familiar with the area. Happy to chat about it directly, maybe at one of our live events, if you’re going to be there soon. This is Richard Wilson at the Family Office Club, and Centimillionaire Advisors. I hope to see you live at one of the events. Take care.

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Richard Wilson