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CRE Insights Blog

Single Family Offices

Single family offices are holistic full balance sheet wealth solutions for ultra-wealthy individuals and families. There are over 5,000 single family offices globally, to learn more about them please subscribe to our channel, visit us at http://SingleFamilyOffices.com and download our free report at http://FamilyOfficeReport.com Hello, it’s Richard Wilson. I’m coming to you from Prague, Czech Republic, just here at sunrise. And I’m here to meet with the family office and then go into Paris as well to do some meetings and speak at an event. What I wanted to talk to you about today is single family offices and the industry in general. So first off, I have a different video on this, but real quick, the single family office is a holistic full 360 degree financial and wealth management solution for ultra wealthy professionals. So, a more concise way of saying it is it’s a holistic solution for managing the finances of people who have a lot of money. And what I wanted to give you is a quick two minute overview of the industry in general. So first of all, it’s a pretty new industry, quote unquote, in terms of it being formalized. There’s been forms of single family offices around for a thousand years. For the past 200 years, a little bit more formalized. And for the past 50 years, much more formalized. But really in the past seven years, the term single family office is being used more mainstream. And it’s really growing quite rapidly as an industry. So, if you look at the number of single family offices globally, there’s between three and 5,000 of them depending on how you define them. For example, in Singapore there are a couple of hundred. In Houston, there’s about 180 single family offices. In New York, there’s somewhere around 500 to 750 single family offices at least. And I know in Monaco there’s around 500 as well. So, those are some quick numbers on what’s going on. The single family offices generally don’t have websites. They don’t like to use business cards typically. And they do this to stay under the radar of competitors because they usually have operating businesses within areas of just commodities or real estate and they want to keep very secretive about their investments. They also don’t want to, in some countries like the Philippines or in some places like Malaysia, they might be scared of governments coming after them for extra taxation or extra regulation being put upon single family offices in their country if the government sees a way to build their tax levels. So, I think these are things you should know about the single family office space. Another problem is that a lot of single family offices are trying to do more co-investing, club investing, direct investing. In other words, instead of just investing through private equity funds, hedge funds, mutual funds, ETFs, SMAs, etcetera, they want to buy companies. They want to buy a chain of 30 Pizza Huts. There is one family office right now. It’s $1 billion family and I’ve engaged with them to help them buy small businesses within their niche and basically acquire 10 different companies within the niche of manufacturing that they’re experts at already. So, I’m helping them do that and they need my help even though they have over a billion dollars because other single family offices don’t have websites, they don’t have business cards, they don’t talk to each other very much. It’s not a very formalized industry and everybody’s secretive. So, it’s hard to collaborate and share leads of businesses for sale ,share resources, go in and put their capital together to buy a business. And it’s hard to navigate the industry even if you are in the industry as a family office.

About the author

Richard Wilson