🛠️ BUILD OF THE WEEK

The families most GPs pitch made their money in real estate. The families writing the biggest checks made it everywhere else.

I posted a piece of this on LinkedIn and it took off. Thousands of comments, every time I shared a bigger slice.

The DMs were the real story. Operator after operator asking the same thing: "How did you find these? I've never heard of a single one."

That's the whole point. Here's the part that matters.

Most GPs are pitching the wrong family offices.

When a GP finally goes after family office money, they chase the obvious names. The families who made their fortune in real estate. Those families are operators themselves. They know every line of your model, they co-invest on their own terms, and they are the most competitive money you can possibly raise.

The families writing the biggest checks made their money somewhere else. Consumer goods. Telecom. Services. Manufacturing. They want real estate exposure, they have no interest in operating, and a lot of them partner with emerging managers on purpose. Most GPs have never heard of any of them.

Three I keep coming back to:

The family behind Hot Pockets sold to Nestlé for $2.6B. They now run a $2B+ portfolio buying multifamily and industrial across the Sun Belt.

A LeafFilter founder exited for $1.4B. His family office tracks 60+ real estate investments and runs an open co-invest program for operators.

A telecom family in Boca Raton deploys $1.5B and partners with emerging managers on purpose.

None of them show up on the lists everyone else is working. So I built my own.

How I built it (the Claude part)

No PitchBook. No Preqin. No $30K data subscription. I started with 60 offices. Then 200. Then 500. Then 750, with 22 columns on each one. Claude did the research, the enrichment, and the structuring. The same dataset a research analyst would spend a month assembling, built without paying for a single database seat.

By the numbers

What the data turned up:

The list: 750 family offices actively deploying into U.S. real estate → 22 columns each

Still buying office: 257 offices → the asset class everyone says is dead

The big checks: 95 offices → write $250M or more

Co-invest: when an office lists a preference → 9 out of 10 say yes

The depth per office: decision makers, LinkedIn profiles, emails, phone numbers, recent deals, check sizes, co-invest preferences

That co-invest number is the one to sit with. A list of names is noise. A list of families who write nine-figure checks, openly co-invest, and come with the decision maker's direct email is a raise waiting to happen.

📋 WHAT'S IN THE LIST

All 750 offices, tiered by data depth. Here's what each row gives you:

• The office and the family behind it, including how they made their money

• The decision maker, with LinkedIn profile, email, and phone where available

• Check size and recent real estate deals

• Co-invest preference, so you know who actually partners with operators before you ever reach out

• Asset-class focus, including the 257 still actively buying office

The one rule that ties it together: a waitlist of LPs who look like everyone else's LPs is not an edge. Knowing the exact 95 families who write $250M checks and say yes to co-invest, with a way to reach them, is.

That's the difference between the GPs who fill a raise from a shrinking circle and the ones building a pipeline nobody else has.

👉 Get the full list of 750 family offices

Want help turning this into a raise?

The list gets you the names. Landing them is a different problem.

When a family office says "send me the deal," you have a few days to look like a 10-person shop instead of an entrepreneur with a spreadsheet. That's the part I can help with, how to approach these offices, how to sequence the outreach, and how to set up an investor portal so that when one says yes, you can actually move.

Book a 30-minute call and I'll walk your raise end to end and show you exactly where it's leaking.

Get a free strategy session

The gap between operators who build a pipeline nobody else has and everyone else is widening fast.

Pick the side you want to be on.