Who buys for the REPE funds. 361 managers, 191 in four states, and a median of 14 people doing the investing.

Four states hold 191 of the 361 firms. New York alone has 80.

A manager that raises private funds for real estate in the US has to file Form ADV with the SEC. The filing gives its head office, its regulatory assets under management and the number of people who do investment work. We took the firms whose private funds are mostly real estate and that report $250 million or more, and counted 361 of them. Together they run 4,240 real estate funds, and the median firm manages $1.37 billion across all its strategies.

Where they sit is concentrated. New York has 80, California 51, Texas 31 and Florida 29: 191 firms, 53 % of the list. Pennsylvania has 18, Illinois 15 and Ohio 12. 17 firms have a head office outside the US or no country on file and are not on the map.

Tap a state to see how many firms it holds and how many people the typical one has on investment work. Switch the view to colour the map by the count or by the team size.

Under $1 billion the median firm has 6 to 10 people doing the investing.

The filing asks every adviser how many of its employees perform investment advisory functions, including research. For a real estate manager that is the people who source deals, underwrite them, manage the assets and report to investors, all counted together. A deal team is a part of that number, and we did not measure it.

The bars below group the 361 firms by assets. The median firm with $250 to 500 million reports 6 people. With $0.5 to 1 billion it is 10. A firm needs $1 to 2.5 billion before the median reaches 15, and the group of $25 billion and above is the only one with a median above 100.

Across all 361 firms the median is 14. 125 firms, 35 %, report 10 people or fewer, and 229, 63 %, report 20 or fewer.

Read the number as a ceiling for the people who look at a deal. Every person counted also has funds to run, investors to report to and assets to manage, and the firms with a management company inside report that staff on other lines of the filing, which we did not add. How we read the number

Two firms in three have 20 people or fewer doing the investing.

Each dot below is one firm. Across is its assets under management on a log scale, up is the number of people doing investment work. The cloud rises to the right, as it should, but it is wide: among the 20 firms with $0.9 to 1.1 billion, the team runs from 3 people to 69.

Pick a team size to see what a firm in that group looks like. The 59 firms with 5 or fewer manage a median of $487 million. The 66 firms with 6 to 10 manage $725 million. The 54 firms with 51 or more manage $16.8 billion.

Most of the buyers in this market are in the first three groups: 229 firms with up to 20 people. They are the ones deciding on an offering memorandum with a handful of colleagues.

This is where the work piles up. Each deal that arrives is a package: an offering memorandum, a rent roll, an operating statement. Someone has to read it against the market and decide in a few lines whether it deserves the team’s week. With 6 to 10 people, that reading competes with everything else the firm does.

What to do with this

If you run acquisitions at one of these firms, the practical question is where the first read of a deal comes from. At a team of 6 to 10, the answer is usually the same few people who are also closing the last deal.

Titleman reads the offering memorandum, rent roll and operating statement of a commercial property and returns the issues and the questions for the seller, with the figures tied to their pages. It does not replace the investment committee, an appraisal, or your lender’s diligence; it gives the team a first read of every deal that arrives, so the week goes to the deals that deserve it.