Elaine Misonzhnik | WealthManagement.com
With high-net-worth individuals and their financial advisors showing a growing appetite for alternative investments, real estate asset managers are starting to adopt their strategies to court those capital sources by building up their relationships with RIAs. For CIM Group the move from relying largely on institutional investors to incorporating individual investors started in earnest six years ago with its purchase of Cole Capital, an investment manager with $7.6 billion in assets at the time, including five non-listed REITs and established relationships with independent broker-dealers and RIAs.
While some of its efforts to connect with financial advisors were disrupted by the pandemic—nothing beats meeting with advisors face-to-face, according to Emily Vande Krol, principal at CIM and president of CCO Capital LLC, its registered broker-dealer—the firm has continued to build up its wealth channel outreach capabilities in recent years. It aims to eventually reach a 50/50 balance among its capital sources between institutional and high-net-worth/individual investors.
To get there, CIM has split its wealth-focused team into three groups so that each group can pursue relationships with a particular segment of the wealth management industry, including broker/dealers, wirehouses and RIAs. To add to that specialization, plans are underway to create a platform that will focus on tax-advantaged investment strategies for the private wealth universe.
Meanwhile, on the external front, Vand Krol noted the firm has a partnership with fintech platform CAIS, which today supports more than 32,000 advisors.
“We were involved with them as a company very early on in their launch as we were intrigued by the technology side of the business that they were building,” Vande Krol said. In addition, “We were a first mover with them to raise our hand and say, ‘Let us work alongside you, let us be your test run of different asset classes in the alternative space.’”
Today, the firm has a variety of products that are accessible to individual investors with strategies ranging from core to opportunistic, some with a minimum requirement of just a few thousand dollars, she noted. In particular, CIM is currently focusing on investment opportunities in real estate credit and in infrastructure, including energy renewables, which have been areas where CIM has “excelled in previously” and which tend to be popular investment strategies in this market environment.
WealthManagement.com talked to Vande Krol about how the firm has been growing its offerings for individual investors, how it works together with the RIA and financial advisor community and how it views its role in the alternatives space.
