Most successful families have accumulated a portion (or a majority) of their wealth through real estate acquisition, management, and dissolution. Though not without risk, a properly structured real estate portfolio can be a powerful tool for leveraging dollars into large acquisitions for future gains or tax advantaged income strategies. Are you effectively protecting, managing, and growing your real estate holdings?
The Problems
- Most financial advisors avoid managing or including real estate in your overall plan design. While many will incorporate holdings for your net worth calculation, few will provide specific recommendations for your real estate.
- Most real estate professionals are well trained in the nuances of a real estate transaction, but very few have experience in structuring, evaluating, or managing large real estate portfolios. This is to no fault of theirs; it’s not what they’re hired to do.
- There are very few tools available to real estate owners to help evaluate their holdings and better understand the strengths and gaps in their portfolios.
- In today’s challenging credit and highly litigious society, we must be particularly careful in understanding the risk in our real estate portfolios.
- As most have finally come to accept, real estate values do not always go up!
The Solution – Crosswind Real Estate Design
Our team of professionals views your real estate as a core component in your overall wealth. How your real estate fits in and correlates with your other liquid and illiquid holdings is of key importance. We evaluate your real estate in the context of your overall plan taking the following into consideration:
- Vision, Values, and Goals: What is the purpose for the real estate you own? Purely an investment tool? If so, for growth? For income? Do you own property for lifestyle enhancement? A beach house? A ski cottage in the mountains? Is it important that these stay in the family? It all begins with an understanding of the pieces in the jigsaw puzzle and how they’ll go together.
- Protection: Asset protection is of major concern to us and our clients. You’ve worked hard to get where you are, let’s ensure you don’t go backward. How do you hold title to your real estate? What liability protection do you have?
- Navigation and Management: Owning direct real estate involves ongoing decision making and course correction. How properties are financed, whether they’re rented, having a target valuation for liquidation, exchanges versus direct sales or installment sales; all of these ought to be taken into consideration. Many investors also fail to recognize the importance of diversification of real estate holdings both geographic and in property type. Do you own retail commercial property? Multi-family? Self storage? Single family?
- Transfer: Proper transfer of real estate assets to heirs can be a form of rocket science. Qualified financial, tax, and legal advice are critical in making sure you take advantage of opportunities for efficiency. Illiquid assets such as real estate are often neglected in estate planning and asset transfer strategies, and have proven to be a costly mistake.
- Legacy: For some, there’s more to what you leave behind than merely assets and “stuff.” In leaving your Legacy, your Purpose, your Values, real estate can be a powerful tool with much flexibility. Here again, qualified advice from your accountant, your attorney, and of course our team of advisors is highly recommended.
If you’ve accumulated wealth through the use of real estate, you deserve to work with a team that understands real estate. Real estate is not the enemy; find out how we can help.
