Raising Capital for Multifamily: Where to Actually Find LPs

Raising capital for multifamily does not start at a $3,200 real estate conference. It starts in rooms where the money gathered for some other reason, and in the free networking that happens around institutional events you never buy a ticket to.

Sandra Arimie of Arimie Capital underwrites three to nine multifamily deals a week and raises from a mix of domestic LPs and foreign preferred equity funds. Her two best capital relationships came from a missed flight and from skipping a conference she was standing next to.

Below: where she actually finds investors, what preferred equity from overseas funds costs and demands, the underwriting thresholds that decide whether a deal is fundable before you pitch it, and which markets currently price where her numbers land.

From the Real Estate Pros Show

This article draws on an interview with Sandra Arimie of Arimie Capital on the Real Estate Pros Show, hosted by Dylan Silver.

Why Paid Real Estate Events Are the Worst Place to Raise Capital

A week-long real estate conference at $3,200 puts you in a room where almost everyone is raising. You are competing for attention from people who are themselves looking for checks.

Arimie’s rule is blunt: go where nobody else goes, and go where the money already is. Yacht conventions. Jet conventions. Car shows. Galas. Art galleries. Charity luncheons where family offices show up for reasons that have nothing to do with multifamily.

The person you meet at a boat show is probably not looking for a real estate deal that day. That is the point. This is relationship work, and even if they never write a check, they may know several people who will. The conversion path is two steps long instead of one, but the room is not saturated with other sponsors.

There is a real caveat, and she is direct about it. These rooms do not want to talk about money. They want to talk about everything else. If the only thing you bring to a conversation at a gala is your deal deck, you will be forgettable within ninety seconds.

That is why she ties capital raising to being genuinely worldly — 53 countries’ worth, in her case. You do not need the passport stamps. You need to be someone interesting enough that a person with capital wants a second conversation. As she puts it, if you can’t travel right now, you can still become worldly through your laptop, and the standard you are aiming at is simply being someone good to be around.

There is also a cost logic here: you will not find multi-millionaires at a $30 event. Be near the expensive rooms even when you are not paying to be inside them.

Working Institutional Conferences Without Paying for the Conference

NMHC — the National Multifamily Housing Council annual meeting — is where the major brokers gather once a year. For a syndicator, that is the single densest concentration of broker relationships available.

Arimie does not buy the ticket. The conference itself runs roughly $2,000 and she skips it entirely, paying only hotel, food and travel. She goes for the networking parties, which are free, and for the broker meetings she schedules around the event. The deal flow comes from the meetings, not the sessions.

The practical sequence is simple enough to copy:

• Pick the institutional conference your brokers attend and book travel, not registration.
• Start calling brokers weeks ahead and set meetings for those dates while they are already in the city.
• Work the open networking events in the evenings.

One observation worth sitting with: she has walked into networking parties of 70 to 100 people and been the only woman there. Her read is that this is leverage, not a barrier. Commercial attracts analytical, numbers-first people and has stayed male-dominated, which means being memorable costs her nothing. Her own path into commercial came from the same instinct — her undergraduate degree is in biochemistry, and she preferred an asset class where the numbers decide rather than which side of the street a house sits on.

The broader lesson applies regardless: proximity to institutional capital is cheaper than the conference industry wants you to believe. The ticket buys you sessions. The hotel bill buys you the hallway.

Go where nobody else goes. Go where the money is. Those people are not necessarily looking for a real estate deal there, but this is a relationship building world — and even if that person is not going to invest, maybe they know several people that are.

— Sandra Arimie, Arimie Capital

Preferred Equity: What It Costs and What It Demands of Your Deal

Preferred equity is Arimie’s favorite capital source when the deal supports it — and the second half of that sentence is doing real work.

Her preferred equity contact manages two fund accounts out of Indonesia and Japan. The constraints are hard:

• $1 million minimum investment. They want to deploy in size, not in slices.
• That minimum forces deal size up. She is looking at 100 to 150 units to accommodate it. A 30-unit deal simply cannot absorb the check.
• A 12% required return. Her words: that 12% can either kill the deal or work beautifully, depending entirely on how you underwrote it.

Underwrite the pref before you pursue it. If you take a deal to a fund like this without having modeled a 12% preferred position sitting ahead of your common equity, you will find out the hard way whether anything is left for the LPs below it — or for you.

Why foreign money wants American multifamily at all comes down to cash flow. Arimie travels to Europe regularly and the pattern she hears from money managers there is consistent: they love the American housing market because the cash-flow returns are not replicable in their home markets. She has not found anything close anywhere else in the world.

For a sponsor, that means the demand side is real, but the entry bar is a deal of institutional size with conservative numbers. If your pipeline is 20 to 50 units, pref equity from an overseas fund is not your capital source yet. Build the domestic LP base first and grow into it.

Underwriting Before You Raise: The Thresholds That Decide Whether a Deal Is Fundable

Arimie underwrites three to nine multifamily deals a week, sometimes more. That volume is what produces her pricing read, and it gives her a fast filter.

The pencil test. If a deal returns above a 15% IRR, the price is workable for a syndication. If it doesn’t pencil, the asking price is still too high — and she moves on rather than torturing the model. The broker and the seller only have to think about getting the property off their hands. She has to think about everything after closing.

The stress test. On a Texas deal she is currently working, the question she ran was: if rents do not increase for three years, does this still work? It does. That is why it is still alive. Nobody knows where the next two years go, so the deal should not require a specific outcome.

The pro-forma trap. On one deal she underwrote using the seller’s actual NOI and cap rate and came in $10 million below ask. When she asked where their number came from, the answer was the pro-forma NOI. Her response: that’s not real numbers. Some sellers are still anchored to the 2022–2023 cycle and pricing to a performance the building has never delivered.

The deeper point is about appreciation. Betting on equity growth and inflation to carry a deal — buying with debt the current cash flow cannot support and hoping the exit saves you — is a choice she would question with your own money and will not make with someone else’s. Hopes and dreams are great, she says, but you don’t base investor returns on them.

Market Reality Check: Where Pricing Supports a Raise Right Now

As of the recording, Arimie’s read from weekly underwriting is that the shift toward a buyer’s market is real but uneven.

• Los Angeles and Texas: moved toward a buyer’s market.
• Texas outside Dallas and Austin: priced more correctly, and the cash flow is there.
• Michigan/Detroit and Kentucky: showing numbers that work.
• The Carolinas and Tennessee: still $1–2 million above where her underwriting lands. The Carolinas in particular are going mainstream and sellers know they can price higher.

Her note on the Carolinas for single-family: treat it as a cash-flow market, not an appreciation market. If cash flow is your strategy, fine. If you are underwriting for appreciation, it is not going to show up.

Los Angeles is the exception she will name on appreciation. The county is hemmed in by mountains and ocean, so it cannot sprawl the way Texas can, and seismic risk limits how far it builds vertically. Constrained supply with persistent demand is the one setup where she thinks appreciation is reasonable to expect.

She still will not syndicate multifamily there, despite living in LA. The reason is regulatory fragmentation: roughly 188 cities inside Los Angeles County, each with its own rules. West Hollywood effectively blocks rent increases; Culver City, under ten miles away, operates under a different set. For a value-add, market-rate-rent strategy, that patchwork is fatal. Orange County is meaningfully more landlord-friendly, but California remains a tenant-friendly state overall. She would happily own a property where she lives. She does business elsewhere.

What Investors Actually Want — and Why Asking Beats Pitching

Most LPs cannot tell you what they want. They can tell you a number they heard somewhere.

On a recent investor call, the prospect told Arimie he wanted $100,000 a year and planned to get there with 15 out-of-state properties in Indianapolis, managed from Los Angeles. Instead of pitching, she asked questions:

• Why $100,000? Where did that number come from?
• What does that money actually build for you?
• How much time do you want to spend producing it?
• Do you want the lifestyle of managing 15 doors from another state, or do you want someone else running it and sending you a distribution?

His answer was that he didn’t know, and they scheduled a second call. That is a better outcome than a yes to the wrong product.

Her framing is that no asset class is better than another — that’s why so many exist. Each one is correct for someone depending on how much responsibility they want to carry. Match the investor to the structure rather than selling the structure you happen to have.

The questioning skill comes from six years in sales, plus a habit of getting to the heart of a conversation quickly because, as she describes it, you only have a few minutes with the stranger next to you on a bus in some random place.

One uncomfortable truth she adds: she knows someone from medical sales who became a syndicator, knew essentially nothing about multifamily, and raised millions purely on vibe. For GPs, that is a reminder that likeability moves money. For LPs, it is a reminder to ask the sponsor the same hard questions she asks her investors.

Frequently asked questions

What return does preferred equity capital typically require, and how big does the deal need to be?

The foreign fund relationship Sandra Arimie works with requires a 12% return and invests a $1 million minimum per deal. That minimum check size is what sets the deal size — she targets 100 to 150 units to accommodate it, and notes that a 30-unit property simply cannot work with that capital.

Terms vary by source, so treat these as one real example rather than a market standard. The operational point stands regardless: model the preferred return into your underwriting before you approach the capital, because a 12% pref sitting ahead of common equity either kills the deal or works beautifully depending on how the rest of the numbers were built.

Is it worth paying for a multifamily conference ticket, or just attending the networking around it?

Arimie attends NMHC every January without buying the conference ticket, which runs around $2,000. She pays for hotel, food and travel, attends the free networking parties, and books broker meetings around the event — because the broker relationships, not the sessions, are what she is there for.

If your goal is deal flow and capital relationships rather than education, the hallway and the evening events do most of the work. Start calling brokers weeks in advance to get on their calendar while they are already in the city.

How do you stress test a multifamily deal before taking it to investors?

Run the model with rents flat. On a Texas deal she is evaluating, Arimie’s test was whether the deal still works if she does not raise rents for three years. It does, which is why it survived her screen.

Pair that with a return threshold. Her pencil test is a 15% IRR — above that, the price supports a syndication; below it, the seller is still priced too high. If the deal only clears the bar once you add appreciation and inflation assumptions, you are betting other people’s money on an outcome nobody can forecast.

Why do some sellers’ asking prices still not pencil, and how do you spot pro-forma pricing?

Because the price is built on projected performance rather than what the building currently produces. Arimie underwrote one deal using the seller’s actual NOI and cap rate and came in $10 million under the ask. When she asked where the number came from, the answer was the pro-forma NOI.

The tell is a gap that can only be closed by assumed rent growth, assumed occupancy, or assumed expense cuts that have not happened yet. Her read is that some sellers remain anchored to the 2022–2023 cycle and have not repriced to where the market actually is.

Why avoid syndicating multifamily in Los Angeles even if you live there?

Regulatory fragmentation. Los Angeles County contains roughly 188 cities, each with its own rent rules. West Hollywood makes raising rents nearly impossible; Culver City, under ten miles away, operates under a different framework. For a value-add strategy that depends on moving units to market rent, that patchwork is a serious constraint, and California is a tenant-friendly state overall.

Arimie lives in LA, would happily own a property there, and does her business elsewhere. She does credit LA with genuine appreciation potential — mountains, ocean and earthquake risk limit both sprawl and vertical building — which is why she sees it as a single-family appreciation play rather than a multifamily syndication market.

The bottom line

Before you go looking for capital, run the deal through the thresholds that capital will apply: 15% IRR or better, and still viable with flat rents for three years. A deal that clears both is fundable from a dozen directions; a deal that doesn’t will not be rescued by a better pitch or a nicer room.