About this publication
Who writes Syndication Breakdown, what the method is, how it is funded, and the things it deliberately does not do.
Last revised
Syndication Breakdown is an independent publication about United States real estate syndication. It explains how the vehicles are assembled, how the distribution waterfall decides what reaches a passive investor, and what a sponsor looks like when you read the filings rather than the summary.
It is written for one reader in particular: somebody with a job, an accredited investor by income or net worth, who has been shown a deal and would like to understand the machinery before deciding anything. That reader is usually well served on the sales side of this industry and badly served on the mechanical side, which is the gap this site exists to fill.
The method, stated plainly¶
The method is narrow and I would rather describe it than dress it up.
I read primary documents. The private placement memorandum, the operating or limited partnership agreement, the subscription package, the Form D as filed on EDGAR, and the rule or code section the deal depends on. Then I rebuild the arithmetic in a spreadsheet until the waterfall described in the agreement and the waterfall in my model produce the same number. Where the two disagree, that disagreement is usually the article.
Everything factual on this site traces to a filing, a rule, or an agency publication, and each article lists the sources it relies on. Where a claim cannot be sourced that way, the sentence is rewritten without it. There are no invented market averages on this site, no "typical" fee percentages presented as fact, and no return statistics without a citation you can open.
What I am not¶
I am not a general partner, a sponsor, a broker-dealer, an attorney, a certified public accountant, or a registered investment adviser. I have never operated a syndication and I do not invest in the deals I write about. I hold no professional license in the United States and do not hold myself out as holding one.
That matters for two reasons. It means nothing here is advice, and it means the competence I am claiming is a specific and limited one: careful reading of documents and rules, and modeling of distribution arithmetic. I am not claiming operational experience, and where an article touches something only an operator would know, it says so instead of implying otherwise.
What this site does not do¶
- It does not recommend sponsors, funds or deals. No sponsor is named favorably or unfavorably. There is no directory, no ranking, no "vetted" list.
- It takes no money from sponsors. No sponsored posts, no affiliate links to platforms, no paid placement, no referral fees, and no arrangement under which coverage is exchanged for anything.
- It does not collect leads. There is no gated content, no investor list, and no form that passes your details to anyone.
- It does not give advice. Not investment, not legal, not tax. It explains mechanisms so that you can ask better questions of people who are qualified to answer them for your situation.
How it is funded¶
By display advertising, and that is the entire model. Ads are served through Google AdSense once the site is approved for it, they are labeled, and they are not chosen by me. No advertiser sees an article before it is published and no advertiser can influence one. The advertising disclosure sets this out in full, and the editorial policy explains the separation.
If the arrangement ever changes — an affiliate relationship, a sponsored series, anything at all — it will be disclosed on this page and on the disclosure page before it takes effect, not afterwards.
Corrections¶
Errors get fixed and the fix is visible. If an article is materially corrected, the change is noted with the date. If you find something wrong, tell me and include the source; a correction with a citation is acted on quickly.
Who publishes it¶
Nil Masferrer Jiménez, in Spain, writing about United States markets. Being outside the United States is worth stating, because it shapes what this publication can and cannot be. It cannot be a practitioner's account of running deals in Dallas. It can be a careful, disinterested reading of the documents and the rules — which, given how much of the American commentary on this subject is produced by people raising capital, is not nothing.