Is investing in real estate syndication a good idea?
October 16, 2022
From what I’ve seen so far, there are following problems:
If I choose a single deal, the risk is high because we’ll depend on the expertise of a small number of people. If a fund of funds, asset management fees will be in the range of 2-3% (or more), and that’s high.
Even in the latter case, the risk is fairly high.
If you ask someone, they’ll embellish the track record they show you. However, experts have a track record of getting it wrong.
For e.g., I once invested in actively-managed mutual funds of Morgan Stanley. The experts should’ve had all the good information on the market, still they performed worse than index funds.
This is my biggest gripe: I am hesitant to trust a small number of experts. No matter what they say, it’s difficult to consistently predict the future.
Tax returns will be complicated.
I don’t use a CPA but if I were to hire one just because of this investment, that’ll be 2-3k extra expenses per year. For an investment of 100k, that’s another 2-3%.
A fund or fund of fund will potentially invest in multiple states, so I’ll definitely need a CPA. Otherwise, I’d have to spend a lot of time learning more tax code or risk making mistakes.
Conclusion:
I had a new idea, I explored it and decided to not go with it. That’s a decent outcome too - I don’t have to put my money into every new idea.
As far as diversification goes, stocks, bonds and our primary residence should provide plenty. (For instance, we are hardly invested into bonds and I am going to fix that in the near future.)
I’ve seen Reddit posts of people claiming to have ~10MM just in S&P - if so, I am clearly doing better than that but still have a long way to go.
One future improvement - once we run out of our currently harvested tax losses - could be direct indexing.