“Keep your friends close, and your West Coast capital raisers even closer.” Sun Tzu would have said that if he had run an institutional real estate distribution team.
A while ago I was speaking to a senior leader at a very large real estate investment firm. They had put a search on pause. Not because of budget, and not because of a change in strategy. They paused because they could not find the right person.
The brief was not unreasonable
They were looking for someone senior, institutional level, with West Coast coverage, based on the West Coast. They met interesting candidates along the way. None of them were a match.
They considered someone based in the Midwest or further east and decided against it. They wanted somebody closer to the LPs they were targeting. That is a defensible call, and it is one I hear more often than you might expect.
The problem is arithmetic.
The numbers behind it
From the Francis King map of more than 4,000 US real estate capital formation and investor relations professionals, here is how the two coasts compare.
- West Coast: 642
- East Coast: 1,491
The East Coast pool is roughly two and a third times the size. Put another way, for every senior institutional capital raiser on the West Coast there are more than two comparable people on the East Coast, before you filter for seniority, LP channel, sector experience or willingness to move.
Once you apply those filters to a base of 642, a stalled search stops being surprising and starts being predictable.
One caveat on my own data. We do not have mapped data on where institutional LP concentration actually sits, so I cannot demonstrate that coverage tracks capital. Logically it probably reflects it to some degree, but that is an assumption rather than a finding.
The pool is not just small, it is under pressure
The other thing worth flagging is direction. Tax burden and cost of living have been pushing high earners out of California for several years, and the data supports it.
IRS migration data for tax year 2023, reported in April 2026, shows California with a net loss of 13 billion dollars in adjusted gross income, and New York with a net loss of 10.7 billion dollars. Florida gained 20.7 billion dollars and Texas gained 5.3 billion dollars. In Florida’s case, filers earning 200,000 dollars or more accounted for around 82 percent of the net gain.
That is precisely the income band that senior capital raisers sit in. The pool is being drawn towards low tax states, and once someone has moved to Miami or Austin, persuading them back to San Francisco or Los Angeles requires a compensation package that most managers do not want to write.
This creates a specific problem for smaller GPs who offer modest base salaries with high bonus potential. That structure works when the cost of living is manageable and the candidate can absorb variability. In California it asks a lot more of the candidate than the same package asks in Dallas.
Competition heats up
Competition for this group is going to increase, and retention is going to become a talking point, because the market is turning.
PERE recorded 222.2 billion dollars of private real estate capital raised globally in 2025, up 29 percent on 2024 and the first annual increase since 2021. Hodes Weill and Cornell found institutions under allocated to real estate by 90 basis points with sentiment improving. Ferguson Partners reported that commercial real estate job postings on its board more than doubled between 2024 and 2025, with capital raising specialists named among the strategic hiring priorities. The 2026 NAREIM and Ferguson Partners Global Management Survey found 67 percent of firms expect to increase headcount this year.
On compensation, PERE’s 2026 study with Sousou Partners put median total compensation for capital raising managing directors at 950,000 dollars, with the top of the range at 2.3 million dollars, and median capital raising compensation up 4.25 percent year on year. The increases are coming through bonus and carry rather than base, which is exactly the structure that struggles hardest in high cost states.
Put those together. Commitments flowing back into real estate, GPs wanting to grow capital markets teams, and a West Coast pool of 642 people that is not growing.
Career opportunities
If you are a West Coast capital raiser, you are in a better position than you probably think. As the market improves and GPs look for local talent, you should have interesting options. It is worth being visible now rather than when you need a move.
If you are a GP running this search, the honest choice is between three things. Pay above your normal band for a genuinely scarce profile. Widen the brief to include someone remote from the LPs but strong on the relationships. Or grow someone into the seat, which is slower but a great deal cheaper than a search that stays paused for a year.
There is a fourth option that people rarely consider, which is to accept a hybrid location. Several of the most effective West Coast institutional relationships I know of are run from Denver, Phoenix or Austin by someone who flies out twice a month. Whether that works depends entirely on the LPs, but it is worth testing before you rule it out.
Consideration points
- Size the actual pool before you approve the search. A brief that filters a base of 642 down to nine people is a brief that needs changing, not a market that needs waiting out.
- If you are set on a local hire, move quickly. Competition for this group is increasing.
- If you are a candidate on the West Coast, the scarcity is your leverage. Use it while the cycle is going your way.
Francis King maps the US real estate capital raising and IR market to this level of detail because it is the only market we work in. If you want to know how deep the pool really is for a specific location, channel or seniority, message me privately and I will show you.