Wanting to avoid a revolving door? If you are a real estate capital raiser interviewing for a new role, are you doing your due diligence on past hires to make sure you will actually have the time to make an impact?
It has clearly been tough to raise equity for real estate over the last few years, and there are plenty of examples of firms letting people go because they had not raised money in the first six to eight months. Both sides walk in with the best intentions. So what can be done to reduce the risk?
The arithmetic does not work
Before the questions, the maths.
Preqin’s Global Report on real estate in 2026 found that in 2025 the average private real estate fund took seven months to reach a first close and 31 months to reach a final close, both all time highs. PERE’s full year 2025 report puts the average time to close at 25 months, up from 15 months in 2020.
A new capital raiser typically arrives, spends the first weeks on product, terms, track record and internal relationships, then starts reaching out. If the market average from launch to first close is seven months, and that assumes an established manager with existing relationships, judging a new hire at month six is judging them before the process they were hired to run has had time to produce anything.
That does not mean nothing should be measurable at six months. It means the measurable things are pipeline, meeting quality and how far specific LPs have moved through their own process, not dollars in the door.
The market context is improving, which cuts both ways
The environment is better than it was. PERE recorded 222.2 billion dollars raised globally in 2025, up 29 percent on 2024 and the first annual increase since 2021. Ferguson Partners found that commercial real estate job postings on its board more than doubled from 642 to 1,480, with finance and transaction roles nearly tripling, and named capital raising specialists as a strategic hiring focus.
At the same time, the 2026 NAREIM and Ferguson Partners Global Management Survey of 79 real estate managers showed just how volatile headcount has been. Median headcount growth was flat in 2025, with 48 percent of firms adding employees and 41 percent reducing them. Looking forward, 67 percent expect to increase headcount in 2026.
So hiring is picking up, but the recent past includes a lot of firms cutting. That is the revolving door in the data.
Questions for the candidate to ask
These are open questions, they are easy to ask, and the answers are revealing.
- How many sales people have you hired in the last five years?
- How long were they in the seat for?
- What were the reasons they left?
- Where LPs have gone through due diligence and then passed, what was behind that?
That last question is the one people skip and it is often the most useful. If the answer is consistently about terms, track record or the composition of the team, you are being told what your first year is going to look like.
Also take the time to understand what will make a raise difficult in the first twelve months. Track record and vintage performance. Terms against the market. Timing relative to the LP pacing cycle. The operational set up and whether the firm can actually survive institutional operational due diligence. Preqin found that 55 percent of North America focused funds from 2011 to 2020 vintages fell short of their target, so falling short is not unusual, and understanding why it might happen here is not pessimism.
The other side: what GPs should ask for
If you are the GP, you also want to be hiring someone for the long term who can make an impact. The most useful thing you can ask a candidate to produce, before you make an offer, is a road map for the first twelve months:
- Who they will approach, by name where they can
- Their strategy for widening exposure to names outside their existing network
- What support they need from you, the investment team and marketing
- Milestones, and what action is required if those milestones are not hit
That final point is the one that matters most. A road map with no failure branch is a wish list. A road map that says “if we have not had three second meetings with institutional LPs by month five, here is what we change” is a working document.
Use the road map after the hire
I have more to offer on this and I am happy to share guides for any real estate GP looking to hire. But if you are comfortable with the road map at offer stage, the best thing you can do is keep using it. Make it the agenda for your one to ones.
It does three things. It gives the new hire a fair basis for being assessed, which is the single biggest protection against the revolving door. It gives you early visibility of problems that are about the product rather than the person. And it forces both sides to keep revising the plan as the market moves rather than defending a document written in month zero.
Practical takeaways
For candidates:
- Ask the four questions above in the second or third conversation, not the first.
- Ask to speak to someone who has done the job at the firm, current or former.
- Agree in writing what success looks like at three, six and twelve months, and make sure at least the first two are activity based.
For GPs:
- Ask for a twelve month road map before you make an offer, and treat it as a working document afterwards.
- Be honest in interview about what has made previous hires fail. Candidates find out anyway, and the ones worth hiring respect the honesty.
- Review the road map monthly. Change it when the market changes.
An expensive hire that does not work costs a lot more than the salary. Most of the time the fix is not a better candidate, it is a clearer agreement.
Real estate capital raising search is the only thing Francis King does, and the revolving door is a problem we see from both directions. If you want the twelve month road map framework or a view on a mandate, message me privately.