Chile is raising the alternatives limit for its riskiest pension fund category, and the direction of travel is set through to 2027. That is a good moment to look at what LATAM capital raising coverage actually looks like inside US real estate, because the talent map is a lot narrower than the opportunity.
This is useful if you are a GP looking to expand LATAM coverage, or thinking about hiring someone to help you do it.
The regulatory tailwind is real
Chile’s central bank has been raising the ceiling on alternative assets for AFP Fund A in steps, moving from 17 percent towards a statutory maximum of 20 percent by August 2027, according to analysis of the region’s pension systems published by Funds Society in July 2026 drawing on AIOS member data.
The broader regional picture supports the point. That same study found LATAM pension assets grew from roughly 631 billion dollars in 2020 to around 840 billion dollars by June 2025, a compound annual growth rate of 6.6 percent. Allocations to alternatives grew faster still, with Chile compounding at roughly 61 percent a year over that period and Mexico at 17 percent. Mexico now holds around 16.5 billion dollars in real estate alternatives, alongside 22 billion dollars in private equity.
The detail that matters most for US GPs is the international one. Chile, Colombia and Peru invest close to half of their pension assets with foreign issuers. Mexico remains far more domestically focused. If you are marketing a US real estate strategy, the Andean systems are structurally more available to you than the Mexican one.
How many people cover this market
Here is where the Francis King data comes in. All the figures that follow come from our own map of more than 4,000 US real estate capital formation and investor relations professionals.
We are tracking 46 people with a primary focus on the LATAM markets.
There are a further 33 people who originate from a LATAM country. From experience a good percentage of those carry some LATAM coverage, but they are not included in the numbers below, so treat 46 as the conservative figure and the true pool as somewhat larger.
Either way, this is a small community. For a market with close to a trillion dollars of pension assets and a rising alternatives ceiling, 46 dedicated professionals across the entire US real estate industry is a thin layer.
Where they are
- 37 percent in New York, where the large platforms run LATAM coverage from head office
- 35 percent in Florida, widely seen as the cross section between the US and LATAM markets
- The remainder lean towards the southern states, with California and Texas most represented and the rest scattered
The New York and Florida split is the interesting part. Two very different models sit behind it. New York is head office coverage bolted onto a global distribution function. Florida is proximity, time zone and community. If you are hiring, you are effectively choosing between those two models before you have met a single candidate.
AUM size of the firms they sit in
The numbers show that specialist and boutique operators carve out a real strategy to target LATAM LPs, while bigger funds tend to run a specialist person or small team working alongside a US focused group, with the benefit of a wider product suite to take into the market.
- Up to 1 billion dollars: 33 percent
- 1 to 10 billion dollars: 30 percent
- 10 to 30 billion dollars: 9 percent
- 30 to 80 billion dollars: 9 percent
- 80 billion dollars and above: 19 percent
Nearly two thirds sit in firms under 10 billion dollars. That is unusual for a specialist international coverage function and it tells you something. Smaller managers are not treating LATAM as an afterthought, they are treating it as a route to LPs who are less crowded than the domestic institutional base.
Seniority
The data shows that the people hired to expand LP coverage are senior hires, coming in with a rolodex already in place. For smaller firms they are often the only capital raiser in the business. Even in bigger GPs, these teams are relatively small.
- Head of function, MD or Partner: 45 percent
- VP, Director or Manager: 48 percent
- Associate or Analyst: 7 percent
Only 7 percent at the junior end is striking. There is almost no bench being built here. If you want LATAM coverage you are buying it, not growing it, and that has obvious implications for both cost and availability.
LP coverage
This is drawn from those who disclose their coverage, and the categories overlap.
- HNWI: 46 percent
- Institutional: 43 percent
- Family offices: 37 percent
- RIAs: 22 percent
- Broker dealers: 11 percent
The high net worth and family office weighting is worth sitting with. LATAM coverage in US real estate is not primarily a pension fund business today, whatever the regulatory headlines say. It is heavily private wealth. Anyone building a strategy around the AFP limit increases alone should understand that most of the existing talent pool has been calling on families and single family offices, not Santiago pension committees.
What this means if you are hiring
- Decide which LP channel you are actually going after. Institutional pension coverage and private wealth coverage in LATAM are different networks and mostly different people.
- Accept that the pool is senior and small. There is no realistic path to hiring a junior and developing them into this in the near term.
- Look at the 33 people with LATAM origin who are not currently in dedicated coverage roles. That is where the untapped capacity sits.
- Be clear about location before you start. New York and Florida attract different profiles and the choice signals which model you are running.
- Match the regulatory timeline. If you are building for the August 2027 ceiling, you need coverage in place well before it.
Francis King maps the US real estate capital formation and IR market in this level of detail because it is the only market we recruit in. If you want to see how the LATAM segment breaks down against a specific mandate or location, email me at j.reeves@francis-king.com and I will walk you through it.