Hey! Thanks for being here for Edition #2. You’re one of 59 subscribers, and I genuinely appreciate every single one of you.
My first deal didn't close because I was the smartest person in the room.
It closed because I trusted someone enough to partner with them, and gave up a significant fee to do it.
At the time, that stung. But a little of something big beats all of nothing.
The people who hold on too tight to the fees, the credit, the relationships, usually end up with empty pockets.
I always tell people that trust is hardest on the first deal. It gets easier after that.
Let's get into it.
Ten firms raised $68 billion to invest in real estate this year - roughly a third of the total capital raised across the entire global market. Two firms, Blackstone and Brookfield, accounted for 16% of all capital raised by the top 10. This week, I broke down what that concentration actually means for the market, for smaller managers, and for where the real opportunity still exists.
Watch the breakdown: Monopoly On Real Estate Capital Raising
What's crossing my desk and my conversations this week:
Data centres are still the dominant conversation across every lender I'm speaking to. This week, I connected with a structured finance and private credit firm operating across Dubai and London, with mandates spanning infrastructure, energy, commodities, and real estate across the GCC, SE Asia, Australasia, and Europe. Their previous deals closed include a $9.5B structured finance advisory on a Saudi mega-project and a $225M sustainable aviation fuel deal. The signal from our conversation: they are actively deploying into data centres right now. A firm with that track record and those institutional relationships moving into this space is worth paying attention to.
A Singapore-based family office with no disclosed lending ceiling is running a cash-against-cash structure - deploying up to 3x your liquidity as a credit facility, with no upfront or engagement fees. They accept cash, gold, or crypto as collateral. Minimum entry is $10M in liquidity. I hadn't seen this structure before. It exists - but like most of the best private capital, it's reserved for those who already have skin in the game.
Family offices continue to prioritise trust and operator quality over IRR projections in initial conversations. The numbers come second to downside protection, risk reversal, and exit strategies. That hasn't changed.
The messier the deal, the more interested certain capital gets. A growing cohort of lenders I’ve connected with are specifically chasing complexity, stress, and dislocation - and passing on clean, stabilised assets. If conventional lenders have turned something down, that's not necessarily the end of the road.
CalPERS - the largest US pension fund, managing over $600B in AUM - committed $2.95B in Q4 2025 alone. The single largest allocation was a $2B top-up co-investment with BlackRock-owned Global Infrastructure Partners. They committed $6.3B to real estate last year. Real assets now exceed $77B of their total portfolio. Private markets sit at 32% - and the board is pushing to increase that to 40%. This is a deliberate, long-term rotation into real assets, co-investments, and direct exposure to sectors like data centres and cold storage. How many other pension funds are making the same bet?
Because data centres are dominating every conversation I'm having right now, I'm putting together a curated shortlist of the private credit firms actively funding them: who they are, what they need to see, and how to get in front of them. More on that soon.
If you're raising capital, here's something most people get completely wrong: your deck.
Most decks I see open with 10–15 slides of market context before they ever tell the investor what they're actually being asked for. By the time you get to the number, the reader has already lost interest or formed an opinion without the full picture.
Anyone who invests a significant amount of capital into a deal will do their own research outside of the deck you present. A market synopsis can be valuable, but only later in the deck.
Here's the order that works best:
Lead with the ask. "We are raising $X for [asset/project] in [location], targeting [return]." Debt or equity - make that clear on slide one.
Then the sponsor. Track record, skin in the game, anchor investors if you have them.
Then the deal. Structure, location, downside protection, and exit.
Then the market. Once they know what you want and who you are, then give them the thesis.
Most decks have this completely backwards. The opportunity section is important. But it should reward attention, not demand it before the investor even knows what you want.
A snapshot of what's currently moving through Capital Arbitrage this month:
Note: For the best reading experience, open this on a desktop.
Deal | Asset Type | Geography | Structure | Size |
|---|---|---|---|---|
EU Workforce Housing | Brownfield | Netherlands | Debt/Equity | 400M |
UK Data Centre | Brownfield | UK | Debt | 65M |
Miami Luxury Residential | Greenfield | USA | Equity | 40M |
Biomass | Greenfield | USA | Debt/Equity | 865M |
Landbanking | Landbanking | Hong Kong | Debt/Equity | 40M |
This isn't the full pipeline - just a flavour of what's active. If you're an investor or lender active in any of these asset classes or geographies, reply to this email.
That's all for this week. See you next Friday.
— Jordon
P.S. I get 500,000+ monthly impressions on LinkedIn and a growing list of private capital decision-makers right here. If you'd like to get your company, fund, or raise in front of this audience, just reply to this email.