The Rise of Single-Family Offices

For the past several years, the rise of single-family offices has been one of the fastest-growing trends in asset management for the wealthy. According to Forbes, single-family offices are both growing in number and also in terms of how much wealth individual offices manage on behalf of their clients. There are several reasons behind this development: First, the ranks of the wealthy are expanding, which means there is simply more capital to manage, and these wealthy families enjoy the discretion, direct relationships, and personalized services that are possible through a single-family office.

“Single-family offices are very appealing because they can provide tight oversight of the professionals employed, and they often provide expanded access to business opportunities and economies of scale,” Richard Flynn, managing principal of the family office practice at Rothstein Kass PC, explained to Forbes. “Single-family offices can also be instrumental in ensuring confidentiality for the family.”

While there are some common characteristics to single-family offices, one of the advantages is that its organization and structure can be customized to meet the needs and interests of the family that it serves. This means that there are a wide range of options available at single-family offices, but at the same time, this makes it hard to define what constitutes a single-family office and how to count how many exist.

For professionals in the private equity sphere, Forbes also traces how single-family offices have been increasingly turning to private equity as well as hedge funds for recruitment in order to hire successful proven investors. Private equity professionals are often excited to join these offices, Forbes notes, because families are often more inclined to look at the long-term than other funds and because many single-family offices adopt participatory compensation models. Under such a compensation plan, wealth managers have a stake in the family’s overall portfolio or particular investments, which means they also get to enjoy in the success of the family’s investments.

“In our compensation studies, what we’ve found very interesting about the participatory compensation model is that while some investment professionals can earn many millions of dollars in a year others can earn nothing at all,” Usha Bhate, executive director of Institutional Investor, told Forbes. “The participatory compensation model usually has a number of failsafe mechanisms built in. For example, payouts, while guaranteed, tend to be stretched over a number of years, ensuring the investment professionals are not taking undue risks.”