Mark Quam came from the non-traded REIT world, so he knows how hard it is to make money in that space. But he also understands the downsides to the investment—high fees, limited liquidity, and little transparency. That’s why Quam decided to launch an alternative to non-traded REITs for retail investors—the Versus Capital Multi-Manager Real Estate Income Fund (VCMRX).
There are plenty of publicly traded REITs, REIT mutual funds, REIT ETFs, and mutual funds that invest in the real estate sector of the stock market. But this is the first mutual fund, to my knowledge, to invest in private equity real estate.
Quam, CEO of Versus Capital, designed the fund to combat some of the very issues creeping up in the non-traded REIT world. It’s structured as a continually offered closed-end fund, with quarterly liquidity, no lock ups, daily NAV and greater transparency. It’s also a fee-based product, with no up-front fees. It runs 95 basis points per year. Although private equity real estate funds typically have minimums of $5 million, Quam’s fund has a minimum of $10,000.
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(Read more from Staff Writer, Diana Britton on her blog, Yield of Dreams.)
