Illiquid assets · room 09 of 13
Land, read properly.
We are independent transaction architects for private-market managers, appointed by one side and by one side only. The position arrives already found, by the manager, its bankers or its brokers. What is built here is the file it must survive: the reading that tells the manager what the ground will carry, and what it will not, before capital is committed.
Where complexity arises · Illiquid assets · thirteen rooms
01 · Provenance and price
Provenance
Provenance is a price variable, and not a courtesy.
Provenance is the first thing read on a position the manager brings to us, because it is an input to the appraisal rather than a matter of manners. A parcel the manager reached quietly, through its holder, with its papers, is a different asset from the same acreage after a year in circulation. Most of the difference is price, and all of it is negotiating posture.
The structural consequence sits in the instrument. Where a position has circulated, the site control instrument has to carry a timing risk and a competing-claim risk the appraisal cannot price on its own, and the diligence has to run the chain rather than the transaction. Where it has not, the same instrument can be drawn tighter and cheaper.
02 · The documentary threshold
The threshold
A position that clears the file, or no mandate.
Every position we accept a mandate on first clears a fixed documentary threshold of six heads: chain, records, possession, consents, charges and disputes, each read to an institutional standard. Where a position clears it, the appraisal and the structure are built on ground that will hold them. Where it does not, the manager is told before capital is committed, in writing, with the defects named and priced.
The six are not a checklist. Each head answers a different question about what a purchaser inherits, and the answers travel into different parts of the structure: the chain and the records into the title opinion the structure is drawn against, possession into the site control instrument, consents into the calendar that prices the financing, charges into the security package, and disputes into the residual-risk statement that a committee reads three years later.
03 · The single-mandate rule
Discipline, structural
One position, one mandate, one clock.
Every file here is built for one manager, under a dated mandate, with a defined end. No second mandate is taken on the same parcel, and nothing in the file is carried to another manager or shown to a party on the other side of the transaction. When the mandate ends the file closes, and everything in it stays with the manager: the reading, the threshold record, the defects named.
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