Case Study

The following is a question-and-answer conversation with Cason Beckham, CFA, who oversees Capital Markets for Waterloo Associates in Austin, TX.

Tell us a little bit about your company and your role at the company. 

Waterloo Associates is a boutique private real estate firm based in Austin, Texas, specializing in equity, credit, mezz/pref, and structured finance strategies across the Sun Belt region. We operate with a lean team of roughly a dozen professionals, many of whom wear multiple hats.

Over the past two years, the company has grown from approximately $100 million to approximately $400 million in AUM. We’re currently raising our third fund while also managing institutional SMAs. In my role, I focus on fundraising and distribution, working to expand brand awareness and visibility for our returns, which have been strong, but that only matters if potential investors can see that. Recognizing this, I started looking for a solution to help with creative marketing and distribution.

How did you settle on Nasdaq eVestment(TM) Omni for Private Funds as your solution?

I've known about Nasdaq eVestment since I worked on the allocating side of the business. I wasn't aware of the Omni product and services until I moved to the GP and fundraising side, and I found it compelling.

Coming from the public markets side, where database adoption is widespread, I recognized that the private side is a newer initiative. But with private markets growing rapidly and expected to continue expanding over the coming decades, it felt like a rising tide environment. If database adoption on the private side approaches anything like public market usage, it's an opportunity we want to be ahead of rather than playing catch-up.

Worst case, the consultants use the databases. So, at a minimum we’ll increase our visibility with them. 

What benefits stood out to you when you first learned about Omni?

Passive fundraising distribution that could complement the outbound efforts that consume most of my fundraising time.

We go to conferences, but they are time-consuming and often expensive, with many being outside of the budget for smaller firms.  It is unfortunate that many conferences price out the small, niche, boutique managers that LPs are often not exposed to. We must be scrappy and find ones that are much more bite-sized and affordable, and that can only scale so far because I can only visit so many cities in person throughout the course of the year.

We knew we needed to be in more databases to make it easier for investors to discover us, but admittedly, I didn't realize how many databases existed, each with different fields and requirements. While I had experience downloading data as an LP, on the GP side I had never submitted to databases before, so I didn’t know what was customary to upload.

I tried populating one myself before Omni, and it was a pull-your-hair-out experience. When I discovered there were a dozen or more databases to manage—all with unique formats—I realized it could easily become a full-time job.

With Omni, the process is streamlined. The Omni team consults me on what to upload and provides me with templates that serve as guideposts on what information I’m going to need. Once I have all my information gathered and give it to the Omni team, it quickly gets distributed to multiple databases.

One unintended benefit: gathering all our information for the Omni process has made our RFP application process significantly easier, because we’ve centralized most of our qualitative and quantitative data.

What outcomes have you seen?

In the first 90 days of starting with Omni, we've received two unsolicited inbound inquiries: one was from a consultant; one from an RIA.

We were introduced to the consultant at one of the Curated Opportunities events you hosted. The fact that Nasdaq eVestment is hosting events where we can meet with investors at no charge to GPs was a pleasant surprise, and that face-to-face meeting helped me rekindle a conversation with that particular consultant.

The RIA discovered our numbers in a database and reached out. As I’m sure any GP knows, inbound inquiries can be few and far between but are strong opportunities when they happen.

This is a long game—something you build over time. We're not even a year in with all our information on display. Regardless of performance in the first year, you need to think of it as a long game. You want to always have your brand out there, and there's probably a compounding effect over the years.

What’s surprised you about Omni?

In a few instances we asked to be in a database that Omni didn’t yet distribute to – Townsend was one, which is specific to real estate – and your team onboarded them at no additional charge.

We’ve also been surprised with how cost-effective it is for funds that are closed or in the books. We’ve been able to upload all three of our crystalized funds at a cost-effective rate.