Welcome to the 4th edition of Off Market, Endeavor’s newsletter on real estate executive talent. You’ve watched this move at least once in the past two years. A CIO, a Head of Acquisitions, an SVP of Investments, or a fund CFO leaves a listed platform for a private sponsor, and the reason they give on the way out has nothing to do with the number on their W2.
Two things explain most of it. Carried interest reads differently to someone twelve years into a career than any equity grant does, and decision authority, which sponsors sell harder than they sell the economics, changes what the job feels like on a Tuesday afternoon.
You can answer both from inside a public structure. Five things close most of the distance.
TL;DR
Compensation isn’t what moves senior real estate leaders out of public REITs.
- Carry and co-invest change how an executive values a decade of work, and cash increases rarely close that distance.
- Private sponsors win on decision speed and mandate breadth as often as they win on economics.
- Permanent capital, scale, and a public track record are worth more than most REIT boards say out loud.
- Counteroffers arrive late, because anyone who took the second call has already priced the move.
Senior real estate leaders usually figure out the difference between a public REIT role and a private-capital offer in a single conversation. With private sponsors, they get a clearer line of sight to the upside, more say in the decisions, and a broader mandate they can actually own.
People often treat this as a compensation problem, but base salary is rarely what tips the scale. What senior investment and finance leaders are really weighing is how much authority they’ll have, how directly their work hits their own economics, and whether the next chapter of their career is already mapped out or still wide open.
REITs still have real advantages private sponsors can’t easily match: permanent capital, scale, liquidity, board exposure, and a public-company track record. Those things matter, when leaders can see how they connect to their role, their compensation, and their future inside the company.
This piece looks at why senior talent keeps leaving REITs for private capital, what those private sponsors are actually offering, and five practical ways public platforms can close the gap before someone else defines the opportunity first.
Carried Interest Changes the Math on a Ten Year Career
The decision gets made when the offer letter lands, and it gets made on one page. Your executive is weighing two ways of getting paid for work they already do well, and one of those two shows its math.
Your LTIP grant pays your Head of Acquisitions for the performance of the whole company, plus rate moves, plus whatever the market thinks of your property sector this quarter. A promote pays them for the four deals they sourced.
A $600 million equity fund that returns 1.7x produces a bit over $400 million of profit. Subtract an 8% preferred return accruing across four years and the promote pool still clears $40 million. The acquisitions lead who sourced half that portfolio knows their share and can name the buildings it came from.
The public-market discount makes the comparison sharper. S&P Global Market Intelligence put US REITs above $200 million of market cap at a median 19.3% discount to consensus NAV at the close of Q1 2026, with office, timber, and hotel trading widest. When your shares change hands below what your buildings are worth, the grant you handed out in February reads like payment in a currency your team can’t influence, no matter how well they underwrite. Three excellent acquisitions in a year your sector spends out of favor pay them the same as three mediocre ones.
Call it an attribution problem. Your best people want attribution they can actually see, clear enough that the connection between their work and their payday doesn’t require explanation. Attribution gets the first call returned. The rest of the decision happens over the following six weeks, and it turns on how the job runs.
Decision Authority Is the Second Half of the Pitch
Carry opens the conversation. Approval authority closes it, and that’s the piece your structure makes hardest to match.
The sponsor recruiting your CIO is selling four things alongside the economics.
- Speed to yes. An investment committee of three people clears a deal in a week, which wins the assets that reward speed.
- Mandate breadth. One seat covers the land buy, the JV structure, the development risk, and the vehicle it ends up in.
- Proximity to capital. They sit ten feet from the person who decides where the money goes, which shortens every conversation about a new strategy.
- A lighter calendar. Fewer earnings calls and disclosure cycles that never change an asset in the portfolio.
The economics still move, and the private side is pushing them through incentives more than salary. Sousou Partners and PERE found private real estate pay up about 4% at the median in 2026, with private equity acquisitions roles up 4.6% and CFO roles up 7%, while firms held base salary growth down and let bonuses and carried interest do the lifting. A candidate reading that sees a market where the fixed part of their pay moves a little and the variable part moves a lot.
You hold four cards no sponsor can match, and most of your team hears about them for the first time in an exit interview.
- Permanent capital. No fundraising calendar, and no clock forcing a sale into a soft bid market. Your asset management team can hold an asset through two bad years and get rewarded for that call, which the fund down the street can’t promise anyone.
- Scale that shows up on a resume. Someone running a $9 billion platform takes calls a $600 million fund principal never gets, from brokers, from lenders, and eventually from boards.
- Board and investor exposure. Presenting to a board and to public shareholders builds the credential that decides CEO searches ten years later.
- Compensation with a price on it. Their shares carry a market value every day and they can sell them. Carry pays at exit, which might be year seven, and might land below the model.
Those four hold up well in a side by side comparison. They only count if your people encounter them before an offer letter arrives.
Five Things That Hold Senior Investment Talent at a REIT
None of what follows requires taking the company private or rewriting your charter. Each one fits inside a listed structure, and each answers one of the two problems above.
1. Deal level economics wherever the structure allows. OP units and LTIP units tied to a named development or acquisition program give your team the attribution a company wide grant can’t. Co-invest with capital at risk does more, because people value what they paid for. We’d size these against the pipeline the person covers instead of against the whole company, which keeps the dilution conversation with your board manageable.
2. A portfolio with their name on it. An acquisitions lead who owns a sector or a region end to end, including the hold and sell recommendations, has something specific to point at in five years. A queue of assignments routed from above leaves nothing to point at, and nothing to describe in an interview somewhere else.
3. Authority thresholds stated in the interview. Someone who has to route every $40 million deal through the full board learns that in month two. Naming the threshold up front, along with what you’ll delegate and when, costs you the wrong candidates and keeps the right ones years longer.
4. A path that gets named before someone else names it. Ferguson Partners found that across the past three years, 43% of REIT CEO successions came from the CFO seat and 35% came from the COO seat, and nearly 84% of successors since 2014 came from a real estate background. The ladder at the top of a public company is short and visible, so anyone standing beside it needs to hear what their next two seats look like, in writing, before a sponsor describes those seats for them. Your Head of Acquisitions counts the rungs as well as you do.
5. A conversation that happens 18 months early. A counteroffer after a signed offer letter is a negotiation you already lost. Someone who took a second call has run the numbers, told their spouse, and pictured the office. Eighteen months buys you room to change the structure of what they’re paid, which takes a comp cycle and a board approval, and that beats matching a number under deadline.
If you’re hiring from a REIT into a private platform, your first year risk sits with capital. An executive who has never carried an LP relationship or worked through a fundraise has a learning curve there, and building that into the onboarding plan beats discovering it in month nine.
The move to private capital comes down to attribution and authority, and you can offer more of both than your compensation committee currently believes. The people worth keeping will say what they need long before a sponsor calls, provided someone asks while the answer is still cheap. That conversation is most of the retention plan. If you’re mapping a senior investments, development, or finance hire this year, we’re glad to talk.