Realberry's latest guest byline, published by Physician on FIRE, draws a parallel between the discipline physicians bring to medicine and the discipline a real estate sponsor should bring to underwriting a deal. The piece argues that passive investors are typically asked to trust a sponsor's evaluation process without ever seeing it, and points to Realberry's own record over 35 years as an example of what real selectivity looks like: more than 100 opportunities reviewed in a typical year, roughly 40 clearing an initial screen, around 10 receiving an offer, and only two or three actually closing.

The article walks through what separates a substantive evaluation process from a performed one. It starts with focus — whether a sponsor operates in a defined lane of asset types and markets they understand at a granular level, versus claiming to be opportunistic everywhere. From there it moves into market conviction, arguing that credible submarket knowledge means understanding demand drivers, supply barriers, and micro-location dynamics well enough to explain what happens if rents come in flat. Underwriting discipline is framed the same way: a deal is only as sound as its downside case, with construction costs, tax and insurance assumptions, and exit cap rates as the places where optimism tends to hide. Site and entitlement risk round out the diligence side, particularly for deals with a co-sponsor, whose track record and capital commitment deserve the same scrutiny as the deal itself.

Investor fit gets equal weight — the piece contends that a disciplined sponsor considers hold period, liquidity needs, and physician-specific tax and K-1 considerations before ever presenting an opportunity, rather than leaving those questions for the subscription documents. Running through all of it is the idea that the value of a process shows up in the deals a sponsor turns down, not the ones it closes, and that real alignment means the sponsor's own capital sits in the deal on the same terms as outside investors, tested across full market cycles rather than a single favorable stretch.

The piece closes with a short set of questions investors can bring to any sponsor — how many deals were reviewed and passed on, what happens to returns if rents stay flat, how the hold period could change, and whether the sponsor co-invests in every deal — framing them as a way to test whether a sponsor's process is real without needing a background in commercial real estate.

Read the full article in Physician on FIRE→