The Procopio Companies

Q. What were you looking for in a fundraising platform?

We looked at a bunch of different platforms, part of what we wanted to understand was how the investment is made. There's a variety of different platforms out there, some aggregate into a fund and invest at a fund level, that becomes very institutional, that wasn't what we were looking for. We have access to that capital already.

Others keep the investor on the platform 100% so there's no ability to really communicate with that investor off platform. That's a challenge for us, we have our own portal, we have our own systems in place for how we handle investor relations. What we liked about RealCrowd was it was a very open, transparent platform. What we found really attractive was that immediate connection with the investor. We have full access to the investor. We can deal with them, one-on-one we're not kind of behind the firewall of the online platform with how we interact with that investor.

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Q. Was there anything you were unsure or hesitant about with listing a deal online?

The things we were concerned about is look, if we go out and syndicate a deal online to a bunch of people that are putting $25,000 in, frankly, those are oftentimes the neediest customers, the neediest investors.

A lot of times people will give us a million dollars and we never hear from them again until we exit the deal, and somebody gives us $25,000 and we hear from them every week. We were really worried about that. We were worried about the quality of investor we're going to get.

‍What's their understanding of real estate as an investment.

What's their understanding of frankly, a high risk, ground up development real estate?

We're not in these other value, add cash flowing markets. How are the investors going to respond to that?

Are we going to get buried in requests and buried with calls and emails and stuff like that?

Look, you'll always have that to some extent, but what we found in our experience is those fears were relatively unfounded. It's a sophisticated investor base. We found that some of those investors that are giving us the $25,000, they're just testing the waters and they're perfectly capable of giving us $500,000 check.

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Q. Do you have any tips for sponsors looking to list their first deal?

I would say anything you can do to make your materials pop is going to be better. If you have a video, have it done professionally, don't go running around with an iPhone and producing a video for your project.

If you're going to have an offering memorandum done, get a graphical one or a graphical business plan done or any sort of a PPM that, looks good. You know, the sizzle sells the steak make it look really good, make it look really attractive to the investors. Lots of pictures, lots of data.

They're going to dive down that rabbit hole and love it. And if you can get them to fall in love with the deal early, then you're going to have them in that deal, through the ups and downs and have them as a repeat investor. It's been great.

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About The Procopio Companies

The Procopio Companies is a fourth-generation real estate development firm based in Lynnfield, Massachusetts. Founded in 1950, Procopio has developed large luxury single-family developments, institutional multifamily, condos and commercial-industrial projects throughout eastern Massachusetts. Procopio currently has 688,000 square feet across six buildings in active construction – representing $220,000,000 and 600 multifamily units under construction.

The Procopio Company's tremendous growth and the quality of the product they build has been recognized by the Boston market. In 2017, The Procopio Companies earned the honor of being named the Massachusetts Family Business of the Year by Northeastern University, and in 2019, Michael Procopio was selected as one of two national finalists for the NAHB Multifamily Pillars of the Industry One-to-Watch award.

Since 2018, in addition to developing several projects with family capital, Procopio has closed several institutional joint-ventures, including three with The Carlyle Group and one with ELV Associates, with a focus on the emerging Boston-north transit-oriented gateway cities, including Caldwell, a 259-unit LEED Platinum urban high-rise, Travers Crossing, a 328-unit urban transit high-rise and Mosaic, a 150-unit urban transit project in the heart of Downtown Lynn. Procopio’s current development pipeline through 2023 includes over 1500 units of market rate, senior, workforce and affordable housing units, both multifamily and condo, across the Boston and Portland markets.

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