My three STRs cash-flow fine and I still can't get a fund manager to return a call under $500k minimum.

The misconception worth clearing up first: the $250k floor is not about fund manager snobbery or operational laziness, it mostly comes from the 2,000-investor cap under Section 12(g) of the Exchange Act and the cost-per-LP of K-1 prep, audit allocation, and investor reporting software, which makes a $180k LP genuinely unprofitable to service relative to a $500k LP at the same fee rate. That said, the floor is not a fixed law of physics, and there are structures built specifically for your position.

The category worth looking at seriously is the fund-of-one or feeder structure that some syndicators run through platforms built for sub-$250k accredited investors, where your capital gets pooled with others into a single SPE that then invests into the main fund as one LP of record, so the manager sees one $2M LP instead of twelve small ones. The mechanics mean you are buying the fund's returns with one layer of extra entity cost between you and the asset, so the first thing to ask any platform running that model is what the feeder's annual management fee and admin cost adds to the load on top of the underlying fund's fees, because a 1.5% fund with a 0.5% feeder wrapper is a 2% fund and you should price it that way. The debt funds you mentioned are actually the easier case here because the return profile is fixed-rate and shorter duration, so that extra fee layer hurts less than it would in an equity deal where the promote is the whole thesis. What is the target hold on the debt funds you vetted, and did either of them quote you a net or gross IRR in the deck?

The minimums you hit are real and common, and the reasoning behind them is worth knowing. A private real estate fund is usually structured as a private placement, meaning it can only take a limited number of investors under securities rules. A manager with a $50M fund and a $100k minimum would need 500 investors, which creates legal complexity and administrative cost that genuinely eats into the economics. So they raise the floor to keep the LP count (LP means limited partner, the investors in the fund) manageable. The $1M minimum on the Denver fund likely signals they are targeting family offices and institutions, and you are right that the deck is probably not meant for you.

A few things worth looking at given where you are:

Real estate debt platforms like Percent or similar private credit platforms sometimes run lower minimums than a closed-end fund, though the structure is different and the diligence you would do on them is also different. A few smaller fund managers, often first-time funds or emerging managers, do open at $100k, but the trade-off is that the track record is thinner. Thinner track record does not automatically mean worse, but it changes what you are evaluating.

One thing you may not have considered: some funds accept what are called feeder vehicles, where a smaller operator aggregates several investors into a single LP slot. If you know other operators in your position, that path exists, though it brings its own legal setup costs.

A securities attorney can tell you what your options are in about one conversation, and I would genuinely recommend one before committing capital to any fund structure.

What matters most to you in the fund: return type (income now versus appreciation later), the asset class, or the manager's track record length?