Registered and audited, or a sponsor I can actually trace? Two non-traded offerings on my desk

Neither of your two, for me. I'd put the weight on the repurchase language, because that's the clause that decides whether the rest of it ever matters to me. Both wrappers can cap, prorate, or suspend, and the registered one just tells you about it in a filing afterward. If the private sponsor will put redemption mechanics in writing with a history of what they actually paid out per quarter, that's worth more to me than an audit opinion on last year's balance sheet. Audits confirm the books. They don't create liquidity.

I lean registered, and the reason is boring. Comparability. With quarterly filings I can pull four years of the same statements and see fee load as a percentage of average NAV, see whether distributions were covered by operating cash flow or funded partly from offering proceeds, and see the same numbers presented the same way each time. With semiannual investor letters, the sponsor chooses what to present and how, and the presentation shifts when the story shifts. I've watched that happen in a smaller private fund I looked at, where the metric they highlighted changed the year occupancy softened. Nothing improper about it. It just meant I couldn't build the trend line I wanted.

Rigging's point about the audit not testing appraisal inputs is the part I'd have gotten wrong all week.

I'd take the sponsor, and I know that's the less defensible answer here. My holding periods are measured in decades and the thing that decides the outcome over that stretch is what they bought and what price they paid for it, not how well the quarterly package reads. A manager who bought industrial and senior housing at sensible bases in the 2010s is going to look better in 2031 than one who bought office with a lovely fee table. Still, keystone, a six figure minimum into a sponsor whose reporting I can't independently check would need to be small relative to everything else I own, and I'd want to know exactly who engages and pays the valuation firm.

Question from the shallow end, because I don't have the accredited option at all. Is the $2,500 minimum on the registered one per subscription or a total, and does the monthly subscription mean I could add small amounts over time instead of putting one lump in? I ask because if the answer is yes, the registered wrapper does something the private one structurally can't, which is let me build a position slowly while I watch how they report. That seems like it belongs in the comparison somewhere, though I understand it isn't the same question keystone asked.

Wren, in the offerings I've read the minimum is an initial one and additional purchases can be much smaller, but it's set in the prospectus and varies by share class, so it has to be read in the actual document rather than assumed.

My own confusion is on the word gated. If the quarterly plan is capped at some percentage of NAV and more people ask than the cap allows, everyone gets a share of the cap and the rest waits. That's different from the sponsor suspending the plan entirely, which the documents I've read seem to allow the board to do. Keystone, does the private one even have a written plan, or is redemption at the manager's discretion with no stated mechanism at all? Because those aren't the same risk and I'd want to know which I was being offered.

Rigging is right about the appraisals and I still think the fee table is being undersold in this thread. In a registered offering the selling commissions, dealer manager fee, ongoing stockholder servicing fee, management fee and performance participation are all written down in a document the sponsor is on the hook for. In a private placement the economics live in the LP agreement and I've read ones where the waterfall took three passes to understand and the expense reimbursement language was open ended enough to matter.

Over a ten year hold, a 100 basis point difference in annual drag is worth more than any single valuation judgment. That's a plain arithmetic argument and it points at the registered wrapper for me.

Voted for the redemption terms. Six units taught me that the exit assumption breaks first and everything else follows.

What are you actually buying this for, keystone? That's the thing to settle before picking. If the point is income insulated from public market swings, then the wrapper matters less and the underlying sector mix matters most, because the vehicle isn't going to save you from a portfolio that's a third office. If the point is access to something you can't get in a public REIT, that argues for the private one, and then you're paying for that access with both the illiquidity and the thinner reporting.

My own answer took me about four months to reach on a smaller decision and it was to hold off until I could articulate which of those two I wanted. Whether the private one is even available to you is a suitability and securities question for a licensed person, not for this room.

The six figure minimum is what stops me cold reading this. That's a down payment plus reserves on a small property where I'd control the decisions, traded for a position I can't sell for years and can't influence at all. I understand that's the tradeoff of the whole vehicle and some people want exactly that. But when the private minimum is that size, the comparison isn't registered versus private, it's private versus doing something yourself. Parcel's fee drag math is the argument that moved me most, so I voted for the written fee terms.