Eleven names, no deal to show them. Call now or wait?

The version of this that doesn't feel like begging is asking for their criteria instead of their money. "If I brought you a small multifamily deal, what would you need to see before you'd consider it, and is there a number below which it's not worth your time?" You learn whether the 11 names are actually four names, and nobody has been asked for anything.

@wren has the script. I'd add that you should find out their timeline on liquidity before anything else. I've watched people commit verbally and then discover their money is in a retirement account or a CD that matures in fourteen months. That's not a no, it's a schedule, and you can't plan around it if you never asked.

One more thing from the management side. Whoever you take money from, you'll be talking to them about a busted water heater at some point. Think about which of those 11 you actually want on the phone at 9pm.

Starting from zero as well and the part that scares me in your post is the 30 day version. If two of five say no you're not scrambling, you're defaulting. How much of the deposit would actually be at risk in your market?

Thin margins and fast closings over here, so I'll be blunt. Never go under contract on money you haven't confirmed. Confirmed means a specific person said a specific number out loud, and ideally wrote it in an email. Verbal interest converts at maybe half, and it converts worse on a first deal because the person is deciding about you, not about the property.

So call them now. But don't call to talk about a hypothetical duplex, call to tell them exactly what you're hunting and what the terms would look like. If you can't state the terms yet, that's your homework before the call, not a reason to skip it.

Something nobody has said yet. There's a real difference between taking money from three people who are all active in the deal in some way and taking money from eleven passive people who just want a return. The second one is an offering and it comes with securities rules, and how those apply depends on the facts and on your state. Get a securities attorney on the phone before you take a dollar, not after. It's a cheap conversation compared to the alternative.

I say this as someone with a small portfolio who learned late that "my friends are investing with me" is not a legal category.

@thicket is right and it's also the thing that makes @windlass's timing question easier. If you're going to need documents drafted, that's weeks. You can't discover that during a 30 day due diligence period. Do the lawyer conversation and the investor conversations in the same season and let both run slow.

Trades background, so for me this comes down to sequencing. You don't order materials the day you start framing. Same idea.

The line in your post I'd sit with is "which makes me think I already know the answer and I'm looking for permission." You wrote both options honestly and one of them is clearly worse. I do this too and what it usually means for me is that I'm avoiding the discomfort of the call, not weighing two real choices.

Separately, 40k of your own money into 150k of equity means you're at 27% of the stack. Have you worked out what you're offering the other 110k? Because that's the actual content of the call and I didn't see it anywhere in the post.

@kestrel caught the gap. @windlass, people don't decline the concept, they decline the terms. Show up with a specific structure, a preferred return number, a split, a hold period, and how you get paid. Then when someone says the split is too rich, you're having a negotiation instead of a vague conversation about someday. Build the one page version even if the deal in it is invented, and say it's illustrative.