Does a sponsor need to have owned the asset class before, or is a good underwriter enough?

I do land and entitlement work, so I know one thing well and almost nothing about running apartments. Twice now someone has floated me being the GP on a small multifamily raise because I can find the parcels and read a zoning map, with a property manager handling operations.

The thing I can't decide is whether that's a legitimate GP or a gap being papered over. One view is that sponsoring is a set of skills you can assemble. You underwrite carefully, you hire a third party manager who has run 4,000 units, you keep reserves fat, and your own inexperience with a boiler doesn't matter much because you were never going to touch the boiler anyway.

The other view is that operating experience is the part that shows up when the plan goes sideways. Somebody who has renovated 300 units knows what the turn actually costs in that submarket and knows when a manager is telling them a comfortable story. A careful underwriter with no operating history is careful about the wrong numbers.

I think both are partly true, which is not a useful place to stand. Investors seem to care a lot about this when they ask about track record, and I'd like to know how much the room actually weights it versus how much they say they do.