Every deal I've been shown came from an Instagram ad. Where do the other ones come from?

The rule your other thread was pointing at is real in outline. Private offerings in the US are generally sold under exemptions from registration, and two common ones are usually shorthanded as 506(b) and 506(c). Broadly, the 506(b) route doesn't permit general advertising and sponsors using it rely on relationships with investors formed before the offering, while the 506(c) route permits public advertising and comes with a requirement that the sponsor take reasonable steps to verify that each investor is accredited, which usually means handing over tax returns or a letter from a CPA or attorney. How those requirements apply to a particular offering is a securities law question, so confirm specifics with a securities attorney rather than with a deck.

What that does not mean is that advertised deals are worse. It means the sponsors who can advertise do, and the ones with a full investor list from the last decade don't need to. Sponsors who never advertise tend to fill from repeat investors, referrals, and brokers.

On platforms: most of them make their money from the sponsor side, charging a placement or listing fee on the amount raised, commonly in the low single digits of the raise, and some also charge an ongoing administration or technology fee measured in fractions of a percent per year that can be charged either to the fund or directly to investors. Both structures exist and the numbers vary by platform, so ask for the fee schedule in writing and ask specifically whether any fee comes out of your capital account. If a platform won't put that in a document, that's information too.

Platform minimums tend to run $10k to $25k, direct-to-sponsor is usually $50k or $100k. At my check size the platform's fee drag matters a lot more than it would to someone writing $250k.

The land deals I look at never appear on a platform. The two syndications I've been shown both came through a broker I've bought dirt from, and that took the better part of a year of showing up to the same meetings before anyone brought me anything... the relationship route costs time rather than fees.

What sorts them for me is asking for the LPA and the last two quarterly investor reports before I've said I'm interested in anything. The sponsors who send both the same day are a completely different population from the ones who reply with a webinar registration link!

There's a selection question underneath the sourcing question. A sponsor with a deep investor base fills a raise from repeat capital and goes to a platform for the balance, so platform allocation can be the slice the existing investors didn't take. That's not automatically a bad deal, and it is a fact worth asking about directly: what percentage of this raise came from investors who have been in a prior deal with you? A high reinvestment rate is one of the few signals in this business that's hard to manufacture.

The other thing about building a book off one platform is that it isn't as diversified as the deal count suggests. Six deals from six sponsors on the same platform all cleared the same screening standard, were structured to that platform's preferred terms, and were often underwritten against similar assumptions about rent growth and exit caps. You've diversified the operators and kept the underwriting philosophy constant. Mixing channels, one from a platform, one from a broker relationship, one from a sponsor you found through an accountant, gets you genuinely uncorrelated screening.

On @verity's test, I'd extend it. Ask for the reports from a deal that has gone sideways. Every sponsor with a real portfolio has one. The quality of the write-up on the deal that's underperforming tells you more about how you'll be treated in year three than anything in the offering materials, and a sponsor who has never had a difficult quarter in the last few years either has a very short history or is not telling you everything.

I don't take a sponsor's first deal in a new market. Their second one in the same submarket, after they've sat through a full round of tax and insurance renewals there, tells me far more.