Real estate syndication investor relationships are built on one principle above all others: the sponsor must want investors to succeed as much as they want the deal to close. At Arrowpoint Properties, that principle did not come from a business school course. It came from a conversation in a food court at a Massachusetts shopping mall in the early 2000s, when Dave Lamattina's reluctant father became Arrowpoint's first outside investor - and taught Dave everything he needed to know about what it means to be trusted with someone else's capital.
Key Takeaways
- The first investor is the hardest to get. Dave's father was skeptical, unfamiliar with real estate, and not looking to invest. Persuading him - and then delivering - set the template for every investor relationship that followed.
- Arrowpoint built its investor base entirely through word of mouth. No advertising. No broker placements. Friends and family who made money referred their friends and family. That is how 26 syndications got funded over 22 years.
- Investors who come back across multiple deals are the real measure of a sponsor. Arrowpoint has investors who have been in deals since inception. That continuity is not a marketing talking point - it is the operating record.
- The sponsor-investor relationship runs both ways. Dave gives out his cell phone number to investors – because accessibility is how a sponsor earns the trust that makes referrals happen.
- Not chasing fees is a feature, not a limitation. Arrowpoint invests in every deal alongside LPs. Having a strong alignment of interests across all stakeholders is the foundation of the long-term relationship.
The dynamics described here - sponsor-investor alignment, word-of-mouth capital formation, the cost of a single difficult LP - are patterns that appear consistently across the most durable operators in private real estate. Arrowpoint's 22-year track record, 26 syndications, and 2.50x average equity multiple are the data. The relationship philosophy is what produced them - and it underpins our broader approach to how to invest in real estate syndications.
The Conversation That Started Everything
Dave Lamattina graduated from Fairfield University in 2002 and went to work in his father's restaurant business - Boston Chowda Company, a soup manufacturing and retail operation that had won Boston's Best Clam Chowder three times and grown from a single recipe into a chain of retail locations and supermarket products. The plan was for Dave to take the business forward. He quickly realized it was not what he wanted.
While still working at the family restaurant at the North Shore Mall north of Boston, Dave met Dick Goldberg - a man dating a cousin of his - and told him he was interested in real estate. Goldberg's family had been buying multifamily and commercial property on the North Shore for generations. He took Dave under his wing, invited him to come look at properties the following Friday, and, when Dave showed up through a February blizzard in a two-wheel drive sedan, told him: "this kid must be motivated."
From Goldberg's pickup truck, Dave saw what a long-term real estate operator actually looked like - properties bought in 1972 still in the family, held through every cycle, worth many times what was paid for them. That was the education. In 2004, Dave bought his first property: a four-family, brokered by a cousin, financed in part with money borrowed from his father.
He did the maintenance himself. Changed toilets. Painted. Learned accounting and leasing on the fly. Four or five years in, around 2008 and 2009 and right when the market collapsed, he decided he wanted to do real estate full-time. He spent weekends at Barnes and Noble reading everything he could find about syndications and private equity structures. Then he bought a building around the corner from the first one. And brought his father in as his first outside investor.
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Persuading a Skeptical First Investor
Dave's father was not a natural real estate investor. He understood food and manufacturing and retail. He did not understand cap rates or deal structures or why anyone would hand money to someone else to buy apartment buildings. Dave had to explain it, in plain terms, sitting across from his father: you can diversify out of the business. You can get a return on money that is currently sitting still. I will do all the work. You collect the distributions.
His father came on board. He ended up being very happy with the result. More importantly - and this is the part that shaped everything that followed - he came back. Multiple additional investments in the company, across multiple years. A reluctant first investor became a repeat investor. The lesson was immediate and permanent: deliver, and the relationship sustains and builds upon itself.
What Dave was doing in that conversation at 2009 is what every syndication sponsor does on every first call with a prospective LP. The pitch is not really about the deal. The deal is just the vehicle. The pitch is: trust me with your capital, and I will return it to you with a profit, and I will not disappear when things get hard.
His father believed in the plan because he knew Dave, of course. The investors who came after had reason to believe it because the people who referred them knew Dave. That is the entire model.
How Arrowpoint Built 22 Years of Investor Relationships Without Advertising
After the first deal with his father as an LP, Dave started bringing in friends and family. They invested. He renovated older 1960s and 1970s garden-style buildings - neglected properties that needed roofs, windows, siding, boilers, whatever the building required - and kicked off returns. His investors told their friends and family. Those people invested. They told more people. One deal at a time, over more than two decades, Arrowpoint built a pool of investors entirely through word of mouth and referrals.
There was no advertising. No broker placements. No conference circuit. Dave does not cite this as a virtue - it is just how it happened. Investors who made money referred people they trusted. People who got referred, invested, made money, and referred more people. The compounding effect of a track record that actually performs is its own distribution channel.
Today, Arrowpoint has investors who have been in deals since the company was first formed. Dave gives out his cell phone number. When quarterly reports go out, most investors do not call - not because they are disengaged, but because everything is going the way it is supposed to go. When a distribution hits the account on time, investors does not need to call. Indeed, in 22 years of operations, Arrowpoint has never missed a distribution - though in the first months of COVID, when nobody knew what was coming and holding cash reserves seemed like a prudent call, distributions were deferred temporarily.
And the cell phone matters more than it sounds. Sophisticated accredited investors have dealt with sponsors who are easy to reach before the wire and hard to reach after. The contrast is not subtle, and experienced LPs recognize it immediately. Arrowpoint's investor relationships are built in part on the implicit promise that if an investor has a question, the person making decisions is the person who picks up the phone.
What Long-Term Investor Relationships Actually Require
Alignment of interest
Arrowpoint invests in every deal alongside LPs. This is not an unusual structure - most reputable syndicators have skin in the game - but the degree of operational involvement makes the alignment more direct than it is for a sponsor who manages deals from a distance. Dave has been on site for every major renovation project across 26 syndications.
Not chasing deals for fees
Arrowpoint does two or three deals a year, on average. Dave is explicit with new investors about this: do not expect a high volume of transactions from this firm. The deals Arrowpoint does are the ones that clear Arrowpoint's threshold - a 15-20% return on renovation dollars in year one, conservative fixed-rate agency debt, underwriting that assumes cap rate expansion at exit rather than compression. Sponsors who do 15 deals a year are doing so for a reason, and the reason is not always investor-aligned.
This matters for the investor relationship because it shapes expectations before any capital is committed. An investor who comes to Arrowpoint expecting deal flow every quarter will be disappointed. An investor who understands the model - disciplined, concentrated, relationship-first - tends to stay for a long time, which is part of why we deliberately do just two or three deals a year.
Quarterly distributions and fast K-1s
Arrowpoint distributes returns to investors quarterly and issues K-1s by end of February as a matter of practice. Dave has been on the other side of this as an LP in other deals, waiting until summer for tax documents that are holding up his personal return. He knows what that experience feels like, and he does not run his investor communications that way. The operational detail matters: distributions signal that the business plan is working. Fast K-1s signal that the back office is not an afterthought. Both are part of the same relationship.
Transparency when things go wrong
The fund that Arrowpoint launched in 2022 - Arrowpoint Multifamily Fund I - ran into the spring rate spike almost immediately after launch. Rates went up 50 basis points seemingly overnight, raising capital became harder, and the fund's first deal required preferred equity from a California firm to close the raise. Dave communicated to fund investors throughout. The structure of that particular deal turned out to be the constraint, not the asset itself. The lesson was in the timing, not the market.
That kind of transparency - telling investors what happened and why, even when the story is not flattering - is what keeps people in the relationship when a deal runs into headwinds. Arrowpoint investors – who are regularly updated - stay patient because they understand what’s going on and the extent to which the management team is managing risk on their behalf. [LINK: the fund we started at the worst possible time]
What This Philosophy Looks Like From the LP's Perspective
Investors who have been with Arrowpoint for a decade or more are not there because of marketing. They are there because they made money, had a good experience, and had no reason to go elsewhere. That is a low bar stated plainly, but it is not an easy bar to clear consistently across 22 years and 26 deals in a market as demanding as New England multifamily.
The referral pattern tells the story more clearly than any track record document. LPs do not refer their colleagues, friends, and family members to sponsors they are ambivalent about. Referral behavior is a revealed preference - it shows that the investor trusts the sponsor enough to put their own reputation behind the recommendation. Arrowpoint's entire investor base was built on that behavior, deal after deal, over two decades.
Dave's father was the first. He was reluctant, invested small, made money, came back, and eventually became a multi-deal LP. That arc - the skeptic who becomes the repeat investor who becomes the referral source - is the Arrowpoint model, scaled across every LP who has ever wired into one of the firm's deals.
Frequently Asked Questions
How does Arrowpoint find new investors?
The investor base has grown almost entirely through word of mouth and referrals since the first deal in 2009. Existing LPs who have made money on previous deals refer their networks. Until now, Arrowpoint has never relied on advertising, broker-dealer placements, or crowdfunding platforms to raise capital. The practical implication for prospective investors is that most entry points into the investor community come through an existing relationship with someone who already knows the firm.
What does Arrowpoint look for in an investor?
Accredited status is a baseline requirement. Beyond that, Arrowpoint looks for investors who understand the deal profile - Class B and C workforce multifamily in the Merrimack Valley, two to three deals per year, five-year hold periods, distributions from year one on stabilized assets and after 18-24 months on heavy value-add. An investor who needs high deal frequency or expects a refi-and-distribute model in year two is not a good fit. The best long-term investors are the ones who come in understanding that Arrowpoint is selective, patient, and not chasing volume.
How accessible is Dave Lamattina to LPs after investing?
Dave gives out his cell phone number to investors. Most people do not call often - when the deal is performing and distributions are landing on schedule, there is not much to discuss. When something changes, Dave communicates by email update before the quarterly report. The point of the cell phone is not that investors call constantly. It is that they know they can, and that the person who picks up is the person who made the acquisition decision, not a junior asset manager.
What happens when a deal runs into problems mid-hold?
Arrowpoint sends an email update as soon as there is something material to communicate. It does not wait for the quarterly report cycle. The content is straightforward: here is what happened, here is why, here is what we are doing about it. Investors are then given the opportunity to ask follow-up questions by email or phone. Arrowpoint has never had to issue a capital call to LP investors across 26 syndications, which reflects both the conservative underwriting and the contingency reserves built into every deal budget.
Why does Arrowpoint only do two or three deals a year?
Deal flow in the Merrimack Valley is constrained by design - long-term owners sell infrequently, and the deals that clear Arrowpoint's thresholds are not common. Beyond the supply side, Arrowpoint has no interest in doing deals primarily to generate management fees. Every deal that closes requires the same operational attention from the same team. Doing more deals would dilute that attention. The volume limit is not a market constraint - it is a deliberate choice about what kind of sponsor Arrowpoint is - the same discipline behind never losing a dime of investor capital.
Learn More About Investing With Arrowpoint Properties
If you are an accredited investor evaluating real estate syndication opportunities in New England multifamily, the first step is understanding how Arrowpoint structures its deals and what the LP experience looks like across a full hold period.
For those earlier in the research process, the pillar page on how to invest in real estate syndications covers the full landscape - what to look for in a sponsor, how to evaluate a track record, what questions to ask before committing capital, and how Arrowpoint's approach compares to the broader market.
David Lamattina
President & CEO
About Dave Lamattina
Dave Lamattina is the founder and CEO of Arrowpoint Properties, a vertically integrated multifamily owner-operator based in Lawrence, Massachusetts. He has been acquiring and operating multifamily assets in the Merrimack Valley for over 22 years, with 1,100+ units acquired and exited and a current portfolio of approximately 850 units valued at around $230 million. Arrowpoint has completed 26 syndications with an average net IRR of 32% and a 2.50x equity multiple.
