Relli co-founder and CEO Mor Milo joined host Jeff O'Donnell on the Beyond the Blueprint podcast to talk about why so few qualified investors put money into private real estate, and why sponsors need new systems to raise capital from them. They cover the awareness gap around private placements, why most sponsors lack a CRM, how higher rates pushed institutions from equity to debt, and how Relli uses ad data to help sponsors reach accredited investors. The episode, "The Stock Market for Real Estate Is Here: How to Passive Invest Like an Institution" (Ep. 18), was released June 5, 2026 and runs 18 minutes.
Editor's note: first published June 2026, so some details have changed, including the "stock market for real estate" framing in the episode title. Today Relli is a marketplace where investors review offerings from reviewed sponsors, express interest and talk to each sponsor directly, and each offering page shows its own minimum. Figures mentioned are from that time. Target returns are projections, not guarantees.
Watch on YouTube.
Key takeaways
- Mor says financial advisors have little incentive to show clients private placements, and vetting a private fund takes more work than buying a public stock. Both help explain why few qualified investors put money into private real estate.
- Of the roughly 300 sponsors he has worked with, Mor estimates well over 95% were not set up with systems to reach investors, because institutions funded most of their deals.
- As rates rose, institutions moved from equity to lower-risk debt positions, so sponsors now need individual investors, who decide on trust and emotion, not logic alone.
- Mor says Relli can bring a vetted sponsor's offering onto its marketplace in about 14 days, and feeds its lead data back to ad platforms such as Meta, LinkedIn and TikTok to lower cost per lead.
- His next priority is pairing automation with a human touch in content, to reach people who don't know Relli yet.
Full transcript
Lightly edited for clarity, with a few short passages removed. Section times match the YouTube video.
Who is Mor Milo? (0:00)
Jeff O'Donnell: Hello, and welcome to another edition of the Beyond the Blueprint podcast. I'm your host, Jeff O'Donnell. Today I'm joined by Mor Milo, the co-founder and CEO of Relli. Mor is disrupting the legacy real estate syndication market by building a centralized, liquid marketplace for private investments. Mor, welcome to the show.
Mor Milo: Thank you very much, Jeff. Great to be here.
Jeff O'Donnell: Thanks for being here. I appreciate it. Mor, you came from outside the traditional real estate space. What was the exact spark that made you look at the industry and realize you needed to build a stock-market-style platform for private real estate?
Mor Milo: My family has been investing in real estate for a long time, but personally, I always kind of lived vicariously through them: their single-family residence purchases, managing those properties with tenants and Section 8 and all sorts of fun things.
What sparked the idea for Relli? (0:48)
Mor Milo: I always wanted to get involved in real estate, but I didn't really want to be a landlord. My business partner, Ross Iannarelli, and I have been investing in stocks and crypto over the past 10 years or so and have really enjoyed that experience. After three previous startups together, we looked at each other and said, okay, what works for us when it comes to continuing to grow financially and in our careers? We realized we grew a significant amount as people by being investors: looking at companies, making decisions on them, and investing small sums of money passively into companies that generated awesome profits and great growth for us. We wanted the same type of experience investing in real estate, but we didn't want to be landlords like my parents.
Why bring a brokerage-style experience to syndications? (1:45)
Mor Milo: So we decided to create a platform where we could have an experience similar to our Fidelity or E-Trade or Charles Schwab account, but for real estate, where we could invest $100, $1,000, $10,000 at a time into different real estate syndications and funds that were normally only available to super wealthy people and institutions. We came to find out there was an entire industry consistently grinding away at raising capital behind closed doors, and what we decided to do was figure out how to bring that to the average consumer.
Along the journey we had quite a few conversations with real estate sponsors, and we found a way to deliver them value and show them the promised land of a mass-market opportunity with average consumers who could invest $100, $1,000, $10,000 at a time. But we also met them where they were, by giving them a place to connect with the LP-style, limited partner investors they were so used to delivering great returns for. It's been quite a journey, but we're on our path to really bringing that stock market experience to real estate.
Why don't more qualified investors know about private deals? (3:09)
Jeff O'Donnell: That's amazing. I love the journey, and what you guys are doing is incredible. You've pointed out that while 18% of people qualify as accredited investors, only a tiny fraction actually invest in private placements or debt deals. Why is there such a massive awareness gap?
Mor Milo: There's limited benefit for the people who would educate you about financial instruments. Your financial advisor, for example, gets a small percentage of your net worth over a certain period, usually annually, and they do that by providing investment opportunities they can profit from. Most syndications and funds operate as private placements, and in most scenarios investment advisors don't receive a benefit from sending you that direction.
Not to mention, it requires a little more work. You have to do diligence on the investment opportunities and the people you're investing with, because they're not publicly traded on the stock market and audited annually or quarterly by the Big Four firms we're used to. Although some of these firms do get audited annually, the information is not readily available to the entire market, and you have to engage with the company, as well as the thesis and strategy behind how it's going to make a return. So number one, there's an inherent lack of incentive for the people who would normally introduce you to investments to show you these opportunities.
Why is vetting a private fund intimidating? (4:49)
Mor Milo: Number two, it can be intimidating to learn how to do diligence on a real estate fund or a syndication or a big multifamily project, or whatever the asset might be, for anybody who doesn't have that experience.
Jeff O'Donnell: Yeah, that makes good sense.
Why do so few sponsors use a CRM? (5:41)
Jeff O'Donnell: Now, on the sponsor side, you've noticed that a staggering 98% of real estate development firms don't use a CRM or any automated workflows. Why do so many developers rely entirely on manual spreadsheets and old-school networks instead of modern sales tech?
Mor Milo: Firstly, I appreciate you quoting me, and for the record, I'm using estimations. Let's not take that as a peer-reviewed number. From my experience, I've worked with probably 300 different sponsors at this point, and just in the last 12 months we've actively done business with about 15 of them. So I'm talking to sponsors raising capital and doing business all the time, and the vast majority, I'd say well over 95% of these sponsors, have not been prepared with systems to properly reach out to investors. I think it has to do with the way people have treated raising capital for real estate in the past, compared with the new digital methods real estate sponsors are using to find new opportunities.
How did rising rates move institutional capital from equity to debt? (6:51)
Mor Milo: Just to give some context: the majority of the industry, up until maybe a few years ago, and actually no matter which way you slice or dice it, is funded by institutional capital. Those are big pension funds, massive private equity firms, family offices with boatloads of bucks that are capable of deploying large checks. Depending on the size of the deal, a large check could be a million dollars, a hundred million dollars or a billion dollars. In those scenarios you have professional investors, and the job of a professional investor, for a high net worth family office or an institution managing pension fund money, is to consistently find great deals that can outperform the market and definitely not lose money.
From their perspective, before, call it, 2021 or 2022, debt was very cheap and real estate was a great asset class to participate in. To outperform the market, they had to place their capital in equity, where they'd get upside from the actual development or acquisition of a property. As time has shifted over the last five years, we've seen a significant change in the rate environment. That's created opportunities for those institutions to shift their thesis to debt, where they can take a first position lien, be significantly more risk averse, and still target 8, 9, 10, 12, 15% returns on their money with significantly less downside.
So now those equity positions, which may pay a slightly higher return, are significantly riskier in comparison to that debt. And in a risk-averse position, where the absolute worst thing you can do is lose money, it makes sense for those large institutions to take a smaller return with a lower risk profile rather than keep deploying capital into equity. So real estate sponsors who were normally collecting one or two or three checks per deal from large institutions, which make decisions based on logic, not emotion...
Why is raising from individual investors different? (9:10)
Mor Milo: ...have now had to shift their perspective to: how do I get the average high net worth investor to deploy their capital into my deal, to support the equity stack, keep doing deals and keep scaling the business? There's an inherent gap between the very logical perspective of an institutional investor and the emotional connection a retail investor needs in order to have the confidence to open their wallet for an individual to the tune of $100,000, $150,000, $200,000, $500,000, which in the eyes of the sponsor is a very small check. So there's a disconnect between what needs to happen for that emotional connection to take place and the sponsors' previous experience raising from institutions.
So until now, there hasn't been a need for a lot of those sponsors to incorporate CRMs, workflows, consistent outreach, newsletters, a brand, a website, an investor relations team, a consistent outreach strategy or a sales cycle. None of those things have had to be at the forefront for them to keep doing business.
Jeff O'Donnell: Right. Until now.
Mor Milo: Until now.
Jeff O'Donnell: So they're playing catch-up, then.
Mor Milo: They truly are.
How does Relli help sponsors build relationship funnels? (10:43)
Jeff O'Donnell: Because retail investors make emotional decisions based on trust, a lack of consistent follow-up means sponsors lose capital. How is Relli helping these developers build structured relationship funnels?
Mor Milo: The beauty of our product is that we can plug a qualified real estate sponsor with a deal we can vet into our system in a matter of days. That's the cool thing about our platform: our marketplace can plug a new investment opportunity from a great sponsor into its ecosystem within about 14 days. About three days to underwrite and contract, and about 10 days to get the whole thing off the ground, set up with approvals for the messaging for the deals. We can then launch a campaign to get them immediate distribution, where we've seen leads from qualified investors come through within as little as 30 minutes.
The way we do that is by building systems. We have an online marketplace that brings between 2,000 and 10,000 people into the ecosystem every single month, targeting an audience of accredited investors.
How does ad data lower the cost per lead? (11:50)
Mor Milo: Every time a new person comes to the table, or a new lead is generated for one of our sponsors, we combine that data and ship it back to the open ad-buying platforms, like Meta, LinkedIn, TikTok and so on, to generate lead generation campaigns that deliver outsized results in terms of lower cost per lead and higher lead quality. By doing that, we give sponsors direct access to a flow of distribution that can deliver qualified investors into their ecosystem.
Beyond that, their job is to communicate with those people, engage them, build a relationship with them, and grow that relationship to a place where the investor is willing to open their pocketbook and give them a six-figure or seven-figure check, depending on how well-oiled a machine they are from a sales and marketing perspective. We can do as little or as much as they need to augment the top-of-funnel process of getting an investor in front of the opportunity. Whether they need traffic, lead generation or meeting setting, we can augment that entire function for them. We can even build an automated CRM for them by plugging our best practices directly into their business, so they can do the outreach needed to turn complete strangers into relationships that then invest money with their business.
Jeff O'Donnell: Wow. That is hugely advantageous, for sure. That's great.
What would Relli automate next? (13:54)
Jeff O'Donnell: So here's a fun one, Mor. If you could completely automate one major operational bottleneck in your own day-to-day workflow right now, what would it be?
Mor Milo: If I could automate one workflow... I think what we've seen work well is pairing automation with a human touch. We've automated the majority of the things in our business, and what we're attempting to create is the human touch that gets us to the next level in our results. Finding a way to automate the content we create, supplemented with a human touch obviously, to build an efficient system that consistently produces content that delivers value to our audience: I think that's our number one priority right now.
Currently we have a system that automates daily, if not multiple, posts per day on all of our social platforms, which keeps our image in front of our community. What's been missing is engagement from the platforms to push our content toward new people who don't know us yet.
Jeff O'Donnell: Reach, right.
Mor Milo: Yeah. We've struggled to meet the platforms' expectations from an entertainment perspective, to keep our audience engaged and excited for our newest piece of content. I think if we could automate a process of ideation, strategy and messaging that could properly get our excitement about this business out to our desired audience, and have them wanting to engage with us, asking us questions and looking to us as experts in the field, that would be the most advantageous automation for our business today.
How to find Relli (16:35)
Jeff O'Donnell: Yeah, that would be a beautiful thing, for sure. So, Mor, for investors looking to passively diversify, or sponsors who need to scale their capital raising, where's the best place to find you and join Relli?
Mor Milo: The best place to find us is on our platform. Check us out at www.relli.co, R-E-L-L-I dot co. We can connect with you directly and talk with sponsors about how to get on the platform, and talk to LPs about where they can put their money and what types of deals exist in the marketplace. If you'd like to connect with us on social platforms, we're at @InvestWithRelli, R-E-L-L-I. And if you want to connect with me directly, I'm very active on LinkedIn. You can find me at Mor Milo: first name M-O-R, last name M-I-L-O. That's my favorite of the social media platforms, and I'm pretty active there, so you can reach out to me and I'll respond rather quickly.
Jeff O'Donnell: Amazing. Well, that's all we have for this episode of Beyond the Blueprint. I want to thank our guest, Mor Milo, for his insight and expertise. It's been a real pleasure. I'm your host, Jeff, and we hope to catch you on the next one.
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Beyond the Blueprint is hosted by Jeff O'Donnell. Learn more about how Relli works or review current offerings.
