Relli co-founder and CEO Mor Milo joined host Lancelot Lenard on the Real Estate Roundtable podcast to talk about how private real estate deals work and why more sponsors are looking to individual investors. They cover REITs versus syndications and private funds, the kinds of offerings Relli listed at the time, why sponsors need new sales and marketing skills, and which documents to read before investing. The episode, "How to Access Private Real Estate Deals Without Being Rich," was released June 24, 2026 and runs 33 minutes.
Editor's note: first published June 2026, so some details have changed. 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. Plans described in the episode reflect that time. Target returns mentioned are projections, not guarantees. A few details in the conversation are imprecise: REITs must distribute at least 90% of taxable income, and a lender holds a lien on a property rather than the deed.
Watch on YouTube, or listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
Key takeaways
- Private syndications and funds have mostly been open only to accredited investors, and Mor estimates only about 5% of people who qualify invest in them.
- A REIT pools capital under one manager, so investors don't choose the sponsor, asset type or deal. A syndication is one property; a private fund invests across many properties under one thesis.
- Sponsors raising from individuals have to build a brand and a sales process, because individuals decide with emotion and justify with logic, while institutions negotiate terms.
- At the time of recording, investors on Relli compared offerings and connected directly with each sponsor, with a concierge team to help.
- Read the offering memorandum, the private placement memorandum and the subscription documents, and stress test the sponsor's assumptions, for example by halving the projected rent growth.
Full transcript
Lightly edited for clarity. Section times match the YouTube video.
Introduction (0:00)
Mor Milo: If we can open up a publicly traded platform where any American can invest in these deals, you just opened up the other 99% to invest in these opportunities based in hard assets, which gives those real estate developers completely new avenues to do business. Now take it a step further. In real estate, we battle over quarter percents.
Lancelot Lenard: Some of the best real estate investments were never meant for you to see. Not because they're risky, not because they're complicated, but because the system was designed to keep them behind closed doors for decades. Institutional real estate deals, private syndications and large development opportunities have been reserved for wealthy investors and insiders. Meanwhile, everyday investors were left with two options: buy a rental property or buy a REIT. But what if that gate was finally opening? Today's guest believes the future of real estate investing looks more like the stock market than the traditional property model: a place where investors can discover, compare and invest in real estate opportunities with transparency, lower minimums and institutional-level deals.
Who is Mor Milo? (1:30)
Lancelot Lenard: Mor Milo is the co-founder of Relli, a platform built to democratize access to private real estate investments and bring opportunities once reserved for accredited investors to a much broader audience. Today we're diving into the hidden world of private real estate deals, massive investing, fractional ownership and the future of real estate capital markets. So if you've ever wondered why the best deals seem out of reach, this conversation might change the way you think about real estate investing. Welcome to the podcast.
Mor Milo: Mic drop. Boom. Let's go. Lancelot, that was strong. Thank you for the introduction, my friend. Very excited to be here.
Lancelot Lenard: Awesome. I actually have another introduction just about you. Before building Relli, Mor Milo experienced something many aspiring investors eventually run into. He realized the best real estate opportunities weren't actually available to most people. Large apartment developments, institutional-quality investments, private real estate syndications: these deals existed in a parallel world that everyday investors rarely even saw. And the barrier wasn't knowledge. It was access. As a non-accredited investor, Mor saw firsthand how the system favored wealthy connections and insider networks. Instead of accepting that reality, he asked a bigger question: what if real estate investing could work more like the stock market? So, Mor, thank you very much again for being on the podcast here with me.
Why do investors want smaller pieces of bigger assets? (3:14)
Lancelot Lenard: Tell me, why is real estate doing this with its assets?
Mor Milo: The reality is this. If we look at market trends in how people want to invest, we see more and more that people want access to fractionalization. They want access to small pieces of bigger assets, and you can see that in your crypto accounts, your stock market accounts, Polymarket and all the other fun stuff in the alternatives space. But for some reason, nobody has brought private syndication investments to the table for the average Joe, even though they've been one of the biggest vehicles for the wealthy to grow their wealth, and have really been behind closed doors for decades.
What we think is that these real estate investments are much less risky than your cryptocurrency meme coin or your Polymarket bet or any of the other things in the market coming for the retail consumer. By leveraging things that already exist through the JOBS Act, which came out when Obama was in office, we have the ability to fractionalize this real estate, reduce the cost of capital for sponsors, and give the average Joe access to vehicles that target between 8% and 25% returns annually, based on institutional-grade hard assets that most wealthy people invest in consistently but the average Joe has no idea exist.
So we saw the writing on the wall. We said, okay, we want to be able to invest in real estate the same way we invest in stocks, with a diversified set of offerings from a bunch of great sponsors in different sectors of the market, where we could create different return structures: maybe a little cash flow over here, a little debt over here, a little equity for some big hitters over there. And create that portfolio as a retail investor.
To do that, we went out to all the sponsors we know who are raising capital from high net worth individuals and institutional investors, and showed them a way to go out to the average consumer as well and reduce their cost of doing business. There are lots of these sponsors in the market. Some are ready to take the plunge into the retail consumer category and have already invested in doing that. Some are more hesitant and need a little more time to get there.
So we also created a solution that helps the market the way it exists today, where we can help higher net worth individuals connect with the sponsors in the market. Because that industry as a whole is maybe only 5% penetrated into the number of investors who qualify for those types of offerings. There's no education and no access for those who do qualify, because they just don't know about these investments, how they work or how to access them. What we're trying to do is lower that barrier to entry by giving them a platform to find vetted deals from great sponsors in all asset classes. As we continue to grow our business, we're going to open that up to more and more individuals and lower that barrier to entry, we hope within the next year or so, down to $100 per investment.
How do REITs compare with private syndications and funds? (6:25)
Lancelot Lenard: Oh, that's awesome, man. So let's pull back the curtain a little for investors listening who have only ever bought a house or invested in a REIT. Number one, what is a REIT? And number two, what does the private real estate investment world actually look like?
Mor Milo: Sure. A REIT is a real estate investment trust, and it's kind of the OG fractionalized investment. It's essentially a fund, a mutual fund of sorts, run by a specific manager whose job is to collect capital from investors and deploy it into real estate deals based on their underwriting. You get access to the market, but net of the fees the manager collects, and you don't really have a say: do I put it in multifamily? Do I choose sponsor A or sponsor B? Do I put it in a self-storage deal? Do I put it in debt? They do everything for you. And historically the results have been subpar, to be honest. Ten percent returns, tops, if that: four, six, eight, ten. Even BlackRock. Not the strongest vehicle, because you have all those fees in the middle that BlackRock or Vanguard or whoever is offering that REIT takes off the top. Those have traditionally been available to the average Joe on the stock market or through other platforms, but they're not great. That's number one. Number two, you have no control.
A REIT is a structure that gives you a tax benefit. You can have a small REIT, a big REIT, a debt REIT, an equity REIT, all different types. Basically, being a REIT means there's a certain tax advantage because they pay back to investors, I believe it's 95%, of the capital that comes into the business.
Now, the way the market exists today, for the most part, when you look at larger deals: let's use an example of a 500-unit multifamily deal. You're paying $80 million. Let's say you need 25% or so in equity, so you've got to come up with $20 million, and the rest you get in debt. What great developers and operators do is underwrite a deal, package it up nice and pretty, lock up the property, raise the money from investors, invest that money into the deal and pay back the investors from the property's cash flow. Those are what are called syndications. They're individual assets: one multifamily deal, one self-storage community, one retail facility.
There's also what's called a fund, a private real estate fund, which has one thesis: I'm going after self-storage with these parameters, or single-family homes with these parameters. And you invest in the operator and their portfolio of investments as a whole. Those are the two types of investments in the market, and for the most part they only exist as private investments for what are called accredited investors. An accredited investor is someone with either $200,000 in income as an individual, $300,000 with a spouse, or a million dollars in assets outside of their home. Investors who qualify as accredited can deploy capital $50,000, $100,000, a million dollars at a time alongside the operators who underwrite these deals or offer these funds, and participate in the return as passive investors in the business that manages those assets.
What we're trying to do is show the sponsors of those funds and syndications that they can go out to the average consumer and offer maybe a slightly diluted return. Maybe instead of a 20% IRR expectation, they offer a 15% IRR expectation, which is still significantly higher than what you can get elsewhere in the market from hard assets, and offer those as fractional investments to the average consumer. Slowly but surely, we're seeing more operators shift their strategy from only accredited investors to everybody. But it requires quite a bit of compliance and legal work, so it's a slow trickle of operators moving in that direction. When they're ready, we'll have a platform ready for them to plug into, get in front of a wonderful audience that's excited to invest, and automate all the technology for them in one place.
What kinds of deals were on Relli? (11:00)
Lancelot Lenard: That's awesome, man. And what kinds of developments or projects are typically in the world you're talking about?
Mor Milo: We see a little bit of everything. On our platform today we have a mix of real estate assets, and we also have an energy investment. The deals we currently have include single-family residence funds; debt vehicles, both a mortgage REIT and hard money loans; a self-storage offering; a medical office offering; a retail offering with Walmarts, Sherwin-Williams and Starbucks; and lastly the energy offering on the platform right now, an oil and gas deal where you can invest in wells being drilled in Oklahoma and the Gulf of America, with a massive tax advantage as well as target cash flow from the oil drawn from the wells. So we have a little bit of everything.
We're agnostic to asset sector. We like to focus on hard assets, so anything based in real estate. Energy is kind of that adjacent piece that ends up working pretty well, but for the most part we're focused on real estate and hard assets. We focus on finding operators with a track record of success, a specific real estate specialty they go after, and a team that can deliver consistent results to our investors. That's where we're focused: expanding to more sponsors in more asset classes with great track records.
Why are sponsors shifting toward individual investors? (12:33)
Lancelot Lenard: That makes a lot of sense. You always want those. And for developers and operators out there, what does this shift really mean?
Mor Milo: Okay, run that back one more time. What do you mean, for developers and operators? What does what shift mean?
Lancelot Lenard: Meaning the shift that's happening in the capital markets right now that you're looking at, with consumers who have 100 bucks, or at some point will. Not yet, but you will. Instead of REITs and syndications, what does this mean for those guys? "Hey, I was making 5% on a deal. Now what am I going to do? Where am I going to get my money from?"
Mor Milo: Essentially, the shift happening right now is that real estate development firms are seeing they need to be more efficient, and to be more efficient they need to adopt technology they've never had before. As you know, real estate is a very ingrained business, in that people don't change very often. So there's going to be an uphill learning curve for most operators, who will have to really embrace technology and the new compliance coming down the line and how it can affect their business.
There are definitely two categories of sponsors out there. There are sponsors capable of connecting with, understanding and implementing the technology needed to deliver those results. And there are operators who are reluctant to do that, because they had a certain way of doing business and it worked for them up until now. Because they haven't kept up with the times, they now have to catch up in a very big way, and they're hesitant to do so because it's expensive.
We actually just had this conversation before the podcast, but the reality is that real estate sponsors have been very spoiled, because the deals have been behind closed doors. There were only so many operators qualified to take in capital at that scale, and only so many investors in the market for them to advertise to, and most of those investors are institutions actively looking for deals and negotiating back. In this circumstance, there's a massive shift to retail, because real estate sponsors are realizing that if they build a brand retail investors can get behind, and they can get a thousand people to give them a $50,000 check on every single deal, their company is indestructible.
But where the gap lies is that they mostly don't have the sales and marketing skills to reach out, create attention, generate actual interest, build relationships over time, work a sales process over a long period, and then close that customer based on the relationship. Because retail investors, just like retail buyers, make decisions based on emotion and justify them with logic, as opposed to institutions, which justify their decisions with logic and have the ability to push back on the terms of the negotiation because of the amount of money they deliver. So it's a shift. Sponsors have to learn how to sell and market their offering to average consumers and connect heart to heart, as opposed to "Here's my pro forma, everything looks great. Okay, what are your negotiated terms?"
What is the Relli platform like for investors? (15:56)
Lancelot Lenard: So let's talk about Relli. You've described it as the stock market of real estate, which is, by the way, a fascinating concept. What does that actually look like for an investor using the platform? Do you have the idea put together? Are you going to see charts going up and down? Tell me a little bit about it. I love watching my Robinhood account. I have other investments with brokers and stuff, and I never look at those; I don't even know what my passwords are. But when I look at the charts going up and down, it's cool to watch. Some days I'm sad, some days I'm really happy. Is it going to be similar to that, or different? Tell me about it.
Mor Milo: That's the end goal, man. That's the end goal. The uphill battle we have as an early-stage startup is that the systems aren't in place yet for that to work in the same fashion. Is it possible? Yes. Can we build it? Yes. That's what we're going for. Today, the way the platform works is that it's a marketplace. Just like when you sign into Fidelity or E-Trade or Charles Schwab, you can look through a bunch of different deals available to you. You can look through the data on those deals, look at the sponsors and learn more about their deals.
Today, you have to connect with that sponsor directly, because unlike the stock market as it exists, there's no way for us to have that transact on our platform in real time at this moment. And mostly, investors writing a $50,000 or $100,000 check to a new sponsor they've never worked with usually want to meet the CEO or the team face to face before they release their capital. So today it's essentially a marketplace with a matching service, where we connect you directly with the sponsor, and we offer a concierge-style service to connect the two parties.
As we continue to grow this business, and more sponsors with what's called a Regulation A offering come to the table, which is that fractionalized investment opportunity, we'll be able to integrate a button on our platform that takes you directly to their portal, where you'll be able to invest in those offerings.
Lancelot Lenard: So that's how you discover and compare real estate deals.
Mor Milo: Correct. And we'll give you access to a dashboard where you can compare and contrast the deals on the platform with deals in the open market, as well as with benchmarks like the S&P 500, T-bonds and all sorts of other things. The longer-term vision is to have the same type of engagement you have on your Robinhood account. To get there, we need a bit more customer volume, and we need what's called a broker-dealer license, which gives us the ability to actually transact those dollars. So it's a building process. It'll probably take us another six or seven years to get to the same type of experience you get on your Robinhood account. But today we're giving access to deals immediately, so you don't have to wait another six years to build that portfolio, and you can start making investments in real estate today.
Lancelot Lenard: Yeah. Plus you make some money off it, so you can keep developing.
Mor Milo: That's correct. You have to do that; otherwise it's not going to happen. Really, the real estate sponsors at the end of the day came to us and said, "Hey, we need accredited investors. Help us find them." Great, we're here to do that for you. So let's get to work. And we've been able to do that very successfully.
How does pooling capital compare with buying a rental? (19:16)
Lancelot Lenard: One of the biggest barriers to real estate investing has always been the minimum investment size. "Oh, I have $50,000 lying around, but I can't really buy anything with $50,000. That property over there costs $500,000. I'd have to find a loan," et cetera. So how does Relli help lower these barriers, as you mentioned earlier? Was that the part where you said you're going to collect the money and then invest it in their name?
Mor Milo: Okay, so essentially the way it works is this. Let's take two examples with $50,000. Let's assume you can get somebody to give you an 80% loan. That $50,000 gets you a $250,000 house. Cool, not bad. Maybe you'll make a couple hundred dollars a month, but you're going to have to actively manage that property.
The alternative, where you can target a more lucrative return with no active work, based on a larger deal, is to take that same $50,000 and invest it alongside 20 other investors at $50,000 a pop. Usually it's not exactly 20; some come in bigger and some come in smaller. And you purchase a $5 million property that has scalability and can be priced at exit based on its rental comps, as opposed to one property you can rent to one person.
Number one, that lets you take $50,000 and invest in $5 million worth of real estate instead of $250,000 worth, so you have way more leverage. Number two, it gives you a professional manager: somebody who actually knows how to look at these deals, how to operate them, and how to pursue an efficient return on your capital, with systems and a team dedicated to managing that asset. What most investors forget when they buy a single-family rental home is that they have to deal with tenants. Tenants sometimes get evicted, sometimes don't pay their rent, sometimes mess things up and break things. By offloading that to a professional manager with experience and a larger property, where they can bring in a team and maintain that larger asset more effectively, with less headache and less money, you benefit from all of that. And those deals sometimes target a multiple of what you'd get from your own personal investment in a $250,000 house, for example.
Now, there's a tax implication you get with a single-family home that you don't get with a syndication, so there are benefits and drawbacks. Not all syndications are made equal, though. Depending on the type of syndication, you'll sometimes qualify for some of the pass-through tax deductions from the deal, but it's not guaranteed. It depends on your specific situation and on the deal, whereas with a single-family home you have a little more predictability on the tax side of the purchase. So there are benefits and drawbacks. But if you're looking for the most efficient return, with a professional manager doing the heavy lifting, and you want access to leverage you can't get by yourself, then a multifamily syndication, a multifamily fund, really any type of real estate fund, will give you access to those more significant target returns without the heavy lifting.
Lancelot Lenard: And we're talking about fractional ownership here, correct?
Mor Milo: Correct.
Lancelot Lenard: Is it like a JV, or something else?
Mor Milo: It depends on the structure. Sometimes it could be a joint venture. Most joint ventures don't end up on our platform, because most of them are kind of behind closed doors from a paperwork and legal perspective. What we mostly see is funds. Some of these funds are dedicated to a specific syndication, and some are dedicated to a thesis where they invest in a large number of properties and you get access to the whole portfolio. So it all depends. There are also debt opportunities, where you can invest your money like the bank, be a first position lien holder, and have the safety of having your name on the deed. So there are lots of different options and structures, and it depends on what fits best in your portfolio. Just like in the stock market, you should be diversified: a little bit over here, a little bit over there.
How transparent are private offerings? (23:33)
Lancelot Lenard: I totally understand that, and I think it makes the most sense. How important is transparency when investors are evaluating these deals? Does the consumer get to see everything behind the doors: these are the properties, everything's written down, this is why it's a good deal? Or is it like a wholesaler who sends out a blast email: "Look at these four properties next to this one, ARV 500, 500, 500, and you're getting this for 200"? It's nothing like that, right? It's something totally different.
Mor Milo: The way these companies operate, because they solicit investments, they have regulatory compliance obligations with the SEC. So there's a much higher level of scrutiny for anybody taking capital from investors to deploy into these assets, because they're looked at as private equity managers. They have to play by the SEC's rules, and there are certain parameters they have to have in place before they can actually advertise the deal. They actually have to say, "Hey, SEC, we're raising money for X, Y and Z. Here's all of our paperwork. If we screw it up, you can come after us." And that requires them to have a certain type of relationship with the investor, depending on the structure.
Normally what you'll see with a syndication or a fund is a number of documents. Obviously they'll have their website and all the information on their people and so on. But they'll also have an offering memorandum: an in-depth memo with all the information on the financials, the demographics, who the sponsor is, why they're buying, where they're buying, how they're buying, what the numbers look like. Everything. Those are always beautiful, right? Everybody wants to sell their product. But they'll also normally give you a couple of additional documents, called a private placement memorandum and a subscription document. The subscription documents are what you use to subscribe as a member of the fund. The private placement memorandum gives you the risks and the benefits of the offering, and what could and could not go wrong. They're big, not-sexy pieces of documentation and not very fun, but read them. They're very important, and they'll give you more depth on the risks of that offering.
Now, as an investor, you still need to do your due diligence. You still need to stress test the financials. If they're telling you X is going to be the rent increase assumption, stress test that with half of it. You need to play those games and be a smart investor. It doesn't change the fact that you still have to read, understand and do the research. But they're held to a certain standard, where they have to give you as much information as they can to represent their business in a way that fits the SEC's guidelines.
What happens if millions more investors get access? (26:27)
Lancelot Lenard: Got you. That makes a lot of sense, and it's good. It's not just putting some money somewhere. So, final part: let's zoom out and look at the bigger picture. If real estate investing truly becomes democratized, as we're talking about right now, and millions more investors gain access to deals, what does that do to the industry?
Mor Milo: Oh, that's fun. That's a great question. Okay. We have a big real estate problem in this country. We're undersupplied, rent is through the roof, and we have more land than we know what to do with. The biggest constraint is the financial stack, the equity stack: finding capital for deals and being able to deploy that capital alongside debt to get deals done. Right now, real estate operators in the market are raising capital from accredited investors. Accredited investors are about 14% of the American population, and of that 14%, maybe 5% know about these deals and invest in them. So the pool of people we're working with is a fraction of a percent.
If we can open up a publicly traded platform where any American can invest in these deals, you just opened up the other 99% to invest in these opportunities based in hard assets, which gives those real estate developers completely new avenues to do business. Now take it a step further. In real estate, we battle over quarter percents. In the real estate world, the cost of an accredited investor's capital is anywhere between 8% and 25% per year, based on the return you have to target in order to be attractive.
Say you said to me, Mor, as a non-accredited investor: "I'm going to give you access to this retail real estate fund, with Walmart, Sherwin-Williams and Starbucks paying the bills every single month. Instead of the 20% target return I offer all my accredited investors at $100K-plus, which includes a targeted 8% cash-on-cash return paid monthly into your bank account plus a percentage of the value at exit, I'm going to target 25% less: a 15% total target return, paid as monthly cash-on-cash distributions. But I'll give it to you with the ability to invest as little as $100." I would trip over that offering. I would give you the money so fast you wouldn't know what to do with it.
Lancelot Lenard: Oh, yeah. That's a no-brainer. I'll take that tomorrow.
Mor Milo: But what did the sponsor do? The sponsor just reduced their cost of capital by 25%.
Lancelot Lenard: Yes.
Mor Milo: Not 0.25%. A 25% reduction in the cost of capital for every dollar raised from a retail investor versus an accredited one. At millions of dollars raised, over the 15 years or 10 years or five years or three years of a deal, you're talking about hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars that go straight to the bottom line. Not the revenue line, the profit line. So by revolutionizing the financial structure of a real estate deal, we can pull a massive benefit by engaging a retail audience that's hungry and plentiful.
How should a new investor get started? (30:01)
Lancelot Lenard: For sure. I love that. Last question: if someone listening today wants to start learning about passive real estate investing and private deals, what's the first step they should take?
Mor Milo: They should start doing some research on what passive investing is really about. I'd go to Google and start looking around. I'd go on LinkedIn, look for real estate developers and see what they're doing. I'd talk to other investors who can give you insight into what they've invested in and how those deals have gone. And if you're looking for a central hub, obviously come hang out at Relli. We have a concierge team that's ready to help you, educate you, show you deals and all that good stuff. But whether you use us or not: research, understand what you're investing in, learn the basics, go meet people, have a team around you, talk to a financial advisor, talk to a lawyer. Get an education, because there are a lot of snake oil salespeople out there, and a lot of really great sponsors, and the best way to figure out which is which is to have a team in place, be knowledgeable about what you're looking for, and actually read the documentation thoroughly.
Lancelot Lenard: Mor, this has been a fascinating conversation. What I really appreciate about what you're doing is that it shines a light on something many people never even realize exists: an entire world of private real estate investment opportunities that historically were only available to insiders. If the future of investing really does move toward greater transparency, access and fractional ownership, platforms like Relli could play a huge role in shaping the next chapter. For anyone listening who wants to learn more about Mor and what he's building, you can connect with him on Instagram at @InvestWithRelli (Relli is R-E-L-L-I), on LinkedIn at Relli, and on YouTube at @InvestWithRelli. Mor, thank you again for joining us today on the Real Estate Roundtable. And for anyone else listening, if you enjoyed today's episode, make sure to subscribe, leave us a review and share this episode with someone who wants to understand the future of real estate investing. Until next time, I'm your host, Lancelot Lenard, and this is the Real Estate Roundtable, where we bring you the conversations shaping the future of real estate. See you on the next episode.
Thank you for joining us on Sir Lancelot's Real Estate Roundtable, where we've unveiled the mysteries of real estate together. Remember, in this kingdom of possibilities, every dream home is just a discussion away. Until our next roundtable, may your ventures be prosperous and your homes be filled with love and joy. Farewell, fellow knights of real estate.
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