In this conversation, Ross Curtis, president of Bridgeview Real Estate, shares his journey in financial services and the unique approach of Bridgeview in real estate investing. He discusses the importance of communication with investors, especially in a changing market landscape, and emphasizes the need for transparency and trust. Ross also outlines the company's compliance strategies and their focus on building long-term relationships with investors while ensuring that no single investor is over-allocated in any deal. The conversation concludes with insights on what needs to change in passive real estate investing and the future outlook for Bridgeview.

A Good Deal Can Still Be a Bad Investment with Ross Curtis

Joe Guidi (00:01)

Ross, thanks for joining me today.

Ross Curtis (00:03)

Thank you, Joe, for having me.

Joe Guidi (00:05)

Yeah, I’m looking forward to our conversation. We had a chance to catch up a little earlier. Before we dive in, I’d love to give you an opportunity to introduce yourself to our listeners and give them a little context on the conversation.

Ross Curtis (00:17)

Absolutely. Well, thank you. I am Ross Curtis and I joined Bridgeview Real Estate in their capital markets group of BV Capital back in July of 2023. I've been responsible for the 1031 exchange and Delaware Statutory Trust (DST) program. Then recently, about three months ago, I just got promoted to president. So now I'm over the whole kit and caboodle.

Joe Guidi (00:38)

Congrats.

Ross Curtis (00:39)

Thank you, and it's been great. I've learned a lot very quickly. It's my first true leadership role of an organization versus a department. You learn a lot by doing, and there’s no better way to learn it than to do it. So I've been excited and reinvigorated, really, by the added responsibility—looking over the whole team, not just an army of one anymore. I've got six direct reports from accounting to, of course, investor relations and also operations. So I'm overseeing a lot. It makes for some long early mornings and long nights, so to speak, but that's great. That's what the business needs and that's what I'm prepared to do.

Joe Guidi (01:17)

Yeah, I know the feeling. Why don't you walk us through a little bit more of your background, just where you came from prior to BV?

Ross Curtis (01:26)

Yeah, I remember fondly January of 1993 when I got my Series 7 license because it was my birthday present to myself, really. I've been in financial services ever since. I started at a big mutual fund company in Houston that got bought out and became an even bigger mutual fund company, adding ETFs, separately managed accounts, and all kinds of financial instruments, even real estate investment trusts.

But then in 2012, they had a reduction. So I moved to Dallas and joined a real estate company. I worked for a large REIT manager for six years in their capital markets group, trying to raise capital for their deals. Then I moved into the 1031 exchange space in 2019, actually. I’ve been in 1031 exchange and single-tenant net lease properties and other strategies that make sense for investors looking to defer those large capital gain taxes they would otherwise have to incur.

Finally, I got over to Bridgeview here in July of 2023. So I've had my licenses now for 30-plus years and I've been primarily focused on talking to financial advisors and showing them the investment products that we have to offer as a sponsor for them to show their clients. I've always been a B2B kind of guy. I'm selling to other financial professionals, which is

Joe Guidi (02:43)

Sure.

Ross Curtis (02:44)

quite a challenge. These are very good salespeople. So you have to be a really good salesperson to sell to really good salespeople. But now I’m in the B2C world. I've learned a lot from advisors and how they treat their clients. So I think that's really helped me prepare for this, even though I'm new to actually doing B2C. I've seen a lot of best practices from advisory firms across the country, and of course, that's where they specialize—in working with their clients. So I think I've got some best practices I'm looking forward to introducing here at Bridgeview to really help us do a great job of client retention as well as client growth and referrals.

Joe Guidi (03:20)

Yeah, I'm really interested to hear more about that. I mean, there are things about BV's structure that are different than some other operators we speak to. But also just in your background, having primarily been business-facing, I’m curious about the differences you've seen in migrating to the direct-to-LP model. What is it like communicating with individual LPs versus larger businesses that maybe have more process or structure on their expectations?

Ross Curtis (04:02)

Yeah, BV Capital owns BV Securities, which is a registered broker-dealer. That's who we use as our distributor of our Delaware Statutory Trust programs through the financial advisor community. All of our people here are licensed. I'm a registered principal. I have my Series 24, my 7, my 66, and my 63. So I've got a lot of testing behind me. That's all applicable because I think you need it for the DST world.

Joe Guidi (04:15)

Got it.

Ross Curtis (04:31)

But that's a new division for us; we didn't start that until 2022. We've had the BD longer than that. That's because I think Steve May, the founder of Bridgeview, had the vision that we want to hold our people to a higher standard. If we have our own broker-dealer and we abide by the FINRA rules and regulations—more compliance, more disclosure, more risk factors, et cetera—that sets us apart from everybody else.

And because we've got more to lose. If you break the rules in FINRA, you don't get a whole lot of chances. It's clearly articulated what you can and cannot do, and violations are very easy for them to catch. We get audited every three years at least, depending on their frequency and their availability. If they've got any concerns, they'll come sooner and without much notice. We are always on our toes about that and making sure that all of our files are correct and our communications are valid. We don't use the

Joe Guidi (05:27)

Yeah.

Ross Curtis (05:28)

"G" word—guarantee—or anything like that because it's just not part of how it's supposed to work on FINRA's side. And again, I've been FINRA-registered for 30 years now. Compliance and sales are kind of like the Hatfields and McCoys in the traditional broker-dealer world. But here, compliance is my best friend because they keep us in business. They keep us safe and they keep our investors safe, which at the end of the day, that's what we should all want.

Joe Guidi (05:29)

Yeah.

So, yeah, it's an interesting approach—a little bit different than the way a lot of the Reg D world works. I want to dig into that a little bit more. Obviously, there's a layer of trust and transparency that's built into having a higher level of regulation. But I still think, in terms of communication, one of the central themes that's come out of these conversations is that the landscape has shifted over the past couple of years. Obviously, there was this period where there was a lot of liquidity and people were looking for opportunities to diversify.

Adam Gower recently called a handful of operators "tourists" on one of his social posts. There were a lot of new entrants to the space who figured out how to market to this and capital was flowing relatively smoothly. We're not there right now. Liquidity is in a different spot; people are more reluctant to loosen the purse strings, as they say.

Ross Curtis (06:56)

Mm-hmm.

Joe Guidi (07:16)

What we've seen is that where maybe 2021 to 2023 marketing could get you to the raise, 2025 and 2026 probably are going to be about how we build relationships, trust, and authenticity. I’m curious, as someone who’s navigating the shift from value-based alignment with large LPs to personal value-based alignment to individual LPs, how you've navigated that. Obviously, it's only been a handful of months that you've been responsible for that part, but I’d be curious to get your early insights.

Ross Curtis (07:59)

Right. Yeah, excellent foundation, excellent topic. First of all, it's been a shame every time there's a run-up in an asset class or a security. Whether it's stocks or just technology, there seems to be a madness that follows and people keep getting in. Sometimes they get in a little too late and they're stuck only for the downside. That cycle will continue to happen as long as there are humans and investment vehicles out there, unfortunately.

But you're right, that does tend to promote inexperienced actors—the "tourists" you mentioned. That's going to happen; people are going to jump on the bandwagon from the investment side as well as the sponsor side. We saw it with mutual funds as well back in the 90s leading up to the '99 tech wreck. It happens. You just have to be better prepared next time to hopefully screen out those that you can.

I think that's one of the reasons I like Bridgeview—we're not looking to quote-unquote "cash in." We started in 2009, we've been around for 15 years, and we do a handful of deals a year. So we're not looking to capture a wave, so to speak, but be more of a "Steady Eddie" and only do deals that make sense regardless of the market environment. Yeah, there might be more deal flow in the good times and less in the bad times. But if we can find deals that pencil and where there's low downside risk and high upside potential, then we want to bring it to market and find the investors. That's where it comes into who is the right investor.

We want to make sure that all investors are accredited, obviously—that goes without saying. But we also don't want too much money from an investor. That invokes a lot of pressure. If someone gives you a third of their net worth, or a quarter, or even 20% into one investment vehicle, that's inherently risky. They might say they've got that risk tolerance, but do they really? I'd rather take a little bit less, if not a lot less, and spread that out over maybe a couple of BV deals or other deals from other sponsors so I don't have that pressure. If things don't go according to plan, we're not setting ourselves up for negative conversations in the future.

It's really important for us to look at the customer when they approach us, get their full financial picture, and say, "We're comfortable with this amount of investment based on your net worth." We don't want to take too much because it's just too much pressure, and if things don't work out, it can be bad for both of us. Again, it’s not worth the risk. I'd rather find 10 investors to replace that one capital amount if necessary, because that's more important as long-term success, not short-term success.

But going back to what you said originally, communication is key—not just in that process, but ongoing. With real estate, you fall into this trap as a GP of thinking, "Well, not much changes quarter over quarter, sometimes not much year over year." It's Steady Eddie, plain jane. So there’s not much really to say, so I’m not going to say much this quarter or the next. From my world in equities and bonds and all kinds of alternative investments, there's always something going on. There's always something to talk about. Maybe in certain asset classes there's not much volatility, but that's where you have to get creative and share stories of what's going on around you or around the industry.

Your investors should get something from you that shows your finger is on the pulse. You're not taking them for granted; you're not just mailing it in and hoping you're doing well behind the scenes. You really want to paint the picture that you are doing something and communicate that. And quite honestly, be honest when financial statements aren't as good as they were in previous quarters. Disclose it and talk about why and what you're going to do to fix it.

Joe Guidi (11:38)

Right.

Ross Curtis (11:53)

I've seen a lot in our industry where sponsors hope they can fix it before it becomes much of a problem. If it doesn't, you've dug yourself a bigger problem. We don't want to do that here.

Joe Guidi (12:06)

Yeah. Let's double-click on that in a second. I want to go back to the allocation strategy. It sounds like you guys have a core desire not to have one LP be over-allocated. When do you guys start communicating that in the sales process, and are there guidelines for your team?

Ross Curtis (12:45)

FINRA is very conservative, as all compliance officers and regulators are. There is no number, no line in the sand that says you shouldn't take more than X from any investor in any illiquid deal. If there was, that'd be easy; then we'd all know what the rules are and we'd all abide by it.

Some broker-dealers are more comfortable putting 50% of the client's net worth in illiquid investments as long as it's spread around. Some will take no more than 5%. That's a huge vacuum between 5 and 50. We fall somewhere between there, and it really is relative on a case-by-case basis. If somebody comes to me and they've done real estate for 35 years and they understand the risks, maybe we can go higher. If they're brand spanking new and this is their first LP, and they're a traditional mutual fund or ETF investor, heck no, right?

I would never even ask for something really, really large to go in anyway. Let's start with a little bit in. We'll even lower our minimums for people for the first time because you don't want to find out it's too much later. You want to find out it's too much now. I'd rather take 50 from somebody than 100 and hope that they get comfortable with it and bring us another 50 down the line, versus getting 100 up front and then they have buyer's remorse in three months or three years when the deal hasn't full-cycled yet and they're like, "Why is this money all tied up? Why did I do that?" You just don't want that.

Joe Guidi (14:13)

Yeah. No, totally. And I think there's a practical implication. When we talk about building trust and authenticity, you want to demonstrate care for the LP in the process. You can't do that if you're not willing to say, "I don't need all that." If someone's super eager to do a deal and you're not actually qualifying what their goals are or if this actually aligns, then ultimately they're going to start thinking, "Is this person actually thinking about what's good for me?" That in and of itself becomes a violation of trust. I like how you do that. I didn't realize that was necessarily on the broker-dealer side of compliance.

Ross Curtis (15:18)

And to that point real quick, Joe, if one of the investor relations guys on my team comes to me and says, "Hey, here's a new client. They want to do 100," I have to approve every trade. It's not like they just go and do it and I hope they follow the rules. I have to look at it and say, "Yes, we can accept this amount from this investor with this profile." We take suitability and what's called Reg BI from FINRA very seriously—looking at somebody and their profile and making sure that this is a deal. It is a group discussion, so to speak, as needed. But our guys are pretty good about knowing up front that this might be just right, not enough, or too much.

Joe Guidi (15:55)

I think that's really great that that's front and center for you guys. Okay, let's go back to post-investment communication. You were saying you'd seen some research on communicating 13 times a year. One of the things we're seeing in the reviews is that, in general, pre-investment communication scores are higher for sponsors than post-investment communication scores. Makes sense, right?

Overall reviews score in five categories, but they also leave their own individual aggregate score. One of the things we noticed is that aggregate score correlates more highly to post-investment communication than pre-investment communication. They invest with you because of what they're told, but they're going to evaluate you based on what they hear from you.

Even in the case where people have gotten lackluster performance, but the GP is still communicating, they tend to get better scores than you might expect. So let's talk a little bit about your post-investment communication strategy. It sounds like you're saying you want to communicate at least monthly, even if you don't have much to say.

Ross Curtis (17:56)

Yeah, I'm still getting my business plan in place for 2026 that involves investor communications. Obviously, there are the four quarterly newsletters they should expect, right? That's standard operating procedure. Everybody should be doing that at a minimum. We also do four what we call "midpoints" where we go in between quarters. At the 45-day period in between June 30th and September 30th, for example, we send out a mini-update with a paragraph from the construction team or property manager depending on where that property is in its lifecycle. We highlight a current or upcoming deal and a little bit about what's going on at the company. So, there are eight right there that are pretty much cut and dry.

Well, I want to add to that: news about the industry or news about Texas. We're a Texas-based sponsor. All of our deals take place in Texas except for one—we’ll talk about that one later and why we might not do it again. But you know, it’s a little bit about the Texas market, what's going on here, why we still love it, or where we see areas of concern. I just want to add more touchpoints.

That survey we talked about was from Cerulli Advisors. They’re very well known in the broker-dealer industry; they do a lot of surveys on advisors and their clients. That data was probably from the late 90s or early 2000s, before we had cell phones and information at our fingertips. Back in the day, you really needed your sponsor and advisor to communicate with you because you didn't know what was going on without it. Now you can just go online and figure it out.

Joe Guidi (19:39)

True.

Ross Curtis (19:41)

But I still believe those principles hold true: if I don't hear from you, that probably causes areas of concern. "What’s going on with that investment? I’ve not heard from those guys in a while." I don't want to send out information about our existing deals only; I don't want to spam people. One of the most common complaints from that Cerulli survey was, "My advisor only calls me when they want to sell me something." You don't want to do that. You want to highlight a deal maybe, but that shouldn't be the only reason for your call or email.

It should be one of the many things you talk about. I believe in that kind of three-pronged approach: What's going on with your deal? What's going on in the markets we work within? And what's going on with us? Maybe a highlight on an employee, maybe a highlight on how the firm is growing. Just more information about the whole picture. I think people would want to hear that because it goes back into that trust, like, and know factor. Those principles are evergreen.

The most recent thing we added was new investor gifts. When we get a new client, we send them a care package. We literally just started that this week. High-net-worth, accredited investors should expect something nice from their GP partner. Hopefully, that kind of appreciation will go a long way as well.

Joe Guidi (21:35)

When you're working with individuals, they want to feel like they're being communicated with. Communication equals respect at the end of the day. If we don't communicate effectively with our spouse, they don't really think we respect them that much. It's about being respected, heard, and cared for.

On the other side of communication—how am I being communicated with when something's not going as planned? When do you think the right time to communicate is when something's going sideways?

Ross Curtis (22:47)

Yeah, excellent question. You don't want to sound the alarm too soon because it could cause unnecessary panic when you can work your way through it. And you don't want to do it too late when you're past the point of no return where you've got potential permanent loss of capital staring you down the barrel of a gun. There’s got to be a place in between there.

I was an accounting major, so I'm great with numbers, but I don't necessarily know what they mean when it comes to real estate too much. That's why I'm the sales guy, not the analyst. However, I do think that's why capital markets and the real estate team need to talk because we're two separate things. Because we're securities-licensed, there really is a "Chinese wall" between the files. That’s where internal communication is so important.

Hopefully, the real estate team is being honest with the capital markets team about where properties might have occupancy challenges or expense increases so we can communicate that. I've seen this a lot at previous companies where the capital markets group didn't know what was going on in real estate because they were told everything was fine until it was too late. Then the capital markets group gets yelled at by investors because they weren't informed. Because we're a small firm, I can walk down the hall and knock on the CEO's door and ask what's going on with this or that property. Thankfully, we have that collaboration.

Knowing when to share it is probably a case-by-case thing. Occupancy goes up and down in multifamily. Thinking back to recent struggles around the DFW area because of the influx of new supply, we saw occupancy start to drop in early 2024, but not until the end of 2024 did we know this is probably going to be a prolonged thing. Then we started to disclose it probably second quarter of this year: "This has been tough, but we do think it's near the bottom." We might have been a little late there by a quarter, but again, we didn't want to scare anybody too soon.

Joe Guidi (25:30)

Determining whether something is a trend or a momentary fluctuation is really important. An LP is an entrusted partner, and they don't want you to come to them with everything. They would have bought their own building if they wanted to know every little thing that happened. But they want to know the impact. How does this impact me? That’s where the GP really needs to thrive: "Net this out for me."

Ross Curtis (27:10)

Yeah, agreed. Property-specific, asset-class-specific, market-cycle-specific. There are a lot of specifics.

Joe Guidi (27:17)

Right. So, a couple more questions. We always ask people what part of passive real estate investing needs to die. What element of this market is no longer useful?

Ross Curtis (28:50)

Okay, I gotcha. I love Pat. I learned this a long time ago when I first joined that REIT company. Our boss used to say, "Do not use the word 'opportunity.'" There are so many opportunities out there, and to use it over and over again just becomes marketing jargon and slang, and I hate it. Every time he told me that—it was literally 2014—I remember the day he told me.

I see it everywhere to this day and it’s an automatic tune-out for me. When I’m scrolling on Facebook or LinkedIn and I see a video from a real estate sponsor—whether it's storage or multifamily—saying, "Opportunity, opportunity! You can't miss this opportunity!" to me, it's a red flag. It’s a warning sign that either they’re new or they don’t care and they’re just trying to sell you something. I don’t want to participate because you're still trying to sell me, and that's not how I want to be sold to.

As an accounting major, I like to sell through education. If you help an investor or partner self-realize the benefits of your program or structure, then they'll want to buy it versus me trying to convince them to buy it. It’s a very different approach. "Opportunity" screams sales, but education screams a self-realization approach. Whether I'm talking to an investor or a financial advisor, I don't know if mine's the best, but here are the reasons why I think it might be a good fit if they're looking for this, this, or this. That's the right approach to me, and yet the other one is consistent to this day.

Joe Guidi (30:59)

Yeah, definitely. That's a unique one. Okay, well, this has been great. Ross, if people want to learn more about you or BV, where should they go?

Ross Curtis (31:25)

Sure. Our website is bvcapitaltx.com. BV stands for Bridgeview, the name of our parent organization, Bridgeview Real Estate. Of course, we've got a LinkedIn page and a Facebook page. You can always click the "Contact Us" button to set up a call or have us send you some materials. We do maybe one, two, or three deals a year. We're very selective and focused on Texas. As a developer, you want to build in the path of growth, and Texas is one of the growthier areas of the country. I'm happy to educate and talk more about that if anyone's interested. Thank you to Invest Clearly and Pat for being a great relationship manager with us, and Joe for taking the time to talk today.

Joe Guidi (32:39)

Awesome, Ross. Thanks so much.

Ross Curtis (32:41)

Appreciate it.