Family offices cannot be searched for, and that is the law

The rule

In June 2011, after the Dodd-Frank Act removed the exemption that small advisers had relied on, the SEC adopted the Family Office Rule. A family office that serves one family, is owned and controlled by members of that family, and does not hold itself out to the public as an investment adviser is excluded from the definition of investment adviser altogether. It registers with no one. It files nothing. The rule was written for exactly the firms that everyone raising capital wants to find, and it works as intended.

What the public record holds instead

We went looking for what does exist, and counted it.

The adviser register. On the SEC's Form ADV register, 115 firms carry "family office" in their own name, and 96 of them have a website. Those are the multi-family offices, which serve several families and so must register, and the single-family offices that chose to register anyway. Widen the match to the words anywhere in a filing and the count rises to 250, and most of the extra 135 are firms that serve families rather than being one: Baillie Gifford, Hamilton Lane and Cohen & Steers all appear.

The holdings filings. A 13F is filed by any institution that holds more than $100M in US-listed equities. A full-text search of those filings for the phrase returns 922. This catches the large offices with public portfolios and misses every office invested in private companies, property and funds, which is most of them.

A commercial directory. This summer we processed a 56-page directory of family offices that circulates as a lead magnet. It lists 359 firms across 49 states, with 322 phone numbers and 317 websites. It contains 8 email addresses, five of them generic inboxes. It is a phone book, and an honest one, because that is all the public record allows.

A B2B company database. On one large commercial database of companies, a tight definition of the family-office industry returns 671 firms. A loose one returns 4,331, and the loose one is every wealth manager whose page mentions private investments. The tight number is not a search fault. It is the size of what a database can see.

Why every directory looks the same

They are built from the same scraps: the registered multi-family offices, the 13F filers, conference attendee lists, and journalism. Nobody holds the real list because there is no real list. A directory that claims thousands of single-family offices is counting advisers, banks and wealth managers with a family-office division, and the largest of those divisions belong to firms with twenty thousand employees.

What this means for anyone who needs to reach them

The list is built by hand, one name and one website at a time, and then enriched into people. The relationships are the asset, and the list is only the record of them. That is the position this house holds: we are the connection point for family offices, and the companies, funds and vendors who need to reach them come through us. What we do for founders raising and what we do for an allocator set out both sides of that door.