Capital, debt, and financial infrastructure for owner-run real estate companies.
We're seasoned CFO and CIO executives and entrepreneurs with deep experience in debt and capital markets and in scaling financial infrastructure. For owner-operated and family-held real estate, hospitality, and construction companies, that means a team that can find the problem, build the finance function that fixes it, and then structure the capital to scale. Finance as infrastructure, supported by the systems and processes that make it reliable. Typical triggers: a loan maturity, no consolidated view of the portfolio, an investor asking for better reporting, or a property decision that keeps getting deferred.
Capabilities
Capital, debt, and the financial infrastructure underneath them. The work is sized to the decision in front of ownership and handed back with the systems in place.
Financial infrastructure
- Reporting design and benchmarks
- Governance, controls, and board reporting
- ERP scoping, selection, and implementation
- Audit readiness and multi-entity consolidation
- Fractional and interim CFO / CIO
- People, process, and systems
Capital and decisions
- Debt and equity advisory
- Refinancing and construction finance
- Buy, sell, hold and highest-and-best-use
- Acquisitions, dispositions, and business sales
- Exit and legacy structuring
- Lender, investor, and surety relations
Sectors and situations
- Multifamily, mixed-use, commercial
- Development and construction
- Family offices and private investors
- Asset and property management
- Hospitality
- Foreign investors establishing US holdings
Figures and cases are from Stephen Warheit's executive and advisory roles, before and since founding REST Equity Partners.
Independent, by design
We don't earn placement fees or commissions from lenders, brokers, or equity sources. Fees are fixed or time-based, with a success fee only where it keeps our interest aligned with yours. That is what lets us tell you when the answer is to do nothing.
When we're not the right fit
- You need bookkeeping or a controller. We work alongside both, on the decisions and the finance leadership outside their scope.
- You want hours and tasks rather than an outcome and a handoff.
How an engagement runs.
Diagnosis first, then the function, then the capital. The scope follows the decision: some engagements are a financing or portfolio decision on the team and systems already in place; others need changes to the finance function first. We set that scope before the work begins. A call is usually enough to tell whether we're the right fit; if we're not, we'll say so.
First conversation
No charge. You describe what's stuck; we ask the questions that usually matter.
Written read
A brief written view of the issue and the scope we would recommend: what is solid, what is fragile, and the sequence we would run. No charge.
Build
Reporting, controls, people, process, and systems, sized to the business you're becoming.
Capital
Debt and equity structured on numbers a lender trusts; introductions, negotiation, closing.
Hand off
We stay until it runs without us, then step back. (We can provide post hand-off advisory if it's the best solution for you.)
Six situations, and what happened.
Different sizes, different sectors, the same pattern: financial infrastructure and decision-making didn't keep up with the business.
Converting an underperforming hotel to multifamily
A family-built condo, run as an extended-stay hotel, losing income every year. Ownership had several viable options and no agreed financial basis for choosing among them. We ran the highest-and-best-use analysis, recommended a multifamily conversion, and led it through closing. NOI from $0.8M to $6M. A $45M asset now worth about $100M.
Selling a development site to restore liquidity
A Midtown East site with 175,000 buildable feet, held since 2013, with a carry cost the company could not sustain and a building type outside its competence. We made the case to sell before the market turned, then ran the process. $106M on a $40M basis; within two years nothing comparable in the submarket traded near that level.
From operating businesses to a family office
Three generations, a construction company losing $35M in two years, two hotels, a development site, decisions made on familiarity rather than on an agreed financial basis. From our first year we put one thesis to the board: exit the operating businesses, reposition what is worth keeping, move to passive capital. Returns from 3% to 12%. One US employee.
Building audit-ready reporting for a growing developer
A boutique developer starting a $500M program had landed a hedge-fund principal's family office as its limited partner. The LP wanted audits and K-1s; the GP was on single-entity QuickBooks. We built the multi-entity system, the controls, and the team in under a year. The capital closed. The properties were built and sold.
Rebuilding financial controls across international entities
A global developer's Brazil region had restated its financial statements to sovereign wealth funds and global pension funds. We were brought in to fix it and help it scale: New York-level controls in country, transaction memos agreed with auditors before year-end, interim audits, time on the ground in Portuguese. No consolidation error for the rest of our tenure. $3B+ of new capital followed.
Turning around hotels that could not service their debt
Fifteen years at Marriott International as the finance lead sent to properties with operating and financial problems. A San Salvador hotel that could not service its debt after two earthquakes in 2000 was named Hotel of the Year in 2002, with a 3x profit improvement. A 504-room Bahia resort that had not produced financials in two years recovered more than $20M of workout receivables from its owner and produced three years' financials in one year.
Stephen Warheit
Principal, REST Equity Partners LLC
Before REST Equity Partners, Stephen was CFO/CIO of a family-held developer and investor in New York for seven years: $280M of financings, a $106M land sale on a $40M basis, a multifamily conversion that took NOI from $0.8M to $6M and a $45M asset past $100M, a construction company exit, and the family office that replaced it. Before that, Tishman Speyer's emerging markets, where he took the Brazil region from a restatement to error-free reporting and helped build the infrastructure behind more than $3B of new capital. Fifteen years at Marriott International before that, turning around hotels in the US and Latin America.
Stephen leads every engagement. REST works with a small group of clients at a time and brings in specialists where the scope calls for it.