The world of real estate investing continues to evolve, especially when it comes to capital raising and private money. Industry veterans like Merriah Harkins are at the forefront of these changes, demonstrating that successful wealth generation is not just about finding the right deals but strategically building trust and strong capital relationships.
In a recent conversation hosted by Jay Conner on “Raising Private Money,” Merriah Harkins, a senior sales executive at Lukrom, shared her experience and perspective acquired over two decades in the field.
Navigating an Evolving Investment Landscape
When Merriah Harkins began her career, the investment environment was less cluttered. Investors had fewer choices, which made decision-making more straightforward. Fast forward to today, and the private money landscape has transformed dramatically. Investors now encounter a plethora of options, which can make due diligence daunting and diversification essential.
For those seeking passive opportunities in real estate, the proliferation of funds and firms means greater risk and reward. Merriah Harkins emphasizes the importance of finding trustworthy companies and spreading investments across different products and asset classes to mitigate potential losses and maximize gains.
Lukrom’s Approach in the Marketplace
Lukrom, based in Phoenix, specializes in private credit funds and lends to real estate investors and businesses aiming to acquire, improve, or develop properties. The company’s niche is short-term loans, ranging from six to twelve months, primarily for residential improvement or quick acquisitions with a goal of resale or refinancing. For real estate investors, this means fast access to capital without the delays common with traditional banks.
On the fund side, Merriah Harkins leads the effort in raising capital for Lukrom. The firm accepts accredited investors from across the nation—those meeting specified income or net-worth thresholds. These investors receive monthly cash flow payouts between 8 and 9 percent, a structure designed to provide both consistent returns and strong protections, such as first lien positions on underlying properties.
The Shift from Marketing to Relationship Building
Lukrom initially sourced capital through friends, family, and social media outreach, but found this approach unsustainable for long-term growth. Upon joining, Merriah Harkins redirected efforts toward building relationships with broker-dealers, registered investment advisors, and family offices. The strategy focuses not on pitching or hyping the investment, but on education, extensive due diligence, and integrity.
For high-net-worth and institutional investors looking to diversify their portfolios, Merriah Harkins stresses the importance of understanding a fund’s track record, the sponsor’s experience, and the structural protections in place. Lukrom, for instance, is structured conservatively, targeting high-growth markets and maintaining strict loan-to-value ratios. The executive and advisory team also invests in the fund, placing their capital at risk ahead of clients—a powerful gesture of confidence and alignment.
Mitigating Risks in Private Investments
Every investment carries risk. Merriah Harkins encourages investors to carefully consider liquidity constraints, the sponsor’s history, and the ability of the fund to fully deploy capital. Lukrom’s practice of thoroughly vetting borrowers and maintaining diversity in loans helps protect against concentration risk and defaults. Short-term, first-position loans in high-growth markets tend to be more resilient, reducing investors’ exposure to downturns.
A Blueprint for Investors and Advisors
For those considering real estate funds or seeking private money for projects, Merriah Harkins advises prioritizing education and clarity. If sponsors aren’t willing to spend time explaining risks and protections, it’s a red flag. Building authentic relationships with investment advisors and sponsors lays a much stronger foundation for long-term wealth than chasing the latest trends or highest yields.
The conversation with Merriah Harkins offers several key takeaways for anyone interested in private capital: focus on trust, transparency, and credibility; work with sponsors who invest alongside their clients; and always conduct detailed due diligence. For both passive investors seeking alternatives and active developers in need of quick capital, these principles are essential in reimagining—and realizing—wealth generation through private money in today’s dynamic market.
10 Discussion Questions from this Episode:
- Jay Conner opens the episode, challenging the traditional idea that raising private money is about pitching deals. What does it mean to focus instead on trust, positioning, and playing the long game?
- Merriah Harkins mentions an explosion of investment choices compared to early in her career. How do these expanded options affect investor decision-making and due diligence today?
- The conversation explores Lukrom’s focus on short-term real estate loans in the Phoenix market. What are the main advantages and risks of specializing in this niche?
- Why does Merriah Harkins believe social media is not an effective channel for raising private capital for professional funds? Would you agree or disagree?
- Relationship-building is a recurring theme. How do long-term relationships with investment advisors and broker-dealers contribute to successful capital raising?
- The episode highlights Lukrom’s due diligence process and emphasis on educating investors. In your opinion, how important is education in building trust and attracting capital?
- Merriah Harkins discusses the importance of being in a first lien position to protect investors. How does this structure differ from other types of investment security, and why is it significant?
- The fund offers monthly payments to investors, which Jay Conner views as “out of the ordinary.” What impact might this payment structure have on attracting investors?
- Lukrom’s team puts its own capital at risk through a first-loss commitment. How does this affect investor perceptions of risk and the credibility of the fund?
- At the end of the episode, Jay Conner emphasizes that “capital responds to clarity, credibility, trust, confidence, and consistency.” Which of these qualities do you think is hardest to establish in the world of private lending, and why?
Fun facts that were revealed in the episode:
- Merriah Harkins and the Lukrom executive team have invested their own money into the fund, taking the first loss position to add an extra layer of protection and confidence for investors.
- Lukrom specializes in providing short-term, first-position loans (typically six to twelve months) primarily in the Phoenix real estate market, with a focus on residential investment projects.
- Before joining Lukrom, Merriah Harkins found that marketing through social media like Facebook and Instagram was not effective for raising capital from sophisticated investors, so she shifted the strategy to focus on building long-term relationships with broker-dealers, registered investment advisors, and family offices.
Timestamps:
00:01 Navigating Private Investment Choices
05:08 Short-Term Real Estate Loans
09:57 Building Trust for Investor Funds
11:22 Passive Real Estate Investment Strategy
18:07 Liquidity and Investment Strategy Insights
19:36 High Loan Demand vs. Funding
24:04 Short-Term Real Estate Business Loans
28:55 Investment Education and Diversification Strategy
30:35 Connect with Merriah Harkins:
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Investing Smarter: Creating Investor Trust and Diversification in Private Funds with Merriah Harkins
Jay Conner [00:00:01]:
What if raising private money was not at all about pitching? What if it were totally about trust, positioning, and playing a long game most investors never see? Because here’s the truth. Capital doesn’t chase deals. What does capital do? Capital chases confidence, clarity, and credibility. Welcome back to Raising Private Money. I’m your host, Jay Conner. Now today’s guest is someone who has spent over two decades operating at the highest levels of capital relationships and investor trust. Her name is Merriah Harkins. I’m so excited to have her on.
Jay Conner [00:00:43]:
Now, Merriah is a senior sales executive who leads investor relationships and capital distribution at the company titled Lukrom. It’s a Phoenix-based real estate investment firm specializing in private lending and private debt funds. She works directly with broker-dealers, RIAs, family offices, and high-net-worth investors, helping deploy capital into private lending, real estate, and development opportunities. Now, in this episode right here, we’re going to be breaking down how sophisticated investors think, what actually builds long-term capital relationships, and why most real estate investors get private money wrong. Now, if you want to stop chasing money and start attracting it, this conversation, I promise you, is for you. You’re going to be meeting Merriah right after this.
Narrator [00:01:42]:
If you’re a real estate investor and are wondering how to raise and leverage private money to make more profit on every deal, then you’re in the right place to raise private money. We’ll speak with new and seasoned investors to dissect their deals and extract the best tips and strategies to help you get the money. Because the money comes first. Now here’s your host, Jay Conner.
Jay Conner [00:02:10]:
Merriah, I’m so excited to have you on the show. Welcome to Raising Private Money.
Merriah Harkins [00:02:15]:
Thank you, Jay, and Happy New Year.
Jay Conner [00:02:18]:
Happy New Year to you as well. Now, Merriah, you’ve been raising and allocating capital for over two decades. I got that right.
Merriah Harkins [00:02:25]:
Right, you did, yeah.
Jay Conner [00:02:27]:
Now here’s the question. With all that experience and with markets changing all the time, what would you say are the biggest shifts that you’ve seen in how capital is raised today, perhaps compared to earlier in your career, and what most investors haven’t adapted to yet?
Merriah Harkins [00:02:50]:
Well, I will say that when I first started raising money for a company in San Francisco, I think there just were not as many product choices as there are today. I think there’s so many people today that have so many choices and so it’s, it’s, it’s hard for them to navigate, you know, and there have been private investments that folks have gone into that have not performed as they thought they would. And some who have performed in a great way. But when there are so many choices, going through your due diligence and really finding a company that you can trust and diversifying into lots of different investments are really key to spreading your risk and being able to do private investments the right way.
Jay Conner [00:03:43]:
What type of asset class are you and your company focusing on these days?
Merriah Harkins [00:03:48]:
So we focus on real estate. So I think, you know, for your audience, it seems as though several people want to invest in real estate themselves to rent out the properties. You know, there are others that are passive investors that may not be ready to do it on their own, or may never want to do it on their own, that are looking for opportunities with professional investment firms to be able to do that passively. So what we do and specialize in, mostly our core investment is a private credit fund. So we lend to individual businesses or bigger businesses that want to either acquire, improve, or develop real estate. And then we also do a couple of real estate development projects ourselves, where we raise money for those investments as well.
Jay Conner [00:04:42]:
Okay, so the focus is on real estate, which is what I have been in now for decades and decades. So when it comes to real estate, there’s all like, all all kinds of subclasses. There’s single-family, there’s multifamily, there’s commercial, there’s self-storage, and there’s land. Are, are you and Lukerum like all of that, or more focused on one particular area?
Merriah Harkins [00:05:08]:
So we’re really focused on the real estate investor who has a need for capital. And so if you have created a business for yourself where you are seeking to acquire real estate and you are either trying to improve it, to sell it, or you want to keep that real estate longer term. We’re mostly focused on residential because in the Phoenix area, there are a lot of homes and businesses that are in the business of improving homes to sell them. Our loans are six to 12 months. So we’re not typically a long-term fit for many businesses that are seeking to acquire real estate. But we are used as a bridge loan sometimes. So if they want a 6 to 12 month loan, and then they want to go get permanent financing later on. But typically people will come to firms like Lukerum when they either have a short term project where they’re doing an improvement to sell the property, or they want to acquire a property quickly and the bank financing takes too long, so they come in and they may take a loan from us for 30, for three months, six months, nine months, until they can get permanent financing on a longer term project.
Jay Conner [00:06:28]:
Sure. So would you classify Lukrom as a hard money lender to the end user?
Merriah Harkins [00:06:37]:
Yes. Yeah, I would, I would, I would classify our company that way. My side of the business is to raise money for a fund that we’ve set up. So if you take all of those loans collectively, we’ve got a fun, dynamic, and so we’ve got an originations and lending side. So they’re out there looking for people who need capital. And so, because they want to, you know, acquire or improve real estate, they might want to acquire a piece of land, or they might want to acquire a bigger real estate project, but they want to get into that project quickly. And then later on, they may refinance it into bank financing. But my side of the business is to raise the capital so that our originations and lending side can build a fund around all of these loans in the portfolio.
Jay Conner [00:07:28]:
Yeah. So to make sure our audience that’s listening is understanding what we’re talking about, here are the different moving parts. You have the part of the company, Lukrom, that’s raising capital for their funds. And of course, this is where Merriah comes in. She’s raising capital from family offices, individual investors, and brokers that have capital to deploy. Merriah’s getting that in the fund, and now it’s in the fund. And then the other side of Blue Crumb is now they’re going to be lending that out. They have the origination department, and then you have the other side of that company, real estate investors who want to borrow money on a short-term basis from Lukrom.
Jay Conner [00:08:16]:
So just so everybody knows what we’re saying, Lukrom, that’s spelled L U K R O M L U K R O M Based out of Phoenix, and the website’s very easy. Www.lukerum l u k r o m.com, so let’s talk specifically about what you do, Merriah. That’s the raising of the money when it comes to attracting high-net-worth investors. Family offices. What exactly moves, as you said, in the introduction, introductory comments, there are so many options out there. I mean, there are so many different options for people to invest in. What is it actually today that moves the needle for people to invest in your fund relationships? Track record, structure, storytelling. What’s your favorite way to attract it and why?
Merriah Harkins [00:09:15]:
So Jay, I started with the company a little over a year ago. They hired me because I specialize in long-term relationships. I have built relationships with registered investment advisors and broker-dealers, some family offices, for over 20 years. And so prior to me joining Lukerum, they were raising their money through friends and family, referrals from friends and family. Some high-net-worth investors who heard about Lukrom. We did a lot of social media marketing where we were targeting Facebook and Instagram. We did not find that successful. That was done prior to my joining the company.
Merriah Harkins [00:09:57]:
And so, you know, I think when you have a fund like ours, you know, our rates that we pay investors are between 8 and 9%, depending on how much is invested in the fund. When you’re out there trying to market through Facebook and Instagram, I don’t really think that’s a good channel for a professional fund where you are trying to provide education, and you’re building relationships, because it really does come down to so much out there. You know, they might get ads from 100 different companies trying to raise money. And so how do you sort through that,t and how do you build a relationship and build trust? And so when I came in last January, they brought me in because we had pretty much exhausted our friends and family and referrals from friends and family. And we still have people who add to their investments, still refer people in. But you can go out there when you’re first starting, which we did a couple of years ago in this fund, and you can gather your friends and family around. And of course, see, they’re going to invest in you because they know you and they trust you. And so when you’re raising money from high-net-worth investors, building that level of trust with the end investor is critical.
Merriah Harkins [00:11:22]:
We’re a really good option for people who want to get into the real estate business in some ways, but they don’t want to do it themselves. So they want a passive investment, and they want diversification. Where we’ve got loans on, you know, lots of diversified types of properties, we’re in a first lien position, so that, if the borrower is not paying back their loans, we can take that property back, which is very protective of the investors. But you know what, what they brought me in to do to expand how we were raising money knowing that we kind of exhausted the heavy inflows of friends and family in the beginning of the fund is for me to go out and build strong relationships with broker dealers and registered investment advisors who have registered representatives under broker dealers and advisors under these RIAs who, what they do for a living is they advise their investors and their clients on all of the options that are out there. Most of them are looking to diversify into lots of different asset classes. They’re really understanding the investor’s risk profile, what their goals are, so they’re really getting to know the end investor. And what I’m doing with my team is we’re educating the firms so that they will agree to allow us to educate the advisors underneath them. And then once we’re educating the advisors who have the clients that may be suitable for this type of investment, we really need to get across to them through education and the due diligence that they conduct.
Merriah Harkins [00:13:15]:
You know, we’ve got a due diligence data room where they can go in and look at all of the information that’s out there. And we’re not typically trying to replace investments that they’re already offering to their investors. We’re trying to complement it. So in our fund, where someone can go into our fund and receive an 8 to 9% cash flow that’s paid to them monthly, we are structured to protect the original investment for the investor. And we take several. Our focus is conservative. So we’re doing short-term loans. We’re in high-growth markets, which tend to be more resilient when there are market downturns.
Merriah Harkins [00:13:57]:
Short-term loans, you don’t tend to have a lot of problems when you have a 6 to 12-month loan, when you are first in line as the lender to step in and take the property if the borrower can’t pay on the terms that they’ve agreed to. And so you typically don’t have problems with short-term loans when you’re in a first lien position in a high-growth market. So that is the niche that we have decided to focus on at Lukrom. But when I’m out there working with a financial advisor who might have a hundred people like me with funds that range from risk to reward. So some are low risk, some are high risk with higher returns, but you’re taking a lot more risk. You know, what I’m trying to do is to position myself where I’m educating, providing due diligence resources. They build trust with our company, they get to know us, they understand the structure of our program, and they decide which investors within their universe of investors are suitable. And so I’m not typically going in to try to replace anything they’re already doing.
Merriah Harkins [00:15:08]:
I’m trying to complement being part of the fixed income side of an investor’s portfolio that is really more on the conservative side of private credit. So they might be offering other private credit funds that, you know, private credit can range from a very high level of risk. You could be lending to private companies, you could be lending on real estate, or you could be first in line if something goes wrong with the loan. You could be fourth in line if something goes wrong with the loan. So I would just suggest, if you are trying to do this yourself as a high-net-worth investor looking for funds, really get to know the sponsor. Really find out whether or not you can trust that sponsor. Look at their track record, you know, determine whether you feel like there’s integrity there. And then really look at your overall investment strategy to see if this could be a fit within your current portfolio based on your own risk tolerance and your goals.
Merriah Harkins [00:16:10]:
Or if you have a financial advisor, you know, they will be able to present you with lots of different solutions that provide that diversity diversification for you.
Jay Conner [00:16:19]:
That is fantastic advice, Merriah. No matter what people invest in, there’s risk, as you mentioned; there’s low risk, medium risk, high risk, and everybody’s got their own definitions of that. You know, what is low risk? What is medium risk? What is high risk for your investors that are investing in your fund, which is a great way to be in real estate and totally passive, and let the sponsor and operator, you know, take care of the day-to-day operations. What would you identify as the risks for your investors as they invest? One way you’ve certainly mitigated it is by not investing in a fund that comes with no security. It sounds like they’re getting a mortgage or a deed of trust and giving them the same security that the local bank or mortgage company would get. But what would you identify as the realistic risk? As everything has a isk?
Merriah Harkins [00:17:16]:
Yeah, absolutely. You know, I mean, it really comes down to what is the experience of the sponsor. You know, what have they done before? If the sponsor fails because they’re not making good decisions, then there’s risk. I mean, so you’re putting your money into something. You know, our particular fund there has immediate liquidity, but we have redemption fees for the first three years. So you’re committing to our fund unless you have a hardship, you know, where we will let you out without a fee. You are going into this with the intention of investing for at least three years. So that’s an important aspect to really understand, that you can get better returns if you are investing your money for the longer term.
Merriah Harkins [00:18:07]:
Things that have immediate liquidity with no redemption fees and do not ask you to invest for a couple of years at least. Those are going to tend to return lower returns to you. And you really have to understand liquidity, like what are the catches? You know, so if someone says to you there’s immediate liquidity, they may limit that every quarter, or they may be at a gate, which means they may be able to stop that and not let you out of the fund. So those are really important questions for you to ask. And so it just, it really comes down to, you know, what is your own strategy and being able to feel comfortable with the sponsor. Because even if they have a conservative focus, you know, are they fully deploying the capital that they’re raising? Because if they aren’t and they’re sitting on a lot of cash, then they’re not being able to generate with your cash, potentially enough return to return to you the promised returns that they’ve made to you. And then your capital may also be at risk if they’re not generating the returns that they expect to internally in order to pay you what you expect to be paid in your monthly payments, if the company makes monthly payments, and your principal back at the end. So with our company, when we raise money, we’re making sure that we’re raising money that we’re able to invest right away.
Merriah Harkins [00:19:36]:
So our company, being mostly in the Phoenix market, is a really robust lending market. And so we are restricted in how many loans we can give out to the marketplace because we have diversification standards. So there are some loans we’ll turn away just because we’ve got too much of an asset class in, you know, a particular area, but we have more demand than we’ve got money. So I’m raising money, and the team wants more and more money because they. They have a lot of ddemandd and we’ve got to turn away loans in some cases because of the fact that our demand is so high that the more money I raise, we’re able to place that. But if at some point we. It became more difficult for us to land, they’d say, Merriah. We need to slow down the fundraising. Because if you slow down the fundraising and know that you can place that money and you’ve got a full investment, we know that we can generate between an 11 and 12% return, which allows us to pay all of our overhead, all of our sales people, the people that bring money to us and pay our investors between 8 and 9%.
Merriah Harkins [00:20:55]:
So we’re able to do that because we’re fully deployed. So it’s critical that you look at what’s the integrity of the sponsor, what their track record is, what they’ve done, and whether what they’re offering you is realistic. Can they generate enough inside their company to keep your principal protected while they’re paying you what they’ve told you they’re going to pay you, without the returns being impacted and the risk of the sponsor going out of business or not being able to deliver what they promised to you when you invested your money with them?
Jay Conner [00:21:31]:
Let’s talk for a moment about the geographics of the people that you do business with. So two part question. Let’s talk about people who are investing in the Lucran fund as passive investors, by the way, by you all paying out monthly payments. Very out of the ordinary in my experience. So that’s a big plus right there. So you got those investors that are investing in your fund, and then you have real estate investors that are wanting to borrow the money.
Merriah Harkins [00:22:01]:
Yes.
Jay Conner [00:22:02]:
So, the people that are investing in your fund, are you able to accept people to invest in your fund from anywhere in the nation, or where can investors come from?
Merriah Harkins [00:22:11]:
We are. The restriction in our fund is the investor needs to be accredited, credited, and so that means that they for the last two years have had a $200,000 income or if they have a partner, you know, they’re married or they’ve got a partner and the combined income is 300,000 for the last two years, they can qualify to invest in the fund or if they have a million dollar net worth without including the equity in their home. And so investors like that tend to have more money to be able to diversify into a lot of different investments, which can spread their risk. But we can take investments from anywhere in the country. So if someone came directly to us or had a financial advisor who decided this was a suitable investment, we can take those investments. We specialize in the Phoenix area. We’re here. We’ve got a deep level of experience in the Phoenix area, and it is a market that’s attracting global companies.
Merriah Harkins [00:23:12]:
And so as the economy in Phoenix continues to grow, there is a strong need for continued development of multifamily. There are a lot of improvement projects being done in all kinds of real estate. But we see it a lot in single-family homes, a nd we see it a lot in multifamily, trying to keep up with the demand of bringing workers into a growing economy in Phoenix. We choose to specialize in Phoenix because we’re here, and it makes it easy. We can visit our properties that are that we’ve lent money on and keep a really close eye on them. But we are in other high-growth metro markets that are like Phoenix, and we’re expanding into that as time goes on. Over the next couple of years, you’ll see us in other high-growth markets. So if the investor is anywhere in the country.
Merriah Harkins [00:24:04]:
So let’s just say you are a real estate investor and you want to do this yourself and you’ve done a couple of improvement projects. So we are not a good lender for you to come to if you want to do an improvement on your own home. Because we only lend to businesses, you have to have several projects that you’ve done and completed for us to be comfortable with going through due diligence to be able to lend money to you. And it’s only going to be on a real estate project that you want to improve, acquire, or develop. It’s going to be a 6 to 12-month loan. So we’re really good at helping somebody who needs short-term money. There are lots of other lenders out there that certainly will take a second or a third, or a fourth position in a property. We keep our loan-to-values about 60.
Merriah Harkins [00:24:59]:
So if you come to us and you need a loan for a million dollar property, it’s likely we’re going to give you about a $600,000 loan and we’re going to ask to be in a first position so that if you don’t meet your obligations back to us, we’ve got the security of the property that we lent the money on. So, you know, for folks that are in higher growth metro markets looking to, you know, do this to expand their portfolios in real estate, we’re a really good partner on that part too. To be able to partner with you, we can act pretty quickly within a couple of weeks to be able to get people money, which is why people would come to a company like ours versus a bank initially, because they need to be able to act more quickly.
Jay Conner [00:25:46]:
You mentioned that, you know, every day you work with registered investor agents, you work with independent broker-dealers that have clients, and those clients are looking to place their capital to get a, a nice rate of return that’s, you know, safe and secure. You sort of mentioned this, but I want to dive a little bit deeper into it. How would you say you tailor your messaging to these brokers, to these registered investor agents, differently for each of those as opposed to other sponsors that may be treating everybody the same?.
Merriah Harkins [00:26:28]:
Yeah, so my strategy relationships are critical. I mean, trust is so important. You know, they brought me on because I’ve built relationships with registered investment advisors and broker-dealers over the last 20 years. So there are firms that will go through due diligence and make quicker decisions because they trust me and they know that I’m not going to work for a firm and put my reputation on the line unless I truly believe in it. One unique aspect of Lukrom is that we have what’s called a first-loss commitment. And I’m invested in our fund as well as our executive team, our advisory board, and other employees, so we have 5, close to 5 million. It might actually be even a little bit more than 5 million right now, but we take the first loss. So we are in a class of our investment that if our firm and our fund was not generating enough to pay the 8 to 9% to the clients, or you reached, you know, the third year, or you had a hardship situation before that and you wanted your money back, your original investment, your full original investment, we are going to dip into that $5 million.
Merriah Harkins [00:27:47]:
If there’s ever a situation where that monthly return dips, or your capital account, what you originally invested with us dips. So that full $5 million would have to be exhausted before you would ever feel a loss in our fund. So, you know, that makes it easier because I actually, in 20 years, have never worked for a company that put their money on the line that way. So, me being invested and putting myself in a subordinate position helps to establish trust because you’re not going to do that if you thought the fund was going to lose money. Like you just wouldn’t put $5 million of capital on the line that stands in a subordinate position to protect investors if you weren’t really confident. So those are the kind of things that, you know, it comes down to trusting the person that you’re, you’re offering the investment to. And then, Jay, the other part of it is they have investments that they have probably been offering clients for a really long time. I’m not trying to replace that.
Merriah Harkins [00:28:55]:
I’m not trying to say use, use Lukerum’s I Fund instead of ABC’s Private Credit Fund. I’m trying to get them to put us alongside the investments that they really like, that they vetted, that they feel comfortable with as an additional diversification tool on the fixed income side of an investor’s portfolio. So, I’m educating a financial advisor who has, you know, most have been in the business for a really long time, they can talk the lingo, you know, you can explain things to them where if you’re talking with a high net worth investor, you, you, you educate in a little bit of a different way. You don’t use the industry lingo. You make sure that they understand all of the different aspects of the fund so that they fully understand what they’re getting into. And if you’re looking for a company or an investment that you’ve found through a magazine or a newspaper, or a Facebook ad, get to know that company. Really ask all the questions. And if they don’t take the time to spend a lot of time educating you on the risks as well as what to expect from the comp, any and how they’re going to protect your investment, and their track record.
Merriah Harkins [00:30:13]:
And if they’re just trying to push you into the investment without taking the time to educate you, that’s a red flag. So relationships are really important. Building trust is critical.
Jay Conner [00:30:28]:
Excellent advice, Merriah. As we wrap up Merriah, what would you invite my audience to do?
Merriah Harkins [00:30:35]:
Well, so if you’re invested in learning more about our investment fund, we would love the opportunity to educate you. You can reach me directly. My email address is Merriah@Lukrom.com, so it’s Merriah@Lukrom.com. So it’s L U K R O M dot com. You can also just go to our website. You can reach me through the website as well. Or if you’re interested in seeking a loan from us because you are in the business of acquiring real estate to improve or develop, you know, you can reach out to me, and I can put you in touch with our group that provides loans to people who want to do this themselves. So we’re a good option for folks who want to get into a fixed-income investment with a diversified portfolio of real estate behind it.
Merriah Harkins [00:31:35]:
But we’re also a great choice for people who are seeking to receive capital, where they can have a fast turnaround to be able to do the projects.
Jay Conner [00:31:50]:
Merriah, thank you so much for joining me here on the show. All right, that’s a wrap-up on today’s conversation with Merriah Harkins. If you are serious about raising private money, here’s the takeaway. Capital does not respond to hype. It responds to clarity, credibility, trust, confidence, and consistency. And Merriah here on the show just showed you how sophisticated investors actually think, how they decide, and deploy capital. If this episode helped you see capital raising differently, I need you to do me a favor. Subscribe to Raising Private Money.
Jay Conner [00:32:30]:
Leave a review,e w like Share if you’re watching on YouTube, click that bell, and share this episode. You’re one conversation away from making an impact. Share this episode with another real estate investor who’s still chasing deals instead of attracting capital. And if you want to learn how to raise private money with confidence, without pitching or begging or relying on the traditional methods. You can head on over to my website, www.JayConner.com/Book, and I’ll mail you my book, where you can get the money now, absolutely free. I’m Jay Conner. And remember, when you master the relationship, the money follows. I’ll see you right here on the next episode of Raising Private Money.
Narrator [00:33:16]:
Are you feeling inspired by the knowledge you gained in this episode? Then head over to www.JayConner.com/MoneyGuide, that’s www.JayConner.com/MoneyGuide, and download your free guide that shares seven reasons why private money will skyrocket your real estate investing business right now. Again, that’s www.JayConner.com/MoneyGuide to get your free guide. We’ll see you next time on Raising Private Money with Jay Conner.