Raising Equity in Today's Market with Cash Flow Portal
Raising capital for a multifamily deal is harder today than it has been in years. Fewer people are buying, investors are cautious, and the GPs who are still active are moving at a fraction of their old pace. So how do you keep raising, and keep your investors confident, in a market like this?
On this episode, Old Capital's James Eng sits down with Perry Zheng, founder and CEO of Cash Flow Portal, to talk through the state of capital raising and to walk, live, through the software many syndicators now use to run their entire business. Perry is not just a software founder. He is an engineer who got into syndications in 2019 (with James as his lender on a few of those deals), so he sees this market as both a technologist and a fellow GP.
Here is what they covered.
The state of capital raising: about 30% of the old pace
Perry did not sugarcoat the environment. Across his customer base of general partners, the slowdown is dramatic.
"The trend for the GPs is that people are raising about 30% the speed as they used to," he said.
As a GP himself, he feels it. His response as a software company has been to keep building in the background, even when some tools are not in heavy demand yet.
"It's a good time to develop our muscle for the prime time," Perry said. "One day the market will come back. One day they will be underwriting and managing their assets again."
That is a useful mindset for operators too. The people who use this quieter stretch to sharpen their underwriting, tighten their operations, and get their investor systems in order will be the ones ready to move fast when deal flow returns.
One platform to run the whole syndication
Cash Flow Portal started as cap table management software, a tool to help GPs raise equity and streamline investor relations. The vision now is much bigger: a single operating system for a private equity firm.
Perry drew a comparison to Toast, the restaurant software.
"Toast has the payroll, the restaurant configuration, the POS, gift cards, website, banking, the entire vertical," he explained. Because Toast knows so much about a restaurant's data, it can even act as a lender when that restaurant wants to open a new location. "That is the similar vision that we have for general partners."
In other words, the goal is to take a GP from underwriting a deal all the way through raising, managing, distributing, and filing taxes, all in one place.
"We are creating that future," Perry said. "That is the entire operating system they need to run their private equity firm business."
He then shared his screen and walked through it, start to finish.
It starts with AI underwriting
The first stop for many new GPs is the AI underwriting tool. You upload your rent roll and T12, and the software automatically builds the unit mix and pulls in income and expenses. From there, it behaves like a spreadsheet, but you can talk to it.
"You can say, 'Can you make it such that I have a preferred equity partner come in,'" Perry said, "and then the waterfall will get updated automatically."
The model runs distribution waterfalls, pre-generates a sensitivity analysis by simulating different purchase prices against the resulting returns, and even handles feeder funds. In the live demo, James asked the kind of question a real operator would ask, which unit type has the highest vacancy, and the AI read the rent roll and answered (one unit type was running 20% vacancy).
The AI does not just read the model, it can write to it. When the property tax line was hardcoded at 1.6%, Perry told the assistant to look up the county millage rate for that address and update the tax. It searched, found the rate, and changed the number to 2.23%. As Perry put it, "People use it to look up rents, to update the waterfall, to update the model."
Then the raise: marketing, CRM, and one clean link
Once a deal is under contract, the platform shifts to the raise. There is a full CRM and marketing layer, "think Mailchimp or HubSpot," Perry said, that lets you send campaigns, track who opened your emails, drop warm leads into drip campaigns, take meeting notes, and see how much each of your investor relations people has closed.
When an investor is interested, everything funnels through a single link. Prospects open one clean deal room where they can watch the video or webinar, review the offering, and click "invest now" to choose their entity, connect their bank, sign documents, and complete accreditation and compliance (KYB/KYC).
James, who is on the receiving end of a lot of these offerings, gave it a genuine compliment. "It's a lot clearer than other portals," he said. "Ours is pretty clean," Perry agreed.
Distributions without the spreadsheet panic
Distributions are where a lot of GPs lose time and sleep. Cash Flow Portal breaks it into two parts: calculating the money and transferring it. You plug in a single number, say you want to distribute $100,000, and the waterfall engine allocates it to every investor by their amount, labeling what is preferred return and what is not.
The feature Perry is proudest of solves a very familiar headache: your numbers not matching your spreadsheet. The platform shows a visual walk-through of every investor moving through each waterfall hurdle, and you can upload your own spreadsheet and ask the AI why the two do not line up.
"The AI is like, 'Hey, on your spreadsheet your preferred return starts on January 1st, but in Cash Flow Portal it starts on February 1st, and that's maybe why your calculations are different,'" Perry said. "That's the most aha moment for our customers today."
The part that matters most right now: asset management
This is where the conversation got most useful for operators. Cash Flow Portal's asset management tool (branded "Asset Intelligence") syncs with property management software like AppFolio, Yardi, Rent Manager, or RealPage, or simply reads reports you forward to a dedicated email address. It then compares your original underwriting against actual performance and tells you, with a high degree of certainty, whether you are on track to hit your projected first-year cash-on-cash, or whether you need to change course. From there, it is one click to send investor updates, and LPs can see live charts of occupancy and collections on their dashboard.
James, who reviews dozens of these deals, explained why this matters so much in today's market. Most GP reports, he said, highlight occupancy and maybe some capex, but the real story is buried.
"It's up to me to open it and go to page 12 and look at the net rental trend," he said. "Most GPs don't have a dashboard showing rents, other income, expenses, and the major changes."
He pointed to two problems the tool solves. The first is time. "It's August now, but I'm getting June financials, so you're almost a month and a half behind," he said. A direct connection that refreshes weekly beats waiting on a property manager who may or may not send you an update.
The second is discovery, and Perry told a story every operator will recognize. He was in Texas visiting two of his properties, trying to set a staff bonus tied to last month's collections, and he simply could not find the number in his property management system.
"I searched for the word 'collections,' I couldn't find it. I searched for 'transactions,' I couldn't," he said. "I don't know which report I should be looking at. Even if I click into it, I don't know what variables I need to supply." The fix is being able to ask in plain language: "What were my June collections?"
James tied it back to the current debt environment. "Depending on the debt that they have, operations is super important right now," he said. When margins are tight, you cannot afford to be six weeks behind on your own numbers.
Accounting, K1s, and the tax-season bottleneck
The last piece ties everything together: accounting and compliance. A syndication is not one set of books. There are operating financials, a GP capital account earning treasury rates, and a separate capex account, and at year end all of it has to consolidate into QuickBooks so you can file your syndication taxes. It gets even messier when a fund owns multiple properties.
Perry described the industry's real pain point: January through March, when accountants are buried, reconciling asset-level financials against investor-level financials, often because QuickBooks does not carry the right LP capital balances. "If they don't match up, they couldn't even file the taxes," he said.
Cash Flow Portal built double-entry accounting at the property level, across multiple properties, and at the full syndication level, and it partners with a set of accountants it works with weekly to actually file K1s. "We're not CPAs," Perry noted, "but our preferred partner will do your K1s, and they are very reputable in the space."
A marketplace for capital
Perry also highlighted a newer piece, investbased.com, which he described as "a Yelp for capital raising." GPs build a reviewed profile to reach more potential LPs, and investors can search a GP's reviews before committing. One customer, Granite Towers, had just picked up a 5.0-star rating during the interview.
Key Takeaways
Capital raising has slowed hard. GPs are raising at roughly 30% of their old pace, so systems and investor trust matter more than ever.
Use the slow market to build muscle. The operators sharpening their underwriting and operations now will be ready when deal flow returns.
AI underwriting is here. You can upload a rent roll and T12 and adjust the model in plain language, including pulling live data like county tax rates.
A clean, single investor link matters. A clear deal room reduces friction and, as James noted, stands out from cluttered portals.
Asset management is the sleeper priority. In a tight-margin, tricky-debt market, a live dashboard beats digging through page 12 of a PDF that is already six weeks old.
Plan for tax season early. Reconciled accounting throughout the year is what makes K1s painless in the January-to-March crunch.
The bottom line
Perry's message for this market was optimistic in a grounded way. Deal volume is down, but that makes it the perfect time to get your systems, your underwriting, and your investor reporting into shape. As he put it, the caterpillar is becoming a butterfly. The GPs who come out of this stretch with tight operations and confident investors will be the ones ready to move when the market turns.
Thinking about your next multifamily raise, or how to finance the deal behind it? The Old Capital team can help you size it up. Reach out at oldcapitallending.com