Real Estate Investment Advisory ◆ New York City

Real estate intelligence you can act on this week.

Folio Strategy Partners helps investors, lenders, operators, and capital allocators source deals, raise capital, and run leaner operations. We turn your data, and the data your competitors overlook, into ranked pipelines and working tools, delivered in weeks, and built to slot into how your team already works.

Capital Formation◆Investment Sourcing◆Portfolio & Operations Analytics

The barrier in real estate is no longer technology. It is knowing which question to ask the data, all of it, structured and unstructured alike.

Folio does two things with the answer. It takes the manual work off your team's plate, faster and at lower cost than doing it by hand. And it finds the signal others miss, the deals, borrowers, and capital that conventional workflows overlook, and hands it back ready to act on.

How We Work

Insight, then a deliverable your team can use.

Gather and enrich

Across your own data and the data others leave underused: rent rolls, loan books, filings, permits, reviews, allocation records. Structured and clean or messy and unstructured, most of it is already sitting there. We connect, clean, and enrich it.

Score it

Ranked against your investment criteria, credibility-weighted where the source warrants it, with every score traceable back to where it came from. This is where the judgment and business intelligence live.

Deliver into your workflow

A ranked, sourced, decision-ready shortlist, or a working tool, built to match how your team already operates. Something you can act on this week, not a report to file.

Capabilities

Where institutional judgment meets quantitative real estate intelligence.

◆Capital Formation Intelligence

Limited-partner targeting and fundraising intelligence: revealed-preference universe construction, multi-dimensional fit-and-timing scoring, and decision-maker dossiers built for a specific mandate. Folio runs the project management engine of a raise: pipeline tracking, coverage mapping, DDQ and diligence support, and the analytical questions that come back from the field, for GPs and placement agents who need the function without the full-scope mandate.

◆Investment Sourcing & Screening

Acquisition and origination pipelines built from public and alternative data, scored against your buy-box, reconciled to source, and delivered as a ranked, ready-to-act shortlist.

◆Portfolio & Operations Analytics

Automating the manual work your team should not be doing by hand, plus leasing and pipeline analytics, per-agent attribution, and operational diagnostics, all tying property-level performance to fund-level returns. Time saved and cost taken out.

◆Data & AI Integration

Embedding structured data, workflow automation, and large-language-model pipelines into your existing investment and operating processes, without disrupting what already works.

Representative Engagements

Range across the investment lifecycle.

Capital formation, acquisitions, originations, operations. Selected engagements, anonymized. Client references available on request.

Capital Formation Intelligence

Institutional Placement Agent

BuiltA proprietary limited-partner targeting engine for a boutique placement agent raising a roughly $1 billion fund. Ninety allocators ranked across tiers on an eight-dimension fit-and-timing model: hook strength, program structure, AUM fit, vintage timing, consultant relationship, decision path, and a direct-reach signal, each score traceable to source. The universe was built from revealed preference, allocators with prior commitments to comparable-strategy vehicles, then cross-referenced against the fund sponsor's GP investor to surface LPs already invested elsewhere alongside that backer.

ResultA defensible, repeatable targeting system the firm can rerun for every future mandate, with a decision-maker dossier behind each name.

Acquisition Intelligence

Value-Add Hotel Investor

BuiltA market-intelligence pipeline turning a corpus of 272,000 guest reviews across 470 Miami hotels, 82,500 analyzed in depth, into structured, credibility-weighted operating intelligence, separating fixable operational problems from capital and structural ones.

ResultA screen that flags strong-location, weak-operations targets where value is recoverable. The methodology was the basis of a guest lecture at Columbia Business School, a published Milstein Center viewpoint, and a research practicum for senior institutional researchers at the Urban Land Institute.

Origination Intelligence

Top-10 Agency Multifamily Lender

BuiltA scored, researched, ready-to-send origination pipeline for a managing director at a top-10 agency multifamily lender, built from loan-maturity data with verified principals, whole-loan reconciliation against rating-agency and CLO collateral schedules, and outreach sequenced in the originator's own voice.

ResultLive borrower replies and a scheduled call within 48 hours of the first send.

Acquisition Screening

Luxury Short-Term Rental Operator

BuiltA composite scoring methodology and ranked candidate framework for an established operator scaling across five markets, weighting projected cash-on-cash return alongside value-add potential, regulatory exposure, and market context, with full traceability from each property score back to source data.

ResultA pre-underwritten sourcing approach and an investor-ready methodology designed to support equity fundraising.

Operations & Leasing Analytics

NYC Institutional Multifamily Operator

BuiltLeasing and scheduling automation, pipeline analytics, per-agent attribution, and a daily operations digest layered onto the existing CRM for an owner-operator of roughly 1,100 units and $500M+ in assets. The automation removed manual steps the leasing team had been running by hand.

ResultA 61% improvement in speed-to-first-contact, hours of weekly manual work taken out, and a lead-leakage diagnosis drawn from an audit of more than 2,100 tours.

How Folio Works

One discipline, adapted to each mandate.

Every engagement is built around the client's real question and existing workflow, not a fixed template. What carries across them is the discipline: find the question worth answering, enrich the data that answers it, score it against the criteria that matter, and deliver something the team can act on. The next mandate is yours.

The Principal

Donal Warde

Founder & Principal

Donal Warde founded Folio Strategy Partners after more than fifteen years in real estate, including nine years on the institutional buy side. As Vice President of Portfolio Management at HQ Capital, now CP Capital, an $11 billion private equity real estate platform, he managed $2.4 billion in core-plus and opportunistic multifamily and held voting rights on an affiliate investment committee, underwriting and asset managing 13 acquisitions and developments totaling $1.7 billion in capitalization.

He went on to hold operating and leadership roles across the real estate technology ecosystem, including leading a venture affiliated with a $10 billion owner-operator and serving as an entrepreneur in residence at a national real estate venture studio, work that grounds his analysis in property-level reality. His research on quantitative real estate has been published repeatedly in AFIRE's Summit Journal, and his work has reached institutional audiences through a guest lecture at Columbia Business School and a research practicum at the Urban Land Institute.

MBA, Columbia Business School (Private Equity Fellow)
MSc Finance, International University of Monaco
Investment Committee voting member, HQ Capital / CP Capital
Published AFIRE Summit Journal research contributor
Guest lecturer, Columbia Business School; panel moderator, Blueprint 2026
Board member, RENCAA (Columbia Real Estate Alumni)
Trilingual: English, French, Spanish

Research & Publications

Selected published research.

AI and the Real Estate Differentiation Problem: A Hotel Reviews Case Study ↗

Why the capital-raising challenge is a differentiation problem, and how AI applied to unstructured data creates proprietary investment signals: a case study of 272,000 guest reviews across 470 Miami hotels.

Paul Milstein Center for Real Estate, Columbia Business School

Paul Milstein Center
June 2026

The Complexity Premium: Leveraging the Alpha Opportunity in Regulated Gateway Cities ↗

The case that sophisticated operators can capture outsized risk-adjusted returns in America's most complex market, New York City, while institutional capital chases Sunbelt simplicity.

Co-authors: Richard Cadena, Jr., Wenpeng Ding

AFIRE Summit Journal
Issue 20, 2026

Migration Myth: NIMBYism and Why Coastal Movers Aren't Affecting Sunbelt Housing Supply ↗

A county-level test of the claim that coastal migrants import anti-development politics into the Sunbelt. Across 59 counties, the correlation is near zero.

Co-author: Ron Bekkerman, PhD

AFIRE Summit Journal
Issue 19, Nov 2025

Four Stories of AI in Action ↗

Sole-authored case studies of AI and automation in multifamily operations across four owner-operators, examining where the technology is delivering real efficiency today.

Thesis Driven

Thesis Driven
Nov 2025

The OpCo-PropCo Opportunity ↗

How the separation of operating and property companies is reshaping the real estate investment landscape amid macroeconomic change.

Co-author: Paul Stanton

AFIRE Summit Journal
Dec 2024

The Underperformance Paradox: Why Individual Investors Fall Behind Despite Buying Low ↗

Twenty-two years of multifamily transaction records showing consistent underperformance by individual investors versus corporate counterparts, despite lower acquisition costs.

Co-authors: Ron Bekkerman, PhD, Maxime C. Cohen

AFIRE Summit Journal
Issue 13, 2023

Additional research in AFIRE's Summit Journal.

How to Engage

Three ways to work together.

Most engagements start with a single conversation about your mandate. The structure follows the work.

Fixed fee, phased

A defined scope at a fixed price, structured in phases so a working prototype is in front of you in weeks, not months.

Retainer

For teams that want the system kept current: new inputs added, outputs refreshed on a regular cadence, and the capability maintained as part of how you operate.

Success-based

For select mandates, a reduced fee up front paired with performance-based economics tied to results delivered.

These are starting points, not silos. Engagements often blend them and evolve over the course of a relationship.