What We Look For in Real Assets

There is a meaningful difference between owning something and owning exposure to something. A share in a fund that holds a diversified basket of instruments gives you exposure to an outcome. A building, a company, or a piece of land gives you the thing itself — something you can inspect, improve, and be held accountable for. Capital Ibiza is built around the second kind of ownership. We are drawn to real estate and operating businesses precisely because they are real: assets whose condition, whose market, and whose potential we can verify directly, rather than take on trust.

Why tangibility matters to us

A purely financial instrument — a derivative, a structured product, an interest in a vehicle several layers removed from the underlying asset — can be a perfectly efficient way to gain exposure to a market. But it removes the investor from the thing being invested in. You cannot walk through a structured note. You cannot renovate a derivative. Value, in those instruments, is created or destroyed by forces largely outside your control: rates, spreads, the behaviour of other market participants. That is a legitimate way to invest, but it is not the way we choose to invest, because it removes the one advantage we think we actually have — the ability to improve something with our own hands and judgement, and to verify that improvement ourselves.

A real asset gives us a direct lever on value. A building that is poorly managed can be better managed. A property that is underused can be repositioned. A business with a sound underlying model but weak execution can be operated better. In every case, the improvement is something we can see, measure, and be accountable for — not something we are hoping a market will eventually recognise on our behalf.

What makes a real asset attractive to us

Not every tangible asset is a good investment simply because it is tangible. When we assess real estate or an operating business, a few qualities matter more than any projected return figure on a spreadsheet.

Clear title and a clean structure

An asset with ambiguous ownership, contested title, or a legal structure nobody can fully explain is not a bargain, whatever the headline price suggests. We would rather pay a fair price for something with a clean, verifiable structure than a discounted price for something that carries hidden legal risk. Clarity of ownership is not a detail — it is close to the first filter we apply.

A plausible path to value creation through active involvement

We are not interested in assets whose only prospect of appreciation is a rising market. We want to be able to identify, concretely, what we would actually do to the asset — renovate it, reposition it, manage it better, restructure its operations — and have reasonable confidence that doing so would create value independent of what the broader market does in the meantime. If the entire investment case rests on the market moving in our favour, we consider that speculation, not investment, and it is not what we do.

A market we can genuinely understand and verify on the ground

We favour markets where we can do our own diligence — walk the property, talk to the people operating in that market, understand the real dynamics of supply and demand rather than rely on a report written by someone else. Spain and the wider European market, where we operate directly, give us that ability. An asset in a market we cannot personally verify is an asset we are less able to underwrite honestly, regardless of how attractive it looks on paper.

Effort proportional to the return available

Active ownership takes real work — time, attention, and often direct operational involvement. We look for situations where the return available genuinely justifies that effort. An asset that requires years of hands-on work to produce a modest return is not, for us, a good use of the one resource we cannot expand: our own attention.

The common thread

All of this comes back to the same underlying principle that shapes how we invest more broadly: we prefer situations where we can directly influence the outcome and directly verify the result, over situations where we are simply exposed to a market and hoping it moves in our favour. Real assets — real estate and operating businesses — are where that principle applies most naturally, which is why they sit at the centre of how we deploy our own capital.