Seventy per cent of family offices now make direct investments, and four in ten of those have increased that activity, according to the Citi Wealth 2025 Global Family Office Report, which surveyed 346 respondents across 45 countries between June and July 2025. Direct investment used to be the exception in this segment. It is now the default behaviour of a clear majority.
Which means a great many private transactions are being negotiated by people who do not have an investment committee in the conventional sense, and who are relying on something older than a committee to decide whether to take the meeting.
Tommy Shields, Head of Investor Relations at Onyx Reserve, a private investment firm operating in South Florida, spends his working life on the receiving end of that decision.
“Institutionalisation changed the paperwork and it did not change the front door,” Shields said. “The diligence is more rigorous than it was and it should be. But somebody still has to decide you are worth two hours on a Thursday, and no data room has ever made that decision for anybody.”
The professionalisation is real and it is measurable
There is no serious argument that this corner of the market has stayed informal.
The UBS Global Family Office Report 2026, based on 307 family offices holding $627.4bn in combined wealth surveyed between January and March 2026, found 60% planned to change their strategic asset allocation over the following twelve months, the highest level UBS has recorded, with 37% allocating to infrastructure. Strategic asset allocation as a phrase did not appear much in this segment fifteen years ago. It is now the organising concept.
The 2025 edition of the same report found North American family offices holding 54% of portfolios in alternatives against 46% in traditional assets, with private equity at 27% and real estate at 18%. BlackRock’s 2025 Global Family Office Survey, covering 175 single family offices with more than $320bn in assets, put alternatives at 42% of portfolios in 2025, up from 39% in 2022 and 2023, with 32% intending to raise private credit allocations.
The secondaries market tells the same story from a different angle. Goldman Sachs, surveying 245 family offices in May and June 2025, found 72% now invest in secondaries, up from 60%. Secondaries are a technical and heavily intermediated instrument. Their adoption by family capital is about as clear a marker of professionalisation as the data offers.
And on the direct side, BNY Wealth’s 2025 Global Family Office Study of 282 offices found 64% of decision-makers planning six or more direct investments in the year ahead.
Six or more direct investments is a pipeline. A pipeline requires deal flow. Deal flow, in private markets, arrives through people.
The counterweight: private markets exposure is not a one-way street
The story usually told about this segment is that everybody is piling into private markets and the allocation only moves up. The evidence does not support the simple version.
Goldman Sachs’ 2025 survey found family office private equity allocations fell from 26% in 2023 to 21% in 2025, with total alternatives slipping from 44% to 42%. The RBC and Campden Wealth North America Family Office Report 2025, covering 141 respondents with $285bn in collective wealth, found North American family offices held 29% of the average portfolio in private markets in 2025, down from 30% in 2024, even though 88% were invested in private markets in some form.
Both surveys show a segment trimming, not accumulating. Goldman also found 39% planning to increase private equity over the following twelve months, which is a fair description of a group that has pulled back and is deciding when to go again.
That pattern is precisely why relationships are load-bearing rather than decorative. In a rising allocation, capital finds managers almost regardless of who is calling whom. In a flat or falling allocation, the same number of managers compete for a smaller pool, and the deciding factor stops being availability and becomes preference. Preference is personal.
Shields frames the practical version of it in terms that would embarrass a strategy deck.
“The most underrated act in this business is returning a call the same day when the call is not going anywhere,” he said. “It sounds like a small courtesy. It is the whole differentiator, because very few people do it consistently and everyone keeps a private list of who does.”
The observation is more specific than it first sounds. Responsiveness costs nothing when a transaction is live and everyone is motivated. Its informational value comes from the quiet periods, when there is no transaction, no fee and no reason beyond habit. A principal deciding whether to bring somebody into a deal is not evaluating the pitch. The principal is remembering the eleven months in which nothing happened.
Being introduced and being pitched are different businesses
Direct investing has a structural feature that intermediated investing does not. There is no gatekeeper whose job is to take the call.
A pension fund has a consultant and a procurement process, so an unsolicited approach has a defined route into the building even if the route is slow. A family office principal has none of that. The screening mechanism is whoever the principal already knows and already trusts, which means the entry point is almost always a person rather than a process.
“Getting introduced and getting pitched put you in two different rooms,” Shields said. “One of them, somebody has already spent their own credibility on you before you arrived. The other, you are asking a stranger to take a risk on their afternoon. The work of the job is being the kind of person other people are willing to spend credibility on.”
The economics of that are unforgiving in a way institutional relationships are not. A consultant who recommends a manager that underperforms has followed a documented process. A principal who introduces a friend to a deal that goes badly has spent something that does not come back easily, and will be more cautious the next time.
Which explains why so much of the activity the surveys measure remains concentrated among people who already know each other. Citi’s 70% direct-investment figure and BNY’s 64% pipeline figure describe an enormous volume of transactions being screened without a formal procurement function anywhere in sight. Something has to do that screening work. In practice, reputation and referral do it.
None of that argues against institutionalisation. The diligence standards in this segment have risen sharply and the allocation frameworks are genuinely more rigorous than they were a decade ago. A relationship gets a manager a meeting. It does not get a manager an allocation, and anyone who believes otherwise has not sat through a modern family office diligence process.
The two things operate in sequence rather than in opposition. The relationship determines who is in the room. The analysis determines what happens once they are.
What the survey data cannot show is which of those two filters is doing more of the work, because no survey asks how the manager got the introduction in the first place. The allocation percentages are counted carefully every year. The phone calls that preceded them are not counted at all.