As AI eliminates administrative burden and capital consolidates around scaled platforms, operational performance is becoming a primary driver of returns
Programmatic JVs are how established sponsors scale past the deal-by-deal grind: one relationship, committed capital, a defined buy box, and the ability to move on acquisitions without re-raising every time.
The appeal is obvious. The problem is that the capital partner on the other side has negotiated dozens of these, and the sponsor making the jump has negotiated zero. The institutional LP brings aggressive fee structures, board-level governance, ROFOs, removal rights, and a term sheet that looks nothing like a standard LP agreement.
The economics move, too. Preferred returns run 10 to 12 percent in a JV against the 8 percent a fund investor will accept. Promote splits compress from 80/20 toward 85/15. The asset management fee that carries a fund shrinks toward zero. Every one of those numbers is a negotiation, and a sponsor who walks in without a view on each will concede ground they never knew was theirs to hold.
Most sponsors have no framework for that negotiation. This workshop gives them one.
On Wednesday, July 22, Thesis Driven is hosting a live, tactical session on raising and structuring programmatic JVs, walking the full process from sourcing a partner through negotiating and closing the term sheet.
Wednesday, July 22 | 12:00–2:00 PM ET | Zoom | $299
Paul Stanton will lead the session. Paul is a Partner at Thesis Driven and at PTB, a boutique real estate investment bank, where he has funded over $1 billion of real estate projects and platforms. The session runs on a single fictional case study, Sam Kowalski's $150 million multifamily platform, and works the full arc: matching the right investor type to the strategy, structuring the economics, negotiating the provisions that make or break the relationship, and meeting the governance and reporting bar institutional partners set.
Here's what you'll learn
Understand the programmatic JV landscape: How JVs differ from funds and syndications, when the jump makes sense and when it doesn't, and what institutional partners actually look for in a sponsor before they commit capital.
Match your strategy to the right partner: PERE funds, hedge funds, family offices, platform investors, co-GP funds. These sit on different levels and overlap in practice; a family office can be a co-GP partner, and often is. The session covers how to read which partner fits your strategy, your governance tolerance, and your capital need.
Structure the economics: Management fees, preferred returns, promote waterfalls, and co-investment requirements, and how each lever moves the others.
Navigate the term sheet provision by provision: Buy box parameters, capital commitments and call mechanics, approval matrices, ROFO and ROFR, reporting requirements, and removal clauses, and what each one means once the ink dries.
Negotiate from a position of strength: What to push on, what to concede, and how experienced sponsors protect GP flexibility without blowing up the deal.
Avoid the pitfalls that break JVs: The misaligned incentives, murky approval matrices, and deployment disputes that quietly kill programmatic relationships before the second deal ever closes.
Live exercises you'll work through
You'll run five hands-on exercises against the case study: match Sam Kowalski's strategy to the best of three potential partners, build the waterfall from a provided template, mark up a sample term sheet to find the five provisions most favorable to the LP and draft counters from the GP seat, design the approval matrix, and role-play the negotiation of three key provisions with AI playing the institutional LP across the table.
All participants receive recordings, slides, exercise templates, and sample JV term sheets, shared through our private Circle community. Can't make it live? Recordings go to everyone who registers.
The sponsors who scale are the ones who learn to work the programmatic table before they sit down at it.
Paul Stanton is a Partner at PTB, a boutique investment bank focused on joint ventures, capital raising, and M&A transactions. Paul is a Teacher and Writer at Thesis Driven, developing and growing next-gen real estate & proptech concepts.
