Chicago / Est. 2004
Disciplined on the numbers.Creative on the path.
Helix has acquired, owned and operated a variety of commercial real estate across the United States, including manufactured housing, multifamily, office and others. We invest our own capital in every transaction, alongside our investors and operating partners.
Where we invest
Sectors we have run, not just underwritten.
Every sector below is one where we have signed the payroll, taken the resident complaint, and lived through a full cycle. We are not sector agnostic. We stay out of deals when we don’t add value.
Manufactured housing
Communities / Park-owned homes / Infrastructure
In a manufactured housing community you own the water lines, the sewer, and the roads. There is no city crew coming. We underwrite park-owned home turn costs, submetering conversions, and the infrastructure a broker's pro forma files under deferred maintenance. We read the rent control statute before we read the rent roll.
Multifamily
Value-add / Workforce housing
Apartments where the return comes from operations rather than from a compressed exit cap. If a business plan only works because the reversion is 75 basis points better than the going-in, it is not a business plan.
Commercial
Office / Mixed use
We buy selectively, and only where the basis holds up against replacement cost and near-term rollover.
Adaptive reuse
Conversions / Change of use / Repositioning
We buy buildings the market has written off and put them back to work under a different use: an obsolete office floor plate that pencils as apartments, a warehouse the zoning will let us convert.
What we do
What ownership means here.
Buy
We buy assets we intend to keep. That means the going-in basis has to work on today's operations rather than on a plan that requires everything to go right. Most of what we look at fails this test, which is the point of the test.
Run
Occupancy, collections, expense discipline, and capital planning all depend on the quality of the team managing the property. There is no version of this business where the asset performs and the management does not. We are involved at the level of the monthly variance report.
Hold
We do not set an exit date at closing. We hold while the asset earns its place in the portfolio and we sell when the numbers say it's time, not when a fund's life is ending. The hold period is an outcome, not a plan.
The firm
Helix Funds is based in Chicago. The team has spent more than two decades acquiring, operating, and financing real estate together. We’ve come out of one of the country’s most disciplined investment organizations and we maintain that discipline. We invest our own capital and hold for the long term.