<abbr>In</abbr> 1882, John D. Rockefeller, the world’s richest man, created the first full-service single-family office in the U.S. to manage and invest his fortune, said to be $1.4 billion ($31 billion in today’s dollars) at his death in 1937. Fast-forward 142 years, and many members of The Forbes 400 have a family office to help them manage their enormous fortunes.



But so do thousands of other American families who don’t belong to the billionaire class. At their core, family offices are a means to invest, preserve and pass on fortunes—not to build them de novo. They’re both a safety net and status symbol. “People are busy, and they want to know: ‘How are we doing? Is there anything to worry about?’ ” says Mark Rogozinski, president of Family Office Services for Chicago-based Cresset Asset Management.



Family offices are taking off for many reasons, including increasing wealth and aggressive marketing to the ordinary rich. Baby Boomers and their elders also have concerns about passing on their accumulated wealth (in aggregate, some $84 trillion) and have a desire to involve younger generations in philanthropy. On the other side, the family office providers have access to new technology that can better monitor investment performance and share financial data, making it easier for them to expand. The final impetus is tax savings—the 2017 tax overhaul, coupled with a tax court ruling that year involving the Lender family (of bagel fame), mean that investment expenses which are no longer deductible on individual tax returns can often be written off at the family office level.



It’s unclear how many single-family offices now operate in the U.S.—estimates range from 3,000 up to 7,000. But all agree that the number is growing. Deloitte conservatively estimates there will be 3,550 single-family offices in North America in 2025, up 61% from 2019. (For comparison,&nbsp;Forbes&nbsp;counted 880 billionaires in the U.S. and Canada in 2024.)



It still requires at least $100 million in investable assets (and preferably $250 million) for a single-family office to make sense, but those with as little as $25 million, or even $10 million, can find a spot with a multifamily operator if they’re ready to pay for estate, tax and charitable planning and access to alternative investments like derivatives and venture capital.



A single-family office costs a minimum of $1 million annually (and usually more), but multi-family offices run from 0.5% to 2% of assets a year (generally, the bigger the portfolio, the lower the percentage). Sometimes there are transaction and performance fees as well. Concierge services, such as managing a client’s homes and security and travel, may cost extra. The fee structure is often negotiable and bespoke, just like the services. Some multifamily offices charge a fixed fee per year, starting at $50,000 and ranging up to $1 million for full service.



More and more people want (and can afford) such white-glove treatment. The Federal Reserve’s 2022 Survey of Consumer Finances found the richest 1% of Americans (that’s 1.3 million households) had a minimum net worth of&nbsp;<a href="https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WFRBL99T999309" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank">$11 million</a>, while the top 0.1% (<a href="https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WFRBLTP1310" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank">133,000</a>&nbsp;households) had a net worth of at least&nbsp;<a href="https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WFRBLTP1311" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank">$46 million</a>.



The original multifamily offices were born when a single rich family invited in a handful of others to defray costs. Cresset, founded seven years ago in Chicago by two private-equity veterans to manage their own families’ wealth, is one of a new breed of registered investment advisors expanding aggressively into the multifamily business. After merging in June with The Connable Office, a 130-year-old multifamily office, it’s up to $60 billion in assets under management.



One new multifamily player, New York City’s Beatrice Advisors, is the first owned by a Black woman. It was launched in June by Christina Lewis with assets from her own family and those of her rich friends. Her father, Forbes 400 member Reginald Lewis—a Baltimore-born, Harvard-trained deal lawyer—died in 1993 at 50 from an inoperable brain tumor. Christina was just 12 then, and describes her family as being “underadvised” at his death. Beatrice is investing heavily in technology, creating digital dashboards for its clients that display a family’s whole net worth, including their investment portfolio, business assets and even intellectual property. The aim, Lewis says, is “transitioning our knowledge to the client over time, so that the client is in the driver’s seat.”



In contrast to the Lewises, the Lipitz family has had decades to work out its wealth transition. Gene Lipitz, now 58, got into the family office game in 1997. His dad, Roger C. Lipitz, now 82, had sold the company he built—Meridian Healthcare, a chain of 45 nursing homes—for $205 million in 1993. Father and son began collaborating on investments informally, but Roger became increasingly involved in civic and charitable work and suggested they formalize that partnership, with the younger Lipitz taking the investing lead. Gene first hired a multifamily office in 1997 but was dissatisfied. Ultimately, in 1999, after selling his own tax- and risk-management company to Citicorp, Gene decided to create his own office; it now manages investments for three generations with three full-time employees, outsourcing such functions as accounting. The office’s mission statement is revised regularly. Failing to do that, Gene says, is “a great way to lose buy-in from the next generation.”



Even for people with decades of business experience, starting a single-family office can be daunting, beginning with the challenge of hiring qualified staff. That work, too, is often outsourced. Kay Shah, a director in the Family Office Division at StevenDouglas, a national boutique search firm, spends her days recruiting financial pros to serve in family offices, which typically have five to 15 employees, she says.



New cloud-based platforms help professional managers track portfolio holdings and performance across asset classes, but family offices controlled by older generations still tend to lag technologically. Josh Kanter, an attorney and wealth advisor in Salt Lake City, concluded, based on his own experience, that family offices need to become more tech-centric. After his father, famed tax lawyer and trust engineer Burton Kanter (an advisor to the billionaire Pritzker family), died in 2001, Josh took over managing the family’s office. He found keeping all generations up to date on practical details difficult. For example, he says, the family will pay for tuition and health care, but only if certain guidelines are followed. The problem was that there was no single place to find that sort of information, other than sorting through the more than 275,000 files in the family Dropbox or calling him directly to ask.



His solution was to start his own software company, Leafplanner. It acts as an overlay to existing financial software like Addepar, which tracks multiasset portfolio performance, or Arch, which organizes tax documents. Leafplanner can guide family members through the process of getting answers to specific questions on everything from investment decisions to charitable giving. It can be customized for an unlimited number of users, controlling access to what information each can see. Since launching in 2022, Leafplanner has installed the software for 145 other families, Kanter says. As for his own family, he says, they no longer have to ask, “What happens if Josh is the next one to get hit by a bus?”

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Why You No Longer Need To Be A Billionaire To Have Your Own Family Office

Attention is not something 46-year-old Sisa Ngebulana seeks but at nearly two meters tall, it is hard to miss him. He also happens to own the aptly named Billion Group, which is worth R3.6 billion ($413 million).
The Johannesburg-headquartered company, located in the Montecasino entertainment complex, is busy with developments, in South Africa alone, worth more than R7 billion ($848 million).
Ngebulana, who was born in Mthatha in the Eastern Cape, also chairs the biggest black-managed property fund in the country—the Rebosis Property Fund. His success is drawing attention but this wasn’t always the case, in a long journey where much has changed.
<div id="attachment_1446" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1446" class="size-medium wp-image-1446" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Mdantsane04-300x239.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="239" />Mdantsane City Mall, East London, Eastern Cape</div>
“If you take Mdantsane Mall for example it was a piece of veld [field] where women would be raped when they crossed at night. Today, it is a mall that employs thousands of people and which employed 3,000 at its height during construction. The mall also contributes R140 million ($16 million) to the local fiscus,” says Ngebulana.
The R500 million ($57 million) Mdantsane Mall, which was constructed in 2008, was the second biggest mall in the Eastern Cape at the time. It represented the first time the public became aware of the property mogul, even though it was not his first business.
Ngebulana started out as an estate agent while studying towards an LLB degree at the University of Natal. After completing his studies he became a candidate attorney at De Villiers Attorney’s—now Werskmans Attorneys—in Cape Town. In 1996, he moved to Johannesburg to open Blue Truck Rentals.
“That business didn’t go so well. I put all my eggs
in one basket and when one of the bottling companies,
I was contracted to, went down I had to close down.”
He dusted off his law degree and got a nine-to-five job at Eskom, South Africa’s energy supplier, as legal counsel. He moved up the ranks rapidly, but could not repay the bank the money owed for the failed truck business, and gave business another go. This time, he got involved in coal mining.
“With the R10,000-a-month ($1,100) salary; with a take home of just over R5,000 ($573) after deductions I could not have been able to pay the R1 million-a-month ($115,000) I owed the bank. I only qualified for a R230,000 ($26,000) mortgage bond that would have taken 30 years for me to pay back,” he says.
Needless to say, the worse happened—the coal business failed.
After experiencing an 11 month dry-spell, without a job or any prospects, he made a deal with a generous landowner. He subdivided one of the landowner’s plots in upmarket Hyde Park, Johannesburg and sold houses off plan, making a small profit. The bank then gave him an overdraft and he built another cluster of 20 homes.
From the profit, he was able to acquire commercial buildings such as the Bank of Lisbon building in Pretoria. He was now playing with the big boys but problems arose when he decided to go into retail.
“The nice thing about shopping malls is that it’s a science. You have to do your market research, you have to convince retailers. It is hard work and not everyone can do it,” he says.
He encountered challenges even before he started building his flagship R1.5 billion ($172 million) Hemingways shopping mall, in East London. There was a bidding war to build the first regional mall in the Eastern Cape. Some of the biggest names in South African property development—Investec, Growthpoint and Atterbury—wanted a piece of the pie. Everyone agreed that there could only be one winner: the Billion Group.
“Retail, besides track record and delivery, is about location, location, location. I managed to convince the retailers that my location was the best. It is simple as that,” says Ngebulana.
Some argued political interference and many others looked to ensure that he failed even before he started building. Ngebulana becomes animated as he talks about one of his detractors.
“The MD of Grinaker at the time swore he could close us down. He said he had a bigger wallet and was going to discourage subcontractors from doing business with us,” he says.
The Grinaker MD had enough reason to be angry. After his company reneged on the deal to build Hemingways—Grinaker deny that they submitted a tender to build the mall but would not confirm or deny the comments attributed to their former MD—Ngebulana poached some of their senior staff to start Billion Construction. True to the MD’s alleged words, suppliers and subcontractors refused to do business with Billion. So Billion bought material from Europe, opened a concrete manufacturing plant in Mthatha and made its own steel beams on site. The Platinum Group, which owns luxury brands like Aca Joe and Jenni Button, was not ready to open some of its stores in East London so Billion Retail was created.
“The mall was opened not a day too early, not a day too late,” he says.
What of the accusation that Ngebulana is a beneficiary of the ruling African National Congress?
“People speculate too much. I have never had a relationship with the African National Congress. I have never been a member of the ANC. Sometimes I don’t blame these people. Maybe that is what they are seeing of black people in this country; that they only do things because of connections.
“When I won over the retailers in East London, where were politics? When I formed my own contractor, because I was being stifled by competitors, where were politics? There is a war out there. It doesn’t suit certain circles in business to see a black entrepreneur getting to where I am because it motivates others, and tomorrow there will be more black entrepreneurs and the notion of Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) will go out the window” Ngebulana says.
Hombisa Bubu, a former executive at the Billion Group says, “When you work for him every minute must be productive. He is a hands-on kind of guy, very focused and knows what he wants”.
Interestingly, Bubu adds that when he met Ngebulana, in the early 2000s, he already owned a helicopter and a ten-seater airplane.
Billion Group’s outgoing chief financial officer, Thabo Lebelo, says Ngebulana is the most financially literate lawyer he knows and predicts big things to come.
“He is going to be Africa’s own Donald Trump,” he says.
The divorced father of two credits his grandfather for inspiring him to be the man he is today.
“He forced me to make bricks, to go behind the counter at his shop and to study law when I thought I would do better things with my life.”
The Billion Group is in the process of building the R1.75 billion ($201 million) Bay West City Mall in Port Elizabeth and the R1.3 billion ($146 million) Forest Hill City Mall in Pretoria, set to be opened in 2014.
Ngebulana is making in-roads into other countries. There are currently two malls being leased to retailers in Angola—one on the waterfront in Luanda, will cost $150 million; the other, on the mainland, will cost $100 million. The group also plans to build six shopping centers in Nigeria, collectively costing $300 million, and is busy with plans for malls in Uganda, Mozambique and Tanzania. Once complete, these projects will be worth R38 billion ($4.4 billion).
“The future is certainly Africa. The continent is ready for opportunities. There is a lack of formalized retail in the continent. We will be bringing that to the market and that will lead to things like furniture and fashion becoming cheaper,” he says.
Ngebulana is a businessman par excellence but what really drives him? Surely, he has enough money to relax?
“I am not into a game of money but a game of passion. I take risks, I have God on my side and I want to leave a legacy,” he says.

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Why You No Longer Need To Be A Billionaire To Have Your Own Family Office

Bricks, Mortar, Passion