We map where Mexican cities are going, find what is missing there before it is priced, build it with tenants who have already proven the demand, and sell it to the people who wish they had seen it first.
Monterrey is breaking into hubs faster than its services can follow. The gap between the two is the fund.
Nearshoring put the plants on the periphery. Six municipios on the edge of the metro now hold 92 manufacturing sites of more than 250 workers each: Zuazua, García, Pesquería, Salinas Victoria, Ciénega de Flores, El Carmen. Industrial land there is already priced. The layer around it, housing, clinics, schools, credit retail, food, is not.
Congestion makes those hubs self-contained. One in eight Nuevo León workers already commutes more than an hour each way; another 27% sit between half an hour and an hour. TomTom ranks Monterrey among the world's most congested cities, with 89 hours a year lost at rush hour. Past that threshold a city stops being one market and becomes a dozen.
Obsolescence is the other side of the same movement. Plazas, old naves in the built-up ring, highway motels and vacant Infonavit blocks were built for a population that moved. Their owners still price them on the past.
Opportunistic funds wait for a broker to call. This one runs a pipeline, and the pipeline is what investors see.
Each metro is cut into hubs by where daily trips end, not by municipal lines. A bill of services says what a hub of a given size and income should contain. What is missing is a ranked list of questions.
Chain openings, business registrations, job postings, listing prices and days on market, permits, water concessions, plant announcements. Refreshed on a schedule, diffed against last quarter.
A short list: refurbish an obsolete asset, put a credit tenant on a corner, add the civic layer to an industrial node. Each with a standard model, a partner set, a dominant risk and a kill rule.
Two site visits at 06:30 and 18:00, ten structured interviews, one call to the target tenant's real estate team, and a written answer to "why hasn't anyone done this?" Dead, watch or pursue.
The other half is a query. When a broker calls with a plaza in Escobedo, the same map answers in minutes whether it fits: which hub it sits in, what that hub is missing, whether the asset converts to it, and which constraint kills it. The fund stays opportunistic without being naive.
Thirty days, free public data, one metro. The map already ranks 25 hubs and says what each one lacks.
Every business in the metro (INEGI DENUE, 193,686 units with sector and size), the 2020 census at block-group level (2,185 AGEBs), and the official polygons went onto a hexagonal grid. A watershed on jobs, retail and population cut the metro into 25 hubs. A bill of twenty services, from OXXO to cold storage, was counted against each hub's catchment. The whole run takes under a minute and repeats for any Mexican metro by changing one config line.
Then we tested our own thesis against the chains. OXXO goes wherever people are; its density is flat across income. Coppel goes where people have credit. Bodega Aurrera marks where income drops off. Nine hubs carry the first two signals without the third: the chain-validated medium band, two million people, 39% of the metro. In those nine we asked which services that normally follow purchasing power, gyms, cinemas, private schools, clinics, have not arrived, and whether the market is already closing each gap.
A gap is a question, not an answer. Every gap above threshold gets the field protocol before a peso is committed. The numbers above come from a static map; the signal layer that sees growth, not just stock, is Phase 1.
Medium-income hubs where the chains have already confirmed the customer and the next layer has not followed.
Why medium and not low: the low band is where the plants are, but income has to be there before services can be. The medium band is where the chains have already done our demand study for free.
| Playbook | What it is | Cycle | Dominant risk | Kill rule | Sleeve |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Refurbishment (flagship) | Buy obsolete assets at old-use prices where the data shows a different population is already there; reposition to what the hub needs. Plaza to clinic and school; nave to last-mile; motel to operator housing. | 18 to 36 mo | Title, structural | Title unresolved in 6 months; structural cost above 40% of price | ~50% |
| Pad + credit tenant | Corners on corridors the chains are entering. Solve title and permits, lease to OXXO, Autozone, pharmacy, QSR. Small, fast, repeatable. | 12 to 24 mo | Tenant says no | Tenant real estate team declines; not entitled in 9 months | ~30% |
| Node centro | The missing civic layer for an industrial node: clinic, business hotel, food, services. Pre-leased to the operators the plants already use. | 24 to 48 mo | Absorption pace | Anchor not signed in 12 months | ~20% |
| Workforce housing | Rental housing inside the 30-minute ring of a cluster, with a shuttle. Only with two-plant demand. | 24 to 36 mo | Security, financing | Single-plant demand; security verdict red | opportunistic |
| Constraint arbitrage | Land that is cheap because of water, ejido title or permits. | 36 to 72 mo | Politics, time | Excluded from Fund I: too long for a five-year vehicle. Fund II. | |
Small on purpose, and built for family offices. Six to eight positions, two fast playbooks, one slow one, and a funnel that shows work every quarter.
Three bars, each answering a question a family office actually asks. What does the money earn doing nothing. What does it earn in the liquid version of the same asset class. And what does the family already earn owning finished real estate directly, which is the honest alternative to any fund.
| Bar | Reference | Today | What Fund I commits to |
|---|---|---|---|
| Risk-free | CETES 28 days, Banxico auction of 22 Sept 2026 · reference rate 6.50% | 6.15% | Preferred return of 10%, roughly CETES plus 400 bps. Carry earns nothing below it. |
| Liquid alternative | S&P/BMV FIBRAS index, one-year total return to August 2026 | +14.9% | Performance benchmark: FIBRAS index plus 500 bps. If a listed FIBRA beats the fund over the term, the illiquidity was not paid for. |
| Doing it directly | Stabilised, leased institutional-quality assets a family can buy today: cap rates in pesos, the same rate the fund underwrites its exits at | 9 to 10% | The fund earns its keep only on the spread above that: yield on cost of at least 13% at stabilisation. The family ends up with the building it could have bought, at the cost of the land plus a risk it did not take itself. |
Why not a fixed 15% hurdle: a pesos hurdle that ignores CETES rewards the manager for rate cuts and punishes them for hikes. Tying the preferred return to a public rate keeps the incentive honest across a five-year cycle. Why FIBRAS plus 500: the exit buyer is a FIBRA; if the fund cannot beat its own buyer's return by a margin, the family should own the buyer. Why the direct-ownership bar: most families in the room already own real estate; the fund has to be worth more than one more building.
The report is the funnel, not the deals. A quarter with no acquisition is still a quarter of visible work.
| Risk | Where it bites | Built into the playbook |
|---|---|---|
| Title and tenure | Every periphery site; ejido land | Title review at control stage; ejido specialist on the bench; kill at 6 months |
| Security | Corridors, some northern and eastern nodes | Field verdict includes security. Walk away, do not price it |
| Water | Anything north of Monterrey | CONAGUA concession registry (REPDA) in the data stack; concession confirmed before entitlement |
| Tenant concentration | Anything tied to one plant | Two-plant minimum or shuttle to a cluster; credit tenants on pads |
| Politics and permits | Municipal governments change every three years | Diversify municipios; entitle early; local partner per city |
| Thin data | The map sees stock, not growth; DENUE flattens plant sizes | Phase 1 signals (job postings, plant announcements, listings); field protocol on every gap before capital |
| Small fund | Concentration; one bad deal is 15% of the fund | Pads and refurbs cap single-asset equity at MXN 40M; no asset above 20% of commitments |