Richard Croft, CEO & Founder of Martley Capital

Richard is a character. He knows he’s a character. He’s irreverent, he jokes, he pulls you in with charm and honesty. What makes him memorable is not just what he says, but how he says it. He will be in the middle of explaining the use of data in deal sourcing, and then break into a jingle about “shit in, shit out.” Yet behind the personality is three decades of experience: billions raised and platforms built across Europe. That tension, between entertainer and technician, between humility and authority, is exactly what makes him worth listening to.

I wanted to talk to Richard about capital raising but he kept the discussion simple. I’ll admit I was hoping for complexity that would make this section sing. I think I wanted complexity so I could feel smart. When I asked about his first capital raise and what mattered, he gave me four questions:

That’s it.

In his first raise back in 1995, when email barely existed, the playbook was: put together a deck, hit the road, and pitch face to face. By 2005, during the euphoric run-up to the GFC, raising was even easier. “If you had a smile and a story, people would ask how much you wanted,” Richard recalled. But the world has changed.

Today’s fundraising market is almost feudal. A handful of giants, Blackstone, Brookfield, TPG, Cerberus, Starwood, Lone Star, a few others, capture the largest share of institutional capital.

There’s a second tier of managers competing for the rest. And then there are firms like Richard’s, which have to be creative just to exist. Richard raised $200 million in the last twelve months, which is impressive. “That makes us one of the biggest capital raises in the UK,” he told me, “but you don’t build a real business on $200 million anymore.” The scale required to compete has fundamentally shifted.

So how does a smaller firm survive? You cannot out-compete the giants, and LPs won’t risk emerging managers in head-to-head fights. Instead, you identify what the giants ignore. Rather than raise a blind-pool fund, his firm syndicates each deal individually through the International Stock Exchange, building a network of investors who prefer picking deals one by one.

The model is working. Yet, he admits it is brutal. When I asked if this concentration might reverse, his answer was definitive: “It’s getting worse, not better.” The future, Richard believes, belongs to two groups: specialized niche players and the giants who effectively become capital markets themselves.

“The market is more complicated than anyone thinks,” he said. “I’ve been doing this 35 years and I’m still surprised.” He pointed to his own mistakes. In early 2020 he argued that low rates would persist forever, that markets had become largely efficient. “Like an idiot,” he added. Then came the pandemic, war in Europe, populist movements, and fragmentation. The macro environment became, in his words, “officially mad.”

His conclusion was blunt: “People get too obsessed with the macro when the macro is unpredictable. Focus on the micro, the deals in front of you, the segments you understand.”

And when you focus on the micro, Richard is clear about what to look for: “Find the sectors where occupational demand is going to outstrip supply.”

Too often, investors pile into whatever’s fashionable, PBSA, hospitality, PRS. Occupiers may still be there, but investors flood the space, outpacing demand. “Everybody says, ‘fuck yeah, let’s get on board.’ And then the market overshoots.”

The reverse also happens. Investors decide they hate a sector, regardless of fundamentals. Offices were written off in 2020, no one would return after the pandemic. Now the line is that AI will eliminate jobs, so no one will need an office. Except in London where AI is not expected to arrive. “In the regions,” Richard joked, “everyone’s going to be replaced by a computer. Londoners will be fine.”

In reality, he believes post-pandemic patterns favor regional demand: people want to work closer to home, not spend hours commuting. Meanwhile, office supply is shrinking, with buildings converted into hotels and housing, and EPC regulations set to knock more out. With rents at £20–30 per square foot and development requiring £50+, the gap is there.

In summary: seek out the segments where occupational demand runs ahead of investor sentiment. Avoid the ones where capital has already created oversupply. Or as the GOAT would say “Be fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful.”

Richard said that if he were 20 today, he would see four possible avenues:

As the top three are self-explanatory, Richard and I focused on fractionalization. Real estate remains illiquid and inefficient. In many ways we are still operating as we did centuries ago, with the land registry as the foundation. But fractionalization has the potential to alter this structure entirely. Ownership can be broken down into smaller pieces, whether through portfolios, individual assets, REITs, or debt instruments.

It's not hard to imagine a world where fractionalization becomes the only feasible way into the asset economy. And once you accept that premise, it's easy to see the same pattern extending outward, Ferraris, Picassos, anything rare and valuable. Richard believes that over the next decade, most major asset classes will be fractionalized. And crucially, he sees the buyer not as institutions, but retail. The buy-to-let market has been shut down by government policy. Fractionalization may be the only viable path for younger generations to own real assets.

Richard doesn’t claim to be an expert. “I know what I want it to do, but I wouldn’t have a clue how to build it,” he said. Instead, he has hired a small group of computer science graduates and given them freedom to experiment. Their job is to see how AI and data can make the firm sharper.

For him, AI isn’t about reinvention. It’s about efficiency. Too much of real estate is repetition: reports, models, moving data from one place to another. Machines can do that. People, he insists, should be focused on judgment.

Data presents a similar challenge. A model will give you outputs, but it won't tell you whether a street will thrive or whether a tenant is bluffing. And if the inputs are flawed, the outputs are flawed. This is where the jingle comes in, “Shit in, shit out.”

This isn't new for Richard. Years ago, he built Coyote because he wanted all his deal information in one place. Today, he's chasing the next version of that idea, not to sell externally, but to make his own business more efficient. Technology for Richard is a way of asking whether the things we do out of habit could be done better.

Richard is clear about what he values in people:

He told me about a colleague who corrected him publicly when he was wrong. Most assume people in his position resent that. He found it refreshing. She had been curious enough to notice he was wrong and had the backbone to say so in front of 30 people. The opposite is intolerable: indecision, spinelessness. Richard calls it the human equivalent of a jellyfish. Better to make a mistake and learn from it than to drift along without ever choosing. “If something looks wrong and you ignore it,” he said, “you’re the idiot.” And even if the call turns out to be wrong, he would rather have someone act, be corrected, and learn how to fix it than sit on their hands and do nothing.

But Richard’s philosophy doesn’t stop at performance. He insists on fun. Work takes up too much of life to be grim. There should be music, jokes, and laughter. “Life is very, very short,” he said. “If you take it all too seriously, you’re fucked.” His advice to young professionals? Learn to play the guitar. At parties, nobody remembers who wrote the best memo. They remember the person who got the room singing. To be clear that was a joke, but that is the point - joy matters. As Richard put it, “laughter is the only thing that is really worthwhile, life is meant to be enjoyed, and work is no exception.”

Richard has built his career around people he likes, friends, family, colleagues who make him laugh. He admits he has passed on bigger financial opportunities because they would not have been fun. His philosophy is clear: don’t make career decisions purely for money unless you have to. Work hard, be curious, be courageous, and make sure you enjoy it.