Building GP LP Match: A Marketplace Connecting Real Estate Sponsors and Investors — Aleksey Chernobelskiy

Steven Weinstock (00:00) Welcome back to another episode of the Wealth Clock Podcast. I'm your host, Steven Weinstock. Today we have Aleksey Chernobelskiy — I think I said that correctly — CEO and co-founder of GP LP Match. GP for general partner, LP for limited partner. GP LP Match. Before launching GP LP Match, Aleksey managed STORE Capital's $10 billion commercial real estate portfolio while leading its underwriting team. He also earned a quadruple major from the University of Arizona in finance, mathematics, economics, and accounting. Sounds exciting. Today GP LP Match has become one of the fastest growing platforms connecting real estate GPs — general partners — and LPs through qualified relationships instead of cold outreach. Welcome to the Wealth Clock Podcast, Aleksey. Aleksey Chernobelskiy (00:58) Hey hey. Thank you so much for having me. Steven Weinstock (01:00) Okay, let's just do a little background. Most people know you — I've seen you on LinkedIn, I met you in person at a real estate event recently here in the New York / New Jersey area. Most people know you as the GP LP Match guy. You write great content on LinkedIn. But if we went back ten or fifteen years, what were you doing? Aleksey Chernobelskiy (01:21) Well, ten years ago I was at STORE, give or take. I left about four years ago and went off on my own entrepreneurial journey. As you mentioned, STORE was a very institutional-type seat. It was a REIT. We bought a ton of stuff, but all of it was really focused on single-tenant buildings with non-credit leases, through sale-leasebacks, for the folks who know what that is. Had a good time. Perhaps believed in myself a little too much in terms of going out on my own — set off on my own. And so far so good four years later. Steven Weinstock (01:58) Let's back up a second. What was the first job you had out of college? Was it in real estate? Was it with STORE Capital? Aleksey Chernobelskiy (02:03) Out of college? No, actually not. I basically did not touch real estate much until STORE. My first job out of college was in Israel. I worked for a quantitative trading firm — algorithmic trading. We built an algorithm that sat on top of a bunch of algorithmic trading strategies and allocated to them. So basically fund-of-funds, in that we collected capital and allocated to a bunch of algorithmic trading strategies that traded on the New York Stock Exchange. That job was in Israel, which ultimately led me to spending two more years in Israel. After that I did some distressed debt, trade claims, strategy consulting, and some turnaround work. Then it really wasn't until I came to Arizona that I touched real estate at a serious level, which was 2017-ish. Steven Weinstock (02:58) Got it. When did you start GP LP Match? Aleksey Chernobelskiy (03:01) I did quite a bit before starting it. Started GP LP Match specifically as a platform 18 months ago. The first deal we sent was January 2025. Took me about a month or two to code the first band-aid version of it. Here we are 18 months later, still building. Steven Weinstock (03:27) Tell me exactly what GP LP Match is and how you got the idea. Aleksey Chernobelskiy (03:34) Sure. I advised a lot of LPs first when I left STORE. A very common request from an LP is: do you have opportunities you can send my way? How do I learn to be a better LP? Then naturally I started speaking to GPs as well. GPs always want to meet LPs. And I just said — wouldn't it be cool if I could do this at scale? That gave birth to GP LP Match. Put simply, it's a marketplace of opportunities. LPs set certain filters — property type, market, all the way down to co-invest preferences or waterfall structures — and you get notified any time we get a deal that matches. Otherwise we don't email you. On the GP side, you can submit your deals and get matched to LPs, for free. Steven Weinstock (04:24) Is there a fee for an LP to browse listings and to make contact with the general partners of a specific deal that piqued their interest? Aleksey Chernobelskiy (04:35) No. No fees on either side. GPs don't need to pay us to submit a deal. GPs don't need to pay us for wires — we're not broker-dealers, so we can't charge on that even if we wanted to. On the LP side, also no fees. LPs can sign up within 30 seconds. It takes a little bit of a process for us to approve LPs, but as soon as you're approved, it's a very seamless experience. Steven Weinstock (05:03) Let me break it down for the audience. There are two aspects of the website. On the GP side, they have a real estate opportunity — typically multifamily but I'm sure there's other asset classes. They submit their deal with details: expected rate of return, time frame, type of property, units. On the other side you have people interested in investing in real estate — LPs sign up and can set search filters. Maybe they're only interested in Florida, or only deals 150 units and up. What happens when an LP sees a deal they like and wants more information? What's the communication process? Does Aleksey have to sit in the middle forwarding individual emails? Or is the LP's email and phone number given directly to the GP? Aleksey Chernobelskiy (06:20) In the earlier days it was more manual. We would basically give the email address of the GP, and the LP would need to copy that email, create a subject line, and reach out. For about six months now we actually implemented a simple button. You're perusing a deck, click the button, and that button hits our API to create an email thread between the GP and the LP — with us not involved. It literally sends an email introducing the two parties, and then they're off to the races. Steven Weinstock (06:58) Does it mask the email? Meaning if I'm John Smith at wealthclock.com and I hit the button and it goes to, I don't know, Jared Kushner as the GP — does he see me as John Smith, or is it masked through your own privacy software? Aleksey Chernobelskiy (07:14) They see everything. It's as raw as it gets. They see each other's email, names, LinkedIns, everything. Steven Weinstock (07:22) Got it. That's appreciated on both sides. There's no gatekeeper — I saw on your website something along the lines of "no gatekeeper." I like that. How do you make money on the website? Aleksey Chernobelskiy (07:31) That's by design, because if we're involved, such a thing can't scale. I can't make those introductions at scale, can't be on those calls. Not a scalable solution. That's why we implemented that button — to make it easier for our users but also to make it scalable. To answer the revenue question: really two places, or now three. First — and this is how we scaled — is ads. There's a ton of sponsorship opportunities available for service providers that pitch GPs in different parts of the flow: investor relations portals, property managers, all types of AI solutions nowadays (those are famous), and the list goes on. That side helped me scale and hire a team. Then as we got two software engineers on board, we also created a solid data solution where we take all the deal data on the platform, anonymize it, and help GPs understand how they compare to market. So if a GP wants to understand how they compare to other GPs we've sent deals on over the past six months — that's an off-the-shelf software hit. You upload your deck, within 10 minutes you'll get a response with five different tabs and a bunch of information. That's available under the premium subscription. Notice, that's for folks who want feedback or extended optimization. If you just want to get on the platform — and we've had many people like this — they get on, submit a deal within a minute or two, match with an LP, and the LP wires as much as five million. We don't get anything. Not for submission, not for the wire. Sometimes we don't even hear about the wire because we don't have payment rails on our platform yet, so payments don't come through us. We sort of have to hope one of the sides tells us at some point. Steven Weinstock (09:51) Got it. What would be a reason somebody applies to be an LP and for whatever reason they're not accepted? Assuming they're not writing "Mickey Mouse" in the name field and it's not spam. Aleksey Chernobelskiy (10:09) I try to be generous, but I also have to balance two things. Generous with people who want to learn how to be LPs, but careful — because we're sending somewhat confidential information every day. We send four to five deals a day. First of all, if you're not accredited, I can't really help until you're accredited — that's an SEC thing. If you're accredited but I have a hunch you're not a true LP — or at least not a pure LP, meaning you also do brokerage or your own deals — I'll typically look at those case by case. The other complicated one is international folks, which I'll also speak with. We have some very large sovereigns on the platform, for example. Those are relationships I had to vet. Some are Googleable, some are a lot less. You just have to make sure it's a real person with real money and not somebody trying to mine data. Steven Weinstock (11:16) On the GP side — this is more complicated. How do you vet? You're not making money on these, you're not giving GPs five stars. How do you make sure a GP is solid? Aleksey Chernobelskiy (11:39) Two things. There's a simple test and a more complicated test. The simple test: any time I notice anything even remotely close to misrepresentation, I immediately don't send it. Which happens a lot more often than you would think. People misrepresenting their background, what they own. For example, people saying they own a bunch of stuff — I look on CoStar and it turns out to be a totally different firm, and they were actually LPs in that deal. It's the same thing as saying "I own Tesla" when you have one share. It's a brand thing for me. If I have everyone from a high-net-worth investor all the way to some of the largest LPs in the world on the platform, and they get a notification that is embarrassing to send, or borderline fraudulent, it reflects poorly on our platform. That's the simple test. The more complicated test is: how do I think this will do? Some of that is database, some is gut feel. We've sent about 650 deals across, give or take. For example, I know we don't have a tremendous amount of LPs interested in complicated land deals. So if I get five land deals in a week, my immediate reaction is — I want to make sure they're legit, but I need to space these out. Part of that is solved through filters, because people can filter out land if they're not interested. But people are pretty lazy users sometimes and they don't set filters, and ultimately you want to see stuff that's relevant. That's a bit more subjective. Steven Weinstock (13:37) I noticed your company is hosting a conference. Did I see that correctly? I'm in New York, you're in Arizona. But in September you guys are partnering with IMN, a big real estate networking conference conglomerate. They have niche events throughout the country in different aspects of real estate — single family, multifamily, debt financing, AI, and so on. I saw you're hosting a conference specifically for the GP LP Match audience. Tell us about that. Aleksey Chernobelskiy (14:16) And you just reminded me — that's the third revenue source. I told you two. First was third-party providers pitching GPs. Second was GP premium — that data product. Third one is events. In terms of the conference: September 23, New York City. Trying to do things very differently, and we'll see how it works. At a high level, we're going to have 100 LPs in a room and 100 GPs in a room. Two things different. One is that 1:1 ratio, which I haven't really seen before. The second is that the LP audience will be split evenly into high-net-worth people, family offices, and allocators — in the same room. The hope is there's cross-pollination and learning opportunities for LPs, and for the GPs in the room, you can turn to your right and speak to Nuveen, Davidson Kempner, Goldman's internal allocator team; you can turn to your left and speak to a business owner who just sold his company and is allocating $250,000 checks. It's still very much in the works, but we've had tremendous success so far and I'm excited for it. Steven Weinstock (15:30) That's quite a conference. It's going to be hard to get the right LPs and the right GPs in the room, but if you can get quality companies on both sides, that should really be a home run. Having the conference in New York definitely lends itself to a good audience. Hatzlacha — good luck on the conference. And you definitely partnered with a top-notch operator to run the event. What else are you working on besides GP LP Match? Is this your full focus? Any other companies? Aleksey Chernobelskiy (16:19) Take kids to camp, put them to bed, learn Torah. Jokes aside, I don't really have time for anything else. GP LP Match overall — we have a lot of things we're working on, and it's still a lean team of five. That takes it all. I'm usually doing 70-ish hour weeks and can barely keep up. Steven Weinstock (16:40) Wow. Okay. Tell our audience how they can reach out to you. I'll put it in the show notes, but — LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, email, whatever you want. Aleksey Chernobelskiy (16:54) My last name is pretty unique. You can find me on Twitter — pretty active there — and pretty active on LinkedIn. Email is my first name at gplpmatch.com. Steven Weinstock (17:16) Got it. Aleksey, thank you very much. When you're in town, maybe we should have another dinner together. We had dinner back in New Jersey at that other event. It wasn't scheduled — you asked if the seat next to me was available. It was. We had a great time talking and I really appreciate it. For everybody else, thank you for tuning in to another episode. If you like us, hit like, hit share, and subscribe. Aleksey, thank you very much. Aleksey Chernobelskiy (17:47) Very good. Okay. Thank you. Bye bye.