This is the second part follow-up to my recent article on how we started.
Several years into doing real estate investments around 2002, we were approached by other investment companies such as financial advisers wanting to offer their services to our investor base. We were looking for diversity for our client’s portfolios as real estate didn’t offer much liquidity to their portfolio.
The problem we encountered with financial advisers was identifying the quality of their service and investments. We knew that a more diversified portfolio was better for clients, but needed to have a better guarantee of the quality of investments we put in front of our clients.
Short term and quick profits are easy if you throw anything at your client base, but a long term stable business is much more rewarding if you really scrutinize the investment and in many cases make the investment yourself before offering it to your clients.
After much deliberation and research, we decided to venture into fine wine investment since it offered stability and a lower entry point than real estate. 20 years ago, I had done some training in a fine wine brokerage and I always remembered how very few clients ever lost any money. On the Italian side of my family, my grandfather made his own wine in his vineyards and my father was a very popular Italian chef, so wine was something I grew up learning about from an early age.
I knew from my days as a trainee wine broker that wine was always a consistent performer for returns on investment. At the time, fine wine investing was not correlated to the global markets unlike it is today, so it was a great fit for our client’s needs. I remember being told by many people that it was a bad idea.
Nevertheless, we had confidence in our own service levels and ability, so we decided on fine wine investing and the marriage was complete, fine wine became part of our client’s investment portfolio.
It was one of the best decisions we ever made, for our clients and for Sure Holdings.
When we ventured into fine wine investing, we were looking to diversify our portfolio. Wine turned out to be the perfect match with real estate. The timing of fine wine investing could not have been better, since it was an up and coming investment class.
Thanks for reading, I will write some more next week!
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