Multi-family office (MFO)

A multi-family office is a firm that delivers family-office services — investment oversight, tax coordination, bill payment, consolidated reporting, estate administration, family governance support — to multiple unrelated families. The name covers two different kinds of firm, and the difference matters more than most comparisons admit.

The founder-family lineage. The oldest MFOs are single-family offices that opened their doors to other families to share costs:

• Bessemer Trust — built for Henry Phipps in 1907 to manage his proceeds from the sale of Carnegie Steel; opened to non-family clients in 1974.
• Pitcairn — formed in 1923 for the family behind Pittsburgh Plate Glass; began serving other families in 1987.
• Rockefeller — the family office at 26 Broadway dates to 1882; Rockefeller & Co. took outside clients from 1979 and, after an investment by Viking Global, became Rockefeller Capital Management in 2018.

That genealogy is the definition. A dedicated office only pays for itself at very large fortunes, so offices that wanted to persist found other families to share the payroll. Every legacy MFO brand is a former single-family office that sold access to amortize its fixed costs.

The commercial lineage. Most MFOs today were never anyone’s family office. They are for-profit advisory firms — usually registered investment advisers, sometimes bank-chartered — that sell “family office services” as a product line, typically priced as a percentage of the assets they manage. When a wealth manager says “we’re a multi-family office,” this is almost always the meaning.

In both lineages the structural fact is the same: the office belongs to the firm, and the family is a client.

Marketing pages say “holistic” and “bespoke.” Prices live in the Form ADV Part 2A brochures firms file with the SEC. Here is what four marquee firms' own filings say, quoted exactly.

Cresset (ADV filed March 27, 2026) is the only marquee MFO publishing a complete numeric tier schedule:

with “Minimum Fee is the lesser of $25,000 or 2.00% of Managed Assets.” Family-office services run through a separate affiliate, Cresset Family Office, LLC, under a separate agreement and a separate fee.

Pitcairn (ADV filed March 31, 2026): the base advisory fee “generally does not exceed 1.1%” — but portfolios implemented through its GLASfunds platform are charged "an operations fee of 15bps and a services fee of 32bps, as well as Pitcairn’s platform fee of 33bps, in addition to the base advisory fee." That is an 80-basis-point stack on top of the headline number. Family-office services are sold on an annual fixed fee.

Rockefeller Global Family Office (ADV filed March 31, 2026): Holistic Financial Planning carries “an annual retainer fee generally ranging from $75,000 to $500,000.” The Family Office Counseling menu runs $35,000–$75,000 a year, “a portion of which is shared with the client’s Rockefeller representative.” Since October 1, 2025, legacy-platform clients also pay a 3.5-basis-point “Relationship Fee” that “does not reduce or offset” advisory fees. And Item 4.E states, verbatim: "Unless the Firm otherwise agrees in writing, the Firm does not act in an investment advisory capacity and has no fiduciary duty when providing Family Office Services."

Tiedemann / AlTi (ADV filed March 27, 2026): fees run “generally up to 0.85% per annum,” and family-office services are available only to “a limited number of Clients,” consisting of "such administrative services as bill payment. Fees for these services may be in addition to fees payable for investment advisory services."

The oldest brands publish even less: Bessemer, Glenmede, and Brown Brothers Harriman run their client business through bank charters, so their fee schedules appear in no ADV at all. The one public number is BBH’s voluntary disclosure of a minimum annual fee “typically $50,000 to $175,000” (BBH Client Disclosure Document, 2024).

The arithmetic the schedules invite: at Cresset’s published 0.80% band, $30M of managed assets pays $240,000 a year; at 0.70%, $50M pays $350,000 — every year, before the separately contracted family-office fee.

The ground truth across every brochure: the asset-based fee (0.60%–2.00%) buys investment management. The actual family-office work — bill pay, entity accounting, tax coordination, reporting, governance — is a separately contracted, mostly flat-fee menu, at one marquee firm expressly carved out of fiduciary duty, and sometimes with the salesperson sharing in the service fee. The industry’s own filings price operations as a flat-fee product; they staple it to an asset fee.

The MFO exists for a first-principles reason: a dedicated office is only rational when coordination costs exceed roughly $1M a year of staff cost, and most families never reach that line. The MFO amortizes one office across many families — rented internalization. Rent is efficient at entry and expensive over decades.

What you get is real: senior professionals no single family below the largest tiers could hire alone; institutional infrastructure — reporting systems, tax coordination, trust administration (the founder-family firms hold bank or trust charters); continuity that doesn’t depend on any one employee; and, at the legacy firms, a century of institutional memory in serving families like yours.

What you give up:

• Ownership. You are a client. If you leave, the staff, the systems, and the institutional memory of your affairs stay with the firm. You cannot fire the office and keep it.
• Priority. One office serves many families, and attention follows revenue. The smallest relationships tend to get the newest staff — and Rockefeller’s brochure says plainly that it screens clients not by account minimum but by “expected revenue generation” (Rockefeller ADV Part 2A, 2026).
• Aligned-on-paper economics. Revenue-sharing with representatives, affiliate service fees, and platform-fee stacks are all disclosed in the filings quoted above. Disclosure is not the same as absence.
• Stability of the deal itself. The industry is consolidating fast: Corient’s acquisition of Stonehage Fleming and Stanhope Capital, announced September 2025 and closed in 2026, added $214B to one buyer, and global MFO assets exceed $5.2T (Corient announcement, 2025). When your MFO is acquired, the team, pricing, and product shelf you underwrote get re-underwritten — without your vote.

Buyers at scale have noticed. In the communities where principals compare notes, MFO fees on large relationships get called “absolutely insane” (r/fatFIRE, 2025) — because 0.70% of $50M is $350,000 a year whether the year was demanding or quiet.

A natural question: why not skip the commercial firm and share a real office with two or three families you trust? Because securities law is built against it.

The SEC’s Family Office Rule (17 CFR 275.202(a)(11)(G)-1, adopted June 22, 2011) excludes a family office from regulation as an investment adviser only if it meets three conditions: it serves family clients only, it is wholly owned and exclusively controlled by the family, and it does not hold itself out to the public as an investment adviser (SEC IA-3220, 2011). It is an exclusion, not an exemption — a qualifying office isn’t an adviser at all. Fail any condition and the full Investment Advisers Act applies.

The wall is higher than it sounds, and the SEC’s own record shows exactly where it stands:

• Adding one niece took nearly three years. Lewis Family Advisors applied in June 2018 for permission to advise a single niece, arguing she "has been considered and treated as a close family member… for purposes of intrafamilial affection." The order was granted in February 2021 (SEC IA-5690, 2021). There is a whole catalog of such orders — including one for the sibling of a former spouse.
• Sharing staff breaks the exclusion. The rule’s adopting release states that separate family offices “staffed with the same or substantially the same employees” are, in effect, one multi-family office — and therefore a regulated adviser. In 2012 the SEC staff refused a no-action request from an adviser who wanted to serve as a key employee of ten separate family offices (SEC, Adamson no-action denial, April 3, 2012).

The consequence: two or more families cannot jointly own one office, and cannot share one office’s employees, without becoming a regulated adviser — which is to say, without becoming a commercial MFO. Under the rule as written, the only way multiple families can share capability while each keeping an excluded family office is to share a vendor, never the office itself.

There is a third way to use the words “multi-family office” — and it is the most literal one: not one firm serving many client families, but many family-owned offices cooperating in a network. The industry does not use the words this way today; the words themselves have always said it plainly — multiple families, each with an office.

In this architecture, each family owns its own office — its own entity, wholly family-owned and family-controlled, serving only that family: exactly the shape the Family Office Rule excludes from adviser regulation. No office shares staff with another. No office advises another. What the offices share is a common operations vendor and a membership: pooled vendor leverage, shared operational intelligence, peer connection among principals.

This is not a workaround discovered after the fact; it is the only shared-capability architecture the compliance wall above permits. Joint ownership breaks the exclusion. Shared employees break the exclusion. A shared vendor breaks nothing — the SEC’s own staff-sharing doctrine is precisely why the vendor, not the office, must be the thing in common.

The premise of the alliance, in one plain sentence: the more each office contributes to the network, the more the network is worth to every office in it.

Side by side:

Sometimes it is, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise.

A traditional MFO is a rational purchase when:

• You want investment management delegated to an institution, under one roof, with institutional oversight — and you accept asset-based pricing as the cost of that. Investment discretion is the one thing the commercial MFO model was actually built to sell.
• You want a chartered trustee. The founder-family firms hold bank or trust charters; a corporate trustee that will outlive every individual involved is a genuine multigenerational job that a vendor cannot do.
• You want named humans who know your family, across decades and generations, and being a client — with no entity to govern, no staff to direct, nothing to own — is the point, not the compromise.
• You are at a scale where the fees are tolerable to you after you have done the arithmetic above, with your own numbers, over a decade.

If that describes you, buy it with clear eyes. Read the ADV Part 2A before the pitch deck — the fee schedule, the affiliate arrangements, and the fiduciary carve-outs quoted on this page are all disclosed there, and the brochure is the most honest document a firm publishes.

Avolve is not a multi-family office in the commercial sense. We manage no assets, custody nothing, sell no products, and charge no percentage of anything.

What we do: we are the operations vendor to a family office you own — your entity, excluded under the Family Office Rule, with us as its service provider. Agents run the office’s daily work: bookkeeping, bill-pay preparation, consolidated reporting, entity administration, document management, deadline tracking, and coordinating the advisers you hire. You approve every consequential action through a queue with a permanent audit trail. We never touch your money. The fee is flat.

Because you own the family office, you can fire us and keep it — the ledger, the documents, the run-book stay yours. And member-owned offices can, if they choose, join the alliance described above: capability shared through the network, ownership never shared at all. That network reads “multi-family office” at its most literal — many families, each with an office. The traditional industry does not use the words this way, and we don’t claim it does.

What we are not: not a registered investment adviser, no custody, no products, no asset-based fees, no investment advice — the advisers you hire for that remain yours.