Institutional Real Estate Investment Platform
Cimiento Capital acquires quality, supply-constrained real estate at a good basis, with low to moderate leverage, and holds it for cash flow with no predetermined exit date. Value is built through disciplined operations, not financial engineering or market timing.
The name
noun, Spanish. Foundation. The part of a structure that no one sees, and that everything else depends on.
Return on Structure™
“Charisma inspires. Structure empowers.”
The most effective leaders create systems that let vision scale beyond personal reach. That idea is the origin of Cimiento Capital and of its investment philosophy, Return on Structure™: the recognition that the most valuable investments are not simply in assets or in people, but in the frameworks that align them.
At Cimiento, structure is a multiplier of potential, not a constraint on it. It shapes how assets are bought, how they are managed, and how the capital behind them is organized, so that every party has a reason to do what is best for the asset.
Why Cimiento was founded
In most real estate vehicles, the decision to exit is made by something other than the property. Three forces push assets to market before they are ready, and when they do, market timing becomes the deciding factor instead of the asset’s own readiness. That misalignment erodes value. Cimiento was built to remove all three.
A closed-end fund’s artificial end-of-term deadline forces sales on the fund’s schedule, whatever the market or the asset is doing.
Cimiento’s answerNo predetermined exit date. Assets are held for cash flow and sold when they are ready.
When a manager is paid only at sale, the manager has a reason to sell. When it is paid on committed capital, it has a reason to deploy.
Cimiento’s answerPerformance tested and paid along the way, partly in shares, so the manager stays vested in the portfolio, not its own exit.
An investor who needs cash can turn a long-term asset into a forced sale at the wrong point in the cycle.
Cimiento’s answerDefined, orderly liquidity, with buyouts first and an asset sale only as a last resort.
Built on three pillars
The thesis, the manager, and the capital structure are designed together, because each one only works if the other two hold.
NOI growth in supply-constrained real estate. Multifamily first, industrial once the platform is established.
Read more IIAlpha through sourcing, execution, and control. AI-native from day one.
Read more IIINo reason for anyone in the capital structure to force an early exit.
Read moreI · The Thesis
Underwriting and performance are benchmarked on unlevered yield, isolating real property-level execution from leverage and cap rate noise. Leverage is a secondary tool, not a primary source of return.
Acquired below replacement cost, driving strong unlevered dividends from day one.
Locations where new competitive supply is structurally difficult to build.
Cash flow growth, not debt, is the hedge against a higher-for-longer rate environment.
And no mandate to chase a high IRR through market timing.
A structurally higher-for-longer rate environment, rising federal debt, and an open question over the dollar’s long-run reserve status all add volatility to liquid markets. Institutional portfolios have historically allocated only 10% to 20% to illiquid real assets. Cimiento’s view is that the allocation to income-producing, capital-preservation-first real estate should grow, priced off a defensible, historically grounded spread over the 10-year Treasury.
Owners who bought or built during the low-rate era are running out of room as debt matures, while the record wave of new supply rolls off. That convergence creates an attractive vintage: buying ahead of the recovery, not ahead of the bottom.
The same spine of good basis and real supply constraint, in a different form. A warehouse cannot be built vertical, which gives industrial a structural protection against oversupply that multifamily does not have. The focus is quality, effectively irreplaceable last-mile assets within roughly 45 minutes of the population centers they serve, in coastal markets where rent-growth drivers are genuine.
II · The Manager
A manager can ride a market cycle, or create real value through skill. Cimiento is built to generate alpha in three places: sourcing, acquisition execution, and asset management.
Being paid on committed capital creates pressure to deploy, and that pressure erodes underwriting discipline. Cimiento is built without it, so the platform can wait for the right asset at the right basis.
The most attractive assets increasingly trade on-market. Winning them takes real relationships, market knowledge, and a genuine guarantee of execution: capital already committed, not raised after a letter of intent is signed.
The metrics an asset is judged on are approved before it is acquired. Performance management is a continuation of underwriting, run from a position of control, sitting above the property manager rather than behind a sponsor.
Not how often an asset is reviewed, but whether a decision is made while it can still change.
AI-native from day one
Technology applied to a poorly designed process only accelerates its weaknesses. Applied to a well-designed process, it compounds its strengths. Cimiento designs its processes and its technology together, from the first hire, so the platform can scale without scaling headcount at the same rate.
Built by a founder who has scaled both an institutional real estate manager and an AI-based company, Cimiento is the first platform where those two experiences meet.
Starting with an agent that identifies and screens target markets for supply constraint, employment-driven demographics, and landlord-friendly policy.
Expense approvals, leasing targets, and covenant headroom tracked continuously.
Quarterly valuations and hold-or-sell analysis on every asset, with debt maturities monitored across the portfolio.
Timely, consistent reporting produced from one source of record, not assembled by hand.
Finance, compliance, and back office run lean from day one.
III · The Structure
Capital structure begins with fees that fairly compensate the real work of sourcing and portfolio management. From there, every element is designed so that neither the manager nor its investors has a reason to sell before an asset is ready.
No fund-life clock. Assets are held for cash flow, and the platform is built to evolve into an open-ended vehicle as it grows.
Meaningful GP co-investment on every deal, on the same terms, so the manager’s capital is at risk alongside its partners’.
GP compensation tested periodically against a high-water mark on NOI and NAV, paid partly in shares, and trued up at eventual sale.
Every asset valued quarterly on its own terms, before the hold-or-sell decision ever considers capital-side motivations.
Partners can share in the enterprise value of the manager itself, not just the returns on the underlying real estate.
The first acquisition is funded in cash for certainty of execution; each deal builds on the credibility and momentum of the one before it.
Full terms are set out in the Pitch Deck, available on request to qualified parties.
The Founder
Juan DeAngulo is an institutional real estate investor and platform builder. Over more than two decades he has invested in and managed over $5 billion in total assets, and taken part in nearly $10 billion of transactions, across every major commercial real estate asset class and in markets from Seattle to Miami. The majority of that capital has been concentrated in multifamily and industrial real estate.
What sets his career apart is not only the investing. It is that he has repeatedly built the organizations that do the investing: the people, governance, fund structures, processes, and culture that turn a team into an institutional platform, and a platform into an enterprise with value of its own. He has done it twice: as employee number two of Transwestern’s institutional investment platform, and as Managing Partner of Elion Partners, which he joined when it was just its three founders and built into a national institutional manager.
Raised in Colombia and fully bilingual in English and Spanish, Juan has spent his career connecting U.S. institutional real estate with capital from across the Americas and beyond, from Latin American pension funds to U.S. endowments, family offices, and sovereign wealth funds.
Harvard Business School’s Owner/President Management program sharpened a lesson Juan had already lived: an owner’s lifecycle is not automatically in sync with the lifecycle of the business. That insight shaped a deliberate, organized exit from Elion and the decision to build again, applying the same playbook a second time, with more experience, and with AI and technology at the core from day one.
Alongside his real estate career, Juan co-founded Inselligence, an AI-powered revenue operations platform that combines deterministic process mapping with predictive and generative AI. He set the strategic direction of the company and its product and built its cross-border U.S. and Latin America team from the ground up, applying the same process-first discipline he brought to Elion. That experience is the reason Cimiento is AI-native from its first day.
Juan joined Elion as Managing Partner at the start of 2013, when the Miami firm, founded in 2010, was still just its three founding partners. Over the next eleven years he built it from the ground up into a vertically integrated institutional platform with nearly $4 billion in assets under management, 75 employees, and offices in Miami, New York, and Washington, D.C. Along the way the firm completed more than 175 property investments and realized three closed-end funds alongside its permanent-capital vehicles. Juan personally sourced key assets for the platform, including City Place in the Minneapolis area and RidgePort (now ELP 55) in metro Chicago, primarily through relationships built over years, while building the teams that let it scale.
He shared operational leadership of the firm with one other managing partner and sat on its Board and its Senior Management, Investment, and Asset Management Committees, taking part in the deployment of every fund investment. He led all corporate, fund, and legal structuring as Elion grew from startup to institution, across more than twelve fund vehicles and their feeder entities, and was the main point of contact for its institutional limited partners, from pension funds and endowments to family offices and sovereign wealth funds, negotiating their LPAs, side letters, and co-investment structures.
Juan also took personal ownership of the firm’s culture, creating the material used across eight corporate retreats. By the time he left, the management company had become a nine-figure asset in its own right, separate from and additive to the real estate it managed.
As employee number two of Transwestern’s institutional investment platform in Chicago, Juan managed client portfolios across the full investment cycle. He helped design the customized core program that won a $1 billion equity commitment from State Farm, spanning office, multifamily, retail, and industrial real estate and built for unlevered, long-term cash flow, and then led its portfolio strategy and execution from the ground up. Coming out of the Global Financial Crisis, he was directly responsible for sourcing every opportunity for the program, leading its due diligence, taking it through investment committee, and closing it, across multifamily, office, and retail acquisitions in key U.S. markets.
He also took over an existing State Farm portfolio across four U.S. regions, building the asset management, property management, leasing, and disposition processes behind it and preparing a hold-or-sell analysis on every asset. The results led State Farm to place additional assets under the firm’s oversight.
In parallel, Juan opened the door to Latin American capital. He built the partnership with Finesa Real Estate Group under which Transwestern was retained to buy, manage, and sell assets for the $200 million Diversified International Partners fund, anchored by three of Colombia’s pension funds, and secured further commitments from international institutions and family offices.
Juan moved into real estate by launching C&D Real Estate Group in Miami, where as Managing Principal he brought in the investor for an industrial condo conversion and managed the project from start to finish. He then joined Cape Horn Group as Regional Manager and opened its Chicago operations, generating more than $30 million in sales in the first year across condo conversion projects. At the same time he oversaw the asset management of a $300 million, one million square foot office portfolio, managing its lease rollover and completing more than $50 million of dispositions.
Juan began his career in technology, first as Director of Sales at NetByTel and then as Director of Operations at Visual Knowledge, where he managed a network of more than 100 people across Latin America and earned a business development award from the U.S. Department of Commerce. Those years built the process and systems discipline he has applied to every organization since.
Cimiento is not being built to make money for the first time. It is being built to protect and grow Juan’s own capital under a discipline he believes in: reliable yield and long-term capital growth over financial engineering.
Sourcing across the cycle
Juan’s track record is not the product of a single favorable market. He has personally sourced, underwritten, and closed acquisitions in very different conditions, while building the teams that let a platform scale.
2010 to 2012
At Transwestern, Juan sourced and deployed State Farm’s allocation across multifamily, office, and retail deals in key U.S. markets, owning every stage: sourcing, due diligence, investment committee, and closing.
2013 to 2024
Through a full expansion, the pandemic, and the 2022 rate shock, Juan personally sourced key assets such as City Place in the Minneapolis area and RidgePort (now ELP 55) in metro Chicago, primarily through relationships, while building the teams that let Elion scale.
Today
Owners who bought or built in the low-rate era face maturities and covenant pressure. Cimiento meets that moment with the same relationships and discipline, committed capital, and no pressure to deploy.
Investing across the country
Over his career Juan has made property investments in eighteen states across multifamily, industrial, retail, and office, with a primary focus on industrial and multifamily. In every major market, he has existing relationships in place.
Selected investments
Woodbury, Minnesota · Mixed-use redevelopment
State Farm built a 450,000 square foot regional campus on 100 acres, then vacated it in 2006. The site sat empty for eight years through multiple failed redevelopment attempts, earning a reputation as “the third rail of Twin Cities real estate.” Leveraging a relationship built while managing State Farm’s own separate account, Elion, led by Juan and co-founder Shlomo Khoudari, acquired the site and worked with the City of Woodbury and partner Kraus-Anderson to reposition it as City Place: the renovated office building combined with new retail, a Whole Foods-anchored grocery component, medical office, and hotels.
A key anchor deal for Elion’s third fund, later the subject of a Harvard case study.
Wilmington, Illinois · Industrial development
Sourced off-market and entitled by Elion beginning in 2014, RidgePort (now ELP 55) is an 18 million square foot master-planned logistics park in metro Chicago’s I-55/I-80 corridor, alongside the largest inland container port in North America. It broke ground with a single 664,000 square foot build-to-suit and has grown into a multi-building portfolio anchored by tenants including General Mills, Amazon, and PrimeSource.
8.68 million square feet built and under development as of Q1 2026.
Miami Beach, Florida · Mixed-use development
A ground-up mixed-use development at the corner of Alton Road and 17th Street in Miami Beach, with residential units above street-level retail anchored by Trader Joe’s. Developed through Elion’s third fund, the property totals 174,448 square feet.
Trader Joe’s opened in 2019; the property was 100% occupied as of early 2024.
Go deeper
Both documents are shared privately through DocSend. Request access and an email to Juan opens, already drafted. He will reply personally with your link.
The long-form statement of Cimiento’s philosophy in three parts: the investment thesis, the manager built to deliver it, and the capital structure designed so no one has a reason to force an exit.
Request accessThe investor presentation: the opportunity, sample market and illustrative underwriting, track record, and the proposed partnership terms.
Request accessContact
A manager built for alpha. A thesis built on NOI. A structure with no reason to force an exit before an asset is ready.
Headquartered in Miami, Florida
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Click the address below to open a pre-drafted email in your email app. Juan will reply personally with a private DocSend link.
jd@cimientocapital.com