Cadre in 2026: Institutional Real Estate Access Now Runs Through Willow Wealth

TL;DR: Cadre built its reputation on $25,000-$50,000 minimums that got individual accredited investors into institutional-grade multifamily, industrial, and office deals once reserved for pensions and endowments, and its pre-acquisition track record showed real numbers: 13 exits and roughly 28% aggregate net realized IRR through October 2022. But the brand you would sign up for at cadre.com in July 2026 is not an independent company anymore. It is a product line inside Willow Wealth, the company formerly known as Yieldstreet, which disclosed at least $208 million in real estate investor losses as of December 2025.

Cadre was acquired by Yieldstreet in a deal that closed in January 2024, and Yieldstreet's own completion announcement confirmed Cadre founder Ryan Williams would stay on as CEO while also taking a broader role at the parent company. What that press release did not say, and what matters most for anyone doing diligence today, is that Yieldstreet itself renamed to Willow Wealth in October 2025, and its real estate book has since been the subject of default disclosures that materially change the risk profile of anything operating under that umbrella. I have covered a lot of platform reviews for this publication. This is the first one where the most important finding is not about the deals, it is about who actually owns and operates the platform.

What Cadre actually is, and what it became

Founded in 2014 by Ryan Williams along with Joshua and Jared Kushner, Cadre set out to do something genuinely different from the crowdfunding wave of that era. Instead of $500 minimums pooling retail money into blended REITs, Cadre let accredited investors buy into specific, named commercial properties: a 143-unit multifamily building in Queens, a 268-unit complex outside Atlanta, a $50-million-plus office asset. The minimum was steep by design. It kept the platform in institutional territory, and Cadre's investor base historically included the Harvard Management Company, the MacArthur Foundation, and a co-investment partnership with BlackRock's Impact Opportunities Fund on its second Direct Access fund, according to Cadre's own 2023 press release announcing Direct Access Fund II. The company raised $133 million in venture and debt funding from Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst, Khosla Ventures, Goldman Sachs, and Thrive Capital, and at its 2017 Series C it was valued at roughly $800 million. Then the wheels came off, financially rather than operationally. TechCrunch's coverage of the Yieldstreet acquisition reported that Cadre's valuation had reportedly dropped to around $100 million by the time of the sale, an 87% haircut from peak. A separate 2018 SoftBank Vision Fund conversation that could have valued Cadre near $2 billion also fell apart, reportedly over Jared Kushner's unwillingness to divest his stake. Revenue never caught up to projections either. Cadre had projected over $400 million in annual revenue by 2023 and was generating under $30 million, per reporting cited in a detailed 2026 forensic review from CrowdfundedWealth, which pulled from SEC EDGAR and FINRA BrokerCheck records. That gap between projection and reality is the real story behind why a platform with institutional-caliber deal flow sold for a fraction of its peak valuation.

The entity you are actually signing up with in 2026

Here is the part that most aggregator "Cadre reviews" glide past. Cadre's broker-dealer subsidiary, RealCadre LLC (SEC CIK 0001612778, FINRA CRD #172295), has been renamed Willow Wealth Markets LLC. The Form CRS disclosure document linked from cadre.com is now titled "Willow Wealth Website Disclosures." The April 2025 Regulation BI disclosure on the same site is issued by Yieldstreet Markets LLC, the parent's other legacy broker-dealer entity, also renamed. Visit cadre.com today and the platform tells you outright: "Cadre has joined with Willow Wealth to be your partner." New investor sign-ups route through willowwealth.com, not a standalone Cadre onboarding flow. None of that is illegal or even unusual after an acquisition. But it means the fiduciary and custodial relationship an investor enters into is with Willow Wealth's infrastructure, not a Cadre-only structure, and that infrastructure has a rough recent history worth spelling out plainly.

Willow Wealth (the former Yieldstreet) disclosed to customers in late 2025 that real estate projects in Houston and Nashville had defaulted, accounting for about $41 million in new losses, according to CNBC's December 2025 reporting, which verified the customer letters directly. That came on top of $89 million in marine loan losses disclosed in September 2025 and $78 million in earlier write-offs, bringing the confirmed total to at least $208 million. CNBC also reported that Willow Wealth removed roughly a decade of historical performance data from its public website in the weeks before the rebrand, including a chart that had shown real estate returns turning negative (around -2% annualized from 2015 to 2025, down from a reported 9.4% two years earlier). A Boston University finance professor quoted in that piece called the timing "alarming." I would use a plainer word: convenient.

To be precise about what this does and does not mean for a Cadre-branded deal specifically: the CNBC-reported defaults were tied to named Yieldstreet-originated real estate deals (a Houston multifamily equity fund, a Tucson apartment complex, single-family rental portfolios), not to Cadre's named CDAF I, CDAF II, or Horizon Fund vehicles as far as public reporting shows. But Cadre's deals are now serviced by the same renamed broker-dealer and the same corporate parent, and no public Cadre-specific performance update has been issued since Cadre's last disclosed track record on October 4, 2022. That is a three-and-a-half-year information gap covering exactly the period, 2023 through 2025, when commercial real estate took its hardest hit in over a decade.

Minimums, structure, and fees

Assuming you can still access Cadre's products (largely through legacy positions or through Willow Wealth's broader offering), the access mechanics have stayed fairly consistent since 2020.

Feature	Detail
Cadre Direct Access Fund minimum	$25,000
Deal-by-deal investing minimum	$50,000
Secondary market partial-sale minimum	$50,000, in $5,000 increments, $10,000 minimum remaining position
Investor eligibility	Accredited investor (506(c) offering, verification required). Non-U.S. investors generally need Qualified Purchaser status
Annual asset management fee	Typically 1.5% of investor equity value
Administration fee	Up to 0.5% annually, reduced to 0.25% above $1 million invested
Transaction fee	Approximately 1.0% of pro rata deal capitalization
Commitment fee (deal-by-deal)	Up to 3.5%, often reduced for larger checks
Property focus	Multifamily, industrial, office, retail. Mid-cap $50M-$150M assets in CDAF II

Sources: Cadre's own support and fee disclosure page and Cadre's secondary market terms page.

Do the math on a $25,000 first-year check and the layered fees can run close to 6% of invested capital in year one alone once you stack the transaction fee, commitment fee, and prorated management and administration fees, before the deal has produced a single dollar of return. That is not unusual for private CRE. It is simply a cost accredited investors should model explicitly rather than skim past, because it is capital that comes off the top regardless of how the underlying property performs.

What carried interest actually buys you

The management-fee-plus-carry structure is the same basic architecture private equity has used for decades: a base fee to keep the lights on, plus a promoted interest (carried interest) that only pays the sponsor once investors clear a preferred return, typically in the 6-8% range for value-add CRE deals of this kind. That structure genuinely aligns incentives better than a pure fee-for-assets model. If the deal is mediocre, the sponsor's upside is capped along with yours. If the deal is a homerun, everyone wins together. The catch, and it is a real one, is that the base management fee does not disappear in a mediocre-return scenario. You pay 1.5% a year on your equity value whether the property clears its preferred return or limps along at 4%. Carried interest solves the "sponsor wins even when you lose" problem. It does not solve the "you pay fees regardless of outcome" problem. Read the Investment Advisory Agreement for each specific deal, because per Cadre's own disclosures, individual investor Net IRR varies meaningfully depending on when you were admitted to a fund and what fee tier you negotiated, a point Cadre's Direct Access Fund II offering materials spell out explicitly.

The secondary market: a genuine differentiator, with real caveats

Cadre pioneered something worth taking seriously: an online secondary marketplace, launched in 2018, that lets investors list all or part of an LP position for sale before a deal's full exit, after a one-year regulatory hold. That is a structural advantage over most direct CRE syndications, which lock capital for the full five-to-ten-year hold with no exit ramp at all. According to Cadre's secondary market page, trading windows open for roughly two weeks each quarter, and Cadre's matching process pairs buyers and sellers at prices tied to a "Marked Value." Three caveats matter more than the marketing copy suggests. First, liquidity is not guaranteed. Cadre says so directly: there is no assurance you will find a buyer, or at what price. Second, real estate secondary markets more broadly have historically traded at meaningful discounts to stated net asset value, sometimes 20-30% in illiquid or thinly traded segments, according to industry analysis from CBRE Investment Management's 2024 research on real estate secondaries. If you need to sell in a down market, that discount can erase a chunk of your paper gain. Third, and this is new context for 2026, it is unclear how deep the secondary market's matching liquidity remains now that new investor acquisition has shifted to Willow Wealth's broader platform rather than a dedicated Cadre funnel. A marketplace is only as good as the number of active participants on both sides of it.

The commercial real estate backdrop in 2026

Set the platform-specific issues aside for a moment, because the underlying asset class matters too. The good news: multifamily and industrial both enter 2026 in reasonably strong shape. Multifamily absorption is running near record highs, new construction starts have fallen roughly two-thirds from their peak, and Cushman & Wakefield's January 2026 outlook forecasts rent growth strengthening toward 5% by 2027 as that supply pipeline dries up, according to Cushman & Wakefield's 2026 U.S. CRE outlook. Industrial demand rebounded in late 2025 as tariff uncertainty moderated, with 2026-27 absorption forecasts revised roughly 70 million square feet higher than midyear 2025 estimates. Office is the honest exception, and Cadre's fund materials list office as part of its target mix. National office vacancy sat near 18.8% by late 2025, still close to a cyclical high, and recovery is expected to stay slow and highly bifurcated between trophy, amenity-rich buildings and commodity space in secondary locations, per Principal Asset Management's Spring 2026 sector report. If a Cadre or Willow Wealth-managed fund holds meaningful office exposure acquired before the 2022-2024 repricing, that is where the risk of a stale, above-market valuation is most likely to be hiding today.

Risks, named plainly

• Parent company financial distress. Willow Wealth (formerly Yieldstreet) has disclosed at least $208 million in confirmed real estate investor losses as of December 2025, plus additional deals flagged for likely future losses. That is the operating entity now servicing Cadre's broker-dealer functions.
• Disclosure gap. No Cadre-specific performance update has been made public since October 2022. You cannot verify current portfolio health from Cadre's own materials alone.
• Concentration risk. A single $25,000-$50,000 check buys exposure to one property or one fund vintage. Real diversification against a CRE downturn requires spreading capital across multiple deals and vintages, which means a genuinely diversified allocation likely requires $150,000 or more in total commitment.
• Fee drag independent of performance. Management and administration fees accrue regardless of whether the deal clears its preferred return.
• Liquidity is marketed, not guaranteed. The secondary market is real, but Cadre's own disclosures state plainly that a buyer, and a fair price, are never assured.
• Illiquid capital lock-up. Typical hold periods run five to ten years even when the secondary market functions normally.
• Sector concentration in office. Any legacy office exposure in older Cadre vintages sits in the weakest-performing major CRE sector heading into 2026.

Who this is actually for

If you are an accredited investor with $25,000 to $50,000 (ideally several multiples of that, to spread across more than one deal) who wants exposure to institutional-quality multifamily and industrial real estate without writing a $1 million-plus check into a direct syndication, the underlying investment thesis behind Cadre's model still holds up. Named-asset investing, carried interest alignment, and a functioning secondary market are real structural advantages over both $500-minimum crowdfunding platforms and old-school, fully illiquid private placements. What has changed is that you are no longer doing diligence on a standalone company called Cadre. You are doing diligence on Willow Wealth, a rebranded platform actively working through hundreds of millions of dollars in disclosed real estate losses, that happens to operate Cadre's fund vehicles under a broker-dealer with a new name. Before committing new capital, I would want three things in hand: a current, Cadre-specific performance update covering 2023 through 2026 (ask directly, in writing, since none is public), the actual Investment Advisory Agreement and Marked Value methodology for the specific vintage you are being offered, and a clear answer on whether your capital would sit in a legacy Cadre-only vehicle or a newer product co-mingled with Willow Wealth's broader fund lineup. If Cadre's investor relations team cannot answer all three clearly and promptly, that itself is diligence information.

Further Reading on AIN

• Private Equity Fees: What Accredited Investors Pay Under the 2-and-20 Structure (With Real Math)
• Gold, Commodities, and Real Assets as Inflation Hedges: A 2026 Guide for Accredited Investors
• Life Settlements: What Accredited Investors Need to Know Before Buying Someone Else's Policy
• How to Build a Private Markets Portfolio: An Asset Allocation Guide for Accredited Investors in 2026

Author Disclosure: Jeff Barnes, MBA has no personal position in any company, fund, or platform named in this article. Angel Investors Network has no current commercial relationship with any party mentioned. AIN provides marketing and education services, not investment advice. Past performance does not guarantee future results. All investments involve risk, including loss of principal.