Liquidity worries push family offices from funds to directs, RBC-Campden survey finds

RBC and Campden Wealth reached for liquidity when they named the year in family office capital. Their 2026 North America Family Office Report, built on responses from 155 family offices, finds concern about getting money back out of private-market funds sitting at the middle of the asset class that has done the most for family portfolios over the past decade.

Nearly half of the private-market fund investors in the survey could not complete an exit on the schedule they expected, and half of those who did get out ran into caps or restrictions; the fund vehicle begins to look like a place in line for returned capital.

The allocation mix has already moved under that anxiety: 86 per cent of surveyed offices hold private-market assets, 45 per cent invest directly—many applying the family's own sector knowledge to a deal—and the share committing to funds slid to 36 per cent, which the report calls a reversal of last year's ratio, with liquidity and cost doing the reordering.

Beth Francis, a managing director at RBC and head of its Enterprise Strategic Client Group, reads the turn as a filter rather than a retreat. "When liquidity becomes scarce, it exposes quality," she said, arguing that a manager's willingness to be transparent about exit timelines and potential delays says a great deal about how the manager operates. Her account of the motive lines up with the survey's: offices are choosing direct investments because they want a say in when and how capital comes back.

What directs buy is control of timing, and control of timing is not the same thing as liquidity—a distinction the survey measures in funds but leaves to inference in the direct book. A family holding a direct stake still owns an asset it cannot sell on a Friday afternoon; the difference is that when to test the market is the family's call rather than the fund's.

The appetite itself has not gone anywhere. Brandelyn Perry, senior research director at Family Wealth Alliance, said demand for private equity, private credit, co-investments and other private assets "remains very strong," and that access to those markets drives both growth and referrals for the firms serving families; the frictions she hears named run the length of the client relationship: liquidity constraints, capital calls landing during market downturns, long lock-up periods, K-1 complexity and fee structures families find hard to compare.

Kara Pass, president and CEO of Market Trust, separates the offices that planned from the ones that did not. Her families worry about liquidity "but not as anxious," she said, because their commitments were sized to the liquidity they actually held, a discipline that has kept them out of the forced-seller seat; her prescription is orderly pacing, cash treated as carrying option value, and more use of secondaries to shorten the wait for cash and buy seasoned assets.

That secondaries habit is where the report's findings and Pass's prescription converge. An office that paced its commitments and holds cash as optionality can answer a capital call without selling into a bid it dislikes, while one that did not can become a price-taker in the very market that is growing because funds cannot return capital on the schedule they sold.

The report's second finding points elsewhere: a large gap between what family members and outside executives are paid in key family office roles, with no figure for the gap and no list of the positions measured in the available extracts. That the survey brackets the two together at all is the sharper point, because the professionalization of the family office keeps arriving at the question of who gets paid like a market hire and who gets compensated as an owner.

PWD has followed the allocation surge into the governance gap it leaves behind. Family offices bought the assets well before they finished the succession work those assets demand — the private-market risk that heirs are not yet prepared to inherit. The liquidity finding is the same problem seen from the balance-sheet side, because a private-markets commitment is a multi-year promise and a family that cannot say who will meet the next capital call has a governance problem before it has an investment one.

When the next edition lands, the 36 per cent will show whether the share routed to funds keeps sliding while directs hold their ground, or whether it settles once offices finish repricing the lock-ups they are paying for.