Next level cap raise; syndication, debt, equity? Help!

[Troy Sheets]

My partners and I have been very fortunate thus far with a great group of friends and family type investors that have allowed us to grow rapidly. We started with a single flip 3 years ago and grew to more than 141 Units (between completed and in the pipeline to be completed this year) and a development pipeline that has swelled to over $30 million (between completed and in the pipeline to be completed this year). Along the way we have partnered with investors and raised more than $3 million dollars. Our biggest projects are ahead of us and we are at a point where we are going out to our investors and friends of investors to raise more capital, but the levels of funding we need are beyond most of our immediate network. The friends of investors route has been interesting to say the least. Basically, we've found ourselves in deep water and swimming with sharks! I don't mean that in a bad way, but we're running into very rich/sophisticated investors that want to buy the entire company/portfolio. We're not against bringing on a buy-in type partner to raise capital but aren't interested if we don't retain majority ownership. We are in talks to take on a 25% partner for a decent sum that would handle most of our bridge needs but it's only early stages and these things dry up and go away often, so I need to keep pushing on all fronts. 

Without getting into syndication, how do we find more debt or equity investors for our larger projects? We're not very up to speed on syndication but our larger projects are only 12-17 units and a mix of multifamily and commercial mixed use, and total cost of $2.5m-$4m per project. I'm not sure these smaller projects are syndicateable (I just made up a word!) and if they are, is the learning curve and time it would take too steep for us at this point? We can break ground on a few of these projects in the next 1-3 months. We also have a host of other SFH and 2-8 unit projects ready to go and many will need bridge money as well. Most of our portfolio can be completed in 2018 with a couple projects stretching to early 2019.

In the past we've found our investors either want a fixed return as a note holder similar to 10-12% interest or they want a piece of equity that offers the higher risk-higher reward. What has worked for you if you've been in a similar situation? If you are doing equity deals how much of the project are you giving up to the investor? What interest rates are you paying for something like this? Are you giving pref as well? Should we be looking at syndication? Our previous business model worked well to get us this far but it doesn't seem scaleable to get us through our next phase. Help!