Why Family Offices Need a Proactive Approach to Estate Management
When families establish family offices, they aim to tackle the complexities of their wealth, focusing on their investments, their business assets, and their financial risk.
Meanwhile, at home, their everyday lives become increasingly complex as they purchase homes, art, cars, and more. Their families grow, their lifestyles change, and they hire people to help them maintain their calendars, homes and assets.
But at home, families often take a reactive approach, rather than a proactive one. Without a proactive mindset around how to care for their homes, how to preserve their physical assets, how to scale an increasingly complicated lifestyle, and how to reduce risk in their everyday lives, families can live in a constant state of chaos.
The Estate Management Opportunity
Some families have a reactive approach to estate management because their lifestyle is changing too quickly to stop and ensure the right structure is in place. Others are resistant to structure because they want to keep life at home feeling casual or “normal” — they think, “these are just our homes.”
But the more homes, assets, and employees you add, the more your household begins to function like a business — whether you intend it to or not. The more properties and assets you own, the more work it takes to maintain them. The more people you hire, the more likely you are to feel like you’re running a business inside your home. This leads to a wealth spiral of escalating complexity that can get in the way of the life the family imagined.
Family offices that work to streamline a household’s operations are able to calm the chaos of owning multiple properties and bring a sense of ease to the family’s lives at home.
Family offices that embrace estate management as part of a holistic wealth management strategy can prevent that spiral. By proactively investing in the right support for a family’s homes, household staff, and daily operations, they can calm the chaos and unlock a deeper sense of wellbeing for the family.
A Blueprint For a Proactive Approach to Estate Management
A proactive approach to estate management begins with intention. It’s about shifting the mindset from “we’ll deal with it when something breaks” to “we’ll put systems in place to keep everything running smoothly.” A family office wouldn’t wait until tax season to think about tax planning, and the same philosophy should apply to household operations.
Here are the key components of a proactive estate management strategy.
1. Empower the Team with Clear Preferences, Expectations, and Communications
Every home is different, and household staff and vendors need a clear understanding of what’s in the home and how to take care of it. Establish clear roles and responsibilities for household staff, set expectations for how work is done, and document the family’s standards and preferences.
Centralize and share important information — from vendor contacts to maintenance schedules — in one accessible household manual where everyone can find the answers they need.
Ensure that the family office and the family have an easy way to see what’s being done across properties, and a simple way to communicate questions or comments. With transparency into what each team member is working on, the family has reassurance that the projects they care about haven’t slipped through the cracks. Clear accountability has the power to change the conversation between the family and their estate management team, improving morale for the staff and ensuring overall satisfaction for the family.
2. Professionalize Hiring and HR
Households thrive when private service professionals are hired, onboarded, and managed with the same care as corporate employees. Family offices can guide families to implement fair compensation structures, proper payroll and insurance practices, and clear HR processes to retain top talent.
Investing in top-tier talent, giving them support and professional development, and putting the right structure is in place to help them be successful reduces turnover and ensures the highest quality service.
3. Invest in Preventative Maintenance
High end properties tend to have complex, commercial grade systems that need to be maintained. When these properties function as second homes that get used seasonally or every once in a while, it’s easy for important maintenance tasks to fall through the cracks.
Invest in estate managers and property managers who will think proactively, and make sure they have the tools and budget they need to schedule, manage, track and automate recurring maintenance. A proactive approach to maintenance prevents emergencies, protects assets, saves time and money, reduces stress, and ultimately ensures that the family can enjoy their homes and their assets.
4. Preserve Institutional Knowledge
Too often, the history of a property or a collection lives in someone’s head. A proactive estate management strategy ensures that information, from how to care for a piece of art to how a renovation was handled, is properly documented and easily searchable.
By managing properties in a centralized estate management platform, the family can ensure that historical knowledge is preserved automatically. Having a log of everything that’s happened across a family’s properties ensures critical knowledge doesn’t get lost, no matter who comes and goes.
5. Prioritize Security and Privacy
Increasingly, families need to take a proactive approach to physical security, crisis preparedness, and holistic risk management at home.
A consumer-grade wifi router could compromise a family’s privacy. A vendor without a clear set of “house rules” might take photos of a house during a renovation project and share with his team in a way that compromises physical security. Failing to take the right cybersecurity measures could impact the family’s finances, reputation and safety — and the list of risks could go on and on.
Ensure the family office’s understanding of risk extends to every corner of the estate and the way the family lives on a daily basis, and understand where the gaps in an estate’s security plans are (check out The Estate Security Gap survey for family offices, running now).
The Ripple Effect of Proactive Estate Management
When life at home is running smoothly, families can focus on what matters most to them, like connection, wellbeing, and purpose. Family offices that expand their definition of wealth management to include proactive estate management not only protect their clients’ assets — they help them live well.
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Nines is the modern household management platform built to help discerning families and family offices manage properties, people and projects all in one place. Nines is backed by VCP Ventures (Marc Lore and Alex Rodriguez) and advised by Marta Perrone, and was named the winner of the 2025 Family Wealth Report Award for Innovation in Property & Household as well as a top Family Office solution in Forbes. They also offer in-house estate management support, workshops, and consulting. |