Public stocks are now the fastest-growing asset class among family offices, while real estate holdings are contracting, according to data from the newly launched CNBC Family Office Portfolio Tracker built in partnership with Addepar. The tracker aggregates anonymized portfolio data from family offices managing north of $500 billion in combined assets, making it the first continuous-feed benchmark for ultra-high-net-worth allocation behavior.
The shift is measurable. Public equity allocations have increased by an estimated 8.3 percentage points year-over-year among surveyed family offices, while real estate exposure has declined by 6.1 points over the same window. The tracker does not disclose absolute allocation percentages, but three family office chiefs interviewed by CNBC confirmed their firms moved between $200 million and $1.2 billion each from property holdings into listed equities during the past fourteen months. The velocity matters more than the direction—most of these families spent the prior decade doing the opposite.
The real estate unwind reflects three converging pressures. First, office vacancy rates in gateway markets remain elevated, with San Francisco's Class A vacancy at 34.7% and New York's at 18.9%, per CoStar data through April. Second, the SOFR curve has not cooperated—floating-rate debt on properties acquired in 2021 and 2022 is repricing at 650 to 780 basis points higher than original underwriting assumptions. Third, liquidity has thinned. Private real estate transaction volume in Q1 2026 was 41% below the ten-year quarterly average, and family offices are marking assets to where trades clear, not where appraisals land. The listed-equity bid, meanwhile, has been relentless—volatility has compressed, the S&P 500 delivered 22.4% in 2025, and passive vehicles allow families to deploy nine figures without raising eyebrows or hiring deal teams.
The tracker's architecture is worth noting. Addepar aggregates data from its 400-plus family office clients who opt into the anonymized dataset, refreshing figures monthly with a 45-day lag. CNBC overlays this with quarterly surveys of 60 to 80 family offices managing at least $500 million each. The combined feed offers the closest public approximation of real-time single-family-office behavior, a segment that has historically operated in the dark. Three asset managers we spoke with are already adjusting capital-raising decks based on early tracker reads, emphasizing liquid alts and direct indexing strategies over real estate debt funds.
Allocators should watch for two follow-on moves. First, whether family offices rotate further into private credit as a real estate substitute—several are exploring $50 million to $150 million sleeve builds in direct lending, targeting the same yield with better liquidity terms. Second, whether the public equity tilt is tactical or structural. If families begin hiring dedicated public-markets analysts—a role that had atrophied at many single-family offices—the shift becomes permanent. We expect clarity on the latter within ninety to one hundred twenty days, as Q2 hiring data surfaces.
The tracker goes live publicly in June, with monthly updates thereafter. Huang Goodman has standing access through our Addepar integration, and three named accounts are already adjusting U.S. large-cap overweights in response to the confirmed peer tilt.