When talking about family offices, the same image usually appears: a structure reserved for fortunes worth billions, with its own teams and exclusive offices. That image is true only for a very small part of the family offices that exist. Most are multi-family structures, more accessible than they seem, designed to families with complex assetsnot necessarily astronomical.
This article explains what exactly a family office is, what services it brings together under one roof and what signs indicate that the time has come to consider one, beyond the myth of unattainable wealth.
What is a family office (and how it differs from traditional wealth management)
A family office is the structure that a family creates, or hires, to manage all of its assets in a professional and coordinated manner: investments, taxation, succession, asset protection and, often, personal aspects such as philanthropy or the financial education of heirs. It is not a financial product or an investment fund: it is a organization model which centralizes decisions that, otherwise, would be distributed among several banks, advisors and offices without any coordination between them.
The difference from traditional wealth management is not in the individual services—many overlap—but in scope and governance. Wealth management can solve a person’s investment portfolio well. The family office goes one step further: it coordinates this portfolio with taxation, succession and the decisions of several members of the same family under a single criterion, preventing each piece from being managed in isolation.
Single family office or multi family office: which model fits your assets
There are two models, and choosing between them determines the cost and level of exclusivity of the service.
- Single family office (SFO): a structure dedicated exclusively to a single family, with its own equipment. It offers maximum control and customization, but its fixed costs are only justified by very high assets; The best-known examples in Spain, such as those linked to the family that owns Inditex, manage fortunes that far exceed billions of euros.
- Multi family office (MFO): The same structure provides service to several families, sharing equipment, technology and costs. This allows access to a level of coordination similar to that of an SFO with a disbursement much more proportionate to the real assets of each family.
In practice, the vast majority of Spanish business families that consider professionalizing their assets fit better into the multifamily model. You don’t need to have one of the largest fortunes in the country to benefit from this way of working: you need to have assets that are complex enough so that managing it in a dispersed way begins to generate more problems than solutions.
What services does a family office offer to large fortunes?
The value of a family office is not in each service separately, but in having them coordinated under the same strategy and a single interlocutor. These are the four pillars that it usually integrates:
- Investment management: design and supervision of a diversified portfolio that combines financial markets, real estate, private capital and other assets, with a long-term horizon.
- Tax, accounting and legal advice: coordination of the tax burden of individuals, companies and investments, guaranteeing regulatory compliance and efficiency of the entire structure.
- Succession planning: design of the transition of wealth between generations, minimizing both the fiscal cost and the risk of family conflicts.
- Family governance: protocols and decision-making bodies that define how each family member participates in the estate and how disagreements are resolved before they escalate.
According to Deloitte’s Family Office Insights 2024 study, which we follow closely at Norz Patrimonia, 70% of family offices expect growth in family assets despite the current economic uncertainty, which confirms that the long-term vision continues to be the axis of this model. No pillar works well in isolation.: A well-designed investment portfolio loses efficiency if it is not coordinated with taxation, and a succession planned on paper can fail if there is no family governance to sustain it in practice.
How much assets do you need to consider a family office?
There is no official threshold or single figure, and anyone who takes it for granted is oversimplifying. What does exist is a clear pattern: the larger and more diverse the assets—company, real estate, financial investments, assets in different countries—the sooner it stops making sense to manage it with the dispersed agenda of several unrelated interlocutors.
Some situations tend to anticipate this moment: the sale of a family business that converts business assets into liquidity that must be reorganized, the consolidation of relevant real estate and financial assets, or the explicit need to prepare the transition to the next generation. If your estate does not yet require such multi-family coordination, it is probably better suited to an individual wealth management service, which can evolve into a family office later, as the estate and its needs grow.
Why family governance is the most underrated part
When talking about family offices, the conversation usually focuses on the profitability of the portfolio and leaves in the background what, in practice, determines whether the assets survive to the next generation: governance. A family protocol defines who decides what, how the returns are distributed and what happens when two family members disagree, before that disagreement appears.
The same Deloitte report indicates that almost a third of family offices consider that their heirs are not yet prepared to assume leadership of the family assets. It is a fact that should be taken seriously: preparing the next generation does not happen by itselfrequires intergenerational financial education and explicit communication spaces, two elements that a well-designed family office incorporates from the beginning and that many families only begin to consider when it is too late.
How to choose a reliable family office in Spain
Not all entities that offer family office services are subject to the same level of supervision. In Spain, checking if the entity that coordinates your assets is a Financial Advisory Company (EAF), regulated and supervised by the National Securities Market Commission (CNMV), is one of the first trust filters that should be applied before deciding who to work with.
Norz Patrimonia is an EAF registered in the CNMV registry with number 123, and from there we build our family office service combining investment management with tax, legal and family governance coordination under the same criteria. We have a team of 21 professionals and more than 30 years of average experience in the financial markets, which allows us to accompany both families that are beginning to consider this structure and assets that have already been consolidated for generations.
If your family estate has reached a point where coordinating all its pieces has become complicated, at Norz Patrimonia we can help you assess whether a family office is the appropriate structure for your specific situation.