SVP, Client Services Real Estate Funds

About the Opportunity

A global fund administration firm is investing in senior client service coverage for its real assets and real estate practice in Singapore. The book is growing, new mandates are coming on board, and the firm wants a senior client-facing owner sitting against them rather than the work spread thinner.

This is a seat for somebody who wants to own clients rather than run a team. No direct reports, no headcount to manage - a defined portfolio of real estate fund clients where you are the person they call and the person accountable for what they receive. The level is open at SVP or VP and follows the person rather than a fixed grade.

What the seat is measured on is simple to state and hard to do: clients who renew, onboardings that land on time, and problems solved before the client has to chase. The first year carries new mandates alongside the existing book, so it is real work from the start rather than a settling-in period.

The Role

This is an individual contributor seat. No direct reports, no team to run. You sit between the client and the delivery team - the named person a client calls, and the person who turns what the client is asking for into something operations can actually deliver.

Day to day that means:

• Owning a portfolio of real estate fund client relationships as the senior point of contact, including new mandates as they come on board.
• Running client onboarding - working through the take-on with the client, solutioning the structure and the reporting, and staying with it through to a steady reporting cycle.
• Fielding day-to-day client queries and owning escalation when something goes wrong, rather than passing it along.
• Supporting RFPs and meeting prospective clients as the practice grows.
• Coordinating everything that touches your clients across fund accounting, middle office, investor relations, AML and KYC, tax reporting, treasury and corporate secretarial - so the client deals with one person rather than seven.
• Leading the audit process alongside your clients and their auditors, and presenting administrator updates at board meetings.
• Owning the commercial side of your accounts - service level agreements, fee conversations, account profitability, and spotting where a client could use more of what the firm does.
• Handling incidents when delivery slips: the root cause, the fix, and the conversation with the client.
• Carrying the administrative side that comes with owning accounts - CRM, client billing and internal tracking. Worth being straight about: this is a hands-on seat, not a purely front-of-house one.

The technical bar matters because there is no layer between you and the client. When a client asks why a consolidation moved or how a distribution was calculated, you answer it. You are not managing a team who answers it for you.

What Makes You a Fit

You have most likely spent a decade or more in real estate fund administration or real estate fund accounting, and you have reached the point where the client conversation interests you more than the production does.

• Real estate at fund level. You have worked on real estate fund vehicles - consolidation, SPVs, capital calls, distributions, investor reporting. REIT or property company accounting alone will not carry you here, because the client conversations are about fund mechanics.
• You have owned a client, by name. Not contributed to an account - been the person the client contacts. What happened when one was unhappy is the question you should have a good answer to.
• Onboarding. You have taken a client on and can talk through the sequence, including what broke and what you did about it.
• You operate without supervision. There is no ramp-up runway attached to this seat.
• You pick up the phone. Style is genuinely open - quiet works, and nobody is looking for a performer. What does not work is waiting to be told, or emailing when a call would fix it.

Helpful but not required: hands-on Yardi and a service provider background rather than buy-side. If you have sat on the client side of an administrator relationship and know what good and bad service looks like from the receiving end, that is a credible route in.

What is On Offer

• Genuine ownership. You are the relationship, not part of a relationship team.
• A growing real estate book, with new mandates coming on board that you take on and own from the start.
• A platform with global reach behind you, and an established operational bench in Singapore delivering behind your accounts.