One man doesn’t build a business.
Thirty-five years taught me that — across six countries, multiple capital cycles, and everything that followed the exit. The structure matters. The people matter more. The rest is what I do with it.
Thirty-five years taught me that — across six countries, multiple capital cycles, and everything that followed the exit. The structure matters. The people matter more. The rest is what I do with it.
Thirty-five years building across six countries. Sold everything one week before the 2008 financial crisis. Still building.
Background
The operator
Multiple cycles, multiple sectors
Paul Oberschneider is Chairman of Hilltop Capital Partners, a European real estate credit and equity platform headquartered in London.
From 1991 to 2008 he built one of Central and Eastern Europe’s most significant integrated property businesses — operating across Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine and Russia. At its peak the platform comprised 10,000 residential units, 4 million square feet of commercial and hospitality assets, 35 offices and 350 brokers across six markets.
The business was sold in full in 2008, ahead of the global financial crisis.
The quality of the platform determines the quality of the outcome. Not the market. Not the timing. The structure.”
TODAY
Hilltop Capital Partners
Great outcomes begin with great platforms.
Today Hilltop Capital Partners operates as a real estate credit and equity platform focused on European regional housing markets. The conviction at its centre is straightforward: the quality of the platform determines the quality of the outcome. Not the market. Not the timing. The structure.
Hilltop partners with established regional housing operators across Europe — providing the institutional capital architecture, governance, and platform infrastructure that allows them to scale. Paul brings thirty-five years of operating experience across multiple capital cycles.
He operates between London and Sotogrande and publishes View From The Top — a weekly newsletter on European real estate, institutional capital, and market structure — every Monday.
Beyond
Beyond the platform
A different kind of experience
Alongside Hilltop, Paul has spent the last several years building a second body of work rooted in a different kind of experience.
La Golondrina Private is a private soft capital advisory platform for families and operators navigating wealth transition, succession, and capital deployment into Southern Europe. Paul leads the investment advisory alongside his partner Michela Hancock, who focuses on family wealth transition and succession planning for founders and spouses.
Hard Landing is a private peer circle for founders navigating what success doesn’t fix. Built on a peer-support model Paul knows well. Raw, honest, and without hierarchy. A podcast of the same name will follow.
Coming Clean: Confessions of an Entrepreneur is a memoir covering thirty-five years of building, losing, and rebuilding — written with the directness of someone with enough distance to be honest about all of it.
All of it flows from the same conviction: that clarity about structure — whether in a capital stack or in a life — determines everything.
What I do
Beyond The Platform
Real Estate
Private Advisory
Founder Community
Coming Clean: Confessions of an Entrepreneur
Newsletter
View From The Top
European real estate, institutional capital, and market structure. Published every Monday.