Family offices challenging traditional investment models

Our investment funds and private wealth teams have been collaborating on a number of initiatives designed to assist family offices in structuring private investments. 

Earlier this year, Preqin published a report looking into global asset allocation by family offices, the bias being clearly in favour of private equity and real estate.  What is even more interesting, however, is the disruptive effect that direct investing by single or multi-family offices is having on deal flow which would traditionally only have been accessed by private equity or real estate fund managers.  Gillian Tett's article in yesterday's FT highlighted exactly this point, with the example of a US family office having paid for a significant shopping centre entirely in cash.   

This trend is likely to become the norm given that family offices are, reportedly, collectively worth US$40 trillion worldwide and are sitting on US$150 billion of dry powder poised to be invested in private equity, where returns are outpacing the public markets.  

Look out for the short articles on this theme which we will be publishing over the coming months.