TPG, PAG to Exit Cushman & Wakefield Stake With $311M Share Sale

With shares of Cushman & Wakefield up more than 40 percent in the past 12 months, Texas-based TPG and Hong Kong’s PAG plan to sell their entire shareholding in the global property consultancy, despite the stock remaining 38 percent below its 2018 IPO price.

Nine years after assembling an investor group to gain control of Cushman & Wakefield, funds managed by the two private equity firms own 26.5 million ordinary shares of C&W, representing 11.6 percent of the NYSE-listed company’s outstanding shares, according to a prospectus filed Monday with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

In the exercise known as an underwritten public offering, TPG and PAG will sell their shares to JP Morgan for the investment bank to resell. Friday’s closing stock price of $11.72 implies a value of more than $310.7 million for the combined equity. The 40 percent upswing in C&W’s share price in the past year doubles the nearly 20 percent climb in the Dow Jones Industrial Average over the same period.

“The underwriter will offer the shares from time to time for sale in negotiated transactions or otherwise, at market prices prevailing at the time of sale, at prices related to such prevailing market prices or at negotiated prices,” Cushman & Wakefield said Monday in a release.

Cashing Out

In 2015, TPG and PAG partnered with the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan to buy Cushman & Wakefield for a reported $2 billion after the investor group had acquired London-based DTZ the previous year.

The merged company continued under the Cushman & Wakefield banner and went public with a $765 million IPO in 2018, at which time TPG, PAG and Ontario Teachers’ held respective stakes of 44.7 percent, 33.6 percent and 11.7 percent.

Chicago-based Cushman & Wakefield grew to rival top global agencies CBRE and JLL, but last month the consultancy reported a net loss of $28.8 million for the first quarter of 2024 after posting more than $100 million in losses for the whole of 2023.

By comparison, CBRE reported 2023 net income of $986 million, down 30 percent, while JLL posted net income of $225.4 million, down 66 percent.

Cushman & Wakefield will receive no proceeds from the offering, said the agency, which employs 52,000 people in nearly 400 offices across 60 countries. The final terms of the deal will be disclosed in a prospectus supplement to be filed later with the SEC.

Steady Deal Flow

News of the potential exit comes at a busy time for PAG and TPG, with the latter recently closing on its eighth Asia-focused private equity fund with $5.3 billion in committed capital and a pair of Angelo Gordon co-branded real estate vehicles that raised $2.5 billion. TPG acquired Manhattan-based Angelo Gordon last November for $2.7 billion.

For its part, PAG in April announced an agreement with partners CITIC Capital, Ares Management, the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority and Mubadala Investment Company on a $8.3 billion takeover of Dalian Wanda Group’s primary shopping mall management business.

The consortium’s takeover of Wang Jianlin’s mall empire came after the tycoon’s Dalian Wanda Group failed to list its shopping centre management business on the Hong Kong exchange after taking out $5.9 billion in pre-IPO financing from investors including PAG in 2021.