Will 2020 Be The Year Private Equity Piles In To Distressed Retail?

There is a weird disconnect in UK property at the moment. The retail sector is undergoing unprecedented distress. Values have plummeted. Owners are starting to be forced to sell. And yet private equity firms are almost entirely absent among the purchasers.

Private equity firms running opportunity funds are supposed to be first through the door to buy distressed properties. The opportunity fund sector was set up in the early 1990s to buy struggling assets, and made huge profits buying in the wake of the financial crash when others were afraid to buy real estate. But in the only truly distressed sector to emerge in the past decade, so far private equity has bought pretty much nothing.

But that could be about to change, according to the co-head of one of the world’s best-known investors. Private equity firms might be about to start addressing retail like the nonperforming loan market where they hoovered up assets from 2010 to 2015.

“One of the big changes next year could be flows of opportunistic capital into the retail sector,” Goldman Sachs co-Head of Real Estate Jim Garman told the more than 300 delegates at Bisnow’s London State of the Market event, held at

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European Heads Of Giant Canadian Investors Outline Their UK Investment Plans

How big global institutional investors view the UK after Brexit has been one of the key existential questions for the real estate sector in this moment of political turmoil. At this month’s Bisnow London State of the Market event, the European head honchos of…

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