As institutional investors try to ramp up or maintain their commitments to private equity without spreading themselves thin on due diligence efforts, their increasingly concentrated investments have helped support a trend toward private equity mega-funds.

Concentration at the top poses some challenges, but investors aren’t fazed: Since 2015, fewer investors have sought to make four or more fund commitments annually and more are gravitating towards making two to three fund commitments, perhaps suggesting an increase in ticket sizes, research firm Preqin found. The increased demand, as well as a need to reinvest capital from older private equity investments, and new players like sovereign wealth funds and wealthy individuals, have pushed dry powder held by private equity fund managers to a record high of $1.09tn as of
March 2018.

Private equity managers with good track records are in high demand, and those managers are increasingly able to find enough capital to scale their efforts to previously-unheard of levels, according Christopher Elvin, head of private equity products at Preqin.

“There looks to be a trend towards mega-funds,” Elvin told MMR. “The private equity industry is seeing huge inflows, but investors are increasingly choosing to sink their capital in the largest funds. LPs (Limited partners) prefer to be involved with fund managers that have been successful in the past – with the expectation that those fund managers will be able to generate large returns in the future – and generally fund
managers don’t tend to raise large funds without building up a track record.”

Read the full story: Institutional appetite drives a rise in PE ‘mega-funds

Published by Money Management Report/Pageant Media.