Private equity firm TPG, which has about $11.5B in real estate assets under management out of a total of $109B in assets, went public on Thursday with an initial public offering at $29.50 a share. The company now trades under the ticker TPG on the Nasdaq.
The IPO raised about $1B for TPG, valuing the company at $9.1B, Reuters reports. Among other investments, the company has holdings in Airbnb, Spotify and McAfee Corp. TPG also has stakes in a diversity of real estate worldwide through three major platforms.
TPG Real Estate Partners looks for opportunistic deals and has about $5.8B in assets under management. TPG Real Estate Finance Trust invests in commercial property mortgages and other debt and has about $5.2B in loan commitments, while TPG Real Estate Thematic Advantage Core-Plus, which was founded last year, looks for low-risk commercial real estate deals.
Though sizable, TPG is dwarfed by larger private equity players, such as Blackstone, with $731B in assets under management ($230B in real estate), and Brookfield Asset Management, with about $650B in assets ($237B in real estate).
TPG's IPO is the first major one of 2022. In recent years, publicly traded private equity firms have done well, despite the gyrations of the U.S. economy during the coronavirus pandemic.
One factor has been low interest rates, which have made borrowing inexpensive and spurred institutional investors to pour money into the private equity sector, The Wall Street Journal reports. Rates are poised to rise this year.
On the whole, equities have had a bumpy year so far. The Nasdaq Composite has dropped about 4.6% since the beginning of 2022, though it has gained about 15% year-over-year. The S&P 500 has declined about 1.5% since the beginning of this year, though up nearly 24% since this time last year.
