Harvard Endowment Liquidating $2.5 BIllion In Assets
by Tyler Durden
ZeroHedge.com
May 8, 2017
Back in January, Harvard’s Endowment stunned the investing world when it announced that the investing vehicle which manages $36 billion in assets, would undergo a “radical overhaul” in the way the world’s wealthiest school invests its money by outsourcing management of most of its assets and lay off roughly half the staff in the process. As the WSJ reported at the time, about half of the 230 employees at Harvard Management Company would depart as part of a sweeping change by the university’s new endowment chief, N.P. “Narv” Narvekar.
The endowment would also shut down its internal hedge funds and let go traders by the middle of the year. Additionally, the internal team in charge of direct real-estate investments was expected to spin out into an independent entity that Harvard would invest with. Following the restructuring, only management of Harvard’s natural resources portfolio and passively managed exchange-traded funds will remain in house.
So with this major overhaul taking place, it is hardly a surprise that the Harvard Endowment is quietly seeking to liquidate some $2.5 billion in private equity, venture capital and real estate investments, as Axios reported on Monday. The website notes that the secondary offerings include just under $1 billion of PE/VC partnership positions plus around $1.6 billion of real estate positions. Harvard has hired Cogent Partners, a unit of Greenhill to seek bidders in the secondary market and to executive the sale.
According to Axios, unlike the last time Harvard tried to offload PE stakes under former HMC CEO Jane Mendillo, this time around secondary buyers are “flush with cash and Harvard can be choosy.”
And some trivia: if Harvard is successful at selling all the offered $2.5 billion in assets at NAV, it would be the largest endowment secondary sale of all time.
