Goldman Sachs Asset Management Raises $15.2B for Secondaries Strategies

Goldman Sachs Asset Management on Wednesday announced the final closing of Vintage IX and Vintage Infrastructure Partners, having raised a combined $15.2 billion for the pair of private market secondaries funds.

Vintage IX, the latest iteration of Goldman’s diversified private equity secondaries strategy and the largest of the Vintage Funds series, closed above its fundraising target with $14.2 billion in committed equity, the investment bank’s asset management arm said in a release.

Commitments to the fund came from institutional and high-net-worth investors and from Goldman Sachs employees. The firm’s predecessor fund, Vintage VIII, closed on $10.3 billion of commitments in 2020.

“We are deeply appreciative of the support from both existing and new investors,” said Harold Hope, global head of secondaries at Goldman Sachs Asset Management. “In addition to this capital, we also raised committed co-investment capital which gives us additional flexibility to pursue a diverse opportunity set.”

Rescuing Overstretched Funds

Secondaries acquire existing interests from limited partners or assets from primary private equity fund investors. Demand for liquidity is high, Goldman Sachs said, with many global institutions over-allocated to private markets or in search of ways to generate cash within their portfolios.

“We are at an inflection point in the secondaries market,” Hope said. “Today there are more ways to derive value from secondaries than ever before, and we believe the long-term winners in this market will be buyers that can navigate it as whole and weigh relative value across transaction types and structures.”

Vintage Infrastructure Partners closed on $1 billion in equity commitments to make it Goldman’s inaugural commingled fund dedicated to the infrastructure secondaries market.

Hope said the firm is encouraged by tailwinds that continue to drive growth and opportunity in the infrastructure segment. “With dedicated infrastructure secondary capital, we hope to be a more complete solutions provider to investors and managers looking for liquidity options across the entire range of their private market investments,” he said.

According to Goldman, the secondaries team’s sourcing of infrastructure secondaries grew by more than 40 percent between 2021 and 2022 and surged to a record half-year total in 2023.

Frasers-PGIM Case

In Asian real estate, a notable deal was Frasers Property’s use of secondary trades in 2019 to increase its investment in a PGIM retail fund by S$635 million ($470.1 million).

Frasers and its Frasers Centrepoint Trust upped their stake in the PGIM fund, the owner of a set of suburban Singaporean malls, to 67 percent by purchasing shares in the fund on the secondary market from Dutch pension fund manager PGGM, sources told Mingtiandi at the time.

The secondaries market is more developed in the US and Europe because of the longer history of non-listed real estate funds in those regions, according to property consultancy JLL.