Wealth management firm taps JLL M&A advisory expertise

The business of wealth management is rooted in trusted relationships between advisors and their clients. For one U.S.-based Registered Investment Advisor (RIA) firm with more than $200 billion in assets under management, years of success serving ultra-affluent individuals and families created an opportunity to dramatically expand their footprint. To analyze their options and optimize their growing real estate portfolio, the firm’s leaders turned to a trusted advisor of their own: JLL.

When the wealth management firm engaged JLL, it was preparing to expand internationally for the first time via a series of strategic acquisitions that would nearly double its real estate footprint. Leadership, including the company’s COO, its private equity owners, and the investment bank supporting the M&A transaction, needed to conduct due diligence on two acquisition targets within an accelerated timeframe. Since this was the firm’s first-ever international acquisition, they were operating in an unfamiliar regulatory environment, which added complexity to the due diligence process.

JLL’s real estate insights proved critical for evaluating the acquisition targets and to establish the groundwork for capturing immediate post-closing M&A synergies. The JLL team was to deliver an actionable portfolio optimization strategy based on its findings—all in less than a month.

JLL went straight to work gathering and evaluating the necessary information to deliver due diligence insights and strategic acquisition recommendations to the wealth management firm. Specifically, JLL assessed two target companies’ real estate portfolios and analyzed lease abstracts to evaluate them for potential risks, cost exposure, overlapping market opportunities and future state requirements.

As part of the process, the JLL team coordinated across organizations and markets, establishing a single source of truth while limiting disruption of the wealth management firm and acquisition targets’ day-to-day operations. Meeting with their core contacts (including the firm’s CRE lead and strategy lead) two to three times a week, JLL helped build a narrative that delivered critical information to relevant stakeholders.

To determine synergies and consolidation opportunities, the JLL team focused on three “buckets:” mark-to-market, clear synergies and complex synergies. The team also performed scenario analyses to evaluate all potential co-location strategies in overlapping markets and recommended scenarios that reflected natural breaks or acceleration where a buyout made financial sense.

Additionally, the JLL team worked to identify quick savings wins, the firm’s largest market rent exposures, and consolidation risks and trade-offs. Based on the findings, as well as regulatory requirements and risk factors across international jurisdictions, JLL delivered recommendations for a real estate operating model that incorporated CRE best practices and aligned with the C-suite’s top priorities.

JLL ultimately delivered a comprehensive analysis and tangible recommendations for the wealth management firm’s international acquisitions that identified 20% in annual portfolio run-rate synergies, as well as $7 million in potential dis-synergy exposure in three markets due to market rent exposure, capacity constraints and/or long-term leases.

As part of their analysis, the JLL team unlocked real estate portfolio transparency, modeled 10-year financial forecasts and projections, and recommended CRE operating model best practices focused on managing the firm’s footprint expansion and international requirements. JLL delivered its comprehensive, 100-page report on synergies and opportunities ahead of schedule in only three weeks, keeping a time-sensitive initiative on track for the client.