Meaning of family office | Babel Free

Definitions

A business whose function is to centralize the asset management of a large family fortune (wealth held by a family).

Equivalents

Examples

“As the company has been growing so noticeably in recent years, it has been taking calls from family offices looking for investment opportunities.”

“Hussein Sayed, a local anchor with CNBC, a TV network, beams from the stage as he welcomes participants to a conference on family offices (FOs) in Dubai. Among those present are billionaires and their offspring, advisers and money managers, and a smattering of investment-minded blue-bloods […] Now an essential part of every self-respecting billionaire’s stable, FOs are booming. Their roles include managing families’ wealth, administering their assets and often other services, from the mundane (paying bills) to the knotty (succession-planning). The biggest have become deal powerhouses, capable of competing with global banks and private-equity firms on big transactions. But they are also, by definition, private—and therefore little understood. “We’re the most important part of the investment landscape most people have never heard of,” says one executive. The FO has its roots in the organisations that oversaw the fortunes of America’s 19th-century robber barons, such as J.P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller. Several hundred have been in operation for at least three generations. Some now serve extended families with hundreds of members—over 600 in the case of France’s Mulliez clan, owners of the Auchan hypermarket chain. Most, however, are recent creations. Of the 311 family offices that took part in the survey for the latest annual Global Family Office Report by UBS and Campden Wealth, published in September, more than two-thirds were established after 2000 (see chart 1) and over half are serving the first generation of wealth.”

“When Matt Weiss began raising money for his Austin-based AI startup, he wanted to tap the vast network of wealthy Texas investors. As he made calls and lined up meetings, one address in Dallas came up time after time. “We kept hearing about this mecca of family offices,” Weiss said. It’s called Old Parkland and it’s become perhaps the most exclusive location in Dallas finance – an array of investment shops tied to Texas billionaires such as Michael Dell and Darwin Deason, as well as the local digs of Citadel and the New York Stock Exchange. […] The Dallas-Fort Worth area has more finance jobs than Chicago and Los Angeles but many of its aging office buildings lack the amenities of trophy real estate in other parts of the country. Illustrating the interest in new high-end space, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. is building a $500 million campus in Dallas while Bank of America Corp. is putting up a tower nearby. Family offices and private equity outfits want similar bells and whistles but with a smaller footprint. Crow Holdings declined to share exact rents at Old Parkland, but it’s known to charge among the highest per-square-foot rates in Dallas at a time when the office vacancy rate hovers near 25%.”

“The billionaire founder of a home-repair business acquired by Brookfield Asset Management is ramping up his UK family office’s activities, a rare positive bet on the country’s prospects amid recent economic uncertainty. Richard Harpin‘s Growth Partner has added investment associates and analysts this year and last month hired UK private equity veteran Susie Stanford for a senior role, helping vault the HomeServe founder’s firm into the top ranks of private money managers for the super-rich. […] Harpin, though, says he’s confident he and Growth Partner can rise above the UK’s recent economic uncertainty with a strategy of buying stakes in small-to-medium sized companies, weighted towards the consumer sector where the entrepreneur built his fortune. His family office’s portfolio now spans more than a dozen companies across the UK, including suppliers of pizza ovens, hair extensions and hot tubs, with the firm homing in on businesses led by founders. […] Growth Partner is among Britain’s most active family offices, the typically discrete firms managing the financial affairs of the super-rich. They are becoming increasingly important to businesses across the globe, targeting publicly traded companies with activist strategies and helping fuel a global boom this year in fundraising for defense startups amid rising geopolitical tensions.”

CEFR level