Hobbled on the dealmaking front and deemed no longer worth fighting for by its largest backer, Cushman & Wakefield is taking some island time as it figures out its next steps. The brokerage is seeking approval to redomicile its parent co. to Bermuda 🏝 , a transaction that would remove supermajority thresholds (i.e. 75% of votes required on major decisions) and give it more wiggle room on the M&A front - something it badly needs.

Recall that last May, TPG and fellow PE firm PAG Asia Capital announced that they would sell all their O/S shares in the firm, an acknowledgment by TPG that its heavily levered dreams of one brokerage to rule them all (rolling up DTZ-Cassidy Turley-Cushman) weren’t going to pan out. In the last couple years, Cushman has been defined by balance-sheet babysitting ™, w/ dealmakers expressing concern that minding the books has eclipsed doing business. The latest Green Street rankings bear out this sorry state of affairs
• Multi: Cushman fell to 8th place, the only firm in the top 15 to see a drop in volume
• Office: Came 5th, and here too was the only big boy to see a drop

There is now definitively a Big 4 (CBRE, JLL, Eastdil, Newmark – in that order), and then there’s Cushman, which is hovering in the unenviable position of being big but not massive. The upside: It’s a good 🎯 for a takeout.

We’ve been thinking a lot recently about how PE’s reimagining of insurance (via Athene, Athora, Global Atlantic) as 🚀 fuel for its private-credit bets will make it a bigger force in CRE lending – see here, here & here. Now we have some data to match the vibes: debt deals by the most active insurers were up 28.2% YoY, per CMA, w/ Apollo’s Athene taking the top spot for 2nd Y in a row. Athene originated $10.4B (up 41% YoY). “Part of it is the opportunity set of what insurance companies are going to do has evolved and changed,” Apollo’s Scott Weiner told the pub, adding that CRE credit provides both duration & call protection. 🥅

Matt Salem of KKR, whose Global Atlantic was runner-up w/ $9.4B (up 60.4% YoY) said that most of its juice at the moment was in refis rather than acquisitions, but he’s looking for that trend to ◀ .

Related Cos. is answering the call of the wild, seeding a new data-center arm w/ at least $500M and eyeing a total raise of up to $8B, the company said. CyrusOne alum Brent Behrman will be CIO of the new vehicle, dubbed Related Digital, which will deploy its capital through Related Fund Management.

Morgan Stanley is advising on the raise for Related, which enters a field crowded w/ fellow titans. Blackstone-QTS is the benchmark bet, but there’s also the BlackRock-Microsoft JV, bankrolled by Abu Dhabi’s MGX, Apollo’s potential credit bet on Meta, and so many others. One thing I’ll say about Related: They have the kind of pressing-palms political savvy that will come in handy on projects of this scale and complexity – the politicking on something like Hudson Yards is a heavier lift than dealing w/ lawmakers in Northern VA or Abilene, TX.

Worth paying attention to a few hiccups in the game tho: As we wrote Wed., Microsoft is pulling the plug on 2GW worth of new projects, and CoreWeave has had to navigate some issues around its Blackstone debt.

Ivan Kaufman’s Arbor Realty Trust, one of the alpha lenders of the multifamily syndication boom/bust, is being sued yet again by investors, alleging that the REIT doctored its financials & ignored its own underwriting standards. In response, the firm’s CFO Paul Elenio told TRD that the lawsuits simply rehashed “meritless” short-seller reports, most prominently from Viceroy Research - see The Promote’s Arbor chat w/ Viceroy boss Fraser Perring here. (Sample: “Arbor can’t gild the lily anymore.”)

Arbor recently landed a $1.15B loan repo facility w/ JPMorgan, which the firm hailed as a testament to the solidity of its loan book. It has, however, recently acknowledged that the REOs on its balance sheet have shot up and will continue to do so.