TPG-Backed Cushman & Wakefield Files U.S. Public Offering

(Bloomberg) -- Cushman & Wakefield filed for an initial public offering in the U.S., saying it would use proceeds to reduce debt.

The commercial real estate firm listed the amount of its offering in a regulatory filing Wednesday as $100 million, typically a placeholder amount that will change later.

Cushman & Wakefied, whose owners include private equity firms TPG and PAG Asia Capital, said it will also use IPO proceeds for general corporate purposes and for making deferred payments to employees who worked for Cassidy Turley, a brokerage that its predecessor agreed to buy in 2014, according to the filing. Those payments -- which have to be doled out by the end of this year-- represented a liability of about $112 million at the end of March, according to the filing.

The offering will be led by Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and UBS Group AG.

Before the listing, Cushman & Wakefield will restructure from DTZ Jersey Holdings Ltd., which filed for the IPO, to a public limited company incorporated in England and Wales that will be named Cushman & Wakefield Plc.

Last year, Cushman & Wakefield had a net loss of $221 million on revenue of $6.9 billion, according to the filing. The New York-based firm said its 48,000 employees at 400 offices in 70 countries manage about 3.5 billion square feet of commercial real estate.

In 2015, Cushman & Wakefield merged with DTZ, a property services company that TPG, PAG Asia and the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board purchased a year earlier from UGL Ltd., an Australian construction engineering firm.

Those three firms collectively own about 90 percent of Cushman & Wakefield’s outstanding shares, the filing states. They will continue to control a majority of the voting power of its outstanding shares after the offering.

--With assistance from David M. Levitt.

To contact the reporter on this story: Michael Hytha in San Francisco at mhytha@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Elizabeth Fournier at efournier5@bloomberg.net, Matthew Monks

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