Century City-based investment bank Houlihan Lokey has leased a West Palm Beach office, joining a slew of financial companies looking to tap into the up-and-coming “Wall Street South.”
The firm officially opened its West Palm location in early September in a Coco Group-owned office building, subleasing 4,500 square feet for three years, The Real Deal reported. The property’s other tenants include asset manager Stone Point Capital and hedge fund Alta Rock Partners, and the asking rent is $68 per square feet per year.
Houlihan, which reported $3.7 billion in assets in its latest regulatory filing, runs 33 offices worldwide alongside its local headquarters and counts roughly 2,600 employees. The investment bank added the West Palm office to its existing Miami presence to meet a growing cluster of private equity firms and family offices in South Florida, said Matt Swain, Houlihan’s global co-head of equity capital solutions.
“We like to go where our clients are in order to be ingrained in the community,” said Swain, who has been based in West Palm since April.
Growing capital, advising demand
Houlihan sees plenty of opportunity in West Palm and its surrounding communities, including affluent Boca Raton and Palm Beach Gardens, for its capital solutions, restructuring, valuation, and mergers and acquisitions services, Swain said. Other financial players who’ve recently set up shop in the area are investment bank Solomon Partners, analytics firm MSCI and venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.
Key clients in South Florida are senior professionals, many of whom are East Coast transplants, Swain said, and companies in the healthcare, education, technology and defense sectors.
“From a capital solutions standpoint, most of our clients have been industrials, infrastructure and defense-related so far, but I think that will expand very quickly,” he said.
Having an office in West Palm gives Houlihan access to a new pool of “unique capital providers,” Swain said – mostly the family offices of wealthy South Florida families.
“Us having a presence in the community is only going to allow us to better serve our L.A.-based clients,” he said. “As you can imagine, some of the wealthiest individuals in the world are based out of Palm Beach, so having a presence here and being able to cover them opens up optionality across all our business lines.”
While the new sublease gives Houlihan’s West Palm contingent an option to extend past three years, Swain said the investment bank has already surveyed nearby offices it could eventually grow into.
“We’ll track the growth of the community and the market and will respond as such,”
he said.
The post Houlihan Lokey Heads South appeared first on Los Angeles Business Journal.
