Where the deals are done

When it comes to choosing office space for your firm, an old adage seems to hold true. It really is all about location, location, location. In order to gauge which cities and neighborhoods are the most popular for private funds managers, pfm took a look at PEI Media’s rankings across four asset classes—the PERE 50, the Infrastructure Investor 30, the Private Debt Investor 30 and the top 100 private equity firms in the PEI 300. The dots on the maps below represent the locations of approximately 150 of the world’s biggest firms across four asset classes: grey for private equity, red for real estate, green for infrastructure and blue for private debt.

In most cities, firms flock to the same neighborhoods, with many even occupying the same building. New York is by far the most popular city globally, where some firms have two office locations. Midtown east is the most common neighborhood in which to set up shop, although investment banks and a few firms like Brookfield are still rooted down on Wall Street.

London’s firms are better dispersed, clustered in Mayfair and along the Thames into City of London. In Los Angeles, Beverly Hills and Santa Monica draw more firms than downtown, while in Boston, real estate firms tend to settle downtown while private equity firms favor Back Bay. Many firms head to Menlo Park or Palo Alto for their “San Francisco office” instead of the city itself. Both Paris and Hong Kong are a bit less crowded than some of the other cities, with most firms based along the rivers and a few populating the outskirts. In Beijing, keeping your competitors close seems like the name of the game, as most firms are located in the three towers of the China World Trade Center.

Looking to open a new office in one of these top eight cities? Click here to take a look and see which neighborhoods serve as private equity playgrounds.