The secondary market perspective

How sellers view valuation

Sellers typically approach valuation from a very different viewpoint from buyers. Whereas buyers are most concerned with the price they should pay to achieve their target returns, sellers are much more concerned with the buyer valuation relative to the fund’s NAV as provided by the manager. This is particularly the case when a buyer is offering to purchase a fund at a discount to the fund’s most recently reported NAV, thereby creating a loss on the seller’s books. While no seller ever looks favorably on a loss, alternative asset investors might be particularly unwilling to accept losses due to compensation issues (personal compensation tied to performance) and political concerns (investors that have to report publicly).

Many sellers are not equipped to perform a typical buyer-style valuation. However, those sellers that do perform such analyses often end up with substantially different valuations from buyers. Sellers will typically use more aggressive assumptions than buyers. This is partly due to comfort with the assets and partly due to psychology. The seller has likely been in constant contact with the fund manager for the life of the fund and may be more familiar than a buyer with a given company’s prospects, thereby allowing more confidence in an aggressive assumption. The seller may have also made the initial recommendation to make the fund investment and may be anchored to a positive outlook for the investment.

Another major difference in a seller valuation can be the discount rate used. Sellers, like buyers, typically have a target rate of return for a given asset. However, seller targets are often lower than buyer targets, which will cause a seller’s valuation to be higher than a buyer’s. Even larger discrepancies can be seen when an organization uses its cost of capital, which should always be lower than the target rate of return, or when pension funds use target rates of return which must be quite low for actuarial reasons. However, the reasons for selling typically would increase the required rate of return for the seller. If a sale is planned for liquidity reasons, the target rate of return for the asset is no longer particularly relevant and the discount rate should be increased in proportion with the size of the liquidity problem. If the seller wants to redeploy the capital from the sale into another asset with a higher expected return, the discount rate should also be increased for the asset being sold to be in line with the desired return in redeployment. Seller discount rates can normally be moved in line with buyer targets when the circumstances of the sale are fully taken into account.