Greenhill Cogent advised on 31 LP sales in Q1

Greenhill Cogent advised on 31 sales of limited partnerships stakes in the first quarter of  this year, according to results released on Thursday.

This is little changed from the fourth quarter 2016 figure of 32 and slightly down on the 38 registered during the first quarter of 2016 by the investment bank’s secondary advisory group.

Overall, the investment bank had revenues of $56.9 million, a 15 percent drop year-on-year drop, as smaller transaction sizes resulted in lower completion fees and lower fund placement fees. There were small increases in deal announcement fees and retainer fee revenues.

Advisory revenues, which includes revenue from the firm’s secondaries advisory unit, fell to $56.7 million during the quarter, compared with $66.6 million a year earlier.

“Already in the early days of April we saw larger transaction completions, which brought our year-to-date revenue back into line with what we had been expecting,” chairman Robert Greenhill said in the results statement.

“As we proved last year, when we overcame a similarly light revenue result for the first quarter to end the year with the largest percentage increase in advisory revenue of any of the 15 publicly traded investment banks that disclose that figure, a single quarter’s results should not be extrapolated to longer term expectations,” he said.

Secondaries Investor‘s annual advisory firm survey in March revealed that Greenhill and Evercore led 2016 activity, working on $8 billion of deals each, the former spread across 57 transactions, the latter across 36.

Limited partnership sales accounted for more than 80 percent of Greenhill’s deals by value, the survey revealed.

Greenhill Cogent has advised on more than 8,000 limited partnership interests representing approximately $160 billion in commitments, according to its website.