Avison Young Recapitalization Provides “War Chest” for Further Growth

Avison Young’s newly announced recapitalization does more than deleverage the company’s balance sheet debt-to-EBITDA ratio to less than 3x, reduce debt and preferred equity by nearly 70% and give key financial partners a common equity position, although it accomplishes all of these. “We’re pretty excited,” Avison Young chair and CEO Mark E. Rose told Connect CRE. “This gives us the war chest to do the things that we’re known for”–namely, make strategic acquisitions, broaden the platform’s capabilities and expand the pool of talent through recruitment. “And we have our eyes on targets.” 

Expected to close in October, the new transaction builds upon the success of the company’s 2024 recapitalization. It also represents a rethinking of how to produce the best outcome for Avison Young’s longtime financial stakeholders as well as the company’s principals.  

“It’s kind of simple,” said Rose. “Was it better to take the money and pay these [stakeholders], or was it better to invest and make them multiples of the same money? And after 16 months, that’s what we were able to come to.” 

The process of devising this solution began in the spring of 2025, Rose said. The company looked at various options for taking the stakeholders’ investment and “putting it into a different form that would meet everybody’s needs.” 

The solution entailed a 70% debt-to-equity swap, “giving us a debt-to-EBITDA ratio that’s under 3x so that we can build, effectively, a fund—a pool of capital along with additional new money that [the stakeholders] were putting in,” said Rose. 

He continued, “What we needed to do was work with our financial stakeholders, convert them into equity holders.” Their ownership stake is “approximately 50-50 between the Avison Young principals, securing all of their value in equity and turning the debt into equity for the lenders so that we can all benefit from this period of growth that’s coming.” 

The scaling-up that Rose and his team have in mind post-closing may not quite compare to the transformation the company underwent two decades ago, moving from a strictly Canadian services firm to a global organization operating in 20 countries. “When you look at the first 50-plus acquisitions, which were all spot-on for strategic reasons, it’s the law of smaller numbers,” Rose said. “If you go from $40 million [revenue] to $1.2 billion, it’s a pretty high-percentage growth rate. I think that you’ll see something a little more measured than that, but nevertheless, you could very well see a very significant upsizing of the organization.”