Hazlewoods and its specialist health and care advisory and due diligence teams had an exceptionally busy year in 2014. In the year they advised on 43 completed transactions valued at £185 million.
The social care sector continued to attract interest from private equity investors, and this was accompanied by greater availability of bank debt. An interesting point was how the bank debt markets changed during the course of the year. We found that debt was generally easier to access and the terms were “softer”. It will be interesting to see if this continues into 2015, with the cautiousness over the recovery seeming to return!
Although trading conditions continue to be challenging many operators are cautiously optimistic. It does however depend upon what sub sector of social care and what geography you operate within, and clearly the quality of the business. The team was able to advise a number of clients either in their acquisition strategies, or to successfully exit their businesses, and the pipeline going into 2015 is very positive.
A selection of the completed health and social care transactions undertaken during 2014 include:
- Acquisition advisory services provided to Acorn Care and Education.
- Financial due diligence on behalf of August Equity on their acquisition of a number of businesses for their portfolio companies.
- Financial due diligence on behalf of Sovereign Capital for a number of their investee companies.
- Advising on the disposal, tax planning and exit of businesses in the following sub-sectors:
- Supported Living
- Domiciliary Care
- Residential Learning Disability
- Elderly Residential and Nursing
- Foster Care
For further information on this release, please contact a member of the team on 01242 246670.