Introduction
Before a buyer opens the data room, the seller's name has already told it three things: how long the seller can wait, who else will eventually learn the price, and whether the same institution will be back with another portfolio next year. That is why private capital advisory (PCA) bankers sort limited partners (LPs) by institution type as well as by motive. The motives themselves, from overallocation to budget pressure, are set out in why LPs and GPs need liquidity. What differs by seller is the decision chain behind a sale, the fund interests it brings, and how it behaves once bids arrive. The mix moves quickly too: in Evercore's count, sovereign wealth funds went from a rounding error to a major seller group in one year.
How the LP Seller Mix Shifted in 2025
Evercore's 2025 secondary market report splits $120 billion of LP-led volume by seller type. Categories differ by survey (Jefferies groups pensions with sovereigns), so shares are not interchangeable.
| Seller type | Share of 2025 LP-led volume | Share in 2024 |
|---|---|---|
| Fund-of-funds | 23% | 13% |
| Public pension | 21% | 31% |
| Endowment or foundation | 12% | 10% |
| Sovereign wealth fund | 12% | 2% |
| Insurance company | 10% | 12% |
| Corporate pension | 9% | 8% |
| Family office | 8% | 7% |
| Bank | 1% | 8% |
| Other | 4% | 9% |
Fund-of-funds became the largest group, sovereigns multiplied their share sixfold, and banks nearly vanished. Evercore also found 83% of volume was intermediated by an advisor, split roughly evenly between repeat sellers and new ones, and 71% came from North American sellers.
Public and Corporate Pensions
Public Pensions: Board Policy and Open Records
A public pension rarely decides to sell in one meeting. The trigger usually appears in an allocation review, the process described in pacing and the denominator effect, and the sale runs under an investment policy that says whether the board votes or staff act within delegated limits and report back. The Pennsylvania Public School Employees' Retirement System (PSERS), a repeat seller, shows how visible the result is: staff reported to the board in October 2024 on 13 private equity funds with a net asset value (NAV) of $822 million, sold in a deal that had closed on 30 September, and by March 2025 were updating trustees on a second sale of about $935 million across 16 funds.
Both sales were announced after public board meetings, and that publicity is the defining constraint. Public pensions sit under open-records laws with specific carve-outs for fund documents. California's code, for example, sets out which alternative-investment records public pensions and public endowments must release:
- Exempt: fund financial statements, capital call and distribution notices, and partnership agreements.
- Disclosed: each fund's name and vintage, contributions, distributions, net internal rate of return (IRR), multiple, and fees.
Corporate Pensions Heading for an Insurer
A corporate pension answers to trustees and a sponsoring company, and many mature plans, particularly in the UK, are heading toward an insurer. Insurers usually take the premium in cash or liquid assets, so private equity interests often have to be sold first: in Standard Life's April 2026 survey release, 76% of UK defined benefit (DB) schemes above £1 billion named secondary sales as their preferred route for illiquid assets.
- Pension Risk Transfer
A transaction in which a defined benefit pension plan passes some or all of its obligations to an insurer, through a buy-in (a policy held by the plan) or a buyout (the insurer takes over the liabilities), in exchange for a premium.
This seller has a hard date set by the insurer's timetable, so certainty of closing can outweigh the last point of price, and deferred-payment bids fit poorly.
Sovereign Wealth Funds: Large, Quiet, and Increasingly Repeat
A sovereign wealth fund answers to a government owner rather than a public board, and can sell a billion dollars of NAV without a press release. Recent reporting describes repeat sellers in Asia. Singapore's GIC sold private equity interests with more than $1 billion of NAV in 2025 and was reported in August 2026 to be marketing a second portfolio of similar size with PJT Partners advising. China Investment Corporation (CIC) sold roughly $1 billion of US private equity fund stakes, including Carlyle and Hellman & Friedman funds, after seeking to reduce its private markets exposure; Bloomberg reported in April 2026 that Goldman Sachs and Ardian were the buyers.
Large multi-manager sovereign portfolios suit this kind of split, the subject of mosaic bids and portfolio construction. Yet Asia-Pacific institutions were only 3% of Evercore's 2025 seller volume, so the Asian sovereign seller is a growth story, not an established category; how sovereign wealth funds invest explains where their capital goes.
Endowments and Foundations: Trustees, Budgets, and the Message
An endowment sells under an investment committee of trustees, and its liquidity need runs straight into the university budget. Harvard's endowment distributions covered nearly 40% of the university's operating revenue in fiscal 2025, so slow private equity distributions become a budget problem.
- Endowment Spending Rule
The policy that sets how much an endowment pays out each year, usually a percentage of a multi-year average of its value. The average effective rate among US colleges and universities was 4.9% in fiscal 2025, according to the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO) and Commonfund.
What an endowment guards most is manager access, since its model depends on getting into oversubscribed funds. When Yale's Evercore-run sale became public in April 2025, the university stressed it would keep committing to its current managers' new funds. Harvard Management Company chief executive N.P. Narvekar wrote in the fiscal 2025 annual letter that its secondary sales were "not signs of constraint or liquidity concerns", even as Harvard's private equity allocation rose to 41%.
For the advisor, narrative control is part of the mandate: which funds go and what the institution says afterwards. How the seller mix has moved since is tracked in the changing secondaries seller base.
The Other Sellers and the Rise of Repeat Sellers
Insurers, Banks, Family Offices, and Fund-of-Funds
Insurers and banks sell under a regulator's eye: capital charges make fund interests costly to hold, so a rule change can force a sale, though insurers can instead use collateralized fund obligations, which repackage fund interests into rated notes. Family offices can decide quickly, with a family or small team signing off. Fund-of-funds sell as fiduciaries to their own investors, often to wind down vehicles near term end; Jefferies' review of the first half of 2025 found they favoured affiliate-vehicle and managed-fund structures that work around transfer restrictions and keep GP relationships.
Comparing Seller Types in a Process
Side by side, each seller type has its own approval route and its own binding constraint, the thing an advisor cannot trade away for price:
| Seller | Who signs off | What it tends to sell | What it guards |
|---|---|---|---|
| Public pension | Board, or staff under policy | Non-core managers | A defensible price |
| Corporate pension | Trustees and sponsor | Illiquids before an insurer deal | Certainty by a date |
| Sovereign wealth fund | Internal committee | Large multi-manager portfolios | Confidentiality |
| Endowment or foundation | Trustee committee | Funds outside core managers | Manager access |
| Insurer or bank | Management, under capital rules | Capital-heavy positions | Capital relief |
| Family office | Principals | Single interests | Speed |
| Fund-of-funds | Manager, for its own LPs | Vehicles near term end | GP relationships |
The last column shapes the process: a deadline demands certain closing, a sovereign a discreet buyer list, an endowment buyers its managers will accept.
Programmatic Sellers
The shift that matters most for advisors is toward programmatic sellers. CPP Investments, which manages the Canada Pension Plan, sold 25 interests in North American and European buyout funds more than ten years old, to Ares and CVC Secondary Partners for about C$1.2 billion of net proceeds in March 2025, and called itself a systematic buyer and seller in the market. PSERS returned within six months of its first sale, and GIC was marketing a second portfolio in 2026.
A repeat seller is also a repeat client, and buyers remember whether its last data was clean and its winning bids closed. For a first-time seller the advisor supplies the process; for a repeat seller it also protects a market reputation the next auction trades on, which is why the LP portfolio sale process starts with the seller's history as well as its fund list.
