KKR & Co. Inc. (NYSE:KKR) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Operator: Our next question is from Patrick Davitt with Autonomous Research. Please proceed with your question.

Patrick Davitt: Thanks, good morning. I have another follow-up on the real estate market. Is there any specific region or specific type of assets in the portfolio where those transaction cups €“ comps drove the mark? And as a follow-up to that, could you give us an idea of where the cap rates were moved to and where they were before?

Craig Larson: Patrick, we haven’t disclosed the specific cap rates. I think the dynamic this quarter is, one, I think I wouldn’t be €“ we wouldn’t be surprised if you’d actually see a real variability in those cap rate assumptions is, again, it’s €“ each manager is probably going to view the data points differently. And what you’re going to see in this 90-day period. And again, like the book that we have is going to be predominantly U.S. based just given the maturation of our portfolio. And again, from an overall exposure piece, as I’d mentioned, our largest allocation is 35% in those industrial themes and 80% in those themes where we’re continuing to see really strong growth. But almost by definition, those are going to have the big €“ just given the significance of those in the portfolio, those are the instances that are going to be the biggest contributors to that movements in the court.

Operator: Our next question is from Brian Bedell with Deutsche Bank. Please proceed with your question.

Brian Bedell: Great. Thanks. Good morning, folks. Just wanted to come back to the retail democratized part of the retail strategy. Maybe if you could just remind us on the AUM you have right now in the actual democratized products where you might think that could go to over the long term. Realize it’s a €“ it’s definitely a long-term build. And then, how many products you plan to launch this year? And then, going back to the FRE margin, part of that as you scale the overall business and improve the FRE margins, should we be thinking of the rollout of those democratized products as a near-term headwind as you pay for shelf space and build up the infrastructure to scale that?

Craig Larson: Hi, Brian. It’s Craig. Why don’t I start? And then, we’ll let Rob pick up on the FRE margin impact. Just in terms of framing that significance for us, again, we’ve got about 500 billion of AUM, roughly 6 billion are in these democratized vehicles today. So it’s a little over 1% of our AUM. In terms of the launch of additional products and where we are from here, given SEC rules and filings that we’ve made, we can’t get into a lot of the specifics. But suffice to say we think there’s more to come in the first half of the year, and we’ll keep you abreast as we continue to make progress.

Rob Lewin: Brian, some of those costs that you reference are costs that we’ve talked about, where we’ve been investing back into the firm in distribution and marketing as well as in technology. Some of that technology supports our efforts in the democratized vehicles. So as we talk about operating in the low 60s and over time, gravitating our business model to get to the mid-60s, that incorporates how we’re thinking about the democratized access vehicle space.

Scott Nuttall: And Brian, the only thing I’d add is, we’ve said over time, if you look at kind of what we’ve been selling to individual investors, so think democratized plus the more traditional fund formats sold through platforms to individuals, that’s been roughly 10% to 15% of the capital we’ve been raising ex-GA. And we’ve said that we expect that over time to trend to 30% to 50%. So to your question of where do we think this goes over time, think of it as kind of an increasing percentage of a larger base. And we’ve also shared over time that we expect to have democratized versions of what we’re doing across all of our major product areas in the near term and that’s still the case.

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