Cushman launches $250M SPAC

Commercial real estate giant latest firm to form blank-check company

Cushman & Wakefield CIO Nathaniel Robinson and CEO Brett White (iStock)
Cushman & Wakefield CIO Nathaniel Robinson and CEO Brett White (iStock)

Yet another major real estate firm is jumping on the blank-check bandwagon.

Cushman & Wakefield has formed a special-purpose acquisition company, C&W Acquisition Corp., that aims to raise $250 million from investors to take a company public, according to the firm’s filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission.

The firm’s executive chairman and CEO Brett White and CIO Nathanial Robinson will lead the SPAC as board chairman and CEO, respectively.

But unlike some of the other real estate bigwigs that have formed blank-check companies, Cushman isn’t necessarily targeting proptech with its SPAC. In the filing, the firm states that C&W Acquisition has yet to identify any specific business to merge with.

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“We will not be limited to a particular industry or geographic region in our identification and acquisition of a target company,” the filing reads.

In a statement, Cushman confirmed that it’s formed a SPAC but said that the company is in “a registration quiet period,” and could not comment further.

SPACs have become an increasingly popular alternative to traditional IPOs, with celebrities, venture capitalists and athletes forming their own blank-check firms. In 2020 alone, 248 of those firms went public, raising $83 billion, according to SPACInsider.

The real estate industry has joined the SPAC craze, with major landlords and commercial real estate firms forming their own blank-check companies. Those include CBRE, whose $400 million SPAC launched in November; and Tishman Speyer, which formed two separate SPACs in October and January, respectively. The first of those took smart-lock maker Latch public in late January.

Most recently, Howard Lorber and Steve Witkoff teamed up for a blank-check company that aims to raise $250 million to take a proptech startup public.