Kennedy Wilson Holdings, the New York-listed real estate investment group, agreed to a buyout by its chief executive and the Canadian insurance company Fairfax Financial to make it a private company.
A definitive accord has been reached for the company, based in Beverly Hills, to be bought in an all cash-transaction by an entity affiliated with a consortium led by William McMorrow, chairman and chief executive of the company and other senior executives, alongside Fairfax.
The group will buy all outstanding common shares of Kennedy Wilson other than some owned by the consortium's members for $10.90 per share in cash. The per share purchase price represents a 46% premium to Kennedy Wilson’s unaffected share price as of the last trading day before the takeover bid was first publicly disclosed in early November 2025.
Fairfax has also committed to provide the group with up to $1.65 billion to fund the cash purchase price for the transaction. The filing said that the KW management group, led by William McMorrow, will have control of the company and will continue to lead it.
Fairfax is expected to have a majority of the economic interest in the company. In November, the consortium said that private ownership would reduce costs and increase efficiencies by letting management focus on strategy.
The transaction is expected to close in the second quarter of 2026. On closing, Kennedy Wilson’s common shares will cease trading on the New York Stock Exchange.
Rental housing focus
Kennedy Wilson has more than $31 billion of assets under management across the United States, the United Kingdom and Ireland. It focuses primarily on rental housing, with over 65,000 multifamily and student housing units owned by the company or financed through its credit platform. It is also a major investor in industrial and commercial real estate debt and has traditionally invested in offices. It has 320 global employees.
As of the third quarter of 2025, in the United Kingdom it had 11.7 million square feet of commercial real estate assets under management and loan commitments of $118 million. In Ireland it has 3,500 multifamily units and 2.3 million square feet of commercial under management.
Jointly, the buyout vehicle owned 31% of Kennedy Wilson's shares when it announced last year that its board had formed a special committee to evaluate the proposal.
The November bid was received as Kennedy Wilson published its third quarter earnings. McMorrow said then the group had grown fee-bearing capital to $9.7 billion and made strong progress on its 2025 disposition plan, which had generated about $470 million in cash in 2025 and exceeded its target of $400 million.
In December it bought the Toll Brothers' apartment living platform in America, which has added $5 billion in assets under management and expanded its rental housing portfolio to over 60,000 units.
In July CoStar News revealed it had exchanged on the purchase of about 275 units for its single-family rental housing joint venture with Canada Pension Plan Investment Board for approximately £100 million via three separate transactions in the United Kingdom's Milton Keynes, Derby and Cheltenham.