Good morning, dealmakers. MK Flynn here with today’s Wire. Today, there’s deal news is in a thriving area of the home services market. Plus a slew of people moves in healthcare investing. And we’ve got new fund performance data to share with PEI Group’s audiences. But first, a quick look at a breaking story. Soaring secondaries. Brookfield Asset Management is in talks to take over the private equity secondaries business of Deutsche Bank AG’s asset management arm, Bloomberg is reporting, citing a person familiar with the matter. Deutsche Bank’s DWS Group has been pitching its secondaries business, which raised an initial $550 million fund just over a year ago, to interested parties as part of a plan to pull back from areas where it doesn’t have sufficient scale, Bloomberg reported in December. Representatives for Brookfield and DWS declined to comment. For ongoing coverage of the hot secondaries market, visit our affiliate pub, Secondaries Investor. Bugs be gone. Pest control continues to attract private equity. We’ve written about this trend before. It’s part of a larger surge in home improvement and maintenances services that began during pandemic lockdowns and is continuing now, when economic challenges are inspiring many people to make the most of what they already have rather than buy new stuff. Today, PestCo, which is backed by Thompson Street Capital Partners, announced the acquisitions of two pest control services firms: Romney Pest Control and Phenom Pest Protection. PestCo was formed to consolidate the highly fragmented pest control industry and has made nine acquisitions so far. Based in St. Louis, TSCP invests in middle market businesses. The private equity firm has managed more than $3.6 billion since being founded in 2000. Other PE firms are also snatching up companies in the sector. Earlier in January, Rockit Pest, which is backed by Halle Capital, bought Petri Pest Control Services. You can read more on that deal here. Healthcare experts. January typically produces a slew of new hires and promotions at private equity firms, and this January is no exception. Today, we’ve seen a couple of announcements involving healthcare investors. The Vistria Group has named Elizabeth Jurinka as operating director, healthcare policy, as Iris Dorbian reports. Jurinka joins the Chicago-based PE firm after nearly two decades on Capitol Hill and in the White House. Most recently, she served as Special Assistant to the President in the Biden/Harris Administration. Prior to that role, she served as Chief Healthcare Advisor to U.S. Senator Ron Wyden and the Senate Finance Committee. For the latter role, she spearheaded efforts to draft and advance some of the most consequential bipartisan healthcare legislation of the last decade, according to Vistria. For more on Vistria’s healthcare investment strategy, read PE Hub’s profile, featuring an interview with Amy Christensen, partner and co-head of healthcare. Kain Capital, which invests in the technology enablement of healthcare services companies, today announced several moves designed to deepen its bench. Bret Cummings has joined the firm as chief financial officer and chief compliance officer. He joins the firm with 30 years of experience, serving in various roles at Macellum Capital Management, Healy Circle Capital Management, Irvine Capital Management and Sage Asset Management. And healthcare veterans Anne Barr, Dennis Nesta and Long Thai have joined the New York firm as advisors. For more, see Iris’ story. Fund performance. At a time when resource-constrained LPs are thinking carefully about which GPs to re-up with, a firm's track record becomes more important than ever before, writes Private Equity International’s Adam Le. To that end, PEI has this morning launched a fund performance data offering. Fund profiles on PEI’s database now disclose how much of a fund's capital has been called and how it has performed in terms of TVPI, RVPI, DPI and IRR. The data covers 84 of the largest 100 funds closed between 2008-20, and funds that comprise 50 percent of all capital raised over that period. Try it out for yourself on PEI’s Private Equity Database. Europe beat. Over on PE Hub Europe, there’s a slew of stories from the editorial team led by editor Craig McGlashan and including reporter Nina Lindholm and assistant reporter Irien Joseph. Today, the team wrote about a big take-private deal in the UK by Energy Capital Partners; a move in the opposite direction by a company that Warburg Pincus has a minority holding in; Permira’s purchase of a majority stake in an analytics firm from Equistone; a deal for an auction company in Finland; KKR’s partnership with a private debt company; and the latest US private equity interest in a European football team. We launched PE Hub Europe last summer to extend the renowned and respected North American deal coverage of PE Hub to the European market by leveraging the unrivalled access and knowledge of PEI Group. Complementary access to PE Hub Europe will be ending soon, so sign up today! That’s a wrap for today. I’ll be back with more tomorrow. Happy dealmaking, MK Read the full wire commentary on PE Hub ... | 