57% of Family Offices Borrow Against Securities, Citi Finds

More than half of the family offices Citi surveyed this year borrow against their investment portfolios. In the bank’s 2026 Global Family Office Report, a survey of 351 offices in 41 countries, 57% said they use securities-based lending or margin facilities, which according to the report was “by far the most widely used form of financing.”

Commercial property loans came next, at 30%. Only 10% borrow against their stakes in private funds, and 26% use no leverage at all.

A liquidity mismatch

Part of the explanation sits in the other half of the portfolio. Family offices built large private-market allocations over the past decade, and those markets have been slow to return capital. Bain & Company’s Global Private Equity Report 2026 found distributions to investors, measured as a share of net asset value, stuck below 15% for four consecutive years and flat at 14% in 2025. The industry holds 32,000 unsold companies worth $3.8 trillion, and buyout holding periods at exit have stretched to around seven years.

The mismatch is not new. In a paper published in the Journal of Financial Economics in 2016, economists David Robinson and Berk Sensoy studied the cash flows of 837 buyout and venture funds between 1984 and 2010 and found that capital calls and distributions both rise and fall with the market, but distributions are more sensitive to market conditions than calls. When markets weaken, distributions from funds fall faster than capital calls. For an office committed to several funds, capital calls continue on the managers’ timetable, while distributions depend on exit markets.

Citi’s respondents hold 18% of their portfolios in private equity, split evenly between funds and direct stakes. Listed equity, at 30%, is the largest single allocation and the most liquid.

Borrow or sell?

Capital calls are contractual. Under most fund agreements a missed call is a default, and the penalties can include forfeiting part of the existing stake. Selling to meet one is always an option, on either side of the portfolio. Secondary-market volume, covering investors’ fund stakes and manager-led deals, rose 19% on a year earlier to $121 billion in the first half of 2026, including $56 billion sold by investors directly, according to Evercore. Even high-quality buyout exposure traded “in the 90s” as a percentage of net asset value.

Borrowing against listed holdings avoids both kinds of sale. For many families, those holdings include shares in their own company. UBS’s Global Family Office Report 2026, covering 307 offices with average assets of $1.3 billion, found that 77% of the families still run an active operating business, and the listed shares of a family company are often the last ones a family wants to sell.

Bank securities-based lines and brokerage margin facilities are usually recourse, repayable on demand, and subject to maintenance calls with short deadlines. That is manageable for a diversified book of blue chips. It is harder for an office whose collateral is one large stake, since lenders tend to advance less against a single concentrated position than against a diversified portfolio.

Specialist non-bank lenders offer a different structure. EquitiesFirst, for example, provides equity-backed financing to family offices and high-net-worth investors, among other clients, on a non-recourse basis, so the client’s liability is limited to the securities used as collateral. The firm has transacted more than $7 billion in loans since 2002.

Bain’s midyear update in June found the exit market clearing only selectively, for the highest-quality assets, with little progress toward easing the liquidity crunch. Until that changes, family offices are likely to keep turning to the listed part of their portfolios for liquidity, and the terms on which they borrow against those holdings will determine how much of them they still own when exits recover.