On Realogy: "Why LBO's will be the Next Thing to Pop"

Eric Reguly:

Take Realogy, formerly Cendant, the world's largest real estate franchisor, whose businesses include Century 21, Coldwell Banker and Sotheby's International Realty. Its debt trades at about 75 cents (U.S.) on the dollar, a level that implies a fairly high chance of default.

This is bad news for Leon Black's Apollo Management, one of the world's biggest private equity firms. Its purchase of Realogy, completed in the spring of 2007, when the buyout frenzy was at its height, valued the company at $8.5-billion. It's safe to assume Realogy is worth considerably less today as real estate values go into the tank.

While the partners of private equity firms were built up as swashbuckling captains of capitalism, the reality is that their business model was dead simple: Goose investment returns by buying an asset with as little equity as possible.

They could do so because loans were cheap and plentiful, and rising markets kept the credit spigot open. Typically, private equity firms financed LBOs with one-quarter equity and three-quarters debt, though many were done with much thinner equity layers.