For years, there has been a relentless amount of commentary on why family offices and wealth managers more generally should increase exposure to private market investing. A recent poll suggests that for various reasons, there is a digestion problem.

The share of UK-based family offices interested in making new private equity investment slumped to 35 per cent from 73 per cent between 2024 and 2025, a family offices group said after polling its membership.

AYU, a “global private members club for family offices and investment professionals,” said it took 104 responses from its poll, including from 87 family offices. The organisation has a membership of over 200 family offices, as well as funds, service providers and others. 

The change in private equity sentiment may be caused by uncertainty about the medium-term economic outlook, while at the same time highlighting the attraction of strong short-term opportunities emerging in other markets. 

A simpler cause may be that much of the capital committed to private equity and venture capital in prior years has not yet been returned, reducing appetite among investors to push more capital into the area, AYU said in a statement. This chimes with what WealthBriefing has heard – many large investment organisations are fully allocated to private markets and waiting for distributions before committing fresh capital.

“Anecdotally, the reduced appetite in the PE and VC areas is being attributed by some families to heavy allocations in the previous year, but these survey results nonetheless represent a meaningful rebalancing of focus among these LPs,” Toby Abel, chief technology officer at AYU, said.