We’re in a new year but a number of brokers and lenders may wish we were still in 2022. That is because many of them really made hay when the sun was shining (that sun being the lower interest rates of the first half of the year) and propelled us to a record M&A year, by some margin. After the previous record of 455 transactions in 2021, we have so far tallied 527 deals announced in 2022, a 16% increase year over year.
We expect a few more 2022 deals to trickle in, but we did not experience the normal end-of-December rush of closings, except from a couple of brokerages. In fact, only 36 deals were made public during the month. That’s a solid number to end 2022 and similar to the monthly totals from September onward. But it’s not even close to the December’s we had grown accustomed to, like the 57 deals we saw in December 2021 and the 60 from December 2020.
The party had to end sometime, and now we could be in for a very quiet winter of dealmaking. Let’s all just hope that the rumors of some of the national lenders starting to dip their toes in the market in the new year are true.
