Hayley Cuccinello's piece in CNBC's Inside Wealth profiles Equity Group Investments — the Zell-family vehicle now run by Mark Sotir — and its portfolio: a John Deere dealership, a bluefin tuna fishery in Baja California, a pedestrian bridge to Tijuana airport. The thread tying it together is the part worth a practitioner read. EGI underwrites these businesses on a 10- to 12-year duration and asks one question first — will the industry still be here? Sotir is quoted plainly on why the firm stays out of much of software: he cannot tell you where it goes in ten years. The article also gives the trade a name — HALO: Heavy Assets, Low Obsolescence — that is now circulating on Wall Street as the anti-AI hedge.
The numbers in the piece are almost incidental, but they are the load-bearing piece for the planner. EGI does one to two deals a year. Traditional sponsor funds underwrite to a three-to-seven-year hold. Bonus depreciation is back to full first-year expensing under the bill signed last year, which Brian Hans at UBS's advanced-planning group calls a material change. And families with active-business participation can move that depreciation against other portfolio income — the kind of stock-heavy balance sheet most multigenerational households are actually carrying. None of that is hidden. What is hidden is what it does to the price you pay for a dealership group, an HVAC platform, or a regional ag business in 2026 relative to 2023.
Three implications, by audience, because the read is different at each seat.
For the family office. The HALO label is new. The strategy is not. Permanent capital with no exit clock has always been the structural advantage of the family-office vehicle versus the closed-end fund. What changed is that the asset class on the other side — durable, cash-generative, asset-heavy operating businesses — is being repriced upward as more families crowd in. The FO allocator's job in the next twelve months is not to copy the trade; it is to write the underwriting standard for it. What counts as “low obsolescence”? Is a regional Chevy dealer low obsolescence if EVs hit 35% of new-vehicle sales by 2032? Is a tuna fishery low obsolescence if a single quota change in Baja moves the cap rate by 200 bps? The discipline is to write the criteria down before the deal flow forces a decision.
For the PE practitioner. The lower-middle-market sourcing book for family-owned asset-heavy businesses is now competing with capital that does not have to sell. If you run a control buyout strategy in industrial services, dealerships, agriculture, or logistics, your seller is increasingly comparing your bid to a family-vehicle bid that quotes a longer hold, a softer governance posture, and a story the founder can tell their grandkids. The defensive move is to lean harder into the operating thesis — the value-creation plan in the first 18 months — because the “we will hold it longer” pitch is no longer a differentiator. The offensive move is to partner. Sponsor-and-family co-investment structures, where the sponsor underwrites the value-creation arc and the family takes the long-tail stub, are an unsexy but real format that is going to grow.
For the succession seat. This is the one most under-discussed in the article. An asset-heavy operating business is a fundamentally different succession vehicle than a portfolio of public equities, and a fundamentally different one again from a tech founder's concentrated stock position. A dealership group has hard-asset basis, depreciation recapture exposure on sale, real-estate components that may live in separate entities, a workforce that is part of the going-concern value, and franchise-agreement consent rights that constrain what the estate plan can actually do. A fishery has quota rights that may or may not transfer with the entity. None of this fits neatly into a standard revocable-trust-plus-pour-over-will template. The succession plan for the HALO portfolio looks more like the plan for an operating company than the plan for a balance sheet — and that is the practitioner the family needs to hire before they buy the next dealership, not after.
The piece closes with Sotir on agriculture: people are worried about the space, that is the time to step in, and the duration buys you the patience to be wrong for two or three years. Read on its own, that is just a buy-the-fear line. Read against the bonus-depreciation reset, the AI-disruption fear cycle, and the family-office sector flow, it is the cleanest articulation I have seen this year of why permanent-capital vehicles have a structural edge in 2026. The article is the prompt. The library is where the underwriting standard, the tax frame, and the succession architecture for that edge actually live.
Why permanent capital wins the asset-heavy bid — the duration-yield identity
A sponsor fund and a family vehicle underwriting the same asset-heavy business arrive at different bids because they are solving different equations. The sponsor solves for IRR over a 5-year window where exit multiple does most of the work. The family vehicle solves for compounded cash yield over a 10- to 12-year window where distributions do most of the work. If the business throws off a 6% cash yield growing at 4% per year, twelve years of reinvested distributions alone produce roughly a 7× cash-on-cash without any exit event — the math compounds before the multiple even has a chance to matter. That is why the family can pay more for the same EBITDA and still hit target. The PE practitioner needs to know this not to compete on hold period — you cannot — but to know which deals to bid on and which to walk away from before the diligence spend.