Blue Owl BDC boosts share buyback in 'uncommon' offer to investors

With some financial advisors and clients already jittery over their nontraded business development companies, or BDCs, one major manager of private loans and credit, Blue Owl,  recently made the unusual decision in one BDC fund to more than triple the amount of shares investors may sell back to the fund in the quarter.

The nontraded Blue Owl Technology Income Corp. two days before Christmas said it was making the move to boost liquidity for clients. Its net asset value per share at the end of November was $10.40, according to the company.

Blue Owl manages a variety of private loan and credit funds, and the company’s credit platform has met investors’ buyback or tender request, in full, since inception back in 2017, totaling approximately $3.6 billion. 

Recently, nontraded BDC sales have surged at brokerage firms as investors have been looking for high-yields as interest rates increased. Leading funds advisors sell include those managed by Blackstone and Ares.

But recent high-profile corporate bankruptcies have spooked financial advisors’ clients who plowed cash into high-yielding nontraded BDCs, resulting in a surge in clients cashing out of the illiquid funds by selling back billions of dollars of shares to the investment funds in the final months of last year.

Regarding the $6 billion nontraded Blue Owl Technology Income Corp., its original tender offer was made November 26 and totaled $171.3 million, or 5% of its net asset value at the end of September, according to investment bank and alts fund tracker Robert A. Stanger & Co. Inc. “This lines up with market norms for NAV BDCs.”

But the fund’s December 23 filing increased the offer to 65,771,325 shares, or close to 19% of the shares outstanding as of the end of November, according to Stanger.

“The offer expired yesterday; we don’t yet know the results of this offer,” Stanger wrote in an email Friday morning to InvestmentNews. “We do not see any public statements regarding the amended tender offer, but this is uncommon.”

BDCs lend money to private companies - typically small- and mid-sized companies that might have trouble getting loans from banks. Private credit funds like nontraded BDCs sold through broker-dealers emerged after the 2008 credit crisis, when banks were required to raise standards regarding companies they were lending money to.

“We have honored all tender requests ever made in [Blue Owl Technology Income Corp.] and, with our focus always on our serving investors, we have elected to increase the amount available this quarter to continue to do so,” a   Blue Owl spokesperson wrote in an email Friday to InvestmentNews. “Performance for [Blue Owl Technology Income Corp.] remains strong with approximately 11% returns since inception as of November 30, 2025 for Class I shares.”