Buligo: How Real Is the Embedded Carried-Interest Stack?
Buligo is presenting a future carried-interest stack of $110 million to $136 million, but the annual filing makes clear this is not a gross number on the whole portfolio. It is a filtered, realization-dependent simulation that still sits far above the pace at which carried interest is actually reaching earnings.
The main article argued that Buligo’s upside still depends on realizations. This follow-up isolates the number management uses to give that upside a harder shape: a future carried-interest stack of $110 million to $136 million. That is no longer a vague statement about optionality. It is large enough to influence how the stock is read.
The problem is that this is not cash waiting to be unlocked. It is a simulation. The annual filing defines it explicitly as an illustration and a sensitivity test, not as guidance. But it is also not a made-up number. It rests on a real history of realized transactions, on capital actually invested by vintage, and on a filtered set of deals after management removes transactions it no longer expects to generate carried interest.
So the right question is not whether the stack is real or fake. It is real as embedded economic option value, but it is still far from cash equivalence. To understand how real it is, the stack has to be broken into three pieces: how the number is built, what is already excluded from it, and how wide the gap still is between the slide and the carried interest that is actually being monetized.
Four points are worth holding from the start:
- The historical anchor is real. The company says that, in transactions realized through the approval date of the annual report, carried interest received averaged about 13% of invested equity on a weighted basis.
- This is not a stack on the full portfolio. The simulation is shown after excluding transactions the company believes are not expected to generate carried interest.
- The conservatism is concentrated in one vintage window. Reading the slide, the 2022 to 2024 vintages carry only a 5% to 10% assumption, while the other vintages remain at 13%.
- Actual monetization is still much smaller than the headline. Completed 2025 sales generated $4.527 million of carried interest, and two post-balance-sheet realizations added another $1.547 million.
How The Stack Is Built
The annual filing gives the model two clear anchors. The first is realization history: from inception through the report approval date, Buligo led 153 transactions, of which 67 were realized, with an average 2.1x equity multiple and an average 23.4% IRR net to Buligo investors. The second is the carried-interest mechanism itself: after LP capital is returned together with a preferred return, the GP usually earns 25% of excess profits in income-producing and value-add deals, and 30% to 35% in development deals, while Buligo’s own share of carried interest in partner-backed transactions ranges from 35% to 50%.
That is where the jump from past to future happens. The company takes equity invested by deal year, applies a potential carried-interest rate, and arrives at the $110 million to $136 million range. This matters because the number is not built from asset values, not from NAV, and not from fair-value gains. It is built from the question of what portion of previously invested equity may still convert into carried interest later on.
Reading the slide through those year buckets gives a sharp picture. The 2016 to 2021 vintages contain about $173 million of invested equity and produce about $22.5 million at a 13% rate. The 2022 to 2024 vintages contain about $483 million and are the only bucket that gets the reduced 5% to 10% sensitivity, or roughly $24.2 million to $48.3 million. The 2025 and 2026 vintages already contain about $531 million, and the company puts them back on a full 13%, which adds another roughly $69 million.
That math produces a gross stack of about $115.7 million to $139.8 million. Against the published range of $110 million to $136 million, the implied exclusions reduce the number by only about $4 million to $6 million. That is a very important point. It means the big headline is not being created by cutting out a huge part of the portfolio. Most of the stack still sits in deals management continues to view as monetizable.
Another important implication follows from the same breakdown. The company’s claimed conservatism is concentrated mainly in the 2022 to 2024 vintages, the years it says were characterized by low cap rates relative to historical data. Outside that window the model stays on a full 13%. So the $110 million to $136 million headline looks selectively conservative, not conservative across the entire stack.
What Has Already Been Excluded
The annual filing is sharper than the presentation on this point. The presentation sends the reader only to section 8.8. The annual filing, in the same sensitivity test, says the excluded transactions are those listed in sections 8.8 and 8.9. That is not a technical footnote. It is the difference between understanding that a few deals have already failed, and understanding that the company also excluded a basket of still-open projects that would deliver negative returns to investors if sold at the report date.
| Exclusion Layer | What The Filing Includes | Why It Matters |
|---|---|---|
| Transactions already realized at negative returns | Autumn Ridge and Carrer de la Cera | These are deals that already proved not every vintage reaches carried interest |
| Open projects that would currently produce negative returns to investors if sold now | Eagle Yards, Pencil Factory, The Tyde, Dry Creek at East Village, The Parkwood, 10793 Harry Hines | This is not only closed history. It is a live weak bucket inside the existing inventory |
So the stack shown to investors is not “13% on everything ever invested.” It already comes after removing clearly weak pockets. On one hand, that strengthens the claim that the number is not overly crude. On the other hand, it sharpens the real debate: after the company strips out what already looks weak, will the remaining vintages actually clear the preferred-return hurdle and the exit-price test.
The practical implication is that the discussion moves away from whether there were losses and toward whether the problem-project list stays contained. If more assets slide into an 8.9-type bucket later on, the stack can compress much faster than the clean headline range suggests.
Where The Slide Meets Reality
This is where embedded value and monetized value separate. The company states explicitly that it recognizes carried interest in the financial statements only when it actually receives it, after a preferred annual return has been achieved. That is a useful accounting discipline, but it also exposes the distance between the model and the pace of real monetization.
In 2025, completed project sales totaled about $225.49 million and generated $4.527 million of carried interest. The comparable number was $2.614 million in 2024 and $10.874 million in 2023. After the balance-sheet date and through approval of the accounts, two additional project sales were completed for $54.6 million, with another $1.547 million of carried interest. In the presentation, management already framed 2026 as having started with 3 realizations completed by the end of the first quarter and about 8 expected for the full year.
That gap says almost everything. The low end of the stack, $110 million, is about 24 times the carried interest generated by 2025 sales and more than 70 times the carried interest attached to the two post-balance-sheet realizations. So even if the stack is real, it is still not a number that should be read like near-cash backlog.
There are also accounting subtleties here that matter. In the revenue breakdown near the start of the annual filing, 2025 carried interest is shown at about $4.7 million. But the company also clarifies in the footnote that note 15 includes carried interest from assets not yet sold once LPs have already received their preferred return. In other words, even the reported carried-interest revenue line is not always identical to the carried interest created by that year’s sales alone. That is another reason not to read the stack as if it were a simple amortization schedule of exits.
There is also one genuine point in management’s favor. The slide stresses that carried interest is not netted across transactions. A weak deal does not erase the carried interest of a stronger one. So at the individual deal level the stack can unlock in a nonlinear way and produce years that look stronger than the average. But for exactly the same reason, this is also a stack that depends on a long sequence of successful exits, not on one event.
Bottom Line
Buligo’s carried-interest stack is not empty marketing. It rests on a real realization history, on a 13% average carried-interest take from realized past deals, and on an explicit filtering-out of deals that already look weak or impaired. In that sense, it is real.
But it is still far from value that is accessible to shareholders today. Most of the big number still depends on vintages that have yet to be monetized, especially two layers that still need proof: 2022 to 2024, where the company itself already cut the assumption to 5% to 10%, and 2025 to 2026, where it still applies a full 13%.
So the sharp conclusion is twofold. Yes, Buligo has a real embedded carried-interest stack. No, there is no reason to read it as nearly certain cash. For the $110 million to $136 million range to deserve more economic weight, the company will need to prove over the coming years not only that it still has good deals, but that those deals actually close at the pace, pricing, and return thresholds required to turn embedded carried interest into recurring value that reaches the company layer.
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