Manhattan financier Fred Iseman is ready to part with his biggest investment.
His buyout firm CI Capital Partners has quietly put public company Ply Gem Industries up for sale seeking more than $2 billion including debt, a source with direct knowledge of the situation told The Post.
Ply Gem, which Iseman bought in 2004, is the country’s biggest maker of vinyl siding, and makes windows and doors.
The North Carolina business has hired Credit Suisse to run the sales process, the source said.
Iseman’s private-equity firm last year raised a $750 million fund, giving a sense of the out-sized importance of Ply Gem to the firm.
After buying Ply Gem, CI Capital acquired 10 smaller related companies and combined them. CI brought Ply Gem public in a May 2013 initial public offering at $21 per share.
The shares Wednesday were trading at $16.30, giving it a market capitalization of $1.1 billion.
Although that’s well off the IPO price, the shares are up 72 percent over the last 12 months. CI Capital still owns 67 percent of the stock.
That means its present stake is worth $750 million.
Ply Gem is also carrying about $930 million in debt, giving the company a total enterprise value of more than $2 billion.
CI Capital invested roughly $200 million of equity in Ply Gem through both the 2004 buyout, and a few years later when İmajbet it invested additional money to keep Ply Gem out of bankruptcy during the housing crisis.
Manhattan native Iseman is Chair of the Municipal Art Society of New York, and is on the Metropolitan Opera and Carnegie Hall boards.
He made headlines in 2012 when buying a Fifth Avenue apartment on the Upper East Side for $22.5 million that used to belong to heiress Huguette Clark.
Before becoming a private-equity baron, Iseman was a journalist working at the New York Times and a features editor for Hearst.
It might be a good time for him to sell Ply Gem, with some experts predicting the housing market will contract if interest rates rise.
CI Capital did not return calls.
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