In one of the largest buyouts, iProperty to be sold for $534 mn

iProperty is going to be bought by REA Group, a News Corp subsidiary, reports Tech in Asia

iProperty is a pretty big fish as one of Southeast Asia’s leading online property portal businesses. It’s about to be bought by an even bigger fish – REA Group, a News Corp subsidiary which owns property sites in Australia, China, US, and Europe.

This puts iProperty’s valuation at A$751 million ($534 million), one of the largest acquisitions of a Southeast Asian internet company in recent memory.
 

It’s uncertain how the purchase will be structured, though REA will either buy A$4 ($2.80) per share from iProperty shareholders, or offer each of them A$1.20 ($0.85) per share in cash and 0.7 shares.
 

For shareholders who bought in right after iProperty’s initial public offering, they’d make a nice 17x return, assuming they get A$4 per share. REA previously had a bite of iProperty, investing $100 million into the group.
 

iProperty booked A$24.8 million ($17.7 million) in revenue in the first three quarters of this year, though it saw a net loss after tax of A$1.55 million ($1.11 million) in the first half.
 

The acquisition would mark a complete exit for Patrick Grove and his Catcha Group, which remains the largest shareholder in the company. Not a bad result at all for Patrick, it seems. The largest exit to date was jobs portal Jobstreet, also from Malaysia, which got bought for $586 million.
 

With the valuation for iProperty set, all eyes now turn to PropertyGuru, perhaps iProperty’s fiercest competitor in Southeast Asia. PropertyGuru is the market leader in Singapore.
 

The buyout is good news for the Southeast Asian start-up scene. If the region can keep up its momentum, we should see billion-dollar exits soon.

This is an excerpt from Tech in Asia. You can read the full article here.