The IPO on the London Stock Market yesterday of property portal Zoopla – effectively the Zillow of the UK – yesterday attracted blue-chip investors to its £900m / $1.53m floatation making founder Alex Chesterman £32m / $54m after selling his 3.5 per cent of stock. Zoopla is trading at £918.8m / $1.53m valuation.
The other winner yesterday was major shareholder Atlas Ventures. Prior to its float, Zoopla had raised a total of $13.4m from Octopus, Atlas and SVB.
The company priced shares at 220p and saw 38.3 per cent sold to new investors existing shareholders Chesterman and Daily Mail and General Trust cashed out.
Chesterman, who also founded website LoveFilm (acquired by Amazon for £200m in 2011) and the other selling shareholders now hold 52.6 per cent of the firm.
Shares closed up 4.5 per cent at 230p yesterday, making the company one of the few to rise on their London stock debut this year.
Bankers priced the shares in the middle of a 200p to 250p range.
The company will now list in the FTSE 250, against it’s main rival Rightmove.
Chesterman founded ScreenSelect, an online DVD rental company in 2003, which merged with LoveFilm in 2006, prior to the Amazon sale in 2011. He founded Zoopla in 2007.
Zoopla has gone through a roll-up of the market, acquiring Thinkproperty.com, PropertyFinder Group, Globrix.com and UpMyStreet.com.