This is no doubt that this is the year of technology IPOs. Vacation home rental service HomeAway has set the price range of its offering, pricing the range between $24 and $27 per share, valuing the company at a whopping $2 billion. HomeAway aims to raise as much as $248 million in the offering and will list its stock on the NASDAQ under the symbol “AWAY.”
HomeAway, which filed for an IPO in March, currently offers home rentals through 31 websites in 11 languages and provided listings for vacation rentals located in over 145 countries. In 2010, its sites averaged over 9.5 million unique monthly visitors.
HomeAway is bringing in revenue and profit. HomeAway saw $167.9 million in 2010 revenue, which is up 39.6% from 2009. In 2010, 37.9% of the company’s revenue came from outside the United States, including 36.6% from Europe and 1.3% from Latin America. In 2010, rental listings contributed 91.1% of HomeAway’s revenue.
Net Income for 2010 came in at $16.9 million, up from $7.6 million in 2009. And the company says there is plenty of room for growth—the vacation rental market is valued at $85 billion in 2010 in the United States and Europe.
HomeAway has raised close to a half a billion dollars in venture funding, and in its most recent investment round was valued at $1.4 billion. So $2 billion isn’t too far off from this estimate nine months ago.
We’ll see how the markets respond to HomeAway in the next few weeks but all signs point to the share price popping on the first day of trading.