Redfin, the Seattle-based real estate shop, started trading today after pricing its IPO at $15 per share yesterday. That pricing, which raised $135.8 million according to CNBC, was above its initial range of $12 to $14 per share, indicating bullish demand.
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Today, the firm shot higher, closing regular trading at $21.70, up 44.67 percent from its IPO price. Such a strong result will inevitably lead to complaints that the firm left money on the table, even as Snap shows how premature those cries can be.
Here’s the company’s chart via CNBC:
That’s a solid first day, and it’s a performance that contrasts with Blue Apron and Tintri‘s lackluster debuts. Blue Apron is down about 25 percent after its reduced IPO price. Tintri is flat.
Investors, therefore, pushed Redfin up despite prior tremors. So much for the “windows” current degree of openness being Chief Oracle for all things IPO.
Another Unicorn, Launched
The Redfin IPO valued the firm at $1.2 billion, according to TechCrunch, who reported the company’s new valuation in the following way:
Despite an ugly patent lawsuit from a former co-founder over one of Redfin’s pending patent applications — one filed just this Monday — the company priced above the $12 to $14 range, at $15 per share, a number that values the company at $1.2 billion. It also means the company just raised $138 million
After its day-one gains, Redfin is worth $1.73 billion according to Yahoo Finance, putting the firmly above, we presume, its prior valuation. The firm was not present on the Crunchbase Unicorn leaderboard, which would have implied a $1 billion private valuation, and it did not appear on the Upcoming section of that list. Although it’s hard to be sure, I doubt that Redfin is unhappy with its outcome.
That means July is capping off a slowing IPO cadence with a win for the technology industry. August isn’t expected to bring much, and there isn’t anything of note coming up according to the Nasdaq. This could be the last IPO, to quote the phrase, for a minute.
That means the current venture liquidity squeeze could go from dry to parched. But then again, there’s always hope that for venture kids — and their paymasters, the limited partners — on the horizon.
(I can’t resist asking the same damn question again: If this is as good as it gets when stocks are at all-time highs, what happens when the indices stumble by ten or twenty percent?)
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