CoStar has bid $6.7 billion for California based property data and business intelligence firm CoreLogic according to Bloomberg. Understandably for such an expensive deal between two publically traded companies, details are scant and the unnamed source quoted in Bloomberg did not go into great detail, but did reveal that a rival all-cash bid from a group led by private equity firm Warburg Pincus was made for less than the amount offered by the all-share CoStar bid.
CoStar has had its eyes on CoreLogic for some time and the interest ramped up recently after high-level upheaval at the California based data company saw activist investors Cannae Holdings Inc and Senator Investment Group win three seats on CoreLogic’s board. CoreLogic’s share price on Monday closed at $76.18 meaning that CoStar’s bid valued the company, which operates in North America, Western Europe and APAC, at around $86 per share.
Last week CoStar CEO Andy Florance used an interview with inman.com to set out his company’s stall when it comes to residential real estate, a sector which the Washington based company has plans to build a consumer-facing portal for. Florance also revealed in the interview that his company would seek to acquire companies along the way to augment organic growth and even teased listeners by saying that he had been up late working on an acquisition with the implication being that an offer for CoreLogic was in the pipeline.
A deal for CoreLogic is far from in the bag, the unnamed Bloomberg source is reported to have said that the company’s board will be evaluating whether to go ahead with a sale in the coming weeks and if the board does approve the CoStar bid over a rival bid, the deal will still likely have to navigate through review by the Federal Trades Commission which torpedoed CoStar’s acquisition of RentPath in December.
