Casa.it, a leading residential and commercial property websites in Italy, and similar leading websites in France, Germany and Luxembourg with the atHome brand, are to be bought by Oakley Capital, a UK private equity firm who is closing its second deal in Italy in the sector after having bought a 75% stake in Facile.it in 2014, which in turn acquired Mutui.it last April (see here the press release).
Oakley sill support Casa.it and atHome managment in a management buyout deal with the manager investing for a less than 20% stake. The deal is valued 132.6 million euros (enterprise value).
The seller is Rea Group, a multinational digital advertising business specialising in property listed at the Australian Stock Exchange. More in detail rea Group is sellin Home Group sarl, which operates activities in Luxembourg, France and Germany, and Rea Italia srl, which operates the Italian activities. Mediobanca acted as Oakley’s financial advisor, while Citigroup supported Rea Group.
Oakley Capital, which is listed at the UK Aim market, will invest through its Oakley Capital Private Equity III eand the deal is expected to close by Q1 2017.
In FY 2016 ending on June 30th, Casa.it and atHome reached 33,33 millione uros in aggregated revenues (mostly in Italy) and 6 millions in ebitda (gmostly out of Italy), but Oakley expected to be able to make margins to grow quite fast thanks to significant synergies with its Facile.it and Mutui.it websites.
Luca Rossetto (Casa.it’s ceo), Tim Pittevils (atHome’s ceo), Julian Kavanagh (cfo) and Mario Capocaccia (head of product & delivery) will lead the next phase through further development of the websites’ software and technology and development of new products leading to an increase of advertise revenues.
