For Compass, the road to listing on the New York Stock Exchange required that the real estate technology firm slash the size of its initial public offering by one-third and cut its price range the night before it began trading. This helped the stock rise nearly 12% Thursday.
“The goal of the Compass [IPO] was never a valuation or a price,” said Chairman, CEO, and co-founder Robert Reffkin, who spoke to Barron’s from the floor of the NYSE. “The goal was a capital raise…. From that perspective, we were successful because now we have hundreds of millions to infuse into the company that we will use to accelerate our investment into agent productivity and efficiency tools.”
Compass (ticker: COMP) had filed to offer 36 million shares at $23 to $26, which it reduced to 25 million shares at $18 to $19 on Wednesday. It ended up selling 25 million shares at $18, raising $450 million.
Frontier Airlines (ULCC), which also went public on Thursday, closed at $18.85, 15 cents below its $19 offer price, making it a so-called broken deal. Two other companies that were also scheduled to trade, Intermedia Cloud Communications and Kaltura, pulled their deals. Read more
