Vacation home rental service HomeAway has priced its IPO, which is set to begin trading tomorrow morning at $27 per share, giving the company a valuation of $2 billion. The company aims to raise as much as $248 million in the offering.
Last week, HomeAway priced the range of its offering between $24 and $27 per share, so this final pricing is at the high end of the range. The company’s shares will begin trading tomorrow morning on the NASDAQ under the ticker symbol “AWAY.” The company’s IPO is being underwritten by Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan.
HomeAway, which filed for an IPO in March, currently offers home rentals through 31 websites in 11 languages and provides listings for vacation rentals located in over 145 countries. In 2010, its sites averaged over 9.5 million unique monthly visitors.
In the offering, HomeAway is offering 5,931,335 shares and 2,068,665 shares are being offered by selling stockholders. In addition, the selling stockholders have granted the underwriters an option to purchase up to an additional 1,200,000 shares of common stock.
Unlike some of its predecessors in the tech IPO market, HomeAway is actually brining in both 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.
It’s important to note that company isn’t raising its IPO range significantly, as others have in the past. How that will impact the opening price is unclear. For example, LinkedIn priced at $45 (at the high end of its set range) but opened at $83 per share. Pandora, on the other hand, priced at $16 per share (well above its range of $10 to $12 per share) and opened at $20 per share.
We’ll see how the markets respons to HomeAway tomorrow.