Chinese Portal Anjuke the Latest to File for IPO

Chinese property portal Anjuke has filed an IPO application with the Hong Kong Stock exchange making it the latest property portal to seek to go public. Although Anjuke's filing did not reveal a timetable or a valuation for the IPO, analysts are predicting that the company's floatation could raise as much as $1 billion.

Anjuke is one of the leading property verticals in China where it competes with the likes of Beike and the NYSE listed Fang. According to Anjuke's filing, the portal counts 67 million monthly average users of its mobile site and app, has the second-largest inventory of listings and property data (194 million) and has a 67% market share of online real estate marketing in the country with more than 726,000 paying clients from China's fragmented real estate industry.

Anjuke Revenue vs EBITDA 2018 - 2020. Source: Anjuke IPO filing

The latest filing is the second attempt to take Anjuke public after a 2014 attempt was withdrawn after a series of disputes with brokerages put a sizeable dent in its initial $1.5 billion valuation. Anjuke was then acquired by marketplace company 58.com for around $267 million in 2015 and has been marketed alongside 58's own real estate vertical 58 Real Estate since then. The new IPO filing claims that the two portal brands complement each other "in terms of geographic coverage and differentiated property listings" and that as a controlling stakeholder, 58 has "has successfully integrated Anjuke and accelerated its growth".

58.com was itself listed on the NYSE and has major investment from Chinese mega-corporation Tencent Holdings but the company signed an $8.7 billion deal backed by General Atlantic and Warburg Pincus to be taken private last year.

Anjuke is the latest of several portals to have either filed for IPO or flirted with the idea of doing so at a time of unprecedented optimism for publicly traded proptech companies. Last week saw the news that leading Swedish portal Hemnet is to go public on the Stockholm Nasdaq, while Southeast Asian portal giant PropertyGuru is rumoured to be weighing up its options and considering a SPAC merger and there have long been rumours of a possible public floatation of leading Spanish portal idealista.