In case you missed it last week, private equity firm Thomas H. Lee Partners announced the closing of its more than $1 billion majority acquisition of Ten-X. The online platform operates Auction.com as well as other brands.
With Ten-X Homes and Ten-X Commercial, two recently added legs of the company, homes are sold online via auction format. The company claims over $50 billion in residential and commercial transactions via its platforms. Ten-X Homes was introduced in 2016 at SXSW (South By Southwest) Interactive, a tech event at the popular Austin, Texas festival.
“This is just the ‘official’ closing of the deal we announced previously,” said Rick Sharga, chief marketing officer of Ten-X, in an email to Inman.
The terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Inman reported on the acquisition earlier this year:
Ten-X (previously known as Auction.com) was valued at $1.2 billion by CapitalG (formerly Google Capital) in 2014, when the Google-owned equity fund poured $50 million into Ten-X.
Since then, Ten-X has grown in the last three years and Thomas H. Lee Partners is reportedly ponying up $1 billion or more for only a controlling interest in Ten-X (not the entire company). Ten-X could easily have been valued at north of $1.5 billion — though Ten-X officials declined to comment on this.
While Thomas H. Lee Partners will gain a majority of seats on Ten-X’s board of directors, the private equity firm won’t be replacing Ten-X’s management team, according to Rick Sharga, chief marketing officer at Ten-X.
Ten-X is “going to continue to run the business as we’ve been running it,” he said.
The online auction format allows users to instantly make an offer on a listing they are interested in. This service also allows sellers to work with their agents to see offers alongside each other as they are made.
Correction: an editing error made reference to TenX cryptocurrency products, which are offered by a different, unrelated company with a similar name. We have since updated the story to remove this mention and regret the error.
