Shares of Realogy Holdings Corp., the real-estate brokerage company controlled by Apollo Global Management LLC, rose 27 percent Thursday after the company raised $1.08 billion in its initial public offering, pricing the shares at the top of the planned range.
The shares closed at $34.20 in New York. The owner of the Coldwell Banker and Century 21 real-estate brokerage brands sold 40 million shares for $27 each Wednesday, according to a statement. Parsippany, New Jersey-based Realogy had offered the shares for $23 to $27 each.
The IPO price gave Realogy a market value of about $3.5 billion. The firm had planned to use the proceeds from the sale to help reduce debt by more than a third. Realogy was taken private by Apollo in 2007 in the largest U.S. leveraged buyout of a real-estate services firm on record, just as U.S. home prices headed for the worst slump since the 1930s.
Apollo, co-founded by Leon Black more than two decades ago, took Realogy public as it prepares to raise a new fund of as much as $12 billion, people familiar with the situation have said. Last week, New York-based Apollo’s Berry Plastics Group Inc. completed its own IPO, pricing its shares at the bottom of its planned price range.
Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. led the offering for Realogy, which is listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol RLGY.
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