Barry Diller is about to make a bundle by taking Tinder public, but meanwhile he can’t get a date with Angie’s List.
The billionaire’s IAC/InterActiveCorp media conglomerate has made an unsolicited cash bid of $512 million to buy Angie’s List, the popular review site for plumbers and handymen.
In a letter to Angie’s List’s board members, IAC Chief Executive Joey Levin griped that they have been rejecting advances for “many months.”
To close a deal, Levin said he would be willing to either buy the company for $8.75 a share in cash — a 10.5 percent premium to Angie’s List’s Wednesday closing price — or combine it with IAC’s HomeAdvisor site in a tax-free stock-for-stock exchange.
“Our strong preference would have been to work with you on a confidential and cooperative basis,” Levin wrote in the letter. “However, we have been unable to develop any meaningful dialogue with you for many months now.”
Angie’s List shares spiked 12 percent to $8.88 in after-hours trading, suggesting that Wall Street expects a sweetened bid.
IAC’s surprise offer for Angie’s List comes nearly a month after activist investor TCS Capital disclosed a 9 percent stake in the Indianapolis subscription-based, crowd-sourced local service business review site. TCS prodded the 20-year-old company to sell itself to a rival such as HomeAdvisor.
Setting aside the after-hours jump, Angie’s List shares had risen about 37 percent since TCS Capital disclosed its stake.
The offer also comes as IAC is searching for fresh investments to replace Match Group, the dating-site subsidiary that owns Tinder, Match.com and OKCupid, which is slated for an initial public offering.
Earlier this week, IAC said it expects Match Group will fetch a valuation of $3.1 billion, based on the midpoint of its expected initial stock offering price range, fueled by the torrid global growth of its Tinder hookup app.