Published in The West, 12 June 2024.North American real estate...

Published in The West, 12 June 2024.

North American real estate platform Final Offer is among the buyers angling for parts of property tech business Openn Negotiation. Perth-based Openn developed software to improve property deals for buyers, sellers and real estate agents but hit the wall in May when a planned equity raising could not get off the ground. KordaMentha’s John Bumbak and Richard Tucker were sent into the ASX-listed business as administrators and will put a potential deal to creditors next Tuesday.

Final Offer and Tribar Pty Ltd — which lists engineering consultancy Mining Plus’s boss Ben Auld as a director — are set to snap up Openn’s main trading entities, intellectual property and overseas subsidiaries in a deed of company arrangement. Launched in 2021, Final Offer also runs a “real estate negotiation platform” and serves nine states in the United States and Canada.

Sydney-based Bennelong Capital Partners will buy the shell company to support potential backdoor ASX listings. That proposal will be considered separately, pending the outcome of the Final Offer bid. It’s understood Bennelong will seek to bring the shares back into quotation, likely through a different business.

Administrators said 40 expressions of interest were received for Openn and 14 proceeded to data room, according to a report to creditors by KordaMentha. Trade creditors were likely to receive up to 57 cents In the dollar but related parties will get back less than 1¢ per dollar.

Openn was established in 2016 and hit the boursein 2021 with a plan to raise $9 million. But as with many tech businesses,administrators said cash needed to fund growth far outweighed client revenue,and Openn was reliant on capital injections. “Ultimately, the companies appearto have been unable to scale up their sales sufficiently to meet their ongoingcapital requirements, and this coupled with a more challenging equity capitalmarket made raising additional equity increasingly difficult”. KordaMentha’sreport said Openn’s directors had acted swiftly to put the company intoadministration after the failed capital raising in May