HomeAdvisor basking in glow of banner year
CEO: Merger with Angie’s List “has been a home run for us”
When it isn’t helping homeowners find house painters, plumbers and cabinet installers these days, HomeAdvisor is basking in a warm glow.
The fornow Goldenbased home services advisory company absorbed its biggest competition when its parent company, IAC/InterActiveCorp, acquired Angie’s List for $500 million in a deal that closed on Oct. 2 last year.
Since then the combined public company that resulted — listed as ANGI Homeservices on Nasdaq — has seen its share price grow 84 percent. It closed Friday at $23.48, up from $12.76 the day of the acqui sition. Its market cap is now $11.3 billion.
The merger itself has gone swimmingly, CEO Chris Terrill said. The two corporate cultures have blended well, and Angie’s List has adapted to HomeAdvisor’s business model of providing free access to consumers while charging service providers to be on the platform.
“Mergers are hard,” he said. “They’re hard enough when you’re bitter rivals and it’s even harder when you have to bring two business models together. I think this has been a home run for us in every dimension.”
Now, HomeAdvisor is preparing to move its corporate headquarters into the forthcoming HUB building at 3601 Walnut St. in Denver’s ultra trendy RiNo neighborhood. About 300 staff members — including finance, marketing and human resources professionals — are expected to move into the building’s top three floors this year or in early 2019. A large sales and operations team will stay in Golden, Terrill said. The
company employs about 4,000 people total.
With Angie’s List maintaining a presence in Indianapolis, offices in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Chicago and subsidiary brands in Canada, France, the U.K., Italy and the Netherlands, Terrill said he likes to think of Denver as the “epicenter of the home services world.”
A cracking year hasn’t come without challenges. This past summer, a California judge ordered the company to stop saying in local TV and radio ads that it performs background checks on all workers that enter a customer’s home after ruling that HomeAdvisor only checks out business owners. The suit was brought by the San Francisco district attorney.
BusinessDen reported last week that local radio host Tom Martino is suing the company in U.S. District Court for copyright infringement.
HomeAdvisor declined to comment on Martino’s suit but previously vowed to appeal the California ruling. A case management conference is scheduled on that litigation Jan. 2, court records show.
Terrill said he has full confidence in the company’s screening and referral process.
“You get big, you go public and suddenly more people are interested in you for whatever reason,” he said. “That’s just the nature of the beast.”
Ken Sagendorf, a professor with the Anderson College of Business at Regis University and director of the school’s Innovation Center, said one challenge he sees for HomeAdvisor is how it keeps customers coming back once they have already been connected to plumbers, electricians and roofers they like and trust.
“How do we keep people on the platform when they no longer need us?” he asked. “It’s a constant scramble to get people on the platform.”
Terrill doesn’t appear worried about that.
HomeAdvisor is exploring adding unskilled “gig” service providers to its roster — people who lift heavy things but aren’t a fullblown moving company, for instance. A huge segment — 85 to 90 percent, by Terrill’s count — of serviceprovider referrals still come via word of mouth. There is a lot of room to grow.
“This is probably the largest market place that is starting to move online from offline,” he said. “I think people are just now realizing this is a huge market.”