August 8, 2014 — TrueCar held its first quarterly earnings call as a public company with analysts yesterday and the results they reported were fairly strong — strong enough to push the stock price to over $15 a share (now down to $14.66 a share), which is significantly up from the $9 a share it…
Confirming rumors that have persisted since April, Gannett Co. announced this morning that it is paying $1.8 billion to its four partners to acquire the portion of Cars.com it does not already own. Cars.com is owned by Classified Ventures, which is a joint venture between Gannett, A.H Belo Corp., Graham Holdings Co., Tribune Media and McClatchy. Gannett…
Now we know where Dean Evans has landed – LotLinx. We wrote about LotLinx (last fall) and it’s an intriguing product that is trying to capitalize on the current dissatisfaction with the third-party lead model by pushing shoppers directly to the dealership’s vehicle display page. We’ll have a lot more to write about on this…
June 3, 2014 — Internet Brands, the parent company to CarsDirect.com and AutoData Solutions, was acquired today by the private equity group KKR for $1.1 billion. JMI Equity and Hellman & Friedman have owned Internet Brands since 2010 when they paid $640 million to take the company private. CEO Bob Brisco, who has run the… Continue Reading
Internet Brands, the parent company to CarsDirect.com and AutoData Solutions, was acquired today by the private equity group KKR for $1.1 billion. JMI Equity and Hellman & Friedman have owned Internet Brands since 2010 when they paid $640 million to take the company private. CEO Bob Brisco, who has run the company since the fall…
The story regarding DealerSocket and Vista Equity Partners’ investment in the CRM firm is a bit clearer today but still raises several questions. TBR first broke the story while at the Digital Dealer conference in Atlantic City on May 6th on Twitter reporting that Vista Equity had acquired a majority interest in DealerSocket. A private…
The story regarding DealerSocket and Vista Equity Partners’ investment in the CRM firm is a bit clearer today but still raises several questions. TBR first broke the story while at the Digital Dealer conference in Atlantic City on May 6th on Twitter reporting that Vista Equity had acquired a majority interest in DealerSocket. A private…
A few years ago – prior to the recession – I walked the floor of the North American International Auto Show in Detroit with AutoNation CEO Mike Jackson (was not chairman at the time). At the time, AutoNation was consolidating all of its stores onto ADP’s dealer management system. Jackson shared a vision with me… Continue Reading
The $585 million sale yesterday of Apartments.com to the CoStar Group potentially could be one of the biggest acquisition stories in the automotive retail vendor space this year. The reason the sale of an apartment lead-generating company is so important in the automotive retail space is because of what it means for Cars.com. Prior to… Continue Reading
Editor’s note: We updated a couple of sections below — the updates are in italics. We stated that Dealer.com was number one in marketshare for websites. The Cobalt Group has an estimated 9,000 franchise dealer websites in North America, Dealer.com has 7,000. We have several thoughts regarding DealerTrack’s acquisition of Dealer.com which was announced late…