In case you missed it, Ten-X sold a controlling stake to private equity powerhouse Thomas H. Lee Partners for more than $1billion last week! Holy shit, that’s a big friggin number. I wasn’t surprised actually. Not that I had any advance knowledge or that I am some kinda guru or anything, just felt it in the air.

I knew that Ten-X/Auction.com was a thriving company, very profitable and generated hundreds of millions in revenue annually. I knew that their management team was solid. I knew that their product had huge upside. I knew that the private equity/VC world was paying big time attention to the commercial real estate tech sector. Anyone who is really paying attention to the sector knows this too.

Ten-X is extremely well positioned. Their marketplace product is among the most underutilized but also most promising platforms in the sector. And I mean that in a complementary way. The commercial real estate market is just starting to wake up to the power of online transactional platforms. Ten-X has a solid business. And now with all of this additional capital, they are only going to get bigger and penetrate the market even further.

For me, this is a huge deal for two reasons:

It says that the world’s biggest investors are circling, studying and positioning themselves to invest in the commercial real estate tech sector.With this additional capital, it means that companies like Ten-X are going to be way out in front of the pack and that it’s going be increasingly hard for less well-capitalized companies to compete on this scale.

And so, in my opinion, this is indeed the start of something BIG!!!

(P.S. - Thanks to my friend and fellow blogger Jeremy Neuer for slugging this post.)

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