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It appears to be an amicable decision for both parties, given that REA Group’s plan to acquire Dynamic Methods was under scrutiny from the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC).
The deal attracted the ACCC’s attention in November, after the body was made aware of the potential sale by a third party.
Dynamic Methods’ founder and CEO, David Howell, said his firm had complied with all elements of the ACCC investigation and asserted that the acquisition, had it gone forward, would not have caused a lessening of competition.
Nonetheless, he said he respected REA Group’s decision not to proceed with the deal, and thanked the business’s senior leadership for their time assessing the proposed acquisition.
The company, Howell said, would now move forward “without interruption or issue” despite the shelved sale.
“Dynamic Methods has always been a tightly run, profitable company that prides itself on delivering robust Australian-built technical solutions to the real estate industry. It’s what made us an attractive acquisition target,” Howell said.
“Nothing has changed in our fundamentals and I am delighted Dynamic Methods will continue to deliver leading-edge forms technology to the real estate industry and all its stakeholders,” he said.
Dynamic Methods is the operator of the only national platform for digital real estate forms. It provides important documentation related to the lease and sale of homes, partnering with all of the state real estate institutes except Victoria’s on the creation and maintenance of real estate forms. In Victoria, the state institute operates a competing forms platform, while Dynamic Methods supplies its own contracts on its platform.
The national consumer watchdog raised concerns that with REA Group’s dominance in the real estate sector, the merger would reduce competition across the broad spectrum of real estate products in which the firm has a stake, including real estate advertising services, digital real estate forms, real estate agency software solutions and property data services.
Howell, on the other hand, said that the merger would have served to propel innovation in the digital forms space.
“While I still believe the acquisition would have accelerated the future of digital forms for the REIs and the real estate industry that Dynamic Methods has championed since 2012, Dynamic Methods will now continue on our original roadmap to deliver new features and benefits for our customers, and collaborate with the industry on delivering technology that makes the creation, sending, signing, administration and compliance of forms streamlined and easy, which has always been our core purpose,” he said.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Juliet Helmke
Based in Sydney, Juliet Helmke has a broad range of reporting and editorial experience across the areas of business, technology, entertainment and the arts. She was formerly Senior Editor at The New York Observer.
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