Top shareholder sparks a bidding war for beleaguered Purplebricks

A MAJOR shareholder in troubled online estate agent Purplebricks has made a last-ditch swoop on the firm a week after a sale was agreed with rival Strike.

Lecram Holdings, which owns nearly 5.2pc of Purplebricks and is run by activist investor Adam Smith, has tabled a bid of 0.5p per share in cash, valuing it at around £1.5m. The shares soared 39.2pc, or 0.19p, to 0.66p in response.

It comes after Purplebricks signed a deal with Strike this month that would see the online estate agent sold for a token price of £1, putting 750 jobs at risk.

Strike is backed by high-profile investors including Carphone Warehouse and TalkTalk founder Sir Charles Dunstone, as well as the venture arm of Channel 4. The Strike takeover will effectively wipe out all Purplebricks shareholders while chief executive Helena Marston and several other board members are set to resign.

Purplebricks said Lecram’s proposal was not an ‘improvement’ on the deal with Strike and encouraged shareholders to back the latter. Smith has previously butted heads with Purplebricks in a long-running campaign to oust chairman Paul Pindar.

Purplebricks was founded in 2012, disrupting the traditional high street estate agency model. In 2017 the shares peaked at 500p.

But it has been plagued by an unsuccessful international expansion and activist investors that left it facing a cash crunch.

Lecram said the Strike takeover was ‘not in the best interests of shareholders and could end up with them receiving nothing’.

It said its bid provided investors with ‘certainty of cash now rather than vague promises from a discredited board of something more somewhere down the line’.