HW Media Buys Homebuilder Media Company, Expands Remit: Exclusive
HW Media bought The Builder’s Daily, a four-year-old media company focused on homebuilding. Terms weren’t disclosed.
The acquisition expands HW Media’s coverage, currently focused on the housing market, to homebuilding as new home construction represents an increasing fraction of home sales around the country. Pre-COVID, new home sales stayed in a 15% to 20% band of total home sales, with existing inventory dominating the overall home sales market. This year, new home construction has made up over 28% of sales so far.
John McManus, who previously worked for Hanley Wood (today known as Zonda) covering residential construction as editorial director, launched The Builder’s Daily in 2021 as a data-driven media company serving the top 400 homebuilders in the country, which includes builders completing 75 or more homes per year. The addressable market from those companies is to reach 30,000 people, and an additional 30,000 adjacent channel partners. Chief Executive Officer Clayton Collins told AMO:
John has an incredible track record of editorial and news coverage in the home building space. He’s been covering the vertical for close to 30 years… and has built an incredibly strong and loyal audience of home building executives and professionals across the country. And he’s pretty much been running as a solopreneur with a strong freelance and contract support network. As he and I got to know each other, we saw an opportunity to bring The Builder’s Daily, into the Housing Wire, bring more support and resources and capabilities to him and and really put the resources behind The Builder’s Daily to take it to the next level, and being the preeminent source of news and content and events for this home building vertical.
HW Media has done an average of one deal a year, acquiring small- and medium-sized publishers and absorbing and investing in those teams and brands. It self-funds acquisitions, which makes for slower if not safer growth. Collins will continue looking to add in different areas of housing, including more homebuilding assets.
When discussing revenue last year at the AMO Summit, Collins set $20 million as a revenue target for 2025, which would be achieved through a mix of organic growth and small tuck-in acquisitions. Organic revenue growth for the year is 18%, driven by 15% year-over-year growth in advertising, 35% in events, and 15% in subscription. Collins led a private equity buyout of HousingWire in 2016 with his own firm and developed it into a multi-brand housing-related b2b media company with events, research and more.
Revenue on Track
HW Media’s M&A pipeline supports hitting the total revenue target of surpassing $20 million, Collins said, but “I remain completely committed to only spending time on the right deals that add long-term value to HW Media and help us better serve our audience and clients. We’re on track, but still have work to do.”
McManus joins HW as a full-time team member and they are hiring for a reporter for TBD, which has about 4,000 newsletter subscribers. The goal is to grow the newsletter to 50,000 subscribers by 2028. TBD will be integrated operationally with HW’s events team, content studio and sales team. From an audience perspective, TBD will continue as a standalone website and newsletter.
Collins also expects to bring more home building content into the housingwire.com ecosystem and to the event stage. In events, TBD hosts a small, specialized, workshop style event in Denver with 80 to 100 attendees in Denver in the fall.
“We see that as one of our huge opportunities for revenue growth, as well as bringing in Housing Wire’s capabilities to host more webinars and podcasts in the sponsored content and content studio realm,” Collins said. “We’re looking at this as an opportunity for Housing Wire to invest a lot in the business.”
HW’s events business itself continues to thrive, despite interest rates continuing to weigh on the sector. Things are looking up, however, with housing inventory up 30% to 40% this year over last, signaling that sellers are finally gaining enough confidence to go to market.
“When inventory gets constrained at the levels it was a year ago, there’s just no option, sellers are afraid to sell their house because they don’t know if there’s going to be something to buy,” Collins said. “We feel like we’re actually moving into a healthy market dynamic where there’s some buyer and seller equilibrium, and people are starting to come off the sidelines. So still a challenging market for the challenging housing market, but one that we’re very comfortable operating in.”
It’s showing up in ad sales, too, which have reached about 90% of their full year goal, ahead of the benchmark. While events remain a very strong point, digital ads are starting to “pop up in a really meaningful way,” Collins said. The team is looking at a strategy to create more digital inventory because they are selling so quickly.
“It’s a unique spot to start to see digital advertising demand start to pick up in a really meaningful fashion,” Collins said. HW is also very close to its forecast for the year in terms of revenue and cash flow, which should get a boost from the recent acquisition.
“This was a unique launch point because of John’s expertise,” Collins said. “Take a look at the website, and you’ll see that there’s something unique happening here that is an incredibly opportunistic launch point for Housing Wire in the home building space. What’s John’s accomplished in a short amount of time with limited resources is pretty phenomenal, and we’re excited to supercharge that.”
