How a Competitive M&A Process Helped Drive SightPlan's $135 Million Outcome

Taking SightPlan to a Higher Level

{Terry Danner:} I’m Terry Danner, now the former CEO of SightPlan. SightPlan is a resident service and resident communications platform for the multifamily industry. We were recently acquired by SmartRent in a $135 million transaction.

Seeing the Business Through Buyers' Eyes

{Terry Danner:} Our company’s motto is that great teams make great communities. So what we try to do is give the onsite team members and corporate team members the tools that they need to do their job more effectively. Our motivation was to figure out how we could take SightPlan to an even higher level. So when we engaged with SEG, it was about trying to figure out where can we go, what resources do we need, what partners do we need.

Keeping the Business Moving During the Process

{Terry Danner:} We had a good handle on a lot of the metrics and the KPIs that we needed to follow as an organization. I think SEG took that to the next level. Their analytics team and the analysis of our organization, slicing and dicing in a million different ways was just extremely beneficial, not just for the ultimate outcome in the process, but in helping us look at our business in different ways. In hindsight, it was like you almost wanted to use them to do the analytics while you were just running your organization and you weren’t even involved in a process. Their team is just exceptionally knowledgeable, not just on data and data analysis, but on understanding how outside folks or investors, buyers are utilizing that data, and then presenting it in a form that is real.

Narrowing More Than 100 Potential Buyers

{Terry Danner:} The most challenging part of the whole deal or the whole process was the fact that we’re running a company and trying to keep things moving forward. We had high demand for the product. We had a lot of customers that were in pursuit, in implementation, and then satisfying current customers and then just trying to run a process on the side. So SEG was extremely helpful in taking a lot of the work off of us. They kept us on tight timelines, which in hindsight, I would say that if they hadn’t, we would’ve never gotten this deal done.

How Competitive Tension Contributed to the Outcome

{Terry Danner:} There were more than a hundred candidates that SEG had put forth as potential suitors for SightPlan. As we went through the process and began to pare it down, SEG was extremely helpful in understanding why we were paring it down, why we were selecting certain groups.

Why SmartRent Became the Natural Fit

{Terry Danner:} It was that competitive process at the end of the day that contributed to certainly the ultimate sale price, which was important to us because all of our company team members are option holders. So this was a reward for all of them as well.

{Terry Danner:} Ultimately, we made the decision to go with SmartRent as a partner. It became a natural marriage of two software solutions that work well with one another, with two teams that have known each other for years as individuals and business leaders in the industry.