Bluegreen Vacations is set to go private less than a year and a half after going through an initial public offering.
Bluegreen’s parent company, BBX Capital Corp., announced the news in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday. BBX cited the high costs of being a public company and said that its stock was less liquid than the company presumed.
Bluegreen, a vacation timeshare company headquartered in Boca Raton, has over 216,000 timeshare owners and 69 clubs in its program. The company went public in November 2017 at $14 per share.
Boca Raton-based BBX Capital will take the company private through a merger. After the merger, each share of Bluegreen’s common stock will be converted into $16 in cash. Its stock was trading at $15.76 per share at the end of the day on Monday.
BBX Capital said most of shares of Bluegreen stock not owned by the company are owned by a few large shareholders, which impacted the liquidity, or the ability to easily buy and sell the stock. BBX, a diversified real estate company, owns about 90 percent of Bluegreen’s common stock, allowing it to go through with the merger without the approval of Bluegreen’s board of directors or any other shareholders.
Bluegreen was one of the few large South Florida-based publicly traded companies on the New York Stock Exchange. Its chairman Alan Levan is also the chairman of BBX Capital.