Real estate website Zillow soars in IPO

NEW YORK — Shares of real estate website Zillow have more than doubled in their trading debut Wednesday.

It’s the latest Internet company to climb sharply in its first day of trading following strong openings from jobs networking site LinkedIn, music service Pandora and Russian search engine Yandex — although Pandora is almost unchanged from its first-day close, and Yandex trades lower than it did on the end of its first day.

Zillow, founded in 2004, provides online listings for more than 100 million homes for sale and rent. The portal’s “Zestimate” helps estimate property values.

Investors are bidding up Zillow Inc. stock, even though the Seattle company has never posted an annual profit.

Zillow priced shares for $20 per share late Tuesday, $2 more than the top of the range it had predicted Friday.

In midday trading Wednesday, Zillow had risen to $38.80 after trading as high as $60 earlier in the session. That means that the value of the company has dropped from more than $1.6 billion to about $1 billion since trading began.

Including a private stock sale of 275,000 shares, Zillow raised $74.7 million. It has no specific plans for the funds, saying only that it will use them for general corporate purposes.

The stock is trading under the symbol “Z” on the Nasdaq exchange.