Mark Bouris’ Yellow Brick Road to quit public markets after 15 years

Yellow Brick Road, the home-loan business founded by entrepreneur Mark Bouris, entered a trading halt on the ASX on Thursday as it sought to delist from the public market.

Yellow Brick Road, the home-loan business founded by Australian entrepreneur Mark Bouris, entered a trading halt on the Australian Securities Exchange on Thursday as it sought to delist from the public market after 15-and-a-half years.

Following a short trading session on Thursday morning in which its shares fell 3.3 per cent to 5.8c in less than an hour, the company halted trading before releasing a statement saying it would announce plans to delist.

“The trading halt is requested pending an announcement by YBR in relation to an application to be removed from the official list of ASX,” it said in a statement to the exchange.

The company said it was “not aware of any reason why the trading halt should not be granted, or of any other information necessary to inform the market or ASX about the trading halt”.

Mr Bouris, who is known for his stint as the host of reality TV show The Apprentice Australia, said in a text message that he would not comment “until Monday when we advise the market about our strategy for the future ahead of us”.

The company made its ASX debut in January 2008 at $1.105 per share, compared with its latest price of 5.8c.

Its largest shareholders include fund manager One Investment Group with a 19 per cent stake, followed by Pink Platypus Pty Ltd – a Nine Entertainment investment vehicle which has a 15 per cent stake, according to Bloomberg.

Golden Wealth Holdings, an entity controlled by Mr Bouris, has a 15 per cent stake, while Mr Bouris and associates hold various other smaller direct shareholdings, the data shows.

Mr Bouris, the founder of Wizard Home Loans, and Yellow Brick Road’s executive chairman has been under pressure to turn around his underperforming company for years.

In 2019, it sold its wealth management unit to Sydney-based wealth management group Sequoia Financial Group in order to focus solely on the home loan market.

YBR last month reported earnings before tax, depreciation and amortisation had halved to $1.2m in the 2023 financial year, as fierce competition from banks, lower demand for loans on the back of increasing interest rates, and a high rate of borrowers refinancing their loans, hurt the company‘s bottom line.

Its loan book had grown 6.8 per cent to $63bn and it said it was focused on growing its broker networks, increasing sales of its own funded products and using data “to understand” its customers and “transform” into a digital company.

At a recent conference Mr Bouris said he expected home prices – which started to rise again in March – would fall in the coming year, thanks to a slowing economy and higher unemployment.

“My gut feeling is that we’ll see an increase in the supply of markets for sale,” Mr Bouris told a property summit on Tuesday. “That will have a negative impact on the price of properties across Australia.”

Mr Bouris built his reputation as the wizard behind Wizard Home Loans in the late ’90s and early 2000s by building a network of hundreds of Wizard branches and taking market share from the big banks during the credit boom years.

He eventually sold Wizard to GE for more than $400m and has created several other businesses, the latest of which includes social media platform Boa.