A backdoor listing to disrupt the real estate market

The latest junior explorer to transform itself by offering a 'backdoor' listing to a non-mining firm hopes to disrupt the housing market by offering an alternative to traditional real estate agents.

Backdoor listings, or reverse takeovers, have become something of a fad for resource companies over the past two years as investor appetite for highly speculative explorers evaporated.

MinRex Resources, a junior gold explorer with its main project area east of Geraldton in Western Australia and another in Tasmania, had the misfortune of timing its own IPO for November 2011, when the signs were already mounting that the peak in the mining boom had passed.

“MinRex has been looking at various other corporate opportunities for the last few years,” executive director Simon Durack says in an interview.

While some options were in the mining sector, Durack was finally convinced by the opportunity to take a slice of the transaction costs in the real estate market by undercutting agents.

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