IPO market gets chilly

The once-hot IPO market could be cooling down, at least on the Gulf Coast.

One company, Heritage Insurance Holdings, a Clearwater-based property and casualty insurance firm, received a tepid response to its public offering May 22 when it came in $30 million under its highest projections. And the day before that offering Fort Myers-based cancer treatment firm 21st Century Oncology Holdings postponed its own IPO, which was expected to raise nearly $350 million. Officials with 21st Century Oncology, formerly called Radiation Therapy Services, cited an unfavorable stock market in the delay.

Heritage Insurance was able to raise $66 million in going public. The firm, now traded on the NYSE under the symbol HRTG, sold 6 million shares at $11 a share. It had hoped to sell shares from $14 to $16 a share, and raise $84 million to $96 million.

Heritage, with 90 employees, was founded in August 2012, according to pre-IPO public documents. The firm picked up policies from Citizens Property Insurance Corp. in December 2012 under the agency's depopulation program. Heritage had $34.2 million in net income in 2013 on $218.5 million in gross premiums, documents show.

Heritage's counterpart in new, or almost new, public offerings, 21st Century Oncology, has experience in the stock market. The firm first went public in 2004. Vestar Capital Partners acquired the company in a $1.1 billion leveraged buyout and took it private in 2008.

Officials with the firm, which operates 185 cancer-treatment centers in the U.S. and Latin America, didn't say when the company might look to hit the market again. 21st Century, under the symbol ICC on the NYSE, had planned to raise $348 million in selling 13.3 million shares of common stock.