Online classifieds company Quikr has acquired tech real estate company CommonFloor to strengthen its four-month old real estate vertical QuikrHomes.
Online classifieds company Quikr has acquired tech real estate company CommonFloor to strengthen its four-month old real estate vertical QuikrHomes. Both firms are backed by Tiger Global and will continue to work independently post the acquisition. The two will be stronger together to take on rivals Housing.com, Magicbricks.com and NoBroker.
“We see great synergies between us and CommonFloor and we expect this transaction to not only accelerate the growth of QuikrHomes, but also our other verticals,” said Pranay Chulet, founder and CEO, Quikr. Chulet added there would be some additional hiring soon. Currently, CommonFloor has 1,000 plus employees whereas QuikrHomes has 350 member team.
“This merger creates a strong industry leader and gives us a very strong platform to grow the business further. Our obvious synergies will benefit consumers, property developers, as well as our real estate partners,” said Sumit Jain, co-founder and CEO, CommonFloor.
Jain said CommonFloor can explore other categories that Quikr has on its platform. “The power of cross-category pollination is huge,” said Chulet of Quikr.
Founded in 2008 by Sumit Jain, Vikas Malpani and Lalit Mangal, the company has come up with innovative products such as Retina that takes home buyers to a virtual house tour and Street Vision that shows buyers how the locality looks like.
The Indian real estate market is estimated to reach $180 billion by 2020 according to property consultant Cushman & Wakefield. In the residential segment, the top eight Indian cities could see an additional demand of 2.8 million units in the next five years. Online real estate contributes less than 5% to the total pie.
“The combined power of QuikrHomes and CommonFloor will help us bring more choices to our buyers and sellers making us the undisputed leader in the online real estate space,” said Manish Sinha, head of QuikrHomes.
Quikr recently acquired India Realty Exchange (IRX), a mobile-first aggregator of real estate agents for an undisclosed sum. It claims its real estate arm Quikr Homes contribute 35% to its overall revenue. It also made an investment in A N Virtual Tech, that claims to have detailed real life imagery of 90% streets and buildings across top 50 cities in India.
Commonfloor, in which VCs such as Accel, Google Capital and Tiger Global have invested, has five million visitors. So far it has raised $60 million. Quikr has raised $346 million in six rounds from investors such as Tiger Global, Warburg Pincus, and Norwest Venture Partners.