The Indian startup space’s worst kept secret is out. Online classifieds website Quikr announced Thurday its ‘merger’ with real estate vertical CommonFloor.com, into QuikrHomes. Quikr said that it will continue to operate both brands in the market and honour the commitment towards their respective customers.
Rumours that Quikr was likely to acquire CommonFloor.com at a deal value of around $200 million (roughly Rs. 802-1070 crores) made the rounds in late 2015.
Quikr had doubled down on its focus on the homes vertical with the launch of Quikrhomes.com in September 2015, following its acquisition of Indian Realty Estate and Realty Compass. Quikr also said that it had made a strategic investment in AN Virtual Tech, which provides real life imagery of 90 percent streets and buildings across India’s top 50 cities. QuikrHomes operates in over 1,000 cities and towns across India and claims to conclude over 200,000 transactions per month.
Quikr has raised $346 million (roughly Rs. 2,313 crores) in six rounds from investors such as AB Kinnevik, Matrix Partners, Tiger Global, Warburg Pincus, and Norwest Venture Partners.
CommonFloor, founded in 2007 by Sumit Jain, Lalit Mangal, and Vikas Malpani, has seen around $60 million (roughly Rs. 401 crores) in investments from Accel Partners, Tiger Global, and Google Capital, with its last funding round coming in January 2015. Tiger Global is the common investor between the two firms.
CommonFloor offers a map-based search engine for finding properties on rent and sale, and claims to list over 550,000 properties. Its recent acquisitions include Flat.io and Bakfy. In February 2015, the company had launched Retina, a Google Cardboard-based virtual reality experience that allows buyers to view and assess builder properties using an Android smartphone and app.
Other startups in the real-estate space include Housing.com, MagicBricks, Proptiger, and 99Acres, apart from a host of broker-free real estate aggregators.
The merger, which is expected to be completed over the next two to three months, will give CommonFloor.com access to Quikr’s 30 million consumers. QuikrHomes will benefit from CommonFloor’s structured data and domain expertise, the company said, adding that over 35 percent of its revenue comes from the QuikrHomes vertical.
