Quikr Acquires Stepni

Online classifieds platform Quikr India Pvt. Ltd has acquired Stepni, a Bengaluru based start-up that connects vehicle owners with service providers for an undisclosed amount. Quikr has been driving a verticalization exercise, under which the company is focusing on five key business segments – automobiles, real estate, jobs, services, and customer-to-customer sales.

The acquisition of Stepni is expected to help Quikr strengthen car-related services under the QuikrCars vertical, as well as boost its services business, QuikrServices. Stepni, founded in October 2015, claims to have a network of more than 125 service centres across Bangalore. As a classified portal, Quikr has just one rival, OLX, which is backed by Naspers Ltd, a South African Mass media company.

In car segment, Quikr competes with the likes of Warburg Pincus backed CarTrade, which has so far raised at least $185 Million from investors, and CarDekho, which has raised at least $90 Million from Sequoia Capital and Google Capital. The real estate segment has businesses such as Housing, Magicbricks, PropTiger and others. Similarly, the Hyperlocal services segment has deep pocketed start-ups such as Housejoy and UrbanClap, while in the jobs category, the likes of Babajob and Aassan Jobs compete with Quikr.

Quikr is growing beyond a listing platform to a one-stop shop for used goods by enabling payments on its platform, as well as facilitating logistics, a move likely to throw open additional revenue channels at a time when a slowdown in external funding is prompting start-ups to reduce cash burn and focus on profitability. The company has been investing aggressively to build the five verticals by both acquiring companies and making strategic investments.

PropTiger buys PropRates

Online real estate advisor PropTiger.com has acquired Mumbai based start-up PropRates, which gathers real estate transaction data. The acquisition will enable PropTiger to offer consumers real-time data about property transaction, both sales and rentals, in Mumbai in order to determine the fair market value of a property.

News Corp backed PropTiger, which also owns real estate portal Makaan.com, has been acquiring start-ups to gain strength in areas such as data research and 3D reality. PropTiger bought a start-up called 3DPhy in August to strengthen 3D visualization. Last year, PropTiger bought Bengaluru based OoBI Media Solutions Pvt. Ltd, which operates a digital interaction design start-up under the Out of Box Interaction Brand.

PropTiger has been offering new products such as 3D realty and real estate data insights to widen its revenue stream from the current dependence on commissions from real estate transactions. While the 3D visualization service is yet to gain widespread acceptance in the Real estate market, other portals such as commonfloor.com and housing.com are also experimenting with the technology.

PropTiger plans to tap its wider user base to offer its real estate data insights. The PropRates service will initially be available in Mumbai and later extended to nine other cities under the next phase of expansion. 

Quikr Buys Indian Realty Exchange

Online classifieds portal Quikr India Pvt. Ltd had acquired Indian Realty Exchange (IRX, incorporated as 123 Startup Ventures Pvt. Ltd) a real estate agent aggregator, for an undisclosed amount to strengthen its real estate vertical QuikrHomes.

With its latest round of funding ($60 Million) in September, Quikr strengthened its push in five business segments automobiles, real estate, jobs, services and customer-to-customer sales to explore new sources of revenue. These five categories account for about 90% of the 10 Million listings of platform. This acquisition will allow it to gain access to real estate agents.

QuikrHomes currently has customers in 1000 cities and towns across India and concludes 200,000 transactions per month. IRX helps users connect to the agents for buying and selling property, and updates listings with locations in real time and features agent reviews, rankings, trust networks and a chat platform for agents to exchange inventory and requirements with users and other agents.

Quikr has received funding of around $200 Million since its inception in 2008, and counts Tiger Global Management, Kinnevik, Matrix Partners India, Nokia Growth Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, Omidyar Network, Warburg Pincus, and eBay as its investors. QuikrHomes enters into competition with CommonFloor, Housing.com, PropTiger, NoBroker, and Magic Bricks. 

Square Yards acquires Realizing.in

Gurgaon headquartered Real Estate advisory and brokerage firm Square Yards Consulting Pvt. Ltd., is set to merge with Real Estate research portal Realizing.in. The move is aimed at capturing 15 per cent market share of India’s Real Estate search market in the next few years. As part of the deal, the entire team of Realizing which is owned by IDW Technology Pvt. Ltd., would join square yards.

The Realizing.in portal would be rechristened as Square yards and the group would continue to build research capabilities under the Realizing brand. The ultimate aim is to evolve Realizing into a big data analytics platform for global real estate. Square yards, which operates a portal by the same name has been evolved in real estate transactions worth $350 Million since starting operations.

Square yards offers solutions for property related needs. It caters to residential projects, hotels projects, student accommodation, and mall development. Square yards had raised $6 Million in a pre-series round of funding from a clutch of unnamed investors in May this year. The company claims to have clocked revenue of Rs 38 crore in its first year of operations. Realizing.in offers services such as city heat maps, carpet area and built up area calculations for property transactions. It also helps users with key property related decision based on automated algorithms.

India’s online property search market has evolved radically over the last few years. The leading companies in this space are Softbank backed Housing, News Corp backed PropTiger and Tiger Global, Accel Partners and Google Capital backed CommonFloor besides the legacy players. Times Internet promoted Magic Bricks, Info Edge 99acres.com and Chennai based India Property.