Quikr acquires India Property

Online classifieds platform Quikr has acquired Chennai based startup India Property Online Private Limited, a real estate platform, for an undisclosed amount.

The acquisition signals Quikr’s strategy to build the transaction business on top of classifieds. The company has sought to grow through acquisitions since 2015 and has acquired 14 companies so far across categories. The Tiger Global-backed Quikr operates in segments such as real estate, auto, jobs, goods and services.

Founded in 2012, India Property offers in-depth information on property buying, selling and renting. The platform lists more than 6 lakh properties and 8,000 verified builder projects across 15 cities in India. It enables property search, diligence, financing, and transactions.

The startup backed by venture capital fund Bertelsmann India Investments and Mayfield has also built an analytics platform using street-level transaction data for residential properties and covers 5 million properties in south India. Till date, the company had raised $19 million cumulatively. Quikr operates two models in the real estate segment -- a co-living rental business and brokerage business for home buying.

BroEx acquires REXPROP

BroEx, a mobile based property broker’s network, has acquired Real Estate technology startup REXPROP for an undisclosed amount to expand business and provide better products to its clients.

Gurgaon-based REXPROP or 'Real Estate Property Exchange' is a startup which offers solutions such as inventory distribution, broker to broker listings and CRM for property consultants, agents, brokers and developers. Earlier this year, BroEx had acquired independent broker company Professional Brokers. It had also tied up with real estate consultant JLL India's housing arm for getting access to exclusive deals.

REXPROP has developed innovative offerings around listing management and CRM for real estate brokers which compliment BroEx. BroEx is being used by more than 1.5 lakh real estate brokers, he said, adding that this deal would further enhance its offering and cement position as the go-to software for the brokerage industry.

BroEx, which had raised $1 million as seed funding, helps real estate brokers to serve their customers better and close deals faster. It also provides inventory information to FastFox.Com - rental brokerage service by its parent company OkuTech. OkuTech is founded by IIT alumni and funded by LightSpeed Venture Partners.

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. 

Housing to Buy Homebuy360.com

Softbank backed Housing.com, owned and operated by Locon Solutions Private Limited, is in advanced talks to acquire Homebuy360.com, a Koramangala based RETech startup that connects builders, brokers and buyers. Housing will pay close to Rs. 5 Crore for cloud based Real Estate startup.

This is Housing third acquisition. In May this year, it acquired Delhi based Realty Business Intelligence private limited, an information portal focused on the realty industry for Rs.10 Crore. In March, it acquired Real Estate focused online discussion platform, Indian Real Estate Forum for Rs. 8 Crore. Earlier this year, it was seeking to buy real estate data analytics platform PropEquity for an estimated deal value of around Rs. 80-85 Crore but later in May it called off the negotiations.

As of now, the company is present in seven cities, including Bangalore, Mumbai, Pune, Hyderabad, Chennai, Nagpur, and Delhi and has 35 real estate developers on board like Pride Purple, Vaswani group, The Address Makers, PBEL, and Puranik Developers. The portal operates on various revenue models for developers, including pay per user, pay over time, pay as you sell and pay per project model.

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.