In a move to accelerate its revenue growth, cross category classifieds business Quikr on Thursday announced that it has acquired real-estate platform CommonFloor.com and merged it with its real-estate vertical QuikrHomes.
The merger, expected to be completed over the next three months, will give customers access to the largest real-estate platform in terms of inventory and property seeker traffic in the country with over two million listings and over eight million visitors a month.
Stating that the size and terms of the deal are confidential, Pranay Chulet, Founder CEO of Quikr, said: “What started off as a friendship with two like-minded people a long time ago now, culminates in a business relationship with this merger. We see great synergies between us and CommonFloor, and this merger of two solid companies will create more value for customers.”
“Both QuikrHomes and CommonFloor will continue to operate as independent brands as they have complementary strengths, however, we are one team. CommonFloor will have a seat on our Board,” said Chulet.
Other acquisition This is Quikr’s third acquisition and the biggest strategic move in the real estate category since the launch of QuikrHomes four months ago.
Last November, Quikr acquired Indian Realty Exchange (IRX), a mobile-first aggregator of real estate broker community and realtycompass, a real estate analytics platform that provides builder ratings and project analysis, in December. It also made a strategic investment in A N Virtual Tech, the only company in India that has detailed real life imagery of 90 per cent of streets/buildings across India’s top 50 cities.
The merger will give CommonFloor access to Quikr’s 30 million consumers and harness the potential of the cross category nature of the platform, while QuikrHomes will benefit from CommonFloor’s structured data and domain expertise. The combined entity will offer consumers a greater value proposition with innovations such as CommonFloor’s Retina, which offers consumers a virtual walkthrough of the property they are seeking to buy; and QuikrHomes’ Street Vision, which allows consumers to view the locality and street in which the property they are seeking to buy is located. Manish Sinha, Head of QuikrHomes, pointed out that in the last 30 days since CommonFloor was merged with QuikrHomes, customer traffic and customer engagement have risen by 70 per cent.
CommonFloor has 1,000 employees and QuikrHomes has 400 employees. “We need to hire more people in order to grow this business. We are excited about working with the Quikr team to bring more compelling solutions to customers,” said Sumit Jain, co-founder and CEO, CommonFloor.com.
QuikrHomes currently connects customers from over 1,000 cities/towns across India, executes two lakh transactions a month and contributes to 35 per cent of Quikr’s revenue.
CommonFloor has over five lakh listings from over 200 cities and over one lakh listed residential projects. Both companies have one investor in common – Tiger Global.