PropTiger and Housing.com Join Hands to Form India’s Largest Digital Real Estate Company

PropTiger.com and Housing.com today announced they will come together to become India’s largest online real estate services company.

As part of the transaction, REA Group Limited will invest US$50 million in the joint entity with an affiliate of SoftBank Group Corp, investing US$5 million.

News Corp remains the largest shareholder of PropTiger, and also owns 61.6% of REA Group. Representatives of REA and SoftBank will join the board of the joint entity, which will continue to be chaired by a News Corp representative.

Henry Ruiz, Chief Digital Officer, REA Group, Simon Barnett, Sales Director, News Corp and Jonathan Bullock, MD, SoftBank Group International will join Raju Narisetti (chair), Ravi Adusumalli from SAIF Partners and Prashanth Prakash from Accel Partners as investor directors on the board of the joint entity.

Dhruv Agarwala, co-founder, and CEO of PropTiger will serve as CEO of the joint entity. Jason Kothari, CEO of Housing.com, who has skillfully steered the company and strengthened the brand among Indian internet users, has decided to move on to pursue other opportunities in the Indian Internet space. He will continue to be an advisor to the joint entity through the end of February 2017.

The joint entity will draw on strengths of PropTiger, Housing.com and Makaan.com to offer a unique holistic experience to consumers, real estate developments, brokers and homeowners. PropTiger is the largest online residential real estate brokerage firm, having completed transactions worth $1.5 billion since its founding in 2011, while Housing.com is India’s most popular online platform for buying and selling homes, receiving over four million visits every month.

The joint entity will be the only player in India offering the full range of online and offline services in the real estate space, such as personalized search, virtual viewing, site visits, legal and financial diligence, negotiations, property registration, home loans and post- sales service.

By 2030, India is expected to be the 3^rd largest real estate market in the world with the sector contributing to over 15% of national GDP. The joint PropTiger-Housing.com entity is exceptionally well positioned to win the digital real estate market in India with its unique capabilities and a strong set of institutional investors, which also include SAIF Partners, Accel Partners and Nexus Venture Partners.

SoftBank Group International MD Jonathan Bullock said, “Housing is very well established as an online real estate platform brand and we have been working with the management team to create strong execution capabilities to offer full stack services under one umbrella. PropTiger has already created a great transaction engine. We have full confidence in the management team and will continue to support them.  We would particularly like to thank Jason for his leadership and wish him well in his future endeavor.”

The union will immediately strengthen PropTiger’s full stack Online-to-Offline (O2O) services proposition.  In April 2015, PropTiger acquired online classifieds platform Makaan.com to launch India’s first O2O platform, aiding consumers throughout their home buying journey, from initial search and discovery to the final step of transaction closure.

With PropTiger’s acquisition of brands such as makaan.com and OOBI in the recent past, homebuyers now have access to a full stack of services – from online search to assistance with transactions. Since its inception, PropTiger.com has sold homes worth Rs 10,000 crore to more than 15,000 happy customers.