Zillow Wants to Buy Its Biggest Rival, Trulia

• July 25, 2014

by Lark Turner

Zillow, based in Seattle, is looking to buy its biggest rival in the consumer real estate data business, Trulia, a San Francisco-based company, according to Bloomberg BusinessWeek. Regular readers of UrbanTurf may recognize Trulia (and its chief economist Jed Kolko) as the source of trend reports and data that we have reported on over the years.

Both Trulia and Zillow are consumer-based websites that offer homebuyers data on houses available for sale. Both sites are free to anyone online, making their money from advertising that agents use to promote themselves and feature their properties more prominently in search results. Because there’s a limited number of realtors nationwide with cash for that kind of advertising, Trulia and Zillow are directly competing for the exact same money, strategist Brian Boero told BusinessWeek. It’s another reason a merger would be a boon for Zillow.

The asking price for Trulia? Maybe as much as $2 billion in a combination of cash and stock, according to the report. A merger would cement Zillow as the national leader in home searches. Zillow, including traffic from partner Yahoo! Homes, gets about 53.8 million hits a month; Trulia gets 31.6 million. Together, BusinessWeek reports that they dominate most of the traffic going to real estate sites, bringing in nearly 90 percent of all the hits to the 15 most-visited sites.

Both The Wall Street Journal and BusinessWeek suggested a deal could be announced next week, if it ends up going through.

This article originally published at http://dc.urbanturf.com/articles/blog/real_estate_data_company_zillow_wants_to_buy_its_biggest_rival_trulia/8782