The online real estate website Zillow 3.5 billion dollars to buy a competitor Truli

On Monday, July 28, the US real estate information website Zillow announced that after 6 weeks of negotiations, the company had reached an agreement with the online real estate website Trulia, which would buy the latter shares at a premium of $25% per share. The merged company will become the largest online real-estate data company in the United States.

For the past 9 years, Zillow and Trulia have been competing in the real estate inventory market. Two companies have a large number of users and real estate data resources. According to comscore, Zillow's web and mobile users are about 83 million, and Trulia's users are 54 million, and two are merging their subscribers to 61% of the U.S. market, becoming dominant industry leaders.

Although the two have competition in the real estate information market, they also have the advantage of differentiation. In assessing the value of real estate, Zillow has an industry-renowned "Zestimates", a feature that is welcomed by many existing property owners. And Trulia has the tools to attract more potential home sellers. According to Zillow CEO Spencer Rascoff estimates, the user's overlap rate is not more than 50%.

After the merger Trulia incumbent CEO Pete Flint will join the Zillow board and will continue to host the Trulia website. Zillow shareholders will have a two-thirds stake in the merged company, and Trulia shareholders will hold One-third.