What the Zillow-Trulia deal means for real estate
During the housing bubble, websites focused on the real estate sector sprung up like “for sale” signs in a hot neighborhood. Over the past couple of years, out of sight of the headlines, those companies have been merging and buying each other out. It’s called “a roll-up,” and it happens when a sector begins to mature.
In the last couple years, Zillow snapped up New York apartment site StreetEasy and HotPads. Trulia bought Market Leader and last month was rumored to be close to buying Realtor.com. Today came the biggest deal yet: Zillow said it agreed to buy rival Trulia for about $3.5 billion. The pair will create the proverbial 800-pound gorilla for online real estate. Part of the reason for the merger-mania is that when it comes to online real estate, bigger is pretty much always better.
“In internet-based economies, scale matters a lot,” says Nic Retsinas, a professor of real estate at the Harvard Business School. “And as the two largest players in this marketplace, the possibility of them coming together gave them advantages of scale.”
Together Zillow and Trulia will command more than 60 percent of online real estate traffic. That mega-market share is a big part of the reason we’re seeing this deal.
“As one company takes a leadership position, it amasses enormous capital,” says Glenn Kelman, CEO of real estate site Redfin. “So you see Wall Street really rewarding the number-one player in the space and that gives them the capital to buy other companies.”
The real estate market is recovering slowly, but the online real estate space is booming. Redfin is growing by 50 percent a year.
Growth is likely to continue as more people get online and the internet generation comes of home-buying age. “People do love to look at what their house is worth,” says Richard Green, director of the USC Lusk Center for Real Estate. “And, let’s face it, they want to look at what their neighbor’s house is worth.”
Still, Green doesn’t think we’ll see many more mergers of this kind. He says most of the deals that could be done have been done.
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