Housing.com buys real estate forum IREF

BENGALURU: Realty portal Housing.com has acquired online discussion site Indian Real Estate Forum in a move aimed at providing content that can help home buyers make informed choices and attract and retain users in a competitive market.

The Mumbai-based company, which is backed by Japan’s SoftBank, will pay Rs 8 crore to acquire IREF, which has a base of about 1.5 lakh active users, marking the first of two acquisitions it is expected to close in the coming weeks..

Housing received funding of about Rs 560 crore ($90 million) in December and has set apart a corpus of Rs 200 crore for acquisitions this year. “We are in late stage talks to acquire PropEquity for about Rs 80 crore,” said a company executive who declined to be identified as the deal is not yet sealed.

IREF will function as an independent entity under the charge of Ravish Naresh, a cofounder at Housing. The forum claims to provide unbiased and transparent information on new projects, developers, localities, brokers and plots. “

We plan to introduce a section in the platform called “Ask me anything” on (IREF) which will attempt to answer any queries related to projects, brokers and builders,” said a spokesman for Housing.

On the other hand, the PropEquity buy-out is aimed at getting business users onto the Housing portal. PropEquity is a real estate data company which enables clients -mainly PE investors, developers, and financial services professionals - spot market trends and generate insights.