Square Yards and online portal Realizing.in join hands to capture the NRI real estate sector

Wednesday June 17, 2015 , 3 min Read

In a bid to ramp up market share towards their target of 15% in 2017, Indian real estate advisory firm Square Yards has announced its merger with Realizing.in, the tech platform for online search and discovery. While the transaction amount remains undisclosed, Vivek Agarwal, the cofounder of Realizing.in confirmed to YourStory that the merger involves an equity swap deal which values Realizing.in at USD 5M .

Terms of the deal

According to the terms of the deal, the entire team of Realizing.in along with its founders will be joining Square Yards executive committee as partners. The ten employees of Realizing.in will be absorbed into the SquareYards team while the founders Hitesh Singla and Vivek will be joining as co-founders and partners. Their role will be to lead the product platform and research capabilities at Square Yards.

Realizing.in portal would be rechristened as Square Yards and the group would continue to build research and knowledge capital capabilities under the Realizing brand to ultimately evolve it into a big data analytics platform for global real estate.

The back story

Realizing launched a year ago in Gurgaon and then expanded to eight major cities. It was a search and discovery platform focussed on consumers and during the last six months they got a lot of acquisition offers from all four of the top five real estate portals. Vivek told YourStory,

We were in advanced talks with many of them and finally accepted Square Yards offer. We felt that it makes more sense to merge with a major player to compete with the bigger guys than raising a small funding round. Hitesh and I are getting some equity in the parent company, Square Global, with a no dilution clause till 5M USD.

The big party

Square Yards Consulting Pvt. Ltd co-founded by Tanuj Shori and Kanika Gupta, had announced in May 2015 that they had raised an USD 6 million in pre Series A funding from a clutch of investors in Singapore and Hong Kong. This enabled them to ramp up the technology and attain full stack capabilities with digital and services business model competing with the likes of proptiger.com, Housing.com amongst others. They aim to build global project portfolio capabilities and will continue to look for interesting opportunities in regions like Asia Pacific and Middle East to further augment their product offerings.

Tanuj believes that the expertise of Realizing.in team along with the capability of Square Yards adds the much needed technology bandwidth to achieve larger scale. Also Square Yards claims to have transacted USD 350Mn worth of real estate since the start of its operations.

The real estate sector has witnessed a lot of acquisitions in the recent past. Housing.com had acquired Realty Business Intelligence for 10 crores and prior to that Indian Real Estate Forum(IREF) for 8 crores. CommonFloor.com had acqui-hired Bakfy at the beginning of 2015 and News Corp recently increased its stake in PropTiger.com to 30%.

Website: SquareYards, Realizing