PropTiger, Housing merger on cards

PropTiger, the online real estate listing and brokerage portal, is close to acquiring rival Housing.com, which is funded by Softbank in an all-stock deal, said people familiar with the deal.

Housing.com, founded by Rahul Yadav, shot to fame with a $90 million bet made by Nikesh Arora of Softbank in 2014, but failed to match expectations after Yadav squandered money and fought with investors and employees.

Yadav was sacked by the board in 2015 and since then, Housing has tried to sustain itself, shutting its rental arm -- the experiment to host images of available rental properties which made it famous.

Spokespersons of both Housing and PropTiger declined to comment.

In September last year, both Housing and PropTiger got into a revenue-sharing agreement.

Since its peak valuation of $220-250 million when Softbank invested in the company, Housing.com has struggled to be relevant in the online listings market that has seen a shakeup.

In total, Housing.com has raised $130 million from SoftBank, Helion Ventures, Nexus Venture Partners and Falcon Edge.

Talks of a sale of Housing, now headed by Jason Kothari, has been doing the rounds for nearly a year, but the company's inability to raise fresh funds as well as expand business fast is being seen as a trigger to merge it with PropTiger.

PropTiger is founded by Dhruv Agarwala, Kartika Varma and Prashant Agarwal and incorporated in Singapore as Elara Technologies Pte. It has raised funding from Accel Partners, SAIF Partners and Horizon Ventures and News Corp.

PropTiger had acquired Makaan, another listing player in 2015.