Real Estate

US real estate giant CoStar buys UK commercial property portal


A two-year-old UK start-up that provides a Rightmove-like portal service for commercial properties has been bought by the US real estate data giant CoStar.

Nasdaq-listed CoStar said on Friday it had acquired Realla, which currently carries 90,000 listings, in a bet that offices, stores and other commercial properties will follow the market for homes in moving to online portals. The price was not disclosed.

Andrew Florance, chief executive of CoStar, said his company had conducted research with Google demonstrating that 95 per cent of US commercial real estate searches are at least partly conducted online.

“Realla have an amazing start on building an effective, public online marketplace dedicated to commercial property in the UK,” he said.

CoStar will double or triple investment into Realla and expand it into continental Europe, Mr Florance said, while giving it access to CoStar’s business-to-business listings service.

Realla, launched in 2016, works with agents to list properties for sale or leasing online, in a similar model to the residential property portals which now dominate that market.

Andrew Miles, chief executive of Realla, said the acquisition would enable his company to “accelerate its progress . . . providing a greatly enhanced service to our agent and landlord customers”.

CoStar, which has a market capitalisation of $13.7bn, is the largest of many data providers seeking to dominate the information marketplace behind the traditionally opaque world of real estate as it moves into the digital era. It also runs LoopNet, a US online commercial property marketplace.

CoStar’s US rival Xceligent, owned by Daily Mail and General Trust, was liquidated last year following a multimillion-dollar copyright infringement lawsuit by CoStar.



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