US Media giant Newscorp, which has been aggressively foraying into India’s still nascent digital scene, has today announced an increase in its stake in online real-estate platform Proptiger. NewsCorp, which acquired a 25% stake in PropTiger’s Parent Elara Technologies earlier, has now bought an additional 5% to take its total stake to 30%.
Financials of the deal remain undisclosed. We have mailed Newscorp and Proptiger on the same, and will update the story if receive a response.
Post Newscorp’s $30 Million investment, PropTiger has acquired digital design startup Out of Box Interaction (OoBI) as well as adding India’s once No.1 online property search platform Makaan.com to its industry-leading portfolio of offerings and capabilities.
Raju Narisetti, Senior VP for Strategy at News Corp says,
We strongly believe the combination of PropTiger.com and Makaan.com is best poised to be the dominant digital real-estate platform in India for years to come.
NewsCorp is also pretty optimistic about India’s hugely scattered, yet evolving digital real-estate scene. Narisetti says,
While India’s real estate sector continues to work its way through challenging macro conditions, we remain very optimistic, not only about India’s long-term potential, but also about the management team of PropTiger in its ability to execute, rationally and deliberately.
Other major shareholders in Elara, SAIF Partners and Accel Partners, which had increased their shareholdings as part of the original News Corp investment, continue to remain key backers of PropTiger.
Dhruva Aggarwala, co-founder at Proptiger, says,
News Corp’s increased stake is a validation of PropTiger’s strategy to win a growing share of the digital real estate market in India through our unique service offerings and an end user experience that is second to none. We continue to leverage and benefit from News Corp’s global expertise in real estate markets.
Recently, Proptiger introduced a news “City Master pLAN” feature, which lets potential property buyers on its platform to get an insight into possible future infrastructural development around properties of their interest.
News Corp’s investments into real-estate platform have grown significantly over the past few years. The media behemoth owns a 62% stake in REA Group, which is the operator of Australia’s leading property website, realestate.com.au. It also owns Move Inc., which operates realtor.com, the most up-to-date and accurate for-sale listings of any digital real estate company in the US. It also recently incubated MansionGlobal.com, a global luxury real estate website housed at Dow Jones & Company.
