Zillow buys NYC real estate site StreetEasy for $50M | Hacker News Reader

Zillow buys NYC real estate site StreetEasy for $50M

venturebeat.com

47 pointsleknarf8 comments

As an aside, if you ever want go rage hard enough to want to punch someone in the face, get on street easy and go to the forum posts by brokers.

They're the only folks in NYC with a worse reputation than investment bankers, Patriots fans, and the teachers union.

Can you give some examples or links to particularly memorable posts?

"While Zillow’s press release doesn’t say how the acquisition will be structured, it looks like the company plans to leave StreetEasy alone."

Ah, that's rich. It's true until A) there's any sort of disagreement or B) StreetEasy doesn't hit whatever revenue targets that Zillow sets for them. Might be weeks, might be months, might even be years. But there is no world in which Zillow owns StreetEasy but doesn't impose any changes on them.

I generally read "plans to leave [acquired company] alone" as saying the acquirer isn't killing off the products of the company they bought.

Of course, with any acquisition, changes happen eventually. This isn't like Yahoo buying a company for patents or talent and quickly shuttering the product, or HP/Oracle buying a company and killing it under the burden of largecorp bureaucracy. We're talking about a pretty small company, buying another startup.

See also: http://hotpads.com, http://agentfolio.com, http://mortech.com which were all acquired within the last year by Zillow. a few "a Zillow business" logos here and there, but if you were a customer of those companies before the acquisition, you would probably say Zillow has left them alone.

disclosure: i have no insider info

Streeteasy has a terrific brand in nyc. Given that they have 1.2m monthly uniques and 7M in revenue, I'm surprised that the acquisition will not have an impact on zillow revenue projections. Guess if you do $200m in yearly revenue, an extra $7m is only a ~5% bump.

Don't forget the competitive advantages gained.

Where did you see the 7m revenue figure -- source?

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