Realty consultancy Coldwell acquires property portal Favista

Real estate consultancy firm Coldwell Banker India Pvt Ltd has acquired property search site Favista.com in an all-stock deal, the company said in a statement.

Favista's assets, IP and employees will become part of Coldwell. The realty broking firm's brokerage arm will also be absorbed by the company. However, Favista.com will continue to function as a standalone portal.

Favista was incubated by Veddis Ventures in 2011. Its co-founders include Anupam Sinha, Manish Sinha and Vishal Bhargava.

Coldwell Banker India is the master franchisee of the US-based Coldwell Banker Real Estate LLC. However, the Indian firm is not owned by the US company.

In April 2015, Anupam Sinha had taken over as the CEO of the Delhi-based realty portal, after the exit of both Manish Sinha, who joined Quikr, and Bhargava, who secured a position in the Gibraltar-based family office cum private investment firm, Veddis.

Coldwell Banker India had raised an undisclosed amount in investment from Milind Mehere, a US-based tech entrepreneur who co-founded online advertising company Yodle Inc, in March 2016.

Coldwell has 25 offices, including Mumbai, Pune, Bengaluru and Noida, and about 130 real estate agents. It is looking to have 100 offices and 500 agents by 2016-end.

Emails sent to both Favista and Coldwell did not elicit any response at the time of writing this report.

Realty deals

In January, real estate developer Lodha Group had launched its maiden investment fundfor startups focussing on smart city solutions and the overall realty sector.

In the digital real estate space, Gurgaon-based property search aggregator Square Yards Consulting Pvt Ltd, had raised $10 million from the Lohia Group, Andre Hoffman, the chief executive of cosmetics company L'Occitane, and other investors.

The realty segment has also seen a number of mergers. The most recent one was between online real estate brokerage PropTiger.com and property listing portal Housing.com. The combined entity received fresh funding of $55 million from their main investors.

In September last year, PropTiger had acquired Mumbai-based startup PropRates, which provides real estate transactions data.

In January 2016, Tiger Global-backed CommonFloor had merged with online classifieds player Quikr and, in 2015, PropTiger had acquired property search portal Makaan.com. News Corp, the largest investor in PropTiger, owns the parent of this news website.