Classifieds portal Quikr has fired more than 150 employees from CommonFloor, according to a report by Inc42. The report, which cited sources, said that Quikr laid off a 15 member design team, along with 5-10 employees in the engineering team, 5 employees in the product team and 20-30 employees in the services team.
MediaNama has reached out to Quikr and CommonFloor about the development and will update this if we hear from them. However, the companies sent a statement to several media outlets which said the following:
“Bangalore will now serve as the main hub for all business functions of both Quikr and CommonFloor. As part of the overall integration exercise, we have been analysing all our assets and believe it is best to consolidate our physical as well as people assets based on our business needs. Together, we are highly committed to our consumers, people, partners and growing business in India.”
In January, Quikr announced that it has merged property portal CommonFloor with its real estate vertical QuikrHomes. MediaNama had confirmed the merger earlier in November and reports then had said that the size of the deal was $200 million. At the time, the companies said they would continue to operate as separate entities. Following the merger, CommonFloor CEO Sumit Jain had assured employees in an email that they “should not worry about their job or role.”
The deal would give CommonFloor access to Quikr’s 30 million users and expanded scope across Quikr’s four other verticals.
Commonfloor was launched in 2007 by Sumit Jain, Lalit Mangal and Vikas Malpani; and counts Accel Partners, Tiger Global and Google Capital as investors.
QuikrHomes
Quikr launched QuikrHomes in September 2015 and the portal allows users search for residential, commercial or agricultural properties to either buy or rent, in various cities like Pune, Delhi, Chennai, Bangalore, Mumbai and Hyderabad. Quikr had made the announcement in April for the realty portal and at the time had said there were 20 lakh active real estate listings and had accounted for 50% of the transactions on the portal.
In October, Quikr made a strategic investment in Genesys International‘s venture AN Virtual Tech. In December, Quikr acquired real estate analytics startup Realtycompass to boost its offerings in the real estate space and also complement Quikr Homes.
