Zillow Inc. completed its acquisition of rival real estate website Trulia Inc. and announced 350 job cuts as the combined company works to integrate operations.
The final value of the deal was $2.5 billion including stock-based compensation, the company, which will now be known as Zillow Group Inc., said in a statement on Tuesday. That reflects a decline in Zillow's share price since the agreement was signed in July.
The companies eliminated about 280 positions, mainly in San Francisco and Bellevue, Wash., to address overlapping positions in sales and administration, according to the statement. An additional 70 positions will be cut by the end of the second quarter, leaving the combined company with 2,000 employees.
"We wanted to right-size the company for the size of the opportunity in front of us and our current revenue and expense base," Spencer Rascoff, Zillow's chief executive officer, said in an interview. "This is a significant endeavor and we have a lot of work to do to make sure that it’s additive rather than detracting."
Seattle-based Zillow agreed to pay 0.444 Zillow shares for each share of Trulia, in deal then valued at $3.5 billion. The merger positions a combined Zillow and Trulia to capture a larger share of digital real estate ads as more house-hunt online and property agents spend more marketing dollars on the Internet.
Zillow received an official notification from the Federal Trade Commission last week that the agency had completed its investigation of the deal. Zillow rose 2.4% to $109.07 at the close in New York.
