FTC clears Zillow's $1.8 billion acquisition of Trulia, deal could close next week
Taylor Soper / GeekWire :
Context & Ripple Effects
The FTC's clearance removes the last regulatory gate on Zillow's purchase of Trulia, announced at $1.8 billion but already valued near $2.5 billion as Zillow's stock climbed ahead of closing. The two companies run the largest consumer-facing real estate portals, so the antitrust review was the main open question hanging over the combination.
What follows in the corpus shows why this mattered: days after clearing, Zillow closed the deal and moved to cut 350 staffers, then posted back-to-back quarters of growth it attributed directly to Trulia — $162M in Q1 and $171M in Q2 — en route to management guiding past $1B in annual revenue by 2017.
First-order effects
- Zillow and Trulia can legally combine as early as next week, merging the two biggest US consumer real-estate portals under one owner — and per the closing coverage, roughly 350 overlapping roles are eliminated immediately.
- Trulia shareholders exit into Zillow stock while advertisers (real estate agents and brokerages buying leads on both sites) now face a single dominant sales channel instead of competing ones.
Second-order effects
- Rival portals like Move's realtor.com lose their closest scale competitor and must respond on product and pricing; notably, Zillow's later $130M settlement with Move over trade secrets and executive poaching shows how sharply competitive the rivalry stayed after consolidation.
- Divesting non-core assets becomes part of integration math — Zillow sold its Market Leader unit to Constellation Software's Perseus Division for $23M months after close, trimming businesses that duplicated what Trulia brought.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, consumer web categories consolidate from two-leader duopolies into single dominant platforms whose revenue compounds through acquisitions rather than organic share gains — Zillow's trajectory toward its stated $1B revenue year is the template.
- For regulators, clearing a top-two merger in an ad-driven category signals tolerance where the merged firm competes against off-platform alternatives (brokerages, listings data), a precedent other portal-style markets will be measured against.
The trend: Consumer internet marketplaces are consolidating their #1 and #2 players through stock-funded mergers, converting head-to-head portal competition into single-platform dominance.