International real estate shoppers soon won't need to leave their office chairs.
Miami's World Property Journal, which published real estate news online, is being purchased for $33 million by California-based real estate listing website GlobalListings.com. The acquisition is designed to help GlobalListings increase its influence in the real estate analysis and search space.
"By combining both company’s real estate listings, and correlated real estate market news and data on a single screen,we have in effect now become a ‘Bloomberg Terminal’ of the global real estate marketplace," Michael Gerrity, GlobalListings founder and CEO, said in a release. The Bloomberg Terminal is the definitive U.S. source for financial market data.
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The marriage creates a one-stop shopping site combining 30,000 news stories about real estate markets worldwide with 2.2 million real estate listings. Gerrity said in an interview that he expects the listings to grow to 5 million or 6 million within the next year as corporate partners feed into the global database.
While real estate listings for U.S. residential properties are widely available online, they are not typically consolidated in other markets. The combined company, called GlobalListings, aims to join global commercial, residential and vacation properties that are for sale, rent or auction in a single database.
World-wide, "real estate is the world's largest fragmented marketplace," said Gerrity. "We are mapping the world's real estate inventory in one place."
World Property Journal and GlobalListings come from the same lineage: Both were designed and built by Miami's Gerrity Capital "on behalf of each company’s investor base," explained founder Gerrity. The two companies are separate and have different investors, he said; he serves as an officer in each.
Gerrity said GlobalListings was launched a year ago in Irvine, California, because of the real estate-tech talent available in the area. It will move its combined headquarters to Miami while retaining its current employees and expanding the Journal staff, said Gerrity, who currently commutes between the two. The sale is slated to be complete by the end of the year.
The Journal had been publishing out of its offices in downtown Miami since October 2010. It covers a wide range of real estate news from rising global rents, to South Florida's commercial real estate market, in addition to providing listings from across the world.