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Zillow to Grow Rental Offerings with New Acquisition

""Zillow, Inc."":http://www.zillow.com/, announced its sixth acquisition in the last two years. The company has entered into an agreement to buy San Francisco-based ""HotPads"":http://hotpads.com/, a map-based rental and real estate search site.

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The $16 million deal is expected to close by the end of the year.

HotPad offers rental tools for both consumers and professionals, including a website and five mobile apps across iPhone, iPad, and Android. Nearly 2.8 million unique users visited HotPads in October, most of whom were there to shop for rentals. According to a release from Zillow's Seattle headquarters, nearly 70 percent of listings viewed on HotPad during October were homes or apartments for rent.

The deal marks Zillow's first acquisition of a primarily consumer-facing company. The real estate information company hopes the purchase will expand the size of its [COLUMN_BREAK]

growing rental audience and extend the reach of its marketing tools for professionals.

""This acquisition represents a significant step-change for Zillow Rentals, allowing us to dramatically increase the number of leads we send to landlords. HotPads has a younger, complementary and rental-focused audience. Now Zillow will become even more relevant to consumers at the beginning of their real estate life cycle,"" said Zillow CEO Spencer Rascoff.

Rascoff added that ""by acquiring an amazing engineering team, with a deep understanding of how people search for rentals and become tenants, we expect to accelerate our innovation and monetization of our rental marketplace.""

The acquisition signals Zillow's intent to continue its quick expansion of services. Since June, the company has announced deals to acquire Mortech, Inc., Buyfolio, and RentJuice. According to the company's release, the acquisitions ""support Zillow's strategic expansion beyond a traditional media model to offer a suite of marketing and business services to local professionals.""

""At HotPads, we're passionate about empowering people with tools and information to help them find the right place to live, and we have always admired Zillow's similar vision,"" said Matt Corgan, co-founder and CEO of HotPads. ""Combining Zillow's toolkit for owners and managers with an unmatched community of new tenants--across Zillow, Yahoo! and HotPads--we believe will enable the first true marketplace at scale for rentals.""

HotPads will continue to operate from San Francisco.

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