Adevinta France and Zillow to Lay Off Workers

The French subsidiary of online classifieds giant Adevinta has confirmed that it is looking to lay off or reassign some 137 of its current staff of around 1,500.

The news was made public via comments made by Adevinta France EVP, Antoine Jouteau in an interview with French business publication Les Echos and concerns employees currently working in the finance, legal, communications and HR departments. Jouteau confirmed that those employees affected will be offered other internal positions (the company is hiring in its tech departments) and supported as well as possible.

In France, Adevinta operates the leading horizontal classifieds site LeBonCoin as well as the real estate vertical A Vendre A Louer and recent editions l’Argus, LocaSun and PayCar. France has long been the best-performing country for Adevinta and was a big reason for the company posting a 6% rise in year-on-year revenues in its latest quarterly results.

Since signing a sensational $9.2 billion deal to buy eBay's classifieds division and effectively creating the largest classifieds player in the world last year, Adevinta has been looking to optimise its operations and maximise synergies with its new marketplace titles.

Adevinta's CEO, Rolv Erik Ryssdal has already sold off underperforming titles from the company's Global Markets segment and confirmed that others are "under strategic review".  Adevinta also recently announced its new 'Growing at Scale' strategy at a Capital Markets Day for investors and analysts under which the company will look to lean into becoming fully transactional and focus on profitable markets.

Another company to have announced layoffs is American real estate marketing giant Zillow. When the Seattle based company revealed that it was to shutter its iBuying business back in November it also announced that it would be making some 2,000 employees redundant.

A tranch of those employees, were let go at the end of January. Although a Zillow spokesperson declined to give numbers, they did say:

"Employees are receiving a severance package that includes at least 10 weeks of pay, six months of benefit costs covered, the value of their next stock vesting paid directly to them, and outplacement services."