Last week, REA Group agreed to a partial divestment of its India subsidiary, REA India, to Aurum Proptech. The deal is expected to close in the first quarter of the Australian financial year.
As part of the deal, the Housing.com business will come under Aurum's management, with REA India holding a 24.9% stake in the portal.
This is a deal that has probably been in the making for some time. REA Group's recent financial statements have not painted a particularly successful picture of its foray into India. The Group divested from its Indian brokerage business PropTiger to the same buyer, Aurum, in 2025.
REA Group CEO Cameron McIntyre made all the right noises in the press release comments:
"Aurum has strong capability and local market knowledge to operate the India business effectively. We are confident it will be in the right hands and is well placed to build on the strong foundations the team has established. To the REA India team, thank you for the significant contribution you have made. We are committed to supporting everyone through this process and look forward to future growth and partnership under Aurum's leadership.”
The REA India experiment was, and remains, an ambitious, well-meaning expansion strategy by Australia's dominant portal operator. Yet nine years on, the experiment appears to be exiting stage left rather than demanding the spotlight. For unfamiliar readers, here is a brief history of REA India...
PropTiger, a transactional brokerage and marketing platform, was founded in 2011. Housing.com, a traditional property portal, was founded in 2012. Dhruv Agarwala was part of the founding team of both businesses. A secondary portal, Makaan, was acquired by PropTiger (via Elara Technologies) in 2015.
In 2017, REA Group took a USD 50 million stake in Elara Technologies, spinning up REA India in the process. Housing.com was brought into the Elara group in the same month.
In January 2020, News Corp and REA invested further into Elara, before taking full control in June 2020. REA Group increased its stake, taking a 61% stake in Elara for USD 70 million. The core message was that the company could drive faster growth in India by being in charge. News Corp was the next biggest shareholder.
In September 2021, Elara Technologies rebranded as REA India, consisting of Housing.com, Makaan and PropTiger.
India was, and still is, a hyper-competitive landscape. A steeplechase of would-be market leaders includes brands like 99acres, Square Yards, Magicbricks, and NoBroker.
REA's big plan was to market, grow its audience, and then to worry about breakeven once it had established a clear audience leadership.
In March 2024, Dhruv Agarwala, CEO at REA India, told Online Marketplaces that Housing.com achieved a slight traffic leadership in India in 2021, but this was by no means a slam dunk. At circa 1.2x-1.4x, Housing.com was not a runaway leader.
He revealed the path to profitability would rely on further investment. Nevertheless, Agarwala says 2023 was the height of EBITDA losses—and this statement is true, with H1 EBITDA losses shrinking in both 2024 and 2025.
In hindsight, it is telling that REA India consistently talked up its audience figures —but comms around its revenue never received quite as much acclaim. However, a notable milestone was achieved in 2022 with revenues doubling to A$53 million for the full financial year.
Makaan was quietly sunsetted around the end of 2023 as REA India focused its strategic attention on Housing.com.
By 2024, REA India retained a slender traffic lead, at least according to the Group. Agarwala told the PPW Podcast that Housing.com's goal was to reach twice the traffic of its nearest competitor to gain disproportionate revenue. 12 months on, in May 2025, REA Group put its first overtly negative message out to the markets, saying that increased competition in India was "putting downward pressure on yields for Housing.com."
In terms of hard numbers, app sessions (up 37%) and share of app downloads (54%) remained high in February 2025's statement to the market.
Nevertheless, Housing.com never achieved the level of traffic leadership required to maximise its monetisation model, and REA India soon made another major strategic shift—selling PropTiger to Aurum Proptech in September 2025 and exiting from the adjacent services provider Housing Edge in October.
In Q2 2026 (December 2025-February 2026), REA India saw a 20% year-on-year growth in leads delivered to customers, but EBITDA losses for the financial year were forecast between A$40m and A$45m.
It's important context to highlight that the majority of REA India's revenue comes from those divested segments. PropTiger and Housing Edge accounted for circa 60% of REA India's revenue (and EBITDA-positive) in H1 2025, while Housing.com incurred a loss.
In H1 2026, REA India's total revenues dropped despite Housing.com holding steady year-on-year, while revenues from PropTiger and Housing Edge dropped 68% following divestment.
This isn't to say that the divestment from a brokerage business was a bad move.
Regulatory changes forced REA's hand in exiting from Housing Edge. Meanwhile, PropTiger had a headcount of around 300 people and relied on closing deals on a large scale to achieve a relatively modest EBITDA of A$2.8m in the first six months of 2025 (the final reporting period before the divestment to Aurum).
Nevertheless, without the brokerage revenues to prop up the portal, it's fair to say that Housing.com—the de facto core business for REA India—has struggled to translate its popularity with consumers into strong top-line margins.
Aurum has already laid out ambitious goals, telling investors that it expects to make the business profitable by the beginning of 2028, or six financial quarters. The Group's recent investor call suggests that marketing costs will be stripped out of the business to slash expenses, while operations will be optimised with some layoffs likely once the portal is ingested into the Aurum ecosystem.
The Group says it has around $20 million cash as an investment warchest—the same amount as Housing.com is currently burning every year. Those numbers cannot stay equal for long.
REA India isn't the first expansionist strategy to eventually fall flat. Dubizzle Group (formerly EMPG), PropertyGuru and Frontier Digital Ventures (FDV) have all struggled to establish a pure portal play in developing markets worldwide, while the conglomerate Adevinta was described as an 'odd collection of unrelated assets' in 2019.
Dubizzle Group CEO Imran Khan previously told the PPW Podcast that the cognitive load of managing assets across time zones, continents and cultures is tough:
"I remember having a discussion on Mexico and the very next call would be on Philippines, the very next call would be Indonesia. And it was torturous mentally to offload all of that information and then upload the new information."
PropertyGuru, a dominant player in Singapore, exited Indonesia, while FDV (Asia and Latin America) opted to focus its efforts on the stronger Latin American business as well as divesting from brands in Nigeria and the Philippines.
On the other side of the coin, CoStar Group is pushing ahead with an international strategy, recently adding the Italian market (Wikicasa) to its interests in the United States (Homes.com and Apartments.com, Australia (Domain), the UK (OnTheMarket), and the international commercial real estate portal Loopnet.
CoStar CEO Andy Florance told Online Marketplaces in 2024 that there was no reason why portals can't operate across international borders:
"There’s a theory I don’t subscribe to—that you cannot move your tech across borders from Luxembourg to France to Portugal to Italy."
"It’s kind of silly when you say the French market is completely different from the Spanish market when the number one navigation source for the consumer is Google. Google is in France, Google is in Spain. The infrastructure for all these things is multinational."
Simon Baker, Chairman at Online Marketplaces, says REA Group will be happy to deprioritise its India segment and observe as a more passive investor, while Aurum takes on the challenge of delivering profitability in a tough market.
"I think REA won the deal. It was always going to have to write off that money (A$120m invested into REA India) because [the venture] was not turning around. It's very hard to keep justifying that to auditors. Therefore, doing a deal to take a 25% passive stake in an Indian business with local management who have absolutely everything on the line, means there is only upside from an REA Group perspective.
"From Aurum's perspective, it's a toss of a coin. You have a new asset, you're backing your management's ability to turn the business around and create value—but the downside is that you have already set a time and date on when you are going to deliver this by."
REA Group has made successful international investments in the past, but the ambitious REA India strategy never quite bore fruit. Housing.com is by no means a busted flush—it is a top-tier consumer brand in a massive market—and a refreshed management team with a savvy turnaround in their back pocket will make for an interesting case study for portals in the coming quarters.
The best of luck to Aurum Proptech; let's hope they don't need it.
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