Zillow Closes Trulia Acquisition, Cuts 350 Positions

As expected, Zillow today closed the acquisition of its competitor Trulia in a stock-for-stock transaction. The total price of the acquisition was $2.5 billion. When Zillow first announced its intentions to take over Trulia, the stock price still valued the transaction at $3.5 billion.

As is often the case when two very similar companies merge, Zillow and Trulia laid off 350 employees in San Francisco and Bellevue, Wash. This, Zillow says, was “due primarily to redundancy in the combined company’s sales and administrative organizations.” 280 of these jobs have already been eliminated and another 70 employees will be laid off by the end of the second quarter. All of them have already been notified. Together, Zillow and Trulia now have about 2,000 employees.

Trulia’s CEO Paul Levine will now be Trulia’s president and Peter Flint, Trulia’s co-founder and former CEO, is joining Zillow’s board of directors. The combined Zillow/Trulia will now operate under the name “Zillow Group” and start trading on Nasdaq tomorrow.

Zillow says that it plans to offer a shared services and marketing platform for advertisers later this year. For the time being, though, it looks like both Zillow and Trulia will mostly continue to operate as before. That doesn’t come as a major surprise. For the most part, that’s how Zillow has approached most of its acquisitions. HotPads and StreetEasy, for example, are still getting regular updates, and even though they’ve been integrated into Zillow’s organization, you can barely even find Zillow’s own branding on those sites.