The publicly-traded real estate marketplace Zillow has made a big new purchase – the home tours booking site ShowingTime. Zillow will pay $500 million to buy ShowingTime, marking a big exit for the company which was founded over two decades ago.

ShowingTime provides an easy way for real estate agents to schedule home tours with customers at their properties. The company says over 50 million home tours were booked on its platform in 2020 alone.

With ShowingTime, Zillow is getting a service that’s very crucial to its real estate business. Already, many of the agents that list properties on Zillow use ShowingTime to schedule home tours so there’s already a close association between both companies. After the acquisition is completed, Zillow says that it’ll continue to maintain ShowingTime as a separate platform.

ShowingTime is Zillow’s second-biggest acquisition to date, after its splashy purchase of the competing real estate platform Trulia in 2015. By count, it’s Zillow’s 17th acquisition since the inception of the company.

Zillow’s announcement of buying ShowingTime came as the company posted its fourth-quarter 2020 earnings. In that quarter, the company posted a record $789 million in revenue and a profit of $46 million, riding the waves of a strong US real estate market. The profit posted by Zillow is the highest that it’s ever posted in a single quarter.

Photo credit: Zillow

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