• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, September 30, 2024

It could be that News Corp. was overreaching and that it finally sobered up. But the publishing megalith has ended its pursuit of Rightmove, a British property portal after being rejected four times. 

REA Group, an Australian online property in which News Corp. has a 62% stake, confirmed that it does not intend to make... (a formal) offer for Rightmove," News Corp. said in a statement before a UK filing deadline on Monday. 

The latest bid was worth roughly U.S. $8.3 billion.

"The lack of meaningful engagement and the consistent lack of information provided by Rightmove impeded the ability to progress discussions and work together towards a recommended transaction, within the timetable permitted," REA said in a statement, according to Reuters. 

This occurred against a backdrop of an internecine Murdoch family feud. As Agence France-Presse reports in an article picked up in Barrons, “(Rupert) Murdoch, 93, finds himself in the eye of a legal storm as several of his children seek to block him changing the terms of a family trust to ensure his favored son Lachlan gains control of his sprawling media assets after his death.”

The failed bid to buy Rightmove has led to gloating by some observers. REA is “slinking back to Melbourne with its tail between its legs,” The Guardian writes. “A retreat wasn’t the way to bet on day one, but humiliation for the Murdoch vision of creating a multi-hemisphere property portal can be explained easily: REA never offered a decent price.”

The question is: What’s next? Is there another purchase in the offing, maybe in the U.S.? Or will all this be on hold as the Murdoch family sorts out its affairs? Either way, this attempt to add to REA’s (and News Corp.’s) real estate listings is over, for now. Watch out for those subsidiaries!