Flip up the quantity in your actual property success at Inman On Tour: Nashville! Join with trade trailblazers and top-tier audio system to achieve insights, cutting-edge methods, and invaluable connections. Elevate your small business and obtain your boldest targets — all with Music Metropolis magic. Register now.
CoStar Group closed the fourth quarter on a powerful be aware, in line with the Virginia-based portal’s earnings name Tuesday.
CoStar Group’s This autumn income grew 11 p.c 12 months over 12 months to $709 million, representing the Fifty fifth-consecutive quarter of double-digit income progress. CoStar remained worthwhile, though its internet revenue dropped 37 p.c 12 months over 12 months to $60 million.
TAKE THE INMAN INTEL INDEX SURVEY FOR FEBRUARY
“CoStar Group delivered another strong year of profitable revenue growth in 2024 and in the fourth quarter of 2024 we achieved our 55th consecutive quarter of double-digit revenue growth while exceeding the top-end of our guidance range in both revenue and Adjusted EBITDA,” CoStar founder and CEO Andy Florance mentioned in a written assertion.
“CoStar, our flagship offering, generated revenue of $1.02 billion and grew 10 percent year-over-year,” Florance added. “CoStar Group’s commercial information and marketplace brands delivered exceptional results with 43 percent profit margins for 2024.”
The corporate’s full-year outcomes mirrored its This autumn efficiency, with the industrial large rising its income 11 p.c 12 months over 12 months to $2.46 billion and its FY internet revenue sliding from $375 million to $139 million. The adjusted EBITDA (earnings earlier than curiosity, taxes, depreciation and amortization) decreased 13 p.c to $112 million through the quarter.
Though CoStar’s adjusted EBITDA fell in This autumn, the portal ended the complete 12 months on the upswing, with the measure growing from $240.8 million to $491.7 million.
Florance ended his statements by praising Properties.com, the corporate’s residential portal, which has battled with competitor Realtor.com in a race for second place. Regardless of a slight decline in visitors to the Properties.com Residential Community in comparison with 2023, the CEO mentioned visitors to the Community — which incorporates Properties.com, Residences.com and Land.com — remains to be outpacing Realtor.com.
“In less than one year, the Homes.com Network has become the second largest residential real estate marketplace in the United States,” he mentioned. “We reached an audience of 110 million average monthly unique visitors in the fourth quarter, nearly doubling Realtor.com’s 62 million average monthly unique visitors.”
“Homes.com is benefiting consumers, sellers and their agents. Consumers are using what we believe is the best site in the U.S. to find a home,” he added. “Homes.com Members are gaining more exposure for their listings across the internet that helps them sell homes faster while building their brands and winning 58 percent more listings. Our dedicated sales force has grown to 275 representatives with increasing productivity of tenured reps and rising customer NPS scores.”
Within the firm’s earnings name, Florance mentioned CoStar isn’t letting up on its advertising push for Properties.com, which features a new slate of advertisements that debuted throughout Tremendous Bowl 59. These advertisements, he mentioned, will begin the residential portal’s push to lift its unaided consciousness to 50 p.c by the tip of 2025.
“We began [2024] with our low single-digit unaided awareness, and during the year built and grew that awareness number to as high as 33 percent,” he mentioned. “As we complete our second successful Super Bowl campaign and launch our 2025 campaign, I believe that we can reach 50 percent unaided awareness this year, potentially surpassing in two years what our competitors spent 30 years building.”
CoStar has additionally solved its Properties.com staffing problem, which Florance highlighted as a hindrance to membership progress in previous earnings calls. Properties.com grew its employees from 41 devoted salespeople to 275 in 2024, and plans so as to add 50 extra staff by the tip of March.
“Our goal is to have 500 Homes.com salespeople in place by the end of the year and productive,” he mentioned. “Achieving that goal, our Homes.com sales force will go from basically not existing last year to being one of our largest sales teams in just two years. Despite that, the fact is the entire team is literally rookies, but they’re selling effectively.”
Florance mentioned the larger crew has led to features in internet new month-to-month income and NPS shopper loyalty scores. Because the crew turns into extra skilled, CoStar expects Properties.com membership progress charges to expertise a big increase.
“The Dedicated Homes sales team is significantly more effective at servicing our new clients, achieving good net new promoter scores, and renewing business than was the stopgap broader sales effort we put in at the beginning of the year on an ad hoc basis,” he mentioned. “We launched the new homes.com memberships last year. I believe we offered a better value proposition than [other] residential portals, but it required educating real estate agents accustomed to buying agency leads for 30 years.”
The CEO additionally touched on the rental facet of the market, with prolonged remarks about Zillow, which mentioned in its earnings name final week that it had surpassed Residences.com when it comes to common month-to-month distinctive guests based mostly on Comscore knowledge.
Florance mentioned he welcomes the competitors, however categorically rejected the assertion the residential behemoth had larger visitors whereas sharing SimilarWeb visitors statistics on the Residences.com Community, which incorporates 11 websites. He additionally skewered Zillow’s $100 million rental syndication take care of Redfin, calling it “not an attractive transaction.”
“With consumers, we have dominated brand awareness with two out of three apartment seekers saying they will use Apartments.com,” he mentioned. “We continue to add new customers with properties of all unit counts to our marketplace at a rapid pace with more than 75,000 paying apartment communities on our network, up 7 percent year over year.”
“For the year, we processed just over five billion rental payments,” he added. “In a little over a year, we are already number one in traffic in Canada, our newest Apartments.com market, which demonstrates the success we can have extending a brand from one market, one country to another. There’s still a lot of room to grow this business.”
