CoStar Snaps Up Homesnap For $250M
CoStar Group has inked a deal to acquire Homesnap, which specializes in apps and other tech that allows residential real estate brokers to manage and analyze their listings. CoStar is paying $250M in cash for the company, which was founded in 2012.
The deal represents a major move into the residential side of real estate for CoStar, most of whose data services and tech platforms focus on commercial real estate. The deal is expected to close by the end of this year.
The addition of Homesnap’s offerings will quadruple the number of active real estate agent users on CoStar's U.S. platforms from about 100,000 to over 400,000, according to CoStar. The number of U.S. property listings associated with CoStar’s brands will roughly double from 1.35 million to over 2.6 million.
Homesnap, like CoStar, is based in the Washington, D.C. market; it employs about 150 people. For the full year 2020, its projected revenues will be about $40M, representing revenue growth of 45% compared with 2019. CoStar reported $426M in revenue during Q3 2020 alone, compared with $353M during Q3 2019. The company has projected its revenue will rise in Q4 to between $429M and $435M.
“CoStar doesn’t buy one [company] and do what they were doing forever,” CoStar CEO Andrew Florance told The Wall Street Journal. “We tend to acquire companies and integrate those companies together.”
CoStar is also in the running to buy CoreLogic Inc., one of the largest residential real state data companies. All together, CoreLogic's databases house more than 4.5 billion records, including residential property records, tax payment history and parcel maps.
CoStar has closed a number of other acquisitions recently, including the European commercial real estate data firm Emporis, which has data on 700,000 buildings across 100 countries, for an undisclosed price.
In June of this year, CoStar spent $190M to buy Ten-X, an online real estate auction platform, and in February it agreed to buy RentPath out of bankruptcy for $588M. The commercial real estate data giant also acquired online student housing marketplace Off Campus Partners in June 2019 and hotel research firm STR for $450M in October of that year.
