CoStar Agrees To Buy RentPath Out Of Bankruptcy For $588M
CoStar Group has made another acquisition as it continues to expand in the apartment listing space.
The commercial real estate data giant announced Tuesday it reached an agreement to acquire RentPath for $588M. The acquisition comes after the Atlanta-based company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy Tuesday, the Atlanta Business Chronicle reported.
RentPath operates a series of websites for marketing apartments, including Rent.com and ApartmentGuide.com. The company's websites had roughly 28,000 properties listed and generated 9M monthly unique visitors last year. RentPath has about 770 employees and brought in $227 million in revenue last year, down 9% from 2018.
"RentPath was burdened with a heavy debt load that prevented the company from making the necessary investments in building brand recognition and generating traffic from Google," CoStar CEO Andy Florance said in a release. "Following restructuring in bankruptcy, CoStar Group expects the combined companies to benefit from synergies and plans to invest in building RentPath’s online brands and traffic to provide improved quantity and quality of lead flow to advertising clients."
D.C.-based CoStar has been growing its network of apartment listing platforms by buying companies, including its 2014 acquisition of Apartments.com, its 2015 purchase of ApartmentFinder.com and its 2017 acquisition of ForRent. Last year, CoStar acquired online student housing marketplace Off Campus Partners.
"CoStar Group operates a number of large and growing online marketplaces," Florance said. "We believe that RentPath's talented and experienced employees will become valuable contributors not only to our Apartments.com network of sites but across all of our marketplaces."
The apartment listing sector is not the only space in which CoStar has grown through acquisitions. In October, the company acquired hotel research firm STR. CoStar's stock price rose Wednesday morning following the RentPath announcement, and its market capitalization is now over $26B.
