On the desk today · CoStar Group
Every building has a price. One company keeps the book.
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The Book Every Broker
Cannot Close
In 1987, a Princeton senior named Andy Florance had a thesis project and an obsession. His father, Coke Florance, was an architect. Andy had grown up around blueprints and building plans. He noticed something strange about commercial real estate — the most valuable asset class in the world had no organized information system. If you wanted to know how much office space was leasing for in downtown Washington, you called a broker. If you wanted to compare sale prices across a market, you pulled paper files. Everyone was guessing.
Florance started collecting the data himself. He photographed buildings. He recorded lease terms. He entered everything by hand into a computer and distributed it on floppy disks. He called the company CoStar Group. That was 38 years ago.
I was at a friend's office last month — a commercial real estate broker in a mid-size city. Two monitors on his desk. One showed email. The other showed CoStar. He used it the way a bond trader uses Bloomberg — every five minutes, without thinking. I asked him what would happen if CoStar disappeared tomorrow. He stared at me. "I wouldn't know what anything is worth."
Most people have never heard of CoStar Group. But if you have ever rented an apartment, browsed a home listing, or walked past a building with a "For Lease" sign, you have touched its system. CoStar owns the dominant database for commercial real estate — every office building, every retail center, every warehouse, every multifamily property. It also owns Apartments.com, the largest apartment rental platform in the country. And Homes.com, the residential portal it is spending billions to turn into a challenger to Zillow.
Florance founded the company in Washington, D.C. He took it public in July 1998, raising $22.5 million. Over the next 27 years, he acquired LoopNet — the most-trafficked commercial real estate marketplace — and Apartments.com, and built what brokers now call the Bloomberg Terminal of real estate. In 2025, he added Matterport, a 3D digital twin platform, and Domain, Australia's leading property marketplace.
Here is the math. In fiscal 2025, CoStar reported $3.2 billion in revenue — up 19% from the year before. Adjusted EBITDA reached $442 million, up 83%. Net new bookings hit a record $308 million. The company's websites drew 141 million average monthly unique visitors. And the quarter that ended in December 2025 marked the 59th consecutive quarter of double-digit revenue growth. Fifty-nine. That is nearly 15 years without a miss.
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That 59-quarter streak is the number I keep returning to. Fifteen years of double-digit revenue growth — through a financial crisis aftermath, a pandemic, a rate-hiking cycle, and a commercial real estate downturn. The database kept growing. Subscribers kept paying. The streak held because the data is not optional. It is the infrastructure.
A commercial real estate broker without CoStar is a stock trader without a terminal. Every comparable sale, every lease expiration, every vacancy rate, every tenant move — it lives in CoStar's system. The company employs researchers who physically visit properties, verify details, and update listings. That 38-year head start in data collection is the moat. You cannot download it. You cannot replicate it. You either pay for the subscription or you fly blind.
Here is the part that caught my attention. In 2015, CoStar spent $100 million to relaunch Apartments.com with a national marketing campaign starring Jeff Goldblum as "Brad Bellflower" — an eccentric Silicon Valley character who claims to have invented the "Apartminternet." The Super Bowl ads ran. The brand took off. But Florance was not finished. In 2020 and 2021, he acquired Homesnap and Homes.com. Then he started spending three to four times what he spent on Apartments.com to launch Homes.com as a direct competitor to Zillow. The 2026 Super Bowl featured Goldblum and Heidi Gardner in a crossover ad promoting both platforms.
That is the flywheel. CoStar starts with the data — the raw information every professional needs. Then it wraps marketplaces around the data. Apartments.com monetizes renters. Homes.com monetizes homebuyers. LoopNet monetizes commercial listings. Each marketplace draws traffic. Traffic attracts advertisers and listing fees. Listing fees fund more data collection. And the cycle repeats. In fiscal 2025, the company recorded $308 million in net new bookings — a record — meaning existing and new customers committed to $308 million more in annualized subscription revenue than the year before.
Andy Florance said it plainly in the fourth-quarter earnings release: "With our 59th consecutive quarter of double-digit revenue growth and Adjusted EBITDA surging 83% year-over-year, CoStar Group is entering a period of significant earnings acceleration." He has run this company since the day he started it. He still runs it. He has never left.
WHY THIS WORKS
38 years of compounding data. CoStar has photographed, cataloged, and verified commercial property information since 1987. No competitor has the depth, breadth, or history to match it.
Switch-cost prison. Brokers build their deal pipelines, market analyses, and client presentations inside CoStar. Leaving means losing access to the comps, the tenants, and the market intelligence their business depends on.
Marketplace network effects. Apartments.com, Homes.com, and LoopNet attract 141 million monthly visitors. More traffic draws more listings. More listings draw more traffic. The loop compounds.
Founder-led for 38 years. Andy Florance has never stepped away. He still sets strategy, still runs earnings calls, still pushes into new markets. The company has one architect — and he is still drawing.
Here is what most people miss: the Jeff Goldblum Super Bowl ads are not vanity marketing. They are customer acquisition at scale for Apartments.com, which charges property managers a subscription fee for premium listings. CoStar spent roughly $100 million to launch the brand in 2015 — and is now spending multiples of that to do the same with Homes.com. The company that started by selling data on floppy disks is spending Super Bowl money to own the front door of every property search in America.
