Andrew C. Florance
Analyst · Brett Huff from Stephens Incorporated
Thank you, Rich. Welcome and thank you for joining us today. I think we have some very strong news to share with you today. CoStar's 2013 second quarter was our best quarter yet, as we achieved our highest ever net new sales quarter, our best-ever quarterly revenue and EBITDA results. Revenue grew to $109 million for the second quarter of 2013, an increase of $23.8 million or 28% year-over-year. Our annualized net new sales bookings in the second quarter climbed to $14.4 million, an increase of 49% over the same period last year. This is our second consecutive quarter of record annualized net new sales. In the second quarter of '13, we added 1,300 new CoStar information subscription customers, which is the highest number of new subscribers we have ever added in a quarter. Over the course of the last 12 months, we have added a total of 4,700 new clients, the most in our history during a 12-month period. In the second quarter of '13, our EBITDA increased 209% year-over-year to $25.3 million, a new high point for CoStar. Our EBITDA margin rose to 23% in the second quarter, up strongly from 10% in the second quarter a year ago. This shows our ability to flow a high percentage of every incremental revenue dollar sold to the bottom line. Some of the primary drivers behind our solid results are: one, continued strong cross-sales for our -- of our CoStar information services to our LoopNet clients; two, strong results from our LoopNet marketplace as we see higher average price points, longer contracts and more firm-level purchases; three, solid performance across all 20 of our product lines; four, cost synergies achieved in the LoopNet acquisition; and finally, continued recovery in the commercial real estate economy. We continue to grow the top line, and we are reinvesting in the business aggressively for future growth, while at the same time expanding our margins. We're hitting on all cylinders and building an even stronger platform for the 7.4 million registered members we've got, and our hundreds of thousands of paying commercial real estate customers. When CoStar acquired LoopNet last year, one of the core rationales for the purchase was the potential to sell CoStar's premier commercial real estate information to LoopNet's large commercial real estate community on the Internet. In the first year post acquisition, we have clearly delivered on that potential for cross-selling between the LoopNet and CoStar communities. Through the second quarter of 2013, the CoStar sales force had achieved $27.3 million of revenue synergies from our acquisition of LoopNet, which is an increase of 48% over the first quarter's cumulative total of $18.4 million. Of the $27.3 million in cross-selling synergies through quarter-end, $18.4 million of the revenue is from selling CoStar information to LoopNet users. This represents an increase of 48% quarter-over-quarter as well. $6 million in revenue synergies is attributed to selling an annual firm contract for LoopNet Premium Lister, where before the client was previously free or a paid individual user on a month-to-month agreement. Generally, the sale of the company that are done at the same time with the sale of CoStar services to the LoopNet firm. Revenue from this type of sale grew 53% quarter-over-quarter. Finally, $2.9 million of the cross-selling revenue was generated selling LoopNet Premium Lister to CoStar clients, which is an increase of 45% quarter-over-quarter. Overall, through June 30, 2013, we had cross-sold our products to 4,800 commercial real estate firms. We have closed approximately 31% of the 15,500 sales cross-selling demos we had arranged. We believe that we can continue to increase the close rate. The number of cross-selling deals we are closing has accelerated to nearly 600 per month. The 4,800 firms we have cross-sold to date represent less than 4% of the active CoStar and LoopNet prospects we believe are out there for cross-selling. I believe that we are nowhere near reaching the cross-sell potential from the merger yet. And at this point, I believe cross-selling revenue could be several hundred million dollars over time. Another significant factor to consider is the size of the LoopNet prospect pool. The LoopNet team has grown the LoopNet membership remarkably in the past 12 months. The number of LoopNet registered members grew by 21%, or nearly 1.3 million over the last 12 months; which is a robust gain of approximately 25,000 new members a week. We now have 7.4 million registered users, and the number of unique monthly visitors to loopnet.com has grown by 36% year-over-year to nearly 5 million. LoopNet's flagship information product is Premium Searcher. In the first quarter of 2012, before it closed the merger, Premium Searcher had annualized revenue of $18.7 million. Not only have we converted nearly that amount of information revenue by selling CoStar to LoopNet members, we also simultaneously grew LoopNet Premium Searcher revenue 27% to $23.8 million annualized. That depth and strength of the market really came as a surprise to me and is great news. The bottom line is, the pool of LoopNet subscribers we have to sell CoStar information services into is growing. Over the past 3 quarters, we have referred to approximately 100,000 prospects at LoopNet that are prime candidates for CoStar information analytics services. Our most recent analysis of LoopNet leads, using the same scoring system as last summer indicates that the lead list has increased substantially over the last year. In fact, the number of individual prospects has grown from 100,000 to 140,000 in the past 12 months. While we are very pleased with the strong success we have had over the past year, we remain focused on accelerating our sales momentum. We are taking steps to further educate our sales force, reallocate sales resources, improve marketing tools and deploy software solutions in an effort to accelerate our cross-selling and traditional selling activity. Extensive market research and experience leads us to believe that the commercial real estate community will pay significantly more for a high quality, more accurate information source. If you have followed the Loop CoStar merger for 2 years, you've heard me talk about the challenges a CoStar salesperson with normal training has in conveying the qualitative differences between 2 enormous databases like CoStar and LoopNet. I have also commented that post-merger, we plan to build software tools to automate those comparisons for our sales people and clients. I believe these tools will help our LoopNet clients more readily assess long-held views on where to find the best information solution. In turn, I believe that this will likely result in an even higher pace of CoStar information and analytics sales to LoopNet members. Our system team is making fantastic progress on these comparison tools that will reside in LoopNet, CoStar Suite, and CoStarGo. I expect they will be deployed on the third quarter of '13. The first comparison tool for the iPad is in beta, and I'm thrilled with what I've seen so far. A CoStar salesperson will be able to use CoStarGo to view any geography and be able to instantly show the prospect the multitude of listings that are only found in CoStar for that area. I believe it will be very compelling to our prospects that hate to think there's even one listing they're not aware of in their market. We plan for the comparison tool we are building into LoopNet to be only visible to the core up-sell targets. The software will help us to identify prospects and compare their results with what they could achieve if they upgrade to our higher-end CoStar information product. My hope is that these tools will help us achieve close rates in the 40% to 50% range. Although we are already achieving our best-ever sales revenue and EBITDA numbers as a result of the LoopNet cross-sell, I believe we can achieve even better results if we accelerate the transformation of our sales force structure to better address the larger opportunity we have. This transformation is underway and in the early stages. Around the time of the close of the acquisition of LoopNet, we had a combined sales force of approximately 325 total salespeople, with 131 in the field. From the outset, we knew we needed more field salespeople. Without a major disruption of the business, in the last 12 months, we increased the size of our field sales team by approximately 37% to 180, all the while achieving our best-ever sales and revenue results. Many of these new salespeople were recruited from our inside sales team and have successfully transitioned to field sales roles. We are expanding our field sales management infrastructure to ensure maximum productivity from our expanding field sales team. You may recall, we have a team of financial services sales specialists that focus on institutional clients and prospects. These sales specialists are generally, dramatically more productive than our average salesperson. We plan to significantly expand this successful, vertically targeted program by initially adding 30-plus field sales positions focused on 3 to 5 non-broker customer verticals. These salespeople would focus on specific prospects and clients, such as owners or lenders, retailers, institutions or appraisers. Now that we have more than a dozen products in 6 major client verticals, it is much more manageable to train and develop a salesperson extensively and properly on how our services add more value to one client vertical, rather than to all of them. We also plan to structure our marketing and product design teams around our 3 to 5 primary client verticals. Our effort to solve -- evolve our sales force may cause some short-term friction, but we believe it will result in even better sales results over the intermediate and long term, and possibly the short term as well. It is our belief that this next stage structure results in greater client satisfaction, higher penetration rates across all our customer verticals, more effective marketing programs and more valuable products. I'll chat a little bit about LoopNet Premium Lister. In the 3 years prior to LoopNet CoStar merger announcement, revenue for LoopNet's core Premium Membership products have fallen approximately 11%. In the 12 months prior to the announcement, it had grown only a paltry 3%. During the 12-month period since the merger closed in the second quarter of '12 until the second quarter of '13, revenue in LoopNet's core business had turned around and grown 21%. So in the past year, LoopNet's new management team has taken their product from little revenue growth to substantial revenue growth, with a 600% increase in revenue growth rate. For LoopNet Premium Lister, LoopNet's flagship marketing product, the turnaround is even more dramatic. In the first quarter of '11, which was the last full quarter before the Loop and CoStar merger was announced, revenue for LoopNet's Premium Lister had fallen 21% over the prior 3 years and had fallen 2% in the 12 months prior to the close of the transaction. In the last 12 months, revenue in LoopNet's core business, Premium Lister, had strongly rebounded and grown to 20%. So LoopNet Premium Lister is 20% year up year-over-year. The turnaround is even more impressive at LoopNet when you consider that, at the same time, we removed 31% of the costs in the LoopNet business. I believe one of the fundamental changes driving success in that business is that the new management team recognizes the massive revenue potential of LoopNet Premium Lister and has given it the priority it deserves. Each month, approximately 5 million unique visitors from all over the country come to loopnet.com and view commercial properties. I believe it's a great service with the ability to help connect the right buyers with the right properties in a way no traditional offline method could ever do. LoopNet makes a huge difference to the owner or broker that gets a deal done through a connection made in LoopNet's massive community of buyers and tenants. We have also made a number of tactical adjustments to how we sell core LoopNet products that are directly contributing to driving our strong results. We increased Premium Membership, average revenue per unit of new sales 57%, from $56.47 in the second quarter of '12, to $88.65 in the second quarter of '13. Overall, Premium Membership ARPU is up 10% year-over-year from $66.04 to $72.90. Prior to the merger, 90%-plus of LoopNet Premium Lister subscriptions were inefficiently sold to the individual on a month-to-month basis via inside sales. The typical commercial real estate property takes more than a year to sell or lease, so a 30-day marketing program did not make a whole lot of sense to us. We have changed that, and the second quarter of '13, 48% of all Premium Memberships sold were on annual basis and 24% were quarterly. At this point, we've now eliminated the monthly option altogether. This means that the average contract term has gone from 1 month prior to the merger to approximately 7 months now, and that the average new LoopNet contract value has moved from $56 at the merger to $620 today. We found that when a broker was subscribed into LoopNet, only 20% of the brokers in that broker shop were subscribed into LoopNet Premium Lister. A major reason is that if a broker was in a 10-person shop, say, the LoopNet sales force was trying to reach each broker, one by one, to sell them each a month-long contract. Theoretically, in a worst case scenario, that could require 120 sales per year at $56. We have now clearly shown that a much more efficient way to sell LoopNet is to reach out to the principal of the firm and sell the firm an annual contract with volume pricing covering 100% of the firm's brokers. This means we only need to make 1 sale, not 120. We believe that these longer-term firm-level contracts will reduce churn. In the past, year, we have reduced cancel rates on LoopNet premium members 10.7%, from 6.1% in the second quarter of '12, to 5.48% in the second quarter of '13. I believe it will go down further. In the 3 years prior to the merger, only a minority of product design and software development resources were allocated towards enhancing my favorite product, LoopNet Premium Lister. We changed that and made it top priority at LoopNet. We are making significant progress on 2 product enhancements to LoopNet's marketplace that we expect will launch this year or, at the latest, early next year. First, we do not currently give brokers the opportunity to market their services to the millions of monthly visitors interested in commercial real estate that come to LoopNet's website. Not only have we received feedback from brokers that they would like to have this opportunity, but in fact, we've received complaints that they cannot get this opportunity. We are designing and building a new product that will enable brokers to market their service to the tenants or buyers looking for properties in areas they specialize in. On the residential companies -- on the residential side big companies like Zillow, Move and Trulia earn tens of millions of dollars annually from similar product offerings for their brokers. Second, brokers and prospective tenants spend a significant amount of time driving from building to building touring available space to see which ones are a good fit for their needs. They need to do this because there's such a wide range in the quality of spaces within buildings. If an owner has a higher-quality space they are marketing, it is in their interest to make sure brokers know it's great space, even if the broker has not had time to drive out and see it. We are going to make this easier for owners to accomplish by offering walk-through video advertising on our website. We are very well positioned to offer this service, as we have infrastructure of a nationwide team of field photographers we've trained to film walk-through videos. We expect to offer LoopNet Premium Listers the opportunity to purchase walk-through videos later this year. Now let's go across the pond to U.K. We launched CoStar Suite and CoStarGo in the U.K. just 6 months ago. We have had a very positive reaction to the products, with strong uptake. And the second quarter sales result was our best ever for the U.K. operation. Since beginning of the year in the U.K., we have sold 200 firm-level subscriptions of CoStar Suite. About 60% of these sales were from new customers and 40% from upgrades to existing customers. A number of owners have subscribed, including one of the largest property companies in the U.K., Grosvener Estates. Another notable new institutional client in the U.K. is Citibank. Prior to the U.K. release of our CoStar services, only about 12% of our U.K. information revenue was from commercial real estate owners and institutions. Since the launch of CoStar Suite and CoStarGo, we're seeing 40% -- not 12% -- 40% of our sales coming from owners and institutions. This is a large customer vertical, so we believe that delivering products that are appealing to them indicates significant upside potential in our U.K. operation. Our profile is definitely growing throughout the United Kingdom, and we're getting positive feedback from users and prospects alike. We conducted a survey of CoStar subscribers and our newsreaders in the U.K., 78% of CoStar Suite subscribers told us that they believe that we have better data than our closest competitor. And it was only a couple percentage points going the other way. So this was dramatic shift from earlier surveys. I believe we are now the clear #1 provider of commercial property information services in the United Kingdom. The survey also provided an indication that there is a large market for us to target. So far, we've upgraded about 5% of our U.K. client base. We believe that we can, over time, up-sell most of the remaining 95% of the clients still on our old FOCUS system and, hence, be confident of significant growth potential over the coming years. Toronto, Canada is just a 90-minute flight from our headquarters in Washington, D.C. The Greater Toronto Area has a population of 6 million people, is the fourth largest city in North America, behind lovely Mexico City, New York and Los Angeles. CoStar markets that are similar in size to Toronto generate $10 million to $25 million and more in revenue annually on very high margin; so these large markets are valuable. The majority of major commercial real estate firms in Toronto are already CoStar clients in the U.S., the U.K. or both. We are unaware of a competitor with CoStar's capabilities in Toronto. We believe this market has significant earnings potential over time, so we've invested several million dollars over the past 18 months building what we believe is the most comprehensive database of commercial real estate information available for that market. Our Toronto research team has built a database with details on 1.3 billion square feet of commercial real estate and 55,000 properties with 200 million square feet of available space. Based on the number of properties in the database today, Toronto, Canada is the seventh largest market of CoStar's North American markets. We expect to launch our service in Toronto before year's end. While it represents a substantial revenue and leverage opportunity in the intermediate term, we do not expect Toronto to generate meaningful revenue in the first year, as none of our major markets have historically done that. It's usually in years 2, 3, 4 that they really start to pick up. Turning to our software development and product enhancement efforts, we've invested approximately $5 million over the past 2 years into the first of a series of significant broad product enhancements for our core CoStar Suite and CoStarGo products. We expect to release the first of these enhancements in the fall, and we believe that they will enable us to increase customer satisfaction and achieve even better sales results. We have built a new query interface for CoStar Suite that builds on the huge success we have with CoStarGo. Our clients have told us they love the visual, intuitive interface that CoStarGo offers, so we've built that into our web environment. We have updated our interface to give our web products greater visual appeal. We have built a very robust lease valuation tool that a broker or owner can use to enter the myriad of parameters of a lease and determine the true time-adjusted cost or value of that lease. We believe that this will empower our brokerage clients to provide more insights to their clients and accelerate the decision-making process without having to spend extensive time and spreadsheets calculating lease values. We also believe that this tool could become the standard lease value calculation tool and thereby become the preferred method of communicating lease proposals between brokers and owners. We have built a new, expanded analytics product that we believe will help us penetrate even deeper into the owner, banking, investor verticals in commercial real estate. We have even built an analytical tool into CoStarGo, which allows a user on a mobile platform to generate dozens of realtime market stats on CoStarGo in the field. We expect to release our full, new, multi-family properties module with this next release of CoStar Suite and CoStarGo. We have invested millions of dollars over the past 2 years building, what we believe, is the most comprehensive database of multi-family properties in existence. Multi-family real estate is one of the largest components in commercial real estate, and is in an area in which we have not historically provided complete service. We are now tracking information on 290,000 apartment communities with 5 or more units, for a total of 16.8 million apartment units. We are capturing information, such as building details and quality, effective rents, concessions, occupancy levels, ownership, property sales, unit sizes and mixes, images and many other details. This data can be queried and analyzed in the product to provide valuable analytic insight and information on market trends. We believe we can sell this new service to an array of banks, investors, brokers and others with multi-family loans and investments. In total, the new search interface, analytics tools, mobile analytics, lease valuation tool and multi-family product are expected to represent one of the biggest product releases we have ever made. We're very excited about it, and we anticipate it will position us for a strong fall sales season. Equally important, we believe that these product enhancements will give us a tailwind in our efforts in United Kingdom and Canada. In addition to our flagship services at CoStar and LoopNet, we have nearly 2 dozen brands and product offerings. We are hearing a clear message from our clients across these products that they are aware we own all these brands, and they prefer to use them as one integrated whole. They see the potential benefit of seamlessly moving data from CoStar to Virtual Premise to LoopNet to Reaction Web to REApplications, on to Resolve or to PPR at COMPASS. Such integration would give them greater insight to the market and streamline their operations. They're not just looking for CoStar data tied into one of these various products, but they want one web site with everything integrated. We see the potential value and we're responding to that demand. We've hired a strong firm named Interbrand to help us in organizing, updating, streamlining and optimizing our various brands. We expect to complete this study by the first quarter of 2014. This work with Interbrand is expected to help us to set priorities and formulate a strategy and timeline for integration of various software platforms in '14 and beyond. Beyond CoStar and LoopNet, a number of our other services are doing quite well: BizBuySell, #1 site in the Internet for buying and selling businesses; Lands of America, #1 for rural land; Land and Farm, REApplications, Virtual Premise and PPR all hit record revenue levels in the second quarter of '13. One of the strongest standouts in this group is Virtual Premise, which turned in 52% revenue growth year-over-year in the second quarter. Virtual Premise is our real estate project and lease management solution for commercial real estate. Virtual Premise signed or upgraded services to major retailers in that period, including: Texas Roadhouse; Robert Half; Kelly Services; Hibbett Sports; Schwab -- Charles Schwab; Polo; Michael Kors; Sony; Abercrombie & Fitch; U.S. Bank; Genuine Auto Parts; Motorola; Goodyear; BBVA; Regions; Bank, State of Georgia; and Talbots, among some others. So congratulations are in order for all of these market vertical teams. Finally, real estate market conditions, briefly. We're seeing a continued broadening of the recovery in the office markets. This recovery is no longer concentrated in tech and energy markets. It's slow but steady commercial real estate recovery, which is a very good operating environment for sustainable growth for CoStar. The strength in office job growth support 25 million square feet of net absorption in the first half of '13, up 5 million square feet, or 23% from last year. Office demand growth is widespread, with over 1 million square feet of net absorption year-to-date in 8 metros: including Atlanta; Boston; Chicago; Denver; New York; Orange County; San Francisco; and San Jose. So it's a nice, broad, healthy spread. This demand growth, plus a relatively modest 5 million square feet of net completions allowed vacancy rates to fall to 12.1%, which is okay. Improving occupancy is beginning to generate increasing rents, a welcome change for our clients who earn revenue based on commissions from leasing or selling space. Nationally, gross asking rents are up an average of 2% year-over-year. Which is modest, but the highest growth rate since the recession ended. Office sales volumes year-to-date is up 10% versus a year ago, similar to 2005. As investors search for return, the sales volume growth has been concentrated in the secondary markets, such as a Seattle or Denver. Rent and demand growth in the apartment sector continues to be solid, but slowing in many markets. Property sales for the first half of '13 are running 13% above year-ago levels for the same period. The fundamentals, rents and occupancies, are generally increasing, which should support equity values on average. Recently, the potential for increased interest rates did send shock waves through both equity and lending markets. However, we are expecting a relatively slow pace of interest rate increases, so the impact upon real estate is likely to be tempered because other factors, such as improved rents and net operating incomes will likely offset the impact upon the commercial real estate market. So I'm very proud of our results and the progress we have made in the first half of 2013. I'm really excited about the second half of '13 and beyond, as we launch some exciting new technology that I believe will provide significant additional value to our clients and appeal to our prospects. I believe this quarter is clear proof point that we are on our way to reaching our goal of $500 million, or $0.5 billion, annual revenue run rate with 30% to 35% margins when we exit '14. I think Bryan will point out adjusted EBITDA margins, but we'll see where we go there. And we are well on our way to doubling the size of the business over the next 5 years on even higher margin rates. At this point, I'll turn the call over to Brian Radecki. And Brian, I took about 15 minutes of your time, so if you could do it quickly.