Andy Florance
Analyst · Citibank. Your line is open
Thank you, Sarah. Good evening and thank you for joining us today for CoStar's second quarter 2020 earnings call. A caveat, I see a large thunderstorm rolling into my position. So if I get disconnected, Scott Wheeler our CFO will pick up my script and deliver it not quite as well as I do, but he'll muddle through. So going into the second quarter it has been one of the most difficult to predict quarters in my decades of experience. It'd be hard to ever imagine the scale of dislocation our country is experiencing. Yet despite the challenges we face so far our team here at CoStar Group has performed exceptionally well turning in one of our strongest quarters ever. We grew revenue 16%, increased adjusted EBITDA 17% set a record sales month, raised $2.7 billion in equity and debt in the equity and debt markets and acquired Ten-X all while working 100% from remote locations. Traffic to our Apartments.com and LoopNet marketplaces rose to new record levels exceeding pre-pandemic levels. We had 62 million monthly unique visitors in our platforms in the second quarter an increase of 13% of our record traffic levels of 55 million monthly unique visitors reached in the first quarter of 2020. I hope you can agree with me that these results indicate that our business is not only resilient, but is in fact countercyclical. Our business like I believe most businesses was slowed in the first part of the quarter as people adjusted to the new normal. It has progressed back in each month this quarter eventually reaching our best sales results ever in June. CoStar, LoopNet, Apartments.com, LandsofAmerica, BizBuySell, Real Estate Manager, Risk Analytics and STR all showed positive growth in the month of June. In a world of social distancing our digital marketplace has uniquely enabled our clients to continue their mission-critical leasing efforts. While many were debating whether recovery would be V-shaped, CoStar Group's recovery to date looks more like a checkmark. While I believe the challenges from the pandemic are far from over, the progressive improvements in our operating results each month throughout the second quarter gives us greater confidence in the positive outlook for our business. CoStar Group's total revenue grew 16% year-over-year to $397 million. Across the second quarter our sales force brought in $35 million of net bookings with $22 million of that being in June alone. Our Marketplace businesses delivered strong revenue growth with Apartments.com growing 21% and LoopNet growing 18% year-over-year in the second quarter. Our net income was strong at $60 million. Our overall EBITDA was well ahead of expectations at $109 million, an increase of 17% year-over-year. And our non-GAAP net income per share of $2.34 was up 5% well ahead of expectations regardless of the 2% dilution from our equity raise in May. Apartments.com was truly the countercyclical standout in Q2 hitting new records throughout the quarter. Net new sales were up 33% against our previous record set in the second quarter of 2019. In fact every single month this quarter our sales hit a new record high. In the true and accurate words of Paige Forrest our Head of Multifamily Sales every single benchmark was blown away. We had a series of all-time record high-traffic numbers for our Apartments network sites during the quarter including 23 million average monthly unique visitors, up 6% year-over-year, and 200 million visits, up 16% year-over-year according to ComScore. Our Apartments.com sales force logged a 58% increase in quality meetings and interactions with our clients, delivering critical service to our customers at a time of significant challenges for their business. Apartments hit a new quarterly record revenue of $146 million. This June the largest annual multi-family industry conference the National Apartment Association Conference was postponed due to the pandemic. This conference is a significant customer event for Apartments.com and typically makes June our best sales month of the year. Without the possibility of meeting in person we organized and produced a two-day virtual summer showcase event conducted entirely with video meetings. We lined up speakers from top tech, digital, media and advertising companies, along with our own research staff and economists to speak on a range of topics from local market updates to marketing in anxious times, all in support of our customers. The event was a resounding success. Over 3,200 customers participate resulting in connections to over 1,000 new customers. The customer response was tremendous and contributed to a record June in terms of net new sales, nearly 20% above the previous record and for less than 5% of the cost of the annual in-person event. We saved $4 million going digital. As announced last year, we've increased our marketing expense – and we've increased our marketing investment in Apartments.com by nearly 50%. We plan to continue our increased investment in marketing despite the pandemic, because we believe that we can still generate an outsized ROI on that investment even in this environment. Based upon our results this quarter, we think we are in fact seeing an excellent ROI on that increased investment. Our Q2 marketing campaign highlights start with the launch of our new broadcast ads featuring iconic Jeff Goldblum's as Brad Bellflower, the inventor of the Apartminternet. This ad hit the airwaves at the end of March with an increase of 12% more ads over our 2019 campaign, airing across an even wider variety of digital and streaming video platforms. This year, we also increased marketing via paid social and media and retargeting ads as well as addressable TV through personalized advertising based on household composition. We raised our SEM spend significantly leading to a higher frequency of number one positioning in a broad range of search terms. Overall, these paid initiatives led to a 57% increase in impressions. Paid advertising isn't the whole story either. Our continuous investment in the functionality of and content on our site, helped to continue to fuel organic site traffic growth of 16% in Q2. We were also rewarded by new highs in unaided brand awareness, an important measure of the reach and effectiveness of our campaigns. And we are now leading the pack with Zillow in second place and Craigslist and Rent.com tied for third. We believe that strong and improving levels of consumer awareness is the key to our ultimate success in penetrating the broader rental markets and the timing and magnitude of our investment is clearly paying off. The strength of our business is evident in that we can make these aggressive investments in growing Apartments.com, while still generating $109 million of EBITDA in the quarter. We were focused on accelerating our sales penetration across all categories of rentals from the largest apartment buildings, to midsize apartment communities, to single-family homes condos and townhouses. In late 2019, we added an inside sales team based in Richmond Virginia to focus on selling Apartments.com solutions to owners of midsized and smaller apartment buildings in single-family dwellings. Nine months into launch in this under 100-unit sales force we're seeing great results. This quarter, we grew our net new sales in the under 100-unit segment nearly 70% versus Q1 2020. Over the last 12 months half of all advertisers we added 2,400 properties were in the sub 100-unit category. While – when we acquired Apartments.com in 2014 little to no effort was made selling to apartment communities with under 100 units. Now 16% of Apartments.com revenue comes from properties with under 100 units, this means that today we have more revenue in the previously overlooked below 100-unit communities than Apartments.com had in total when we bought them. Clearly, there's demand for Apartments.com and rentals of all types big and small. But as much as we have sold, we are still less than 1% penetrated into the sub 100-unit segment. We are excited about the amazing multibillion-dollar scale of the opportunity we have here and plan to continue to build out the marketing efforts and sales teams to fully monetize our leading position. Some costs get behind us. On June 9th, the bankruptcy court signed off on RentPath Chapter 11 plan and our acquisition proposal as part of the plan, so the remaining hurdle is the FTC process. On April 29th, we received a second request as part of the FTC approval process for our proposed acquisition of RentPath. This was anticipated and we are responding quickly to the request. Should we get approval to close the transaction, it would be completed within a 3 to 12 month time frame that we gave in February. In the meantime, we continue to compete aggressively in the market as always. We believe that, we are continuing to take significant market share away from RentPath because we offer vastly superior traffic more exposure and thus more leads and leases Over this past quarter, we began integration of our successful lender Risk Analytics solutions in the CoStar Suite. Productizing these solutions into the larger platform will allow CoStar to expand its reach from the top-tier of CRE leaders to the many thousands of institutions that could greatly benefit from analytics-only available with CoStar data. For over a decade, our highly experienced risk analytics team has been a trusted source to lenders providing credit risk models for portfolio stress testing and loan-loss reserves used in regulatory reporting, examinations and for internal risk management. By leveraging curated CoStar property data and market research, we can provide up-to-the-minute information on a lender's collateral allowing them to perform real-time performance surveillance. This is a capability unmatched in the industry. We think combining these time-proven models with CoStar data is a scalable -- in a scalable platform creates exceptional growth opportunity in the lending market. LoopNet finished the quarter on a strong note overcoming the market disruption that began in March and April caused by the pandemic. Monthly unique visitors are now tracking over seven million which is an all-time high being the record set earlier this year. Net new sales improvement followed the improvement in traffic finishing June with net new sales up 91% year-over-year. To keep this momentum going, we have really leaned in with significant product enhancements and marketing efforts. We positioned LoopNet Diamond and Platinum level signature ads to property owners as powerful digital marketing innovation that generates unprecedented and differentiated marketing reach frequency and branding for their valuable properties. Beginning in April, we dramatically expanded our use of broad retargeting to further increase the frequency reach and brand enhancements at our top search advertisers enjoyed on LoopNet. With over seven million unique monthly visitors LoopNet is by far and away the most heavily traffic commercial real estate website, so we believe we have the best insights into who is currently in the market for commercial real estate. Once we identify a prospective tenant or buyer on LoopNet, we retarget them across the Internet thereby increasing the critical frequency of use for our top signature ads by 600% above the great performance they're already getting. In addition to driving up the frequency of valuable exposure for our advertisers, this retargeting investment has a benefit bringing a significant number of LoopNet visitors back to LoopNet for further reengagement. In addition to retargeting, we have launched a new program to leverage our database of six million tenants and digitally target them across the web and social media to bring these tenants to our advertisers' properties digitally. We've also added video conference-enabled CoTour to LoopNet this quarter. This allows registered LoopNet users to invite colleagues to virtually tour potential spaces together. At the end of June, we closed our first virtual M&A deal with our acquisition of Ten-X. Ten-X is the leading innovator of online commercial real estate auctions having completed more than $24 billion in property sales online. In the few weeks since we closed the deal, Ten-X has held two auctions transacting an aggregate value of $50 million. We have approximately $400 million in aggregate value going to online auction over the next two weeks. Ten-X has been used by all the major broker terms in America to transact properties online and close deals faster. While Ten-X is used to transact both performing and distressed properties it was borne out of the Great Recession and the need to liquidate a high-volume of distressed properties quickly. We believe that Ten-X is highly countercyclical. If there's an increase in distressed commercial properties in the cycle, we believe that Ten-X will see an increase in auctions and revenue. We are starting to see tangible signs of financial distress in the commercial real estate market, the first being delinquencies which are clearly on the rise. This month 30-day delinquencies jumped five percentage points versus June 2019. This is only two percentage points lower than the peak of the Great Recession. And this time around delinquencies are driven primarily by retail and lodging. In June of this year, we saw 7% of CMBS go 30 days delinquent which could translate into over 3% of CMBS defaulting over the next few months. You may remember that one of the key synergies of the Ten-X acquisition is that we can leverage our millions of LoopNet visitors and global CoStar users to increase awareness of properties going to auction to Ten-X and thereby dramatically increase the potential bidder pool for properties. Auctions with three or more engaged bidders are much more likely to transact above the reserve than are auctions with just one or two bidders. More bidders drive more closed auctions which we believe will draw more properties for sale which in turn draws in more bidders. And all that generates more commissions for our brokers. One of the first steps, we've taken is to move Ten-X auction candidates at the top of LoopNet and CoStar and present them as enhanced Diamond placements with enhanced retargeting which will dramatically increase their exposure to potential bidders. We will continue to invest in harvesting our unique data sets of millions of potential buyers and their search activities on our sites to digitally target them and draw these potential bidders to Ten-X. We're very excited about the enormous potential of this acquisition. This quarter the STR business model has clearly proven its resilience in what must sadly be the darkest days of the hospitality industry in modern times. Remarkably, STR generated positive net new sales in Q2 and a recovery in ad hoc revenues that was a positive surprise. In April of this year, 19% of hotels in the U.S. were closed. But by this month, only 7% were closed. Looking elsewhere, in April, 98% of Spanish hotels were closed, but in contrast today, only 3% of the hotels in China remain closed. Globally, the hotel industry is slowly recovering from the bottom, although more recently occupancy and demand have started to climb again in the U.S. But as long as hotels are open STR is essential with global occupancy rates in the mid-40s, 40% and little hope of a quick recovery business travel is very probable that we will see many hotels restructuring and changing hands. The lenders investors and new owners will also need STR data in order to accomplish those transactions. As you know, our strategy is to combine STR hospitality data with CoStar's complementary building set in order to create new products that provide a full view of building data income and occupancy information, sales comps and for-sale information. We're making good progress on this step and hope to have launched within the next year. We had two successful capital raising events in the quarter. In May, we issued $1.7 billion in equity. In June, two of the three rating agencies awarded our initial debt issue with an investment-grade rating wisely. As a result, we were able to issue $1 billion of 10-year debt with a coupon of 2.8% on July 1. Including our cash generation this quarter, this leaves us with a current cash balance of approximately $3.8 billion. This combined with our undrawn revolver of $750 million gives us over $4.5 billion of firepower and growing. As we move forward to grow this business aggressively, we're positioned with a phenomenal balance sheet and are well prepared to take advantage of what we expect could be significant opportunities in the coming years. I'm grateful for the confidence of our investors -- grateful for the confidence our investors have placed in us. Our investors are the 12th player in the CoStar football team and one of our company's greatest strengths. We have a long successful history of acquisition and integration having made over 30 acquisitions since CoStar was founded. A number of our great acquisitions have been made during down cycles. Examples include COMPS.COM which we purchased in 2000 at a 60% discount to the pre dot-com premium; and LoopNet, which we acquired in 2012 at a 40% discount to its pre-Great Recession premium. In total, acquisitions have provided about 30% of our revenue growth since our IPO, but it is how we integrate them and how they accelerate our organic growth that's more important. Taking the two examples of above COMPS.COM now brings in 8 times its acquisition level revenue and LoopNet 4 times. It's this kind of discount and development potential that we aim to exploit in the coming years and why we view market stress as an opportunity rather than a concern. Over 7,000 proptech companies have emerged over the past decade or so. Probably 500 or so have truly viable business models that are interesting that create plenty of future M&A opportunity for CoStar Group. CoStar Group is the largest proptech company with the strongest balance sheet and the most experienced and successful M&A. So we believe we are well positioned to make a number of accretive acquisitions in the proptech space in the years to come. We are very patient and have always waited for the right opportunity. Digital real estate consolidation is clearly a very hot space right now. I think the proof point is Bill Foley's, Cannae and Senator launching a $7 billion hostile takeover bid for CoreLogic in the midst of a global pandemic. I'm very familiar with CoreLogic, since decades ago as a young software engineer starting CoStar Group I invented the first ever version of their flagship digital public records product. Perhaps my first M&A success for our investors was declining an offer from CoreLogic's predecessor company to acquire the fledgling CoStar Group for $250,000 in our first year of operations. I had thought we were aggressive in acquiring Ten-X in a friendly deal during a lockdown. But I must say that even leaving aside the clear antitrust issues, Foley has one-upped us with the aggressiveness of seeking to operate a company acquired in a hostile takeover in the midst of a pandemic. Lastly, a few words on what we're seeing in the U.S. economy and commercial real estate. The rebound in the labor market that began in April was largely driven by workers coming off of furlough and reattaching to their previous jobs in restaurants and retail. However, as a second wave of infections is spread across areas of the South and Southwest, the momentum in job gains has predictably slowed as reopening plans were paused and reversed. The improvement in initial claims for unemployment has stalled at a level that is still more than double the worst single week during the Great Recession. Other high-frequency indicators and hiring seem to have slowed as well, so it seems that the initial V-shape recovery in the labor market is likely to pause. And with the emergency unemployment benefit set to expire in some form at the end of the week, the sharp bounce back in retail sales could also be at risk. Looking at the commercial real estate market, the lockdown has affected demand drivers for every property type in very different ways. None have been as negatively impacted as hospitality and retail. The retail sector has shown a sharp bifurcation in property performance and rent collections between tenants deemed essential and those labeled non-essential with the former nearly unaffected. The vast majority of rent forbearance and delinquencies during the lockdown have come from hospitality and retail. And we've seen a corresponding pickup in activity from clients in asset management and special servicing as well as from billions of dollars of opportunistic capital that have been raised in recent months. While certain parts of the industrial market have also been negatively impacted, the lockdown has accelerated positive trends for logistics. In fact once CoStar researchers capture all the leases signed in the month of June, it looks like it will be a record month for industrial leasing volume all-time record. For multi-family data from Apartments.com suggests that the spring leasing season was disrupted as you would expect. Asking rents are largely flat year-to-date instead of the gains that are typically seen during the warmer months of the year. We're seeing more noticeable moves lower in the rents of four and five-star properties in major metros in the CBs predominantly, but these are also metros where there are record high levels of new supply coming into the market. Given this increased competition on landlords looking to fill newly delivered space, it's no surprise that Apartments.com continues to experience record sales months. The office sector is perhaps the most talked about property type of them all, and its fate is certainly the most heavily debated in the media. April leasing volume predictably dropped as the transition to work-from-home began and people were more worried about getting a new router delivered to their home, office than looking at office space. That being said, April still saw nearly 15 million square feet of new leases signed. As we move through the quarter, the number have increased sharply as the new cycle shifted from breathless stories about the benefits of remote work to ones about its obvious pitfalls. There seems to be fewer stories today about companies moving toward full-time work-from-home and we're hearing more about hub-and-spoke office models where firms are looking to lease additional spaces closer to residential nodes from where their employees are commuting. Even if we have a successful vaccine full for immunity may be elusive and the realities of social distancing may be with us for years. In that context, I think it's highly likely that the amount of office space utilized at the workstation expands from a typical 36 square feet per workstation to a pi r squared or 3.4x6 squared or 113 square feet from 36 square feet to 136 -- 113 square feet. That could be a huge demand boost requiring tens of thousands of new office buildings albeit in shifting geographies. Uncertainty has permeate the capital markets landscape -- permeated the capital markets landscape, and we've seen a drop-off in deal volume, which registered at just over $46 billion in the second quarter of this year about 30% of where it trended in 2019 and 40% of what we've seen over the last five years. Yet the absence of deal flow isn't a reflection of serious -- commercial real estate's relevance waning rather that investors and lenders are finding it difficult to underwrite deals in this uncertain environment and that there's a pricing disconnect between buyers hoping for a steep discount and sellers holding on to pre-pandemic valuations. We expect that rising vacancy, slowing our negative rent growth and rising cap rates is likely to impair pricing and valuations by upwards of 10% relative to pre-COVID levels. These capital market trends illustrate the countercyclical nature of CoStar's business and its suite of products. During times of change in exogenous cyclicality, investors, owners, operators and lenders and tenants rely just as heavily on technology and data insights to inform their decisions and facilitate their deals operations and apartment searches on the Apartminternet. As we conclude our first quarter operating results in this terrible pandemic, I'm very grateful to all of my colleagues who continue to execute in our business at the highest levels of professionalism. My colleagues did not miss a beat and I have the greatest confidence in their ability to continue to deliver great results for our customers and investors whatever the challenges we face in the quarters ahead. Our services clearly remain mission-critical. Our online marketplaces are providing critical support to tens of thousands of clients maybe hundreds of thousands of clients who need our virtual leasing solutions to bridge them until we can return to the normalcy of an in-person property tour. This is a great quarter to be especially grateful to our great team, including you our investors the 12th player. At this call, having survived the thunderstorm without a power failure, I will turn the call over to our CFO, Scott Wheeler.