Andrew Florance
Analyst · KBW
Well, I'd have to say between the operator and Rich, you guys have set a very high bar for radio personality voices. So I'm going to try to live up to that. Thank you for joining CoStar Group's earnings call for the second quarter of 2025. I am very pleased to report another exceptional quarter. CoStar achieved -- CoStar Group achieved revenue of $781 million, a strong 15% increase compared to last year. This marks our 57th quarter -- consecutive quarter of double-digit revenue growth. Adjusted EBITDA rose significantly to $85 million, representing an impressive 108% increase compared to Q2 of 2024. Both revenue and adjusted EBITDA exceeded consensus estimates and were above the high end of our guidance range. Our commercial real estate information and marketplace businesses also delivered an outstanding profit margin of 43% this quarter. Net new bookings totaled $93 million, a remarkable 65% increase over the previous quarter. This sets a new record as the highest quarterly net new bookings in CoStar Group's history. We're seeing strong performance across all our business segments, driven by strategic investments in expanding our sales force and innovative product development. Throughout 2025, we're growing our core sales team by 20% and tripling our Homes.com sales force from 230 representatives at the end of 2024 to about 750 by the end of 2025, all this to capture additional growth opportunities. Apartments.com had another excellent quarter with revenue up 11% from Q2 2024, reaching $292 million. Our sales team achieved $45 million in net new bookings, the fourth highest quarter ever, representing a 20% increase year-over-year. Apartments.com is approaching an annual revenue run rate of $1.2 billion and maintains a very strong EBITDA margin. I did have a percentage in there, but Chris had me take it out. During the second quarter, our sales team had over 171,000 quality interactions with clients and prospects, maintaining an outstanding Net Promoter Score of 94%. These interactions resulted in a 99% monthly renewal rate, the addition of 3,263 new rooftops or nearly 83,000 multifamily communities advertising on our platform. In the first half of 2025, we've already added 7,600 new apartment communities, more than we added throughout all of 2024, and we did it without steep discounting or paying hundreds of millions of dollars for inorganic revenue as our main competitor did. To address the multibillion dollar addressable market in apartments, we're growing our Apartments.com sales team to 500 representatives in 2025. So far, this year, we've added 65 new sales reps with large training classes scheduled for July and August. In Q2, Apartments.com launched a marketing campaign generating over 4.8 billion media impressions. The campaign reached renters across their favorite media channels and targeted landlords with new commercials featuring Brad Bellflower. We significantly increased our investment across key media channels. Streaming video grew by 25%, paid social by 13% and digital by 130% compared to Q2 '24. Apartments.com was prominently featured during live sports events, including the NFL Draft, College World Series, PGA Tour, NBA and MLB regular seasons and across popular programming on Bravo, E!, CBS, Netflix, Paramount+ and Hulu. We also made our Canadian broadcast debut during game 6 of the NHL playoffs. With the launch of our New York City specific search experience on Apartments.com, we ran targeted out-of-home advertising across all 5 bureaus in New York City and partnered with local influencers. The Apartments.com network averaged 42 million monthly unique visitors and 234 million network visits during this quarter, according to Google Analytics. The latest comScore data shows that all of the rental portals traffic declined Q2 '25 over Q2 '24, but with Apartments.com network doing the best with visits only down 11%, while Zillow Network rental network was down 13%, ApartmentGuide was down 21% and Rent.com was down dramatically, down 39%. Market research indicates that our unaided awareness among apartment seekers remain best-in-class at 68%, significantly higher than all competitors combined, all primary competitors combined. Our closest competitor trails by 30 percentage points and the next closest by 58 points. Realtor.com's unaided awareness for apartments stood at only 4% in June. Apartments.com continues to deliver more leads and nearly twice as many leases as our 2 closest competitors combined according to Entrata data. We believe the Apartments.com network holds the industry's most comprehensive inventory with a record 2.2 million rental availabilities in June of 2025. To further enhance exposure, we also feature Apartments.com listings on the Homes.com rental area, where traffic increased 26% year-over-year due to Homes.com's robust marketing efforts. Canadian Apartments.com also continues to perform well with visits up 31% and leads up 62% year-over-year. Since Q2 last year, we've grown our Canadian business by 300%, ending June with over 1,500 paying properties. Our presence at this year's National Apartment Association Apartamentalize Convention in Las Vegas was highly successful. We hosted 1,500 clients at our kickoff party featuring Kenny Chesney, attracted 3,100 booth visitors and generated over $500,000 in monthly net new bookings, translating to 6 million in annualized net new bookings. We showcased our latest AI-powered technology, including Matterport 3D tours and AI Voice Search and incredible interactive life-sized department exhibit called the Brad. We rolled out our new Matterport Max packages with great success. Clients and prospects who experienced the power of Matterport our booth were impressed and convinced of its value in accelerating the leasing process. These packages come with a Matterport Pro 3 camera and allow clients to create a virtual twin of their units, all their units, common areas and the entire building. Having a Matterport digital twin is becoming essential. 40% of apartment seekers look for communities in different cities and 41% are willing to rent site unseen if you provide high-quality imagery. Significantly, 53%, they'll say they will stop considering a rental unit without detailed imagery. Consumers love the Matterport experience on Apartments.com. In Q2, they viewed Matterports 67 million times, up 193% over the same period last year, spending 71% more time on listing detailed pages with the Matterport 3D tour. Listings with the Matterport 3D tour received 23x more leads than those without. Later this year, Apartments.com and Homes will introduce an AI-powered voice search, allowing consumers to find properties by speaking naturally or typing free-form phrases, no more filtering required. We have also been working with the largest property management firms in the country to provide greater fee transparency for the market. Last week in one of the top property managers in the country, we launched disclosure of their onetime and monthly fees associated with renting an apartment, creating complete fee transparencies for consumers on Apartments.com. Homes.com delivered a strong second quarter, achieving solidly positive sales growth after overcoming Q1 churn from the initial sales last year. Residential annualized net new bookings totaled $12 million for the quarter. Our expanding sales force drove consistent monthly growth, with May sales increasing 5% over April and June sales increasing 15% over May. Revenue for Q2 compared -- grew by 8% compared to Q2 of 2024. We signed 6,300 net new members, representing a 56% increase in membership during the quarter. Our dedicated Homes.com sales team significantly increased product demos, rising more than sixfold from March last year to June. Our B2B marketing efforts generated the highest lead volume since launch, with over 3,600 leads to our sales team in June alone, resulting in more than 5,400 product demos with a conversion rate exceeding 50%. The Homes.com network attracted an average of 111 million unique monthly visitors in Q2 according to Google Analytics, putting us well ahead of our third and fourth ranked competitors. Our marketing campaign has successfully boosted unaided awareness intent among users. Unaided awareness has grown dramatically from 4% at the launch in 2024 to over 36% today or in Q2. Unaided intent has risen 6 points since April to reach 25%, signaling a major breakthrough in user engagement. Member agents listings on Homes.com achieved 22x greater reach compared to nonmembers, significantly enhancing consumer engagement. Listings from members received 7x more detailed views, 4x more favorites and 6x more shares, resulting in faster sales and higher selling prices. Leveraging these marketing advantages, Homes.com members secured 62% more listings than nonmembers with an outstanding return on investment. Especially given the average new listing commission value of $15,000 against a monthly membership fee under $500. Our growing dedicated sales team is doing an increasingly effective job at educating agents about the value proposition of Homes.com. We have observed significant improvement in client satisfaction reflected in rising Net Promoter Scores. Our NPS grew from a modest 3 in Q4 of 2024 to 9 in Q1 of '25. And then it jumped substantially to 38 in Q2, marking a 340% quarter-over-quarter increase. Additionally, our early cancellation or failed payment rate on 12-month contracts remained well below 1% throughout most of Q2. The newly launched Boost product has been successful. Boost provides sellers and their agents with a flexible marketing option, allowing single property listings to be boosted on Homes.com to benefit from membership level marketing. Since Q2 launch, we sold 1,270 Boosts. Boosted listings reach over 14,000 homebuyers with an average of 32 views per buyer making boosted listings 25% more likely to go under contract within 10 days. I can't pass that up. Nearly 25% of Boost users have converted to full Homes.com memberships. So the Boost program is a great lead pipeline for our sales force. This month, we launched a new advertising campaign for Homes.com, celebrating our success building an audience of over 100 million monthly unique visitors to the Homes.com network. In the spot, Dan Levy and Heidi Gartner draw attention to Homes.com's massive audience to reinforce the real estate agents the value of marketing their properties and listings on this valuable -- to this valuable audience cost effectively on Homes.com. The spots also tell home shoppers that 100 million-plus people have chosen to use Homes.com, so perhaps they should check it out too. We believe that the majority of home buyers once they try Homes.com, prefer Homes.com. We strategically placed ads across popular networks, including CBS, FOX, ESPN, contextually relevant shows such as Girl Meets Farm and American Pickers, and major sporting events like the Stanley Cup Playoffs, MBA Finals, PJ Championship, MLB and WNBA regular seasons. Additionally, we expanded digital and streaming sponsorships with DraftKings and Roku and audio and podcasting partnerships with Spotify and Amazon Music, collectively generating over 4 billion targeted paid media impressions. We launched a highly customized direct mail member agent appreciation campaign aimed at nearly 100,000 home sellers represented by Homes.com members. This personalized 20-page brochure delivered shortly after a listing goes live, highlights the seller's home, their agent and the marketing advantages provided by Homes.com. The campaign has received extremely positive feedback, reinforcing seller confidence encouraging agent renewals. I believe that this campaign will further increase our NPS scores. This month, Zillow began questionably leveraging its market power by forcing agents to market listing on its platform within 24 hours of the listing being marketed or risk the listing being permanently banned. This tactic, we believe, raises serious antitrust concerns. Indeed, Compass has already filed a lawsuit against Zillow for such practices. Zillow banned its first listing despite it complying with Bright MLS and NAR regulations. Zillow falsely labeled the property as off-market on their website, misleading buyers. Zillow demands agents listings immediately to avoid losing the opportunity to divert and sell leads from those listings. Given the recent relaxations and clear cooperation no commingling rules, Zillow appears concerned that agents may opt for more agent-friendly platforms like Homes.com, which do not divert leads. By demanding immediate listings and simultaneously offering Zillow exclusive listing, Zillow risks weakening the relative value of the MLSs. A major brokerage has informed us that Zillow now seeks direct feeds from brokers, bypassing MLSs suggesting MLSs may soon recognize Zillow as an existentialist threat -- or an existential threat, not an existentialist. Homes.com is offering free boost to any home for sale that Zillow bans. The first home ban that we're aware of is in Montgomery County, Maryland. And with a Homes.com boost, we've been able to serve it up to buyers 155,000 times in the first 12 days, it was on the market. 205 buyers have favored listing on Homes.com and 43 have shared it with a friend or family member. I visited that open house on that listing this weekend to support the agent, and there was good traffic. The agent told me they've already had 30 showings. Homes.com provides a compelling agent-friendly alternative to Zillow's aggressive tactics. Agents are liking what we are doing. Our impressions on Homes.com social media channels targeted to agents have increased 1,247% in Q2 '25 compared to Q1 '25. We're seeing considerable social listing growth with our net sentiment score up 58% since last quarter. From April to June '25, our social media engagement has increased by 48%, with a 30% growth in positive sentiment. The reason is simple. Homes.com benefits all parties involved, home buyers, sellers and agents and MLSs. We eliminate friction by providing a professional online presentation of every home and community without distracting ads or spam, and we're connecting buyers honestly, directly with the seller's agent. Member listings and Boost reach more buyers more frequently. Members build their brand by being prominently featured across our site and retarget across thousands of websites. No other U.S. portal offers this level of exposure for agents and listings. In August, we plan to launch a robust new home section on Homes.com. This is a vital segment as approximately 60% of homebuyers prefer new construction according to the National Association of Homebuilders. I'm glad they're that confident. We have already secured 200 agreements with leading builders, positioning this new feature as a significant future revenue stream, enabling us to capitalize on a substantial market opportunity. It was another strong quarter for our U.K. residential marketplace on the market. Our inventory continues to grow with over 800,000 listings now on site, up 20% year-over-year and a new record for the business. We're delivering a significant ROI to over 16,300 subscribing customers with leads up 12% in the quarter year-over-year, and total page views on the site up 28% for the same period. We're building an audience of serious property seekers, with average time on site per active user up 85% year-over-year, and lead to visit conversions that we believe are beating Rightmove's conversion rate. Net new bookings reached a record of 100,000 in June, which was the 14th consecutive month of net new revenue growth equivalent to an impressive $9.4 million of annualized revenue. We're continuing to develop the product using the Homes.com playbook as we further differentiate from our competitors. We are in the final stages of acquiring Domain Holdings, one of Australia's 2 largest real estate portals and among the top 10 real estate marketplaces globally. We anticipate the transaction will close in the third quarter of this year, and we're very excited about combining CoStar's capabilities with Domain. Recently, a new dynamic has emerged in the Australian market. The country's antitrust regulator, the ACCC, has announced an investigation in the REA Group, which is Domain's primary competitor. In July, numerous real estate agents in Australia reported that REA Group increased their monthly subscription fees by up to 78%, likely prompting that investigation. We believe the situation creates an excellent opportunity for Domain to position itself as the more reasonable and stable service provider. It's worth knowing that REA Group in Australia and Realtor.com in the U.S. share common ownership under News Corp and the Murdoch family. Media reports speculate that Realtor.com CEO might return to Australia to replace REA Group's current CEO. If that were to occur, it would mean 2 disruptive leadership changes in our favor in one move. Our CoStar product achieved $271 million in revenue in Q2 '25. Revenue growth accelerated sequentially from Q1, increasing 7% year-over-year in Q2. Net new bookings from our CoStar product accelerated from last quarter as we achieved our highest quarter of CoStar net new bookings since Q3 2023. STR had its best quarter for net new bookings, up 24% year-over-year as compared to Q2 '24. This is the third consecutive quarter of increasing net new bookings for CoStar as we generate strong sales with banks, institutional investors and owners. I'm happy to see net new bookings for brokers trending upward each quarter this year. We remain on track to increase the CoStar product sales force by 20% in 2025, reaching a total of 400 sales representatives to position us to capture the substantial and growing total addressable market there. Our lender sales continue to exhibit strong growth as our expanded sales team meets the increasing demand for our product. With over 400 clients and revenue approaching $100 million, we've established a strong foundation pretty quickly that we'll continue to build on as we roll out additional capabilities and expand our sales force to target the larger $1 billion TAM in the lender space. Our quarterly CoStar renewal rate increased to 93%. Our Net Promoter Score for the U.S. sales team reached an outstanding 70%. That was a major first for us and been a solid progression for a couple of years there. Our Canadian team's NPS grew to 63%, again, an all-time high for both teams. In addition, gross productivity per rep has improved in each of the last 6 months. The number of subscribers for CoStar grew to 275,000, up 19% year-over-year driven predominantly by the ongoing migration of STR users into CoStar and the addition of new STR subscribers to the CoStar platform. I'm very pleased with our continued growth in a challenging market. The CRE market continues to face difficulties, particularly in the office segment with persistently high vacancy rates, though moderating and slightly worsening negative net absorption rates. We're seeing a sharp decline in new deliveries, which should help stabilize the office market in the near future. Transaction volumes have maintained a positive seasonal trend, with Q2 up 43% year-over-year. The increase in deal flow was consistent across the 5 main property types with office transaction volume spiking 71%, retail increasing 46%, multifamily rising 42%, industrial growing 29% and hospitality up 18% for the same period. Our international businesses have achieved 4 consecutive quarters of all-time high net new bookings with an impressive 90% year-over-year growth in Q2 '25 compared to Q2 '24. In the U.K., we're solidifying our market-leading positioning, leading -- boosting our year-to-date net new bookings by 257% compared to the first half of last year and accelerating year-over-year revenue growth to 14% in Q2 '25 versus Q2 '24. Concurrently, we've streamlined our cost structure, realizing $40 million in cost savings this year which represents 19% of our 2024 expense base in Europe. Our European sales initiatives are led by Alexa-Maria Rathbone Barker, who was recently promoted to lead the CoStar business in Europe. Alexa joined CoStar Group as Head of European Sales 3 years ago following a decade-long tenure at Bloomberg, where she held senior leadership roles focused on international growth and led the European analytics team. In her new capacity, Alexa will drive the continued expansion of our U.K. business and oversee the broader growth of CoStar across Europe. We're positioning our European business to take advantage of the substantial international growth opportunity. In Europe, over 50% of the value of CRE transactions are cross-border, yet there are no comprehensive pan-European CRE solutions. We have been methodically expanding our European research and marketplace capabilities. We anticipate launching CoStar in France by the end of the year. LoopNet delivered an outstanding performance in the second quarter. It generated more net new business in the first half of 2025 than the entirety of 2024. Net new bookings in the first half of 2025 surged by 345% compared to the same period last year. Consequently, revenue growth accelerated sequentially from Q1 and increased by 8% year-over-year. we expect LoopNet's revenue growth to exceed 10% in the second half of 2025, moving to double-digit growth. Despite ongoing challenges and volatility in the commercial real estate market, we've implemented significant changes to unlock LoopNet's full potential. As previously discussed, our focus on selling LoopNet packages that enable advertisers to promote their entire portfolio rather than a selected few properties. This approach delivers a high return on investment for our clients, increases listing coverage on LoopNet and enhances both the consumer and customer experience. Furthermore, the rollout of asset-based pricing continues to yield positive outcomes. With each passing month, our service is increasingly priced relative to the value we deliver to clients, resulting in year-over-year increase in monetization per listing. LoopNet is the world's most active commercial real estate marketplace. Tenants and investors begin their search online and LoopNet is their preferred destination. Properties listed on LoopNet sell and lease faster. For instance, one of the largest global brokerage firms and long-time client of CoStar recently significantly increased their investment in LoopNet marketing after we quantitatively demonstrated that listings on LoopNet were 60% more likely to close in a given time period than those not listed on the platform. We built the largest audience of commercial real estate shoppers globally with hundreds of thousands of properties available for sale and lease. In 2024, $120 billion worth of transactions occurred on LoopNet, where tenants or buyers viewed listings on our site before pursuing the deals they ultimately closed. Our effort to expand LoopNet's global footprint are progressing well. We launched LoopNet in Spain, and we expect to launch LoopNet France in Q4. This will bring our total listings across Europe to over 100,000, with significant potential for further expansion as we address the evident market need for a pan-European and global commercial real estate marketplace. With the expected close on the Domain acquisition in Q3 2025, Australia will soon become part of the LoopNet network. That will be a good day. Land.com achieved the highest quarter of net new bookings since Q3 2022. This was a result of improved segmentation and servicing of clients. Clients elected to migrate their marketing exposure from the lower and middle advertising plans to the highest plan. Signature ads increased by 49%. Land professionals will benefit from a tremendous increase in reach and value because of the promotion of Land's paid listings on Homes.com and the integration of our recently acquired AcreValue. CoStar Real Estate Manager continues to grow revenue and drive synergies between Visual Lease and Real Estate Manager. Subscription revenue grew 9% in Q2 '25 compared to Q2 '24. I recently had the opportunity to spend some time in Atlanta working with the product teams and the integration of CoStar between Visual Lease and Real Estate Manager, along with Matterport and LoopNet. I'm confident this will be an amazing solution for anyone that leases commercial space. BizBuySell revenue reached $8.8 million in the second quarter, a 9% increase year-over-year. Business for sale net new bookings increased 200% from Q2 2024, driven by strong growth in both business owner and broker subscriptions. Subscription revenue from BizBuySell Edge, which offers entrepreneurs advanced tools and marketing insights grew, 50% year-over-year. Buyer demand continued to strengthen with lead volume increasing 23% Q2 year-over-year. Business owners are increasingly turning to BizBuySell for valuation estimates, educational content and other resources. Over 25,000 new business owners registered on BizBuySell during the quarter, with 5,000 creating detailed business profiles that shared location, industry revenue and profit. Importantly, thousands of these owners also turned to BizBuySell each quarter to connect with our network of business brokers subscribers for expert guidance and listing representation. In Q2, brokers reported 2,342 sold business transactions on the platform, totaling nearly $2 billion in enterprise value. Brokers are rapidly adopting our recently released deal accelerator feature which streamlines dealmaking by automating buyer qualification and information sharing processes, helping brokers close more deals and earn higher commissions. Finally, turning to Matterport, saving the best for last. Matterport is clearly the world's leading provider of digital twin solutions technology. Its primary competition comes from the hundreds of billions of traditional 2-dimensional images used to market real estate and manage facilities. However, these 2D photos fall significantly short of Matterport's immersive capabilities, which intuitively transport remote viewers into a space providing experience second only to physically being there, hence, porting matter. While Matterport offers an exceptional product, the business has not yet achieved profitability and its growth rate has slowed. We strongly believe that integrating Matterport with CoStar Group will help the company thrive, accelerate growth and achieve strong profit margins. An integrated Matterport solution will significantly enhance the value of CoStar's marketplaces and information platforms. Currently, Matterport has a very small sales force. I believe, fewer than 30 quota-carrying salespeople globally, not quite one per major country, which means many of Matterports most promising revenue opportunities have never been contacted by a Matterport salesperson. That will change. We plan to significantly expand Matterport sales force and market its integrated solutions through the thousands of CoStar sales representatives at Homes.com, LoopNet, Domain, Real Estate Manager Land, Apartments.com and other platforms. Historically, Matterport has operated as a product-led company with a strong business consumer focus, which resulted in less emphasis on sales efforts or field sales efforts and less focus on its most powerful technology, the Matterport 3 camera. We intend to shift Matterport towards a business-to-business or B2B approach. The Matterport Pro 3 camera delivers a superior capture experience and a very superior display experience compared to mobile devices. Customers using the Pro 3 camera have an 85% renewal rate for our SaaS services, while those using an Android phone only have a 40% renewal rate. We plan to invest time and capital in developing even more advanced cameras, appropriately named the Matterport Pro 4 and the Pro 4 Ultra specs to be revealed one day. We will work to maintain our highest-end cameras more -- make our highest-end cameras more price accessible to the hundreds of thousands of potential users around the world. Right now, the first Matterport taken with the Pro 3 effectively costs a photograph or $6,500. The first picture costs you $6,500. The second cost $3, the third, the fourth or fifth, each cost $3. As a result, many potential users never get to the second Matterport or the first Matterport. This is easy enough to profitably change and solve for. We're integrating Matterport's amazing capabilities more deeply into all of our portals and information solutions. I think that in combination, we can bring properties to life like never before. We're relaunching the Matterport brand, adding the signature CoStar Group Star Wheel logo to the front of the Matterport name, and we're going to co-brand Matterport with our portal brands, appropriately to the property types. While we invest in profitable growth initiatives at Matterport, we have a sharp eye on getting to profitability so that we ultimately are positioned to achieve our goal of digitizing the world's real estate. Yesterday, we began winding down operations of Matterport's photography business VHT. Matterport acquired VHT in June of 2022, but has not realized its strategic potential. VHT primarily operates as a loss-making real estate photography service, largely focused in the Chicago market. Approximately 75% of VHT's photography services do not include a Matterport tour, and none of their contractors are using the high-quality Pro 3 camera. VHT generated roughly $14 million in annual revenue, but incurred losses exceeding $10 million. It's a nonstrategic asset, so we're going to reallocate resources to more productive areas. In conclusion, I'm thrilled with our strong financial results and CoStar record annualized net new bookings quarter of $93 million, a remarkable 65% increase over the prior quarter. Again, $93 million in net new bookings in the quarter. With a $100 billion total addressable market in the world's largest asset class, we remain committed to our mission of digitizing global real estate. At this point, I will finally turn the call over to our CFO, Chris Lown.