Andrew Florance
Analyst · Citi
Thank you for joining us today. CoStar Group delivered an outstanding third quarter. Revenue grew 14% year-over-year to $952 million, marking our 62nd consecutive quarter of double-digit growth. More importantly, we delivered record quarterly adjusted EBITDA of $229 million, double the prior year and surpassing the previous record of $193 million from Q4 2021. EBITDA increased $166 million year-over-year to $179 million in the quarter, also the highest in our history. Net income was $74 million, an increase of $105 million year-over-year. Third quarter adjusted EBITDA, excluding the positive impact of Zonda, exceeded the high end of our guidance range due to strong cost control with quarterly operating costs declining 2% year-over-year. We expect to continue to benefit from these savings in the inclusion of Zonda, and we're therefore raising our full year adjusted EBITDA guidance to the midpoint of $830 million, 24% above our previous record of $672 million set back in 2022. That represents an adjusted EBITDA margin of 22%, up from 14% in 2025 and 9% in 2024. As we've done repeatedly over the past 4 decades after completing an investment period, we focus on generating strong multi-year increases in adjusted EBITDA. This time is no different, and we remain firmly committed to our adjusted EBITDA target of $1.25 billion in 2028. We're generating strong margin expansion while simultaneously investing aggressively in high potential future revenue drivers. Our 2026 margin growth came from initial steps to improve workforce marketing and procurement efficiency. Last quarter, we expected to bring our 2026 expenses $100 million below our original guidance. We now expect to bring them $150 million below that guidance, excluding Zonda. A deep review of our expense base over the last 2 months identified approximately $200 million of additional cost efficiency opportunities across procurement, organizational design, technology, infrastructure, marketing effectiveness and post-acquisition integration. That's incremental to the $150 million we expect to save this year which we expect to realize the additional $200 million over the next 12 to 18 months, while continuing to invest in future revenue drivers. Our annualized net new bookings were below our expectations, coming in at $37 million for the third quarter. We attribute this to economic headwinds and slower-than-expected sales force growth. Our renewal rates remained high, but with a growing multibillion-dollar subscription base, we need to continue to grow high ROI sales force headcount. Our sales team met with hundreds of thousands of clients and prospects, the lack the scale to reach the hundreds of thousands of additional prospects we have. We currently have about 2,000 sales professionals, down about 10% from the prior year. We launched Homes.com with a large centralized inside sales team in Richmond, many of them without prior sales experience, not a profile we have traditionally hired. Many have succeeded, others have not. We'll continue to build the Richmond team, but we are shifting most of our growth effort to the field sales professionals with prior real estate and sales experience in our top cities. Field reps who meet with clients face-to-face are, on average, much more productive than inside sales and having visited prospects and clients with our home field sales teams at the agents' open houses and offices. I can tell you, agents are very receptive to local, in-person sales professionals. We have taken action. We expect to publicly announce the appointment of a new highly qualified CHRO within the next 2 weeks. We are decentralizing sales recruiting from Richmond into our major city hubs with recruiters reporting into our field sales leadership, and we are building sales force growth into our sales management compensation plans. We expect to reaccelerate sales force growth in 2027 to serve our growing customer base and reach our prospect opportunities. Nonetheless, the impact of the third quarter net bookings together with lower transaction volume at Domain means we're revising our revenue guidance for the full year. Our updated full year guidance is up $25 million at the midpoint and includes approximately $60 million from Zonda. So excluding Zonda, the outlook is $35 million or 1% lower than in July. Our commercial real estate business generated $492 million of revenue in Q3, an increase of 7% year-over-year and adjusted EBITDA of $180 million, down 2% year-over-year due to investments in upcoming product releases, including Australia, France and the new homes modules. CoStar had a great quarter with revenue of $344 million, up 8% year over year. Renewal rates remained strong at 92%. NPS reached a record 70 and users grew 17% year-over-year to 331,000 subscribers. The CoStar sales force of 485 grew 4% in the quarter but remains 4% below the beginning of the year. We anticipate returning to Q4 2025 levels by year-end. We are launching a transformative new AI-driven research process for CoStar Tenant that I believe can expand the productivity of our tenant researchers more than tenfold, allowing us to offer much deeper, more accurate information on order of magnitude more corporate occupiers. Our Tenant AI agents combined 4 decades of proprietary property level and ground truth from our field researchers with thousands of other sources. So we can now update all 6.7 million Tenant locations every year instead of just updating a small percentage. We're updating with higher accuracy than we've ever achieved. In head-to-head tests, an AI agent using only publicly available data had a 75% error rate. We believe our solution operates with single-digit error rates. Our CoStar's international growth momentum is continuing. In Canada, we now serve all 5 leading brokerage firms, as we do in the U.K., where CoStar subscribers now participate in 80% of commercial real estate transactions, and August renewal rates reached an impressive 94%. In France, following CoStar's launch last quarter, we made a strong start in the migration upselling of over 1,100 Business Immo customers, onboarding our first major global brokerage firm nearly right away. In Australia, we're nearing launch with a proprietary data set of more than 93,000 commercial properties, 45,000 curated listings and 123,000 Tenant records, plus close to 10 million pages of government filings abstracted with AI, which we believe will make CoStar Australia one of the most compelling solutions we've ever offered. This week, we are launching CoStar Debt Solutions Benchmark built on $1.5 trillion of CRE debt across more than 155,000 loans, giving lenders visibility into non-securitizing activity for origination, portfolio risk and compliance. Next year, we expect to add loan origination capabilities to lending workflows. LoopNet generated $89 million of revenue in Q3, up 13% year-over-year. LoopNet's sales force of 220 representatives was up 20% year over year, helping drive a 30% sequential increase in Q3 annualized net new bookings. LoopNet and CoStar sales reps generally call in the same firms with large owners, brokerages and enterprises that makes sense as the decision-makers differ and the solutions can be more complex. For small to mid-sized clients and prospects, one skilled rep can sell both products more effectively, reducing our cost of sales and offering a single point of contact prospects desire. Our U.K. trial of this approach this year has produced very good results. U.K. revenue in Q3 rose 22% year-over-year and silver level renewal rates reached 96% in August, and we are now cross-trading reps to roll out the same strategy in the U.S. later this year. Ten-X is regaining momentum under its new President, Steve Price, winning back volume from the industry's largest brokerages, investors and loan servicers. The third quarter trade rate of 60% was the highest since the second quarter of 2022. CoStar Real Estate Manager grew annualized net new bookings 15% year-over-year, with the majority of new bookings replacing competitor applications, and we're expanding our direct sales presence into Europe. Matterport delivered strong Q3 performance with subscription revenue up 11%, direct sales bookings up 14% and new enterprise customers up 46% year-over-year. Following the rebalancing of the Pro3 commercial model towards subscription July, shipments of the Pro3 reached their highest level since launch, up 52% year-over-year. Matterport's profitability has improved massively since it was a stand-alone public company prior to acquiring it, and we expect Matterport to be profitable by the end of 2027. BizBuySell's Q3 net new subscription revenue grew 282% year-over-year, driven by strong supply side demand and membership increased 23% to a record level. Residential revenue was $460 million in Q3, up 23% year-over-year. This included Zonda from August 21, on a full quarter basis, Zonda would take our annualized single-family home revenue to approximately $500 million. Residential third quarter adjusted EBITDA quadrupled quarter-over-quarter to $49 million. This growth was delivered despite some of the most challenging residential and apartment market conditions in many years across the U.S., U.K. and Australia. In the U.S., the interest rate environment drove the pending home sales index to its lowest level on record in September and multifamily remains under pressure with 8% vacancy, rent growth of 1%, which is real growth of negative and the 43% of properties offering concessions in September, the highest we've ever observed. In Australia, rising interest rates were compounded by the government's shift in residential tax treatments -- investment tax treatments. Sydney home sales fell 27% in the quarter and house prices are falling across every Australian city for the first time in 15 years. That's a very significant headwind for Domain. Apartments.com delivered Q3 revenue of $320 million, up 6% year-over-year. The Apartments.com network reached 48 million average monthly unique visitors, up 10%, and 237 million quarterly visits, up 6%, both the highest since Q2 2024, while tour requests rose 57% and applications for apartments more than doubled. Our sales force remains a key differentiator. The team conducted 191,000 quality meetings in Q3, maintained a very impressive 86 NPS and held our average revenue per property steady year-over-year. One of our top priorities for Apartments.com through 2027 is to grow our sales team. Since Q1 '23, Apartments.com revenue has grown by an impressive 53%, but the sales team has only grown 21% and is down this year. During the third quarter, we suffered the consequences. Our team did not have enough time to both service their existing customer base and pursue new business. Our monthly renewal rate dipped 20 basis points to 98.4%, and we ended the quarter with 91,155 properties, down 2% sequentially. The team still delivered impressive gross monthly sales, averaging 6,355 in gross monthly sales per field sales rep. With our restructured sales recruiting process, we believe we can achieve our growth goals and put more reps in front of clients and prospects with the evidence of our unique renter audience product and position to serve the industry. Renters love our Matterport 3D technology. They viewed more than 65 million tours, up 99% year-over-year and listings with Matterport generated over 4x more leads and nearly 6x as many tours or application requests. Apartments.com remains the most recognized apartment search brand with unaided awareness of 63% in September, up 4 points year-over-year and more than 25 points ahead of the nearest competitor. That awareness drives a unique audience per Comscore. 74% of Apartments.com visitors have never visited Zillow Rentals, 90% have never visited Rent.com, and 95% have never visited Apartment List. If you want to reach apartment seekers, one site reaches far more than any other, and that's Apartments.com. We launched Apartments.com AI this summer and are promoting it nationally, nearly 2 billion consumer impressions by year-end and our partnership with OpenAI lets renters move directly from a ChatGPT conversation to a transaction on our trusted inventory, extending the reach of Apartments.com in an AI world. Attribution is another area where a large sales team will help us. Most of our clients reporting credits, the last touch, often the community's property website, and they think that's the source of the lease, missing the discovery touch point that first introduced the renter to the property. In September, we launched the attribution challenge with Hyly.AI, an independent measurement partner to analyze clients' actual lead and lead sources. The first 6 clients that took the challenge found that Apartments.com delivered on average more than double the leases they're reporting indicated twice the value they believed on a cost per lead basis. And in less than a month, 75 property management companies have signed up. Homes.com delivered strong Q3 growth with revenue up 50% year-over-year to approximately $31 million. We ended the quarter with more than 36,000 members with average subscriber pricing increasing to 271 in September. We welcome Felix Kusch as President of Homes.com in September. Felix brings extensive real estate portal experience, including leading immowelt in Germany and Immoweb in Brussels. We introduced Platinum Premium Advertising in mid-September to Homes.com, a classic depth advertising product like the premium levels we offer at Apartments, LoopNet and Domain. Platinum moves a listing on -- that an agent selects the top of the sort order with 5x retargeting and extensive audience boost across the internet. Member listings generate 50x the exposure of basic listings, but premium listings generate 233x the exposure. With the introduction of Platinum, the average sales price increased 58% in October to $429. Sales productivity also reached its highest level of the year. Homes.com generated $7 million of annualized net new bookings in the third quarter despite reducing inside sales reps from a peak of 655 a year ago to 267 today. When we demo Homes membership to an agent, we consistently achieved close rates above 40%. The objective is more demos and expanding our field sales team is how we get in front of more agents. Brand health remains strong, unaided awareness rose to 37% in June. Net Promoter Score held at 41, and more than half of September traffic came from direct and organic channels, reducing our reliance on paid traffic. We are adding Apartments.com's independent owner rental features to Homes.com to expand our revenue at the lower end of the market. In Q3, Homes.com renter traffic increased 12% year-over-year, organic traffic rose 30% and leads from Homes.com for Apartments.com multifamily customers grew 462% Domain delivered Q3 revenue of $70 million, down 5% year-over-year on a pro forma basis with core residential revenue flat at $48 million and residential depth advertising down 5%. Domain's revenue is transaction-based, not subscription-based, so it's sensitive to swings in transaction volume that I described earlier. Dozens of CoStar Group Domain and Homes.com product managers and engineers are in advanced planning to combine the best of Domain and Homes.com products on a single lower net cost global platform which we believe will enhance our competitive position in both the U.S. and Australia and drive EBITDA expansion. We anticipate releasing combined platform, the combined platform in 2027 after which those teams will integrate our U.K. platform OnTheMarket as well. OnTheMarket has delivered 29 consecutive months of positive net new bookings. We serve over 17,000 customer branches and new homes developments up 6% year-over-year. Total listings are up 14% to 875,000, more total stock than Zoopla per third-party data, and our leads grew 7% to 4.7 million in Q3. Land.com revenue grew 8% year-over-year, and annualized net new bookings increased 22% driven by 44% growth in signature ads and a 15% reduction in cancellations. We welcomed Zonda to CoStar in August as the leading B2B homebuilder information platform, serving more than 3,000 builders, developers and suppliers and lenders. Zonda extends our proprietary data software and marketplace model into new home construction. Zonda positions CoStar in a nearly $1 trillion annual market that remains reliant on fragmented data and manual processes. Its subscription analytics provides lot level insight from entitlement through sales, and it will expand Homes.com's new construction inventory and builder advertising opportunity. This month, I had the opportunity to meet with a number of Zonda clients, the leaders in home building. and the reception has been very positive. I'm struck by the similarities to an earlier Apartments.com. When we purchased Apartments.com, the industry had not yet benefited from demand creation and scale. Once we began marketing Apartments to major consumer audiences, property managers loved the demand we created, and we grew Apartments.com revenue from $85 million to well over $1 billion today. American homebuilders produce a great product, and I believe we can create similar demand at scale for new homes through Zonda and Homes.com. Today, we announced a definitive agreement to acquire Vexcel, the operator of the world's largest and highest-quality aerial imagery program. Vexcel's cameras produce the aerial imagery behind Bing maps at Microsoft, and it was spun out as an independent company in 2016. Since then, it has built something nobody else has. Vexcel designs its own camera system in Graz, Austria, flies its own fleet of aircraft and collects more than 60 million images a year across 45 countries, much of it at 7.5 centimeters, 16x more pixels per square meter than the roughly 30-centimeter resolution of commercial satellites. That combination of quality, accuracy and global coverage is why the largest technology companies in the world who could buy imagery from anyone buy it from Vexcel. Vexcel is a strong business with roughly $140 million of revenue in the last 12 months, growing more than 30% on reoccurring multiyear data contracts and profitable with an adjusted EBITDA margin of around 20%. Its camera and processing road map should keep lowering the cost of capture, sharpening resolution and shorten the time from flight to deliver data. That's before taking into consideration what we believe will be significant synergies from bringing Vexcel into CoStar. Since 1989, CoStar Group has deployed thousands of researchers driving tens of millions of miles to find, document and photograph real estate tenants and construction. Direct observation of on-the-ground facts that has differentiated CoStar from its competitors and made us the leading CRE information solution in the world. Advances in aerial photography and LiDAR let Vexcel produce extremely high-resolution images and precise measurement of every kind of property in the built environment, combine those images with rapidly evolving ability of AI to recognize and extract information and features from them, and we can now create a transformative new ultra low-cost proprietary data source. Every aerial image we own becomes a data record. Computer vision reads a property's physical attributes straight off the pixels, roof material, parking count, architecture, condition, year built and hundreds of more data fields. All into a structured attribute database covering the entire market dramatically reducing the cost and time it takes to expand our geographic coverage and improving our data quality and depth of data. Vexcel collects data from 45 countries in more than 320 major global metros and sees hundreds of millions of buildings and houses clearly from the air. It took us 4 decades to inspect several million properties. With Vexcel and AI, we believe we can observe and capture valuable data on hundreds of millions of properties in 24 months. CoStar can differentiate the data we collect from the air and from that of competitors by connecting with all the intelligence we have on who and what is inside these properties. Real estate brokers, developers, construction companies, utilities, insurers, state and local federal governments buy both CoStar and high-resolution aerial imagery. So combining these 2 companies, we can cross-sell our solutions highly efficiently. Vexcel has reached $140 million in revenue with just 6 salespeople. We believe we can accelerate its growth by expanding its sales force and leveraging our 2,000 salespeople who already have relationships with many of Vexcel's most important prospects. Robin will address more details of the Vexcel acquisition in his remarks. We look forward to welcoming Vexcel to CoStar Group. It is clearly aligned with our mission of digitizing the world's real estate with an incredible ability to leverage AI to create proprietary real estate data of durable value. So in his decade at CoStar Group, Robin Rossmann has proved to be an invaluable executive in a number of roles with increasing responsibility. I have had the honor to work with a number of great CFOs. And I can already tell that Robin is a great fit. And I think you can see that in some of our cost control initiatives we're achieving. So I'm pleased to turn the call over to him for his inaugural earnings call.