Andrew Florance
Analyst · Needham and Company
Thank you, Tim. We are very pleased to announce that CoStar Group has entered into an agreement to acquire LoopNet, the premier online marketing service for commercial real estate. CoStar has agreed to purchase all of the outstanding shares of LoopNet for approximately $18.75 per share, which represents a 31% premium to LoopNet's closing price yesterday. On a pro forma basis for 2011, based upon annualized first quarter results for both companies, our combined company will have revenues of $321 million and adjusted EBITDA of $78 million. If you take into account, what we believe are the potential intermediate term cost synergies of $20 million, adjusted EBITDA of the combined companies will approach just under $100 million. We are combining two very innovative companies that have transformed the commercial real estate industry. The team at LoopNet led the commercial real estate industry from expensive and cumbersome paper-based marketing through traditional media like direct-mail, flyers and classified ads into the dramatically more efficient and effective world of marketing commercial properties on the Web. On the other side spectrum, CoStar revolutionized how commercial real estate professionals research and analyze commercial real estate. We believe that the combination of our two outstanding and complementary companies will lead to even more innovative and greater efficiencies by creating the premier internet solution for the $11 trillion commercial real estate industry. We expect that benefits to our customers and ultimately our shareholders to be very significant. The U.S. commercial real estate market is massive, complex and constantly changing. CoStar and LoopNet developed completely different business models address the challenges of aggregating content on, and providing comprehensive service to this $11 trillion asset class that has nearly $3 trillion in transaction bi-annually. Each model excels at tracking a different major segment of the industry, but neither comes close to covering the entire industry. Unfortunately, to often, our clients, who really need to understand the complete picture, pay the price for this lack of coverage by having to piece together information from many different sources, require investment in time, money and lost opportunities. Once the combination of LoopNet and CoStar is complete, and we integrate the back end databases of our two companies, we believe that we will deliver a higher quality marketing solution to LoopNet's customers and a higher quality information solution to CoStar's customers. CoStar's 900-strong research team proactively collects information on 1.5 million listings. LoopNet's marketplace, with 1.5 million monthly unique visitors, draws in nearly a million active listings. We estimate that together, will be able to deliver over 2 million unique listings to our customers. We believe that with this more complete coverage will significantly reduce our customers costs, save them time, and help them better understand the market, and empower them to better serve their customers. In turn, we believe that this will help us win many more new customers. One of the things that I learned in exploring this deal, that really amazed me, was just how little overlap there appears to be between LoopNet's subscriber base and ours. We have nearly 180,000 subscribers between us. Yet, since LoopNet sells mostly to individuals, and CoStar typically sells to companies, and because we are at very different spaces, we believe that the subscriber overlap could possibly be as small as 10% on a revenue basis. Therefore, we expect this to create significant opportunities for us to grow our $321 million combined revenue company into something much bigger through cross-selling. Clients that subscribe to both services have clearly told us that they would continue to subscribe to LoopNet and CoStar because they find very different value propositions from each service. Oftentimes, because the size and composition of our audiences, and the size of our databases and their dynamic nature, our respective prospects do not realize the full potential of our respective service offerings. We plan to build the cross-selling functionality right into each company's website. For example, CoStar customers will see prominent displays of how much more exposure is available for their listings on LoopNet and they will be able to buy that exposure with a single click. LoopNet customers will see prominent displays of how much information is available to them on CoStar, and we will make it easy for them to purchase that information. LoopNet has $4.8 million Registered Members and CoStar regularly communicates with over 350,000 active market participants, who in turn, represent the interest of about a million more participants. While 180,000 combined subscribers between us is an impressive number, we believe that over time, the number could significantly increase. We believe that LoopNet and CoStar are still early-stage companies with approximately 15% to 25% market share of what we estimate to be 600,000 to 1,000,000 active commercial real estate participants. We think this deal gives us an even stronger value proposition to offer these potential customers and it'll give us greater scale in our sales and marketing effort to better reach these prospects. With this combination, we believe that we can achieve significant forward cost synergies from many different areas of our businesses. By working with each other and focusing on the needs of the customer, we expect cost savings of approximately $20 million annually to be realized within 24 months of closing. Obviously, one area where we can begin to save money is by eliminating redundant legal costs. Now, as it turns out the legal cost being friends are almost as much as legal costs being not friends. But by acquiring LoopNet, we believe we can add hundreds of thousands of new listings with dramatically less cost than we would if we used 100% of our traditional researcher-driven model. That could be an enormous cost savings for us. We believe similar synergies will be achieved on the tech side, where we will be joining forces with an excellent and experienced team of software development professionals at LoopNet. This new team could eliminate the need for much of our planned hiring of our new software developers at CoStar. When we acquired Comps.com more than a decade ago, we were very successful at integrating their software team into the core of our technology leadership at CoStar. I believe most of those developers who came on board a decade ago at Comps.com are still here today making very important contributions to CoStar. We look forward to welcoming these software developers and all the LoopNet employees into the CoStar team, and working closely together to create even more innovative solutions for our respective clients. Money we redundantly spent trying to build systems independent of each other can now be invested more effectively into our core brands, allowing us to develop innovative new products faster and at a less cost. In combination, we can reduce our combined and not insignificant pay-per-click investments. Obviously, we will save on redundant public company costs. From a financial perspective, we are combining two complementary profitable growing companies with great cash flow. We believe that as a result of those opportunities to leverage costs and cross-sell services, our target margins will increase and eventually approach 40% to 45% in the intermediate term. We believe that this will enable us to de-lever very quickly to more conservative levels of debt. Finally, we believe the timing couldn't be better to do this acquisition. Later in this call, the CFO of LoopNet and the CFO of CoStar will report excellent first quarter results for both companies. I believe that these results herald clear inflection points in the recovery of the commercial real estate economy and the emergence of recovery in the general or main street commercial real estate economy. I believe LoopNet's revenue growth and renewal rate is most closely correlated with main street commercial real estate economy. Recovery in this area could drive faster LoopNet Premium Member growth. LoopNet's report today of a strong 2,000-plus net new Premium Membership growth quarter-over-quarter is a very significant announcement to us. We believe that our massive research operations and our industry-leading market analysis and quantitative forecasting models give us unique intelligence into the trends-driving commercial real estate. Either we were just plain lucky or we effectively used that insight when we recently purchased our headquarters in Washington and sold it a year later for more than twice what we paid for it. In that case, we were able to capitalize on the recovery of investment-grade real estate before the average investor was aware of it. We believe that the recovery in general commercial real estate is lagging investment grade by just a few quarters. Obviously, we cannot capitalize on this trend by buying a bunch of smaller commercial properties. However, we believe that the investment in LoopNet is an excellent proxy for the broader recovery in the general commercial real estate sector. From 2003 to 2007, when commercial real estate markets were strong in the U.S., CoStar and LoopNet's pro forma combined revenues grew in the range of 22% to 27% annually. Even during 2002 and the recent 2008-2010 economic downturn, combined revenues for CoStar and LoopNet grew in the range of negative 4% to 13%, which we feel is pretty good given the scale of the downturn. We are forecasting a much healthier commercial real estate economy in the next several years. While we may not return to those 20%-plus annual growth revenue rates, we believe we can significantly exceed the modest growth rates we have recently seen. We are looking forward to bringing CoStar and LoopNet together and providing an even more value to our respective customers. LoopNet is an incredibly strong brand and we intend to protect, evolve and grow this valuable brand. On behalf of my CoStar colleagues, I want to congratulate the LoopNet team on building such an impressive business to welcome them on board. We are very excited about this acquisition and we believe our customers will be, too. And with that, I will turn the call over to LoopNet CEO and Chairman, Rich Boyle.