CoStar Group, which operates offices from Columbia Gateway Office Park, has reached an agreement to acquire Homesnap Inc. for $250 million in cash.
Homesnap is an industry-leading online and mobile software platform that provides user-friendly applications to optimize residential real estate agent workflow and reinforce the agent-client relationship.
More than 300,000 agents nationwide use the application an average of 30 times each month. The platform enjoys high growth and engagement as the number of active monthly users has grown at a compounded annual growth rate of more than 40 percent since 2016, while marketing product sales have risen more than 75 percent per year during that same period.
Supported by a consortium of hundreds of the country’s largest multiple listing services (MLSs), more than 1.1 million real estate agents have access to Homesnap Pro. These agents represent more than 90 percent of the residential real estate agents and listings in the United States. With the support of this impressive consortium, Homesnap’s public residential real estate portal showcases 1.3 million active property listings. Tens of millions of home shoppers use the Homesnap website and app to look for a home.
“The acquisition of Homesnap will enable us to enter a new space and expand the total addressable markets in which we can compete,” said CoStar Group Founder and CEO Andy Florance. “The estimated value of commercial real estate assets in the U.S. is $16 trillion. With the new addition of clients and information covering 90 percent of the estimated $27 trillion dollar U.S. residential real estate market we are almost tripling the size of our addressable markets. Over the past thirty years, CoStar has become the leading real estate technology platform by working in partnership with commercial real estate brokers to serve their needs for data, analytics and advertising exposure for their property listings. Similarly, Homesnap works in very close partnership with residential agents to serve their needs for data, analytics and advertising exposure for their property listings. We will continue to differentiate our residential real estate portal and solutions by working solely to help agents market their listings and their brands, which is in sharp contrast to other portals that increasingly advertise on top of agent listings and offer brokerage services directly.”
The addition of Homesnap’s complementary offerings will quadruple the number of professional, paying brokers and active agent users on the CoStar Group U.S. platforms from approximately 100,000 today to over 400,000. The number of U.S. property listings available across CoStar’s brands will double from approximately 1.35 million today to over 2.6 million.