CoStar Group to Acquire Homes.com for $156M
By Celia Young April 15, 2021 11:53 am
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Commercial real estate data group CoStar Group announced it reached an agreement to buy residential property listing site Homes.com for a grand total of $156 million in cash. The Wednesday announcement tightens CoStar’s already titanic grip on real estate industry data.
CoStar is expected to close on the transaction in the first half of 2021 for the site, which boasts 5 million visitors per month and nearly 1.8 million residential property listings. It will join CoStar’s extensive portfolio of apartment and home listing sites, including Homesnap, Apartments.com, ApartmentFinder.com, ForRent.com, ApartmentHomeLiving.com, Westside Rentals, AFTER55.com, CorporateHousing.com, ForRentUniversity.com and Apartamentos.com.
The D.C.-based company plans to combine Homes.com with Homesnap, a workflow and marketing platform for residential real estate agents that CoStar acquired in December.
“The combination of Homes.com’s online portal and consumer traffic with Homesnap’s powerful mobile tools and highly effective agent marketing solutions has the potential to create a differentiated service that uniquely focuses on selling a house faster and at a better price, rather than just trying to take agent fees,” Andrew C. Florance, founder and CEO of CoStar Group, said in a press release.
This acquisition comes after the Federal Trade Commission filed an administrative complaint and kicked off a federal lawsuit in December against CoStar to block its planned $588 million acquisition of RentPath, Commercial Observer reported. The FTC complaint alleged that CoStar and RentPath have been significant rivals, and that an acquisition would only consolidate their control over the rental listing market in most U.S. cities.
While the FTC may have killed the RentPath deal, the acquisition of Homes.com is poised to close, and is expected to contribute approximately $5 to $10 million in incremental revenue to CoStar Group in the second half of 2021.
