CoStar Group delivered a strong second quarter of 2025 with revenue up 15% to $781 million, its 57th consecutive quarter of double-digit growth, and adjusted EBITDA more than doubling to $85 million, both above the high end of guidance. Net new bookings set a company record at $93 million, up 65% sequentially, led by a record $45 million from Apartments.com and improving LoopNet and CoStar productivity. Homes.com showed clear momentum with NPS jumping from 9 to 38 and 6,300 net new members, though it remained early with revenue up only 8%. Management raised full-year revenue guidance to $3.135 billion to $3.155 billion and adjusted EBITDA to $370 million to $390 million, excluding the pending Domain acquisition agreed at AUD 4.43 per share. Analyst focus centered on Apartments.com competitive dynamics versus a discounting Zillow, Homes.com pricing and penetration strategy, and the tripling of the Homes.com sales force toward about 750 reps by year-end.

What went well
  • Second quarter revenue rose 15% year-over-year to $781 million, above the high end of guidance and marking the 57th consecutive quarter of double-digit revenue growth.
  • Adjusted EBITDA jumped 108% year-over-year to $85 million, also exceeding the high end of the $50 million to $60 million guidance range.
  • Net new bookings set a company record at $93 million, up 65% sequentially and 38% year-over-year, with Apartments.com, CoStar and LoopNet all contributing.
  • Apartments.com grew revenue 11% to $292 million with a record $45 million in net new bookings, a 99% monthly renewal rate, a 94 NPS, and 7,600 communities added in the first half, more than all of 2024.
  • Homes.com NPS jumped from 9 in Q1 to 38 in Q2, a 340% sequential increase, alongside 6,300 net new members up 56% and early cancellation rates below 1% on twelve-month contracts.
What went wrong
  • Homes.com remained early and small, with annualized net new bookings of only $12 million and revenue up just 8%, after overcoming Q1 churn from the prior year's initial sales.
  • Management discontinued about $10 million of non-core Matterport revenue that did not contribute to earnings, prompting a reduction to the top end of the other revenue guidance.
  • Overall adjusted EBITDA margin remained thin at 11% given the heavy Homes.com and sales force investment.
  • Comscore data showed rental portal traffic declined across the industry year-over-year, with the Apartments.com network down 11%, though it outperformed competitors that fell further.

Management Commentary

Read the Q2 2025 summary ↗
Richard Simonelli
Head of Investor Relations, CoStar Group

Thank you very much. Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us to discuss CoStar Group's second quarter 2025 results. Before I turn the call over to Andy Florance, CoStar's CEO and founder, and Chris Lown, our CFO, I'd like to review our safe harbor statement. Certain portions of the discussion today may contain forward-looking statements, including the company's outlook and expectations for the third and fourth quarters and full year and beyond. Forward-looking statements may involve many risks, uncertainties, assumptions, and estimates, and other factors that can actually cause actual results to differ materially from such statements.

Important factors that can cause actual results to differ include, but are not limited to, those stated in CoStar Group's press release issued earlier today and in our filings with the SEC, including our annual report on Form 10-K and quarterly reports on Form 10-Q, including under the heading risk factors in those filings, as well as other filings with the SEC available on the SEC's website. All forward-looking statements are based on the information available to CoStar on the date of this call. CoStar assumes no obligation to update these statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise, except as required by applicable law. Reconciliation to the most directly comparable GAAP measures of any non-GAAP financial measure discussed on this call are shown in detail in our press release issued today, along with the definitions for these terms.

Press release is available on our website, located at costargroup.com, under our press room. Please refer to today's press release on how to access the replay of this call. Remember, one question during the Q&A session to make it a good one. Now, with that, I'd like to turn the call over to our founder and CEO, Andy Florance. Andy.

Andy Florance
Founder and CEO, CoStar Group

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 Group achieved revenue of $781 million, a strong 15% increase compared to last year. This marks our 57th 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 for 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 multi-billion dollar addressable market 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 2024. 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 five boroughs 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 2025 over Q2 2024, but with Apartments.com network doing the best, with visits only down 11%, while Zillow Rental Network was down 13%. ApartmentGuide was down 21%. Rent.com was down dramatically, down 39%. Market research indicates that our unaided awareness among apartment seekers remained best in class at 68%, significantly higher than 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 two 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 in the Homes.com rental area, where traffic increased 26% year-over-year due to Homes.com's robust marketing efforts. CanadianApartments.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 Apartmentalize 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 six million in annualized net new bookings. We showcased our latest AI-powered technology, including Matterport 3D tours and AI Voice Search, in an incredible interactive life-sized apartment exhibit called The Brad. We rolled out our new Matterport Max packages with great success.

Clients and prospects who experienced the power of Matterport at our booth were impressed and convinced of its value in accelerating the leasing process. These packages come with a Matterport Pro3 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 sight unseen if provided high-quality imagery. Significantly, 53% say they will stop considering a rental unit without detailed imagery. Consumers love the Matterport experience on Apartments.com. In Q2, they viewed Matterport's 67 million times, up 193% over the same period last year, spending 71% more time on listing detail pages with a Matterport 3D tour. Listings with a Matterport 3D tour received 23 times 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 one-time 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 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 six 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 non-members, significantly enhancing consumer engagement. Listings for 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 secure 62% more listings than non-members, 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 three in Q4 of 2024 to nine in Q1 of 2025, 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. 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 this spot, Dan Levy and Heidi Gardner draw attention to Homes.com's massive audience to reinforce to real estate agents the value of marketing their properties and listings 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 homebuyers, 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, NBA Finals, PGA Championship, MLB, and WNBA regular seasons. Additionally, we expanded digital and streaming sponsorships with Draft Kings and Roku, and audio and podcasting partnerships with Spotify and Amazon Music, collectively generating over 4 billion targeted paid media impressions.

Chris Lown
CFO, CoStar Group

Thank you, Andy. Good evening. I'm happy to report that CoStar has now reached its 57th consecutive quarter of double-digit revenue growth, coming in at 15%. We also achieved a commercial information and marketplace brands margin of 43% in the second quarter. As a reminder, this margin excludes Homes.com, OnTheMarket, and the recently acquired Matterport. Net new bookings for the second quarter were a record $93 million, representing a 65% sequential increase from the first quarter and a 38% increase year-over-year. Apartments.com, CoStar, and LoopNet all contributed strong bookings growth as our growing dedicated sales forces are delivering. Revenue for the second quarter was $781 million, exceeding the high end of guidance. Matterport revenue was $44 million in the second quarter, beating our guidance estimate and contributing to our outperformance in the second quarter. Second quarter adjusted EBITDA came in at $85 million, an 11% margin, also exceeding the high end of our guidance range.

The outperformance in adjusted EBITDA was a result of timing of investment spend, and our revenue beat this quarter. CoStar revenue grew 7% in the second quarter ahead of guidance. Sales rep productivity has steadily improved over the past six quarters, and second quarter productivity was the highest since Q3 2023. The strong second quarter performance, combined with internal leading indicators, compels us to increase our full-year revenue growth guidance to 7%. We expect growth in the third quarter to also be 7%. Residential revenue was $28 million in the second quarter. We expect third quarter residential revenue to increase $3-$4 million sequentially, and we now expect residential revenue growth of over 20% in 2025. Apartments.com's second quarter revenue growth came in at 11% year-over-year, ahead of the 10% guidance we provided last quarter.

Sales rep productivity improved to its highest level in two years, an impressive feat considering we are also at our highest number of sales reps. Our first half of 2025 results are broadly in line with expectations, and we remain on track to achieve the 11%-12% full-year revenue growth guidance we provided last quarter. Third quarter revenue growth is also expected to be 11%-12%. LoopNet revenue grew 8% in the second quarter, one percentage point higher than last quarter's guidance. LoopNet's dedicated sales force continues to perform. In fact, the sales team delivered LoopNet's highest first-half net new bookings ever. The shift in sales strategy to focus on selling broad subscription packages and utilize asset-based pricing has been working well, and we anticipate the benefits of the strategic shift to continue. This first-half performance and strong momentum gives us the confidence to increase our 2025 revenue growth expectations to 8%-9%.

Third quarter revenue growth is now expected to be between 10% and 11%. Revenue from Information Services was $39 million in the second quarter. We are updating our guidance for Information Services revenue growth to 16%-18% and expect third quarter revenue growth of approximately 20%. Other revenue was $75 million in the second quarter, with Matterport contributing $44 million. For the third quarter, we expect other revenue of approximately $75 million, including approximately $40 million from Matterport. Through our integration and streamlining efforts, we are discontinuing certain non-core Matterport revenue that did not positively contribute to earnings, which is why we're expecting Q3 revenue to be below the level realized in Q2. The impact from the discontinued revenue to our full-year outlook is around $10 million. As such, we are revising the top end of our revenue guidance and now expect other revenue between $270-$275 million.

Adjusted EBITDA for the second quarter was $85 million at an 11% margin, meaningfully above the high end of our $50-$60 million second quarter guidance. The favorable performance relates to higher than projected revenue, lower than anticipated professional services costs, and timing of certain growth initiatives. We have made great progress on bolstering our sales force, which has reached 1,800 reps at quarter end. This is an increase of more than 400 salespeople since the beginning of the year and a 43% increase in reps year-over-year. While sales headcount has reached the most at Homes.com, has increased the most at Homes.com, we are delivering sales rep growth in all our major brands. Our contract renewal rate was 89% for the second quarter, with the renewal rate for customers who have been subscribers for five years or longer at 95%. Subscription revenue on annual contracts was 78% for the second quarter.

Matterport's inclusion decreased this metric by two percentage points. On June 30th, our June 30th balance sheet includes $3.7 billion in cash, which earned net interest income of $33 million in the second quarter, a 3.5% rate of return. We repurchased 585,000 shares in the second quarter for $45 million, bringing our year-to-date totals to 825,000 shares repurchased for $64 million. In 2025, we anticipate repurchasing at least $150 million of the $500 million share repurchase authorized. On May 9th, we formally agreed to purchase Domain Group for AUD 4.43 per share. As mentioned last quarter, we already acquired a 16.9% ownership in Domain. We expect to pay an incremental AUD 2.3 billion to acquire the remaining shares when the transaction closes. In anticipation of the deal closing, we entered into a forward swap of USD to AUD to mitigate foreign currency risk while the deal is pending.

We expect the total remaining equity purchase price to be around $1.5 billion. Based on our outperformance in the second quarter, we are increasing the midpoint of our 2025 revenue guidance. We are now providing a range of $3.135 billion-$3.155 billion, implying an annual growth rate of 15%. Our guidance does not contemplate the expected closing of the Domain Group acquisition in the third quarter. The company expects third quarter revenue of $800 million-$805 million, representing 16% year-over-year growth at the midpoint of the range. We are also increasing our adjusted EBITDA guidance for the year with revised guidance of $370 million-$390 million. Our revised adjusted EBITDA guidance reflects our second quarter beat versus guidance and incorporates the timing of the growth initiative spend getting pushed to the back half of the year. For the third quarter of 2025, adjusted EBITDA is expected to be in a range of $75 million-$85 million. With that, I'll now turn the call back over to our call operator to open the line for questions.

Analyst Q&A

Ryan Tomasello — Managing Director, KBW
Hi everyone. Thanks for taking the question. I wanted to touch on Apartments.com regarding the competitive dynamics in the space. Can you say whether or not you've observed any signs of wallet share loss, either directly through properties being moved off the platform or indirectly winning less share of budget growth? And given. Zillow's rental package, I believe, is priced below Apartments.com. Have you seen any pressure on your ability to take price in that business or drive upgrades from that customer base? Thanks.
Andy Florance — Founder and CEO, CoStar Group
Thank you for the question. We have not seen any loss of share or ability to really capture price value at Apartments.com. I think we're conflating two different things here. Obviously, the product is extremely strong with very high NPS, renewal rates, growing bookings, robust sales bookings, growing ASP. That's being conflated a little bit with looking at a lot of purchasing clients by our competitor, paying top dollar to buy share from Redfin and from Realtor. That's relatively low-quality advertisers coming in. The ASP on those properties is dramatically below the ASP on Apartments.com. I would say we feel that we're in a very strong competitive position and nothing's changing.
Chris Lown — CFO, CoStar Group
I'd add one other or two other points. One, the greenfield TAM in this industry is still massive. This concept of wallet share, taking wallet share, really isn't applicable here given how large the TAM are. We're both competing and there's massive TAM. The second thing, and I think Andy says this the best, is we sell leases. We don't sell leads. That's why we have the product we have and the results we have. I just, I think you always need to keep those two things in mind.
Stephen Sheldon — Analyst, William Blair
Hey, thanks. Just on Homes.com, great to hear about the improving NPS scores. Curious, what do you think is driving that improvement? Is it better breadth of leads, higher lead quality, especially as I think you're starting to screen some of the inbounds, other value levers like including Matterport membership, etc.? What's driving that? Where do you think there's still significant work to do to improve the ROI of a Homes.com membership?
Andy Florance — Founder and CEO, CoStar Group
Sure. I think it's important to keep all this stuff in context and perspective. This is a brand new product. We're pretty much running the first year and some number of months on the product. We believe we're launching a vastly superior product offering to anything else offered in the Unites States, and we are inspired by some very successful and profitable business outside the United States and other countries. So we're building up a sales force. These folks are doing a great job. They are relatively rookies. They're in their first year of sales for many of them.
Pete Christiansen — Director, Citi
Thank you. Good evening. Really nice results here, guys.
Andy Florance — Founder and CEO, CoStar Group
Thank you. We really appreciate that.
Pete Christiansen — Director, Citi
I was hoping you would talk a little bit about pricing. I mean, you mentioned multifamily ASPs, I guess. Are positive there. Obviously, the AUM-based pricing and LoopNet is starting to really hit its stride. I am just curious about maybe other parts of the business suite. Then the new homes model, just if you can elaborate on that. Thank you.
Andy Florance — Founder and CEO, CoStar Group
Sure. I will defer on CoStar to Chris if he has any information. I have no information that ASP on CoStar is changing in one way or another. I believe we are in the same place. I would actually say that our lender ASP would be dramatically higher than our standard broker owner ASP. On the home side, we continue to optimize to the members' portfolio. We are seeing pricing coming in at, for a very small player, at a couple hundred dollars a month. We are also seeing for larger players, deals come in at $7,500 a month or $8,000 a month. We are very comfortable at this low penetration rate, playing a little bit more to penetration than to maximizing ASP. If you are introducing a new product, you want to play the penetration game initially. You have the rest of eternity to play the ASP game. We are comfortable where it is going, and we are thinking we are getting good results there.
Curtis Nagle — Analyst, BofA
Great. Thanks very much for taking the question. Maybe just wanted to contextualize the new member growth. I think it was up 61% for Homes.com, 6,300. When they compare to Q1 and then in terms of what's factored in the guidance for the rest of the year, what are you factoring for that new member growth within that guidance?
Chris Lown — CFO, CoStar Group
Yeah, we haven't provided that detail from a member perspective, that level of detail other than the guidance we provided in my earnings comments.
Curtis Nagle — Analyst, BofA
Okay. Can I take a shot at another question then?
Andy Florance — Founder and CEO, CoStar Group
Definitely.
Chris Lown — CFO, CoStar Group
You do.
Curtis Nagle — Analyst, BofA
Okay. All right. We'll do them both then. Yeah. Chris, maybe just in terms of the EBITDA guide for the third quarter, right? I think there's a bit of timing shifts. Anything else kind of going on there in terms of rate going down just a little bit versus last year? Is it just timing?
Chris Lown — CFO, CoStar Group
Yeah. Because if you actually look at the second quarter beat and the third quarter and you sort of take those two together, you'll see the organic actual beat in there, but you also see the timing shift that kind of amounts for the delta if you look at consensus third quarter versus the second quarter beat. It really is primarily timing. The beat's the benefit on the upside, but then the majority of it is timing.
Alexei Gogolev — Executive Director of North America Equity Research, Vertical Software and HealthTech, JPMorgan
Hello, everyone, and congrats with great results. Andy, congrats again. I wanted to double-check. Is there any seasonality in the commercial booking, excluding Apartments.com? Just wondering if it's normal for that portion of the bookings to be broadly unchanged quarter on quarter.
Chris Lown — CFO, CoStar Group
The answer is no. Obviously, in the broader commercial margin that we provide, Apartments usually has a very strong second quarter. CoStar historically has a stronger fourth quarter. It sort of all moves out. I think there is a margin improvement, but there's rounding. It gives you that 43% number.
Alexei Gogolev — Executive Director of North America Equity Research, Vertical Software and HealthTech, JPMorgan
Chris, I was talking more about bookings.
Chris Lown — CFO, CoStar Group
Oh, I'm sorry. I apologize.
Andy Florance — Founder and CEO, CoStar Group
Bookings and CoStar are pretty stable through the year. Sometimes you get a little bit of a lift in the fourth quarter.
Chris Lown — CFO, CoStar Group
Yeah. Apartments always has a strong second quarter, which we've talked about historically.
Andy Florance — Founder and CEO, CoStar Group
I think through time, Homes will probably have a strong second quarter too.
Chris Lown — CFO, CoStar Group
Yeah. LoopNet is clearly on a path to see organic growth, which would have a lack of seasonality given the change in business model.
Andy Florance — Founder and CEO, CoStar Group
LoopNet used to have a strong negative seasonality in the fourth quarter, which we've now eliminated.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of George Tong from Goldman Sachs. Your question, please.
George Tong — Analyst, Goldman Sachs
Hi, thanks. Good afternoon. Andy, in Homes.com, you mentioned playing more to penetration than maximizing price. Can you remind us how the average price for new memberships changed during the quarter and how you're thinking about the broader pricing strategy going forward? Is there a strategy to price based on tiers or just pricing based on agent performance, listing volumes, etc.?
Andy Florance — Founder and CEO, CoStar Group
We're very mindful that every single subscription sold has a very high gross margin. We're looking at our direct costs, our Matterport costs, all that. We want to have a very high direct margin. We want to drive participation and referrals so as NPSs go up. We want to sell profitable business that drives margin. Again, we're at a very low penetration point with a new product area. The pricing is based on—we've done some shifting. We used to charge agents based on some of their buyer agency work. We've shifted that away, and we more focus on the pricing model being on the listing side of the business and the value of the assets, the volume of the assets, the size of the team. We've begun to put a bit of a factor in there for their rental portfolios because with the Homes.com rental listing syndicating over to Apartments.com, that creates a lot of value for them on the rental listing side.
It's a constantly changing mix, and I anticipate best practice will keep shifting it and playing with it every quarter. Thematically, we want to have profitable penetration growth on a unit basis. Again, if you look at a LoopNet where you might be in the 60-some percent penetration or at the institutional end of apartments, you might be at that 60% penetration. We're down the low, low, low penetration cycle for Homes.com. We want to focus on growing share profitably on a unit basis, knowing that you have a lot of time to capture more value. Also remember that folks who are successful in the model we're adopting or the one we're selling in the United States was around marketing the real estate. Again, we're the only platform in the United States that's really focused on marketing real estate.
The folks that do this kind of platform and what we do currently at Apartments.com in the United States and LoopNet in the United States, you begin by selling a product which is around participation. You sell first the entry-level listing, just a silver ad, like a baseline promotion ad. Through time, you can do something called depth advertising or signature advertising, but it's something that evolves through time. If I look at an REA Group in Australia, I would imagine that 80% of their revenue comes from depth advertising, but that's a lever you pull in intermediate out years.
Jeff Meuler — Analyst, Baird
Yeah. Thank you. The 750 Homes.com headcount figure exiting the year, is that a change? I thought you were talking 500-600. How are you thinking about, I guess, the serviceable, addressable market in terms of agent headcount that you're going after at this point? Thank you.
Andy Florance — Founder and CEO, CoStar Group
Sure. Yes. I am reining in Andy Stearns, who has built quite an effective machine down there in Richmond, Virginia. It has been inching up. We're going to hold it there at that number. We may take some of those resources and use them for selling Matterport. Again, Matterport has had a relatively small salesforce. The second part of the question was? I'm sorry, the addressable market there. The addressable market is just massive, right? You have 1.5 million agents there that you can sell to. In reality, you probably have 500,000-750,000 who are really viable candidates. You need to look at these folks, these 700,000-some prospects, not as a one-time sale.
You're not just selling them something on day one and then never talking to them again. You want to sell them something and develop a relationship with them. You want to communicate with them about the value they are receiving from their membership. Continue to educate them on the value they're receiving, keeping in mind that in models around the world and in commercial real estate in the United States, these client relationships grow, and you are able to sell them more and more products and services. If you get to 750 salespeople, you're talking about roughly 1,000 clients or prospects per salesperson, which is a pretty aggressive load. I mean, it's one of the beauties of this space is that it is a huge market opportunity.
One of the beauties of our business model is that, unlike our competitors that can only really sell to 5% of the market, our business model can sell to 60%, 70%, 80% of the market, which is why we love it and why investors should too.
Andy Florance — Founder and CEO, CoStar Group
Thank you, everyone, for joining us for the second quarter earnings call. Sorry if I'm a little too enthusiastic, but for good reason. We look forward to updating you on the progress in the business in the next earnings call. Thank you very much for joining us.
Source: COSTAR GROUP, INC. earnings call transcript (2025-07-22). Management commentary and analyst Q&A are reproduced as delivered; speaker roles as stated on the call.

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