CoStar review: the CRE standard, and what the licence lets you do with it
By Jan Suski. I go deep on every review, checking every number against its source and digging up details other coverage misses, a habit from six years of SEO and link building for tech companies. Bylines at Surfer, Brand24, and Senuto. How the scoring works.
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This review is in progress: a fuller pass with customer quotes and screenshots is still to come, but the facts below are sourced and checked against CoStar's own pages.
Best for
Commercial real estate teams that need phone-verified lease and sale comps and tenant depth, and that can work inside the platform.
Not for
A data team that wants to join CoStar to other feeds in a warehouse, or residential lenders and insurers; the licence bars the first by default and CoStar barely covers the second.
What it costs
No published rate card. costar.com routes every buyer to a demo request and a phone number, and seat pricing scales with rollout size.
- Comp verification
- Lease and sale comps verified by CoStar researchers by phone
- Tenant data
- Tenant rosters by building, with lease expiry detail
- Property records
- Property, owner and broker records across major commercial types
- Market analytics
- Rent and vacancy forecasts, market trends by submarket
- Product line
- CoStar, Debt Solutions, STR Benchmark, Risk Analytics, Real Estate Manager
- Listings
- LoopNet inside the same product line
- Residential coverage
- Incidental
- Export rights
- Terms of Use bar storing, copying or exporting any portion into another database
- Automated access
- Terms of Use ban data mining, extraction tools, robots and spiders
- Credential sharing
- Passcodes are per-person; sharing with a third-party AI service is named and banned
Company
- Ownership
- Public, NASDAQ: CSGP
- FY2025 revenue
- $3,247 million, up 19% year over year
Which CoStar figures are the company's own numbers
The FY2025 revenue figure and the licence terms are drawn from CoStar Group's own press release and Terms of Use pages. costar.com carries no rate card anywhere; the demo-request routing is what the site itself offers in place of one. Checked 16 August 2026.
CoStar is the commercial real estate data other providers get benchmarked against. Its researchers verify lease and sale comps by phone, which is why counterparties recognize the numbers and why the product costs what it does.
The company is large and buying. CoStar Group reported FY2025 revenue of $3,247 million, up 19% year over year, with net income of $7 million after acquisition costs. It closed the $1.6 billion Matterport acquisition in February 2025 and launched a $1.7 billion takeover of Australia's Domain. It's also defending a $1 billion+ copyright suit from Zillow and two customer antitrust suits, tracked in our CoStar lawsuit report.
This review covers what the subscription includes, the licence terms that decide if the data can enter a buyer's own systems, and who is better served by ATTOM or Cotality.
↑ FACT SHEETWhat the Subscription Covers
The comp verification is the product. CoStar employs researchers who confirm lease and sale transactions by phone, and that process is the reason CRE underwriting treats CoStar figures as the reference. Tenant rosters by building with lease expiry detail follow from the same research operation, and no rival on this site matches the depth.
Around it sits a product line: CoStar, CoStar Debt Solutions, CoStar with STR Benchmark, CoStar Risk Analytics and CoStar Real Estate Manager, plus LoopNet listings. Market analytics carry rent and vacancy forecasts by submarket.
Residential coverage is incidental. A mortgage lender or an insurance carrier pricing residential risk buys from Cotality or ATTOM.
↑ FACT SHEETThe Licence, and Why It Decides the Purchase
Read the Terms of Use before the price list. CoStar's terms forbid users to "store, copy or export any portion of the Product into any database or other software program" without written permission, which rules out feeding CoStar data into a warehouse alongside other feeds unless that permission is negotiated and written down.
The same terms ban "any data mining, gathering or extraction tool, or any robot, spider or other automatic device," and passcodes are per-person: they may not be shared with another person or, named explicitly, with any third-party AI service. That's a real constraint on a team building automated underwriting.
There's no published rate card. costar.com routes to a demo request and a phone number, so every number a buyer sees arrives through sales. CoStar fits commercial real estate teams that need verified comps and tenant depth and that can work inside the platform. It doesn't fit a data team that intends to join CoStar to other feeds in a warehouse, since the licence bars that by default, and it doesn't fit residential lenders or insurers at all.