CoStar is blowing it

I think CoStar offers a very unique, hands on service. This thread is more about their handling of Loopnet. CoStar is hell bent on getting rid of the #1 CRE site in the country and calling it CoStar for some reason I will not understand.

Grandmas, students and all walks of life now know the name Loopnet, just in time for it to go away.

CoStar is going to control a ton of data and charge even more for it. Up until about 2010I think Loopnet was $79 a quarter for full service. They didn't offer comps then, just for sale listings and for lease. It was great. Even just a few years ago it was awesome. Now it seems you have to pay $10k a year to CoStar to get the dope on Loopnet.

Soon Loopnet will be no more and we will all be talking about the good ol' days.

 

Same concept as Argus IMO. They took something that didn't need fixing and broke it. People in leadership positions (read: Baby Boomer gen.) in the CRE tech sub-industry don't yet understand how to do a software roll-out, much less creating a good product in the tech space. In a lot of cases you have people that don't understand the day-to-day value of the software that are leading the strategic decisions of those firms. Will unfortunately be a while until Gen Y and Millennial cohorts are in positions at those companies to help right the ship with technical knowledge.

"Who am I? I'm the guy that does his job. You must be the other guy."
 
Best Response

I could go into a full diatribe on this, but in addition to a lot of sloppy, clunky features (including significantly less efficient hotkeys), two good examples of how they bungled this rollout are the auto-save and portfolio analysis functions. I work in an environment where I have a lot of different files open at the same time, and sometimes I have too many open and it crashes the system. With DCF, if that happened, it was annoying, but for the most time my work was saved because in DCF if you entered something into the file, it stuck without having to save. With AE, when they first rolled it out, they had no auto save ability, so if you didn't hit save every few minutes and there was some reason why your system crashed (power went out, internet disconnected, etc. etc.), all of your work was lost. That is unacceptable in my opinion because that should be the first thing you think to do since you're basically creating excel on steroids for a single purpose use. The second thing is the portfolio functionality. It was so easy in DCF to roll up portfolio cash flows for 50+ property portfolios (which I do fairly often). If you try to do that now within AE software, it takes forever for the software to aggregate the consolidated schedules (CF, S&U, etc.). Pretty short-sighted for a software that is touted as 'better than DCF' for asset/portfolio management. There are also a lot of other things that are 'more minor' but are still poorly done/cumbersome, but I'd be here for hours...

"Who am I? I'm the guy that does his job. You must be the other guy."
 

I mean I just gave examples above of how the current software is not meeting the needs of its constituents and two simple things they should have/could do to improve it. The fact that they don't have a more efficient way to roll-up portfolio cash flows is not that 'earth shattering' of an ask IMO. I don't dislike the concept of the software we currently have or what it's trying to accomplish, I'm merely saying they aren't executing well.

But, since you opened up pandora's box, I'd love an underwriting software that took voice dictation and also provided real-time mapping re: data points for different underwriting metrics. Do I think that's going to happen? No.

"Who am I? I'm the guy that does his job. You must be the other guy."
 
Surfing Pirate:
People talk a lot about how they wish the technology was better in CRE but don't always provide alternative desires. What kind of software is it that you need that the incumbent companies seem to not understand?

People also love to shit on Co-Star for not having accurate data but are completely unwilling to share their data with Co-Star when asked lol.

 
bolo up:
Yes - I can't decide if it's more or less annoying than having your account tied to a specific machine and not being able to log in from anywhere else...
well, this makes me feel better that i'm not the only one. my coworker claims that he is not being required to do this. i was furious when i heard that he is getting away with not doing it.
 

I have TONS of frustrations with CoStar.
A) Their research analysts are generally morons to the point where we keep a word doc to record all the hilariously nonsensical sales notes we come across. B) I have to do that damn dual verification that was mentioned above. C) There are tons of tenants that have no tenant profile at all despite having hundreds of locations. Today's example was U.S. Renal Care, you literally cannot search by them as a tenant and they have a huge footprint.

The list goes on and on. BUT...

When was Loopnet ever some useful tool? Not trying to be a dick here, but the only use Loopnet has for me is seeing old expired listings when googling addresses to fill in missing comp data. Might just be different roles in the industry but I never find myself on loopnet.

 

Let's state the facts: (1) Everyone hates CoStar and (2) CoStar is way overpriced. It wouldn't be too hard to convince my firm and many of friends' firms to boycott CoStar. We don't dislike them, we don't hate them, we simply abhor this litigious monopoly.

Robert Clayton Dean: What is happening? Brill: I blew up the building. Robert Clayton Dean: Why? Brill: Because you made a phone call.
 

I wish I could afford to share in on the annoyance of Costar! Here with the stale LoopNet data!:) Costar could have some significant automation of their data collection techniques but maybe newer management will do that someday.

 

Moody’s bought REIS. My bank uses it. No clue what we’re paying for it but it’s definitely cheaper than CoStar. Senior bank management switched to save money and no one in my real estate group is a fan of it. It’s trash in comparison to CoStar, so much incomplete data - we often can’t get data for certain markets, they don’t provide certain asset class data in a lot of markets, their submarket divisions don’t make sense, comp data is often incomplete and unuseful, and their basic numbers (rents, vacancy, absorption) are often completely different than what’s found in every other source.

I understand databases take time to compile and maybe with the backing of Moody’s, they’ll be able to get their shit together in the next couple of years but for the time being, I would recommend staying away. We’re at the point where we use CBRE and JLL research reports more than REIS.

Everyone hates CoStar till they have to use REIS...

 

Anybody who is on the cmbs side will understand my pain. A deal looks can look great and very promising up until we look at the reiss submarket vacancy (especially if its a suburban office deal) and because the rating agencies mostly take into account reiss's submarket vacancy, the great deal just looks awful now and it will never execute from a securitiztion standpoint when the fitch dscr is

 

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