The call in brief

Read the Q1 2026 earnings summary ↗

CoStar Group delivered an exceptionally strong Q1 2026, with revenue up 23% year-over-year to $897 million (10% organic) marking a 60th consecutive quarter of double-digit growth, and adjusted EBITDA doubling to $132 million, $17 million above the high end of guidance. The commercial segment grew 15% at a 34% margin while residential improved adjusted EBITDA by $56 million and remains on track for profitability in Q2. Management raised full-year adjusted EBITDA guidance to $780 million to $820 million and adjusted EPS to $1.32 to $1.39 while reaffirming revenue of $3.78 billion to $3.82 billion. The dominant analyst debate centered on net new bookings, which declined sequentially for a third straight quarter to $67 million despite a much larger sales force, with management attributing the pattern to seasonality and hiring lag. Key growth narratives included Homes.com monetization ahead of a May 1 price increase, LoopNet asset-based pricing driving explosive listing growth, and Matterport as an increasingly central data and product differentiator.

What went well
  • CoStar Group delivered its 60th consecutive quarter of double-digit revenue growth, with Q1 2026 revenue up 23% year-over-year to $897 million and 10% organic growth.
  • Adjusted EBITDA of $132 million doubled year-over-year and came in $17 million above the high end of guidance, or 26% above the midpoint.
  • CoStar product users grew 22% year-over-year to 317,000, with broker sales up 29% and tenant sales up 27%, while quarterly net bookings rose 20% year-over-year to $67 million.
  • The residential segment improved adjusted EBITDA by $56 million year-over-year to negative $29 million and is on track to reach profitability in Q2 2026, with Homes.com paying members growing from about 10,000 a year ago to roughly 35,000.
  • LoopNet's new asset-based pricing drove outstanding early results, with the volume of silver listings sold at $300 or more per month growing 650% from February to March and listings sold below $40 growing over 1,100%.
What went wrong
  • Net new bookings declined sequentially for the third straight quarter, prompting repeated analyst pushback that current bookings sit below prior peaks despite a much larger sales force.
  • Apartments.com revenue growth moderated to 10% year-over-year, and management acknowledged rooftop ARPU has been dragged down for several quarters by lower-end advertisers won from the collapsing Rent.com and Apartment Guide.
  • Google data showed overall rental search demand remains soft, a headwind acknowledged even as Apartments.com gained unique-visitor share.
  • The Homes.com sales force remains largely a rookie team with few reps having more than a year of tenure, limiting near-term productivity.

Management Commentary

Read the Q1 2026 summary ↗
Richard Simonelli
Head of Investor Relations, CoStar Group

Hello everybody, and welcome to the CoStar earnings call for Q1 2026. Thank you all for joining us. Before I turn the call over to Andy Florance, CoStar Group's CEO and founder, and Christian Lown, our CFO, I'd like to review a few of our safe harbor statements. First of all, certain portions of the discussion today may contain forward-looking statements. The company's outlook and expectations are based on current beliefs and assumptions. Forward-looking statements involve many risks, uncertainties, assumptions, estimates, and other factors that can 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 today and in our filings with the SEC. All forward-looking statements are based on the information available to CoStar Group on the date of this call.

CoStar Group assumes no obligation to update these statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise. Reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP measure 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 those terms. The press release is available on our website, located on costargroup.com under 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. Make it a good one. 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

Thank you, Rich. Thank you for joining us today. I wanna start with 3 things. First, this was an exceptional quarter. We delivered our 60th consecutive quarter of double-digit revenue growth. Our adjusted EBITDA doubled, and we're on track for the highest full-year adjusted EBITDA in CoStar Group's history. Second, the homes.com investment is delivering exactly what we said it would. Member agents are generating extraordinary returns on their subscriptions. Consumer engagement on Homes AI is multiples of conventional residential search, and homes.com is the fastest-growing residential portal in the U.S. I'll walk you through the evidence later in the call. Third, the activist distraction is behind us. With the noise gone, we have more focused energy than ever to spend on what matters, growing EBITDA. Let me take you through the numbers. First quarter 2026 revenue grew 23% year-over-year.

Q1 2026 adjusted EBIT of $132 million doubled year-over-year and came in 26% above the midpoint of our guidance. After a record 2025 for annualized net new bookings, we started 2026 stronger still. Q1 net bookings of $67 million were up 20% year-over-year. We expect productivity to build over the year, particularly from the sales reps we hired throughout 2025. Our commercial business generated $472 million of revenue in Q1, up 15% year-over-year, with adjusted EBITDA of $161 million. CoStar revenue was $331 million, let's get that extra million in there, in Q1, with annualized net new bookings from our core CoStar product up 16% year-over-year.

CoStar users grew 22% year-over-year to 317,000. Sales to brokers and tenants were especially strong, with broker sales up 29% and tenant sales up 27% year-over-year. CoStar NPS was 69, and our quarterly renewal rate was 92%. CoStar Rent Benchmark launches this summer. Drawing on our proprietary lease database and public records, it will be the industry's only net effective rent benchmark product, giving landlords, occupiers, investors, and brokers visibility into starting rents, effective rents, TI allowances, free rents, and escalations across U.S. markets. CoStar New Homes is in development with phase 1 planned for Q2. The module tracks new residential construction from planning through delivery and serves home builders, mortgage bankers, retailers, and retail center owners. It integrates builder feeds, drone imagery, and other data sources to deliver insight into housing supply, demand, and market trends.

CoStar Debt Solutions, formerly CoStar Lender, had a strong quarter, with net new bookings up 26% year-over-year as the business crossed $100 million in revenue. Debt Solutions now serves over 500 financial institutions across the full lender spectrum, including banks, private lenders, debt funds, and regulators. Debt Solutions is on track to launch CRE debt benchmarking in the second half of 2026, with CRE loan origination workflow following in Q1 of 2027. The final product will be a full workflow solution to originate and underwrite a loan. Our first release will focus on seamless delivery of property details, peer properties, and market information. We launched a client advisory committee with over 12 institutions to shape the loan origination roadmap, deepen understanding of how AI is reshaping their workflows, and strengthen product market fit.

Across the platform, Debt Solutions is actively building these AI-enhanced workflows. CoStar U.K.'s growth accelerated in Q1, with revenue up 25% and net new bookings up 44% year-over-year. This growth was supported by the release of new land registry lease modules that gave clients authoritative effective rent data sourced from government records and the recollapse of one of our primary competitors there. CoStar Canada revenue grew 22% year-over-year. We released multifamily analytics coverage for Montreal in Q1. CoStar France launches in Q2. We will cross-sell into the 32,000 French CRE professionals who already subscribe to news and information from our Business Immo acquisition, accelerating adoption as we build the only pan-European CRE data and analytics platform. In CoStar Australia, we are rapidly building proprietary property data with our local research team now approaching 100 people.

We expect to launch CoStar and LoopNet in Australia in Q3 and Q4. CoStar Real Estate Manager added AI lease abstraction capabilities to the Visual Lease platform this quarter and will extend these capabilities to CoStar Real Estate Manager later this year. Customers are eager to bring this best-in-class capability into the lease management and accounting workflows to save them a lot of time and hassle. We're also deploying multiple AI agents internally to accelerate customer onboarding, support enablement, and the automation of reputable professional services work. In Q1, STR launched profitability benchmarking, supporting more than 150 detailed data points across a hotel's P&L. Customer interest was immediate, with 750 hotel subscribers submitting data to unlock the functionality. Building participation at scale is critical to future monetization, and this early engagement reinforces the long-term value of the investment.

LoopNet generated $85 million of revenue in Q1, up 16% year-over-year. Paid listings rose 10% year-over-year in the U.S., 35% in Canada, and 63% in the U.K. Last month, after more than a year of successful testing, we rolled out asset-based pricing across all U.S. markets. LoopNet advertising is now priced to match the size of the asset and the value LoopNet delivers to listers. Early results have been really outstanding. At the high end, the volume of silver listings sold at $300 or above per month grew 650% from February to March.

At the low end, listings sold below $40 grew over 1,100%, opening up an entirely new category of inventory and bringing in smaller advertisers who could not justify the higher price points for one-size-fits-all that we had before. We expect this to drive more listings, more traffic, and more revenue. LoopNet's European revenue grew 17% year-over-year. Following last year's launch in France and Spain, we're seeing the network effects of being the first and only global commercial real estate marketplace. Average monthly unique visitors on LoopNet Europe more than doubled to over 900,000, up 102% year-over-year. These users are not just searching their home countries, they're searching globally. We will extend this network effect as LoopNet launches in Australia, Germany, and other markets.

Our Australia CRE marketing platform, commercialrealestate.com.au, grew 10% year-over-year on a pro forma basis, driven by higher depth revenue, improving depth penetration, and higher average revenue per listing. That commercial unique visitor audience was up 129% year-over-year in Q1. Subscription revenue for Matterport was up 19% year-over-year. Enterprise momentum built through the quarter. New enterprise accounts in March were up 31% year-over-year, and direct sales were up 16%, supported by a healthy and expanding pipeline that continues to build into Q2. Matterport has become a critical point of differentiation across CoStar Group. It drives engagement, lists conversion, and generates valuable proprietary data. Integration is proceeding exceptionally well across Apartments.com, Homes.com, LoopNet, CoStar domain. Matterport is already a key component of Homes AI and will unlock huge future AI innovation all across CoStar Group.

Matterport Exteriors with X-ray, now in alpha, lets users virtually remove a roof or floor of a virtual building to see the building's interior in the context of the yard, the neighborhood. That's a real estate marketer's dream. We've also released a number of new innovations with strong use cases in architectural engineering construction, facilities management, and manufacturing. BizBuySell revenue was $8.8 million in Q1, with broker subscribers, I'm sorry, reporting 2,345 completed sales transactions of businesses, representing $2 billion enterprise value, 59% of which involved commercial real estate. We're rapidly turning BizBuySell into a true end-to-end transaction platform with integrated financing, 3D tours, and document sharing, now driving over 24,000 buyer profiles and 15% broker adoption.

Residential revenue was $421 million in Q1, up 32% year-over-year. Adjusted EBITDA improved by $56 million, and we expect the residential segment to reach profitability in Q2 2026. Apartments.com generated $312 million of revenue in Q1, up 10% year-over-year, the 15th consecutive quarter of double-digit revenue growth. Apartments.com delivered 220 million highly engaged renter visits, 370,000 tours, and 300,000 applications submitted directly on our platform to apartment owners alongside 40 million Matterport tours. Our monthly renewal rate held at 99%. Apartments.com brand media impressions nearly tripled in Q1, up 189% year-over-year to 1.7 billion. The longer we invest in our brand on behalf of our clients, the more efficiently we deploy that investment.

Clear example, our first-ever co-branded Super Bowl commercial with Homes.com aired on February 8th, reaching 126 million viewers, the highest peak viewership in U.S. media history. Combined with our industry-leading SEO and SEM, these efforts continue to produce the most qualified audience of apartment seekers on the internet. According to Google, overall rental search demand remains soft. Even so, Comscore data shows Apartments.com network unique visitors up 3% year-over-year in March. Zillow unique visitors were down 5% year-over-year, and Zillow's expanded rental network, Zillow plus Realtor plus Redfin, was down 3%. Zillow has now seen unique visitors decline year-over-year for 15 consecutive quarters. Let's make that 15 consecutive months, not 15 consecutive quarters. I was just sort of picking up the 15 consecutive quarters of double-digit growth we had.

Christian M. Lown
CFO, CoStar Group

Thanks, Andy. In the first quarter of 2026, we delivered $132 million of adjusted EBITDA, doubling the adjusted EBITDA from the first quarter of 2025 and $17 million above the high end of our guidance range. The outperformance in adjusted EBITDA was primarily due to lower personnel costs from cost-saving efforts as we continue to find efficiencies from AI, personnel, and other expense initiatives. OneQ 2026 revenue was $897 million, which was 23% higher year-over-year and toward the high end of our guidance range. Organic revenue growth was 10% for the quarter. Commercial revenue in the first quarter was $472 million, an increase of 15% year-over-year and a 7% organic growth rate.

Our commercial brands delivered revenue in line with the guidance we provided on our February earnings call. CoStar revenue grew 9% to $331 million, driven by strong double-digit international growth. The year-over-year increase was driven by both volume and price. LoopNet revenue was $85 million in Q1, a 16% increase year-over-year or an 11% organic growth rate. The year-over-year growth was attributable to an increase in paid listings from our continued focus on selling silver ads. Other commercial revenue was $56 million in Q1 2026, up 81% compared to Q1 2025.

The year-over-year increase is primarily attributable to the inorganic contribution from Matterport, which has performed well since the acquisition with subscription revenue growth of 19%. Residential revenue in Q1 2026 was $425 million, a 32% increase over last year's first quarter and at the high end of our guidance range. Organic growth for residential in the first quarter was 13%, with double-digit growth contributions from Apartments, Homes, and OnTheMarket. Increased volumes were the catalyst for organic growth in the first quarter. Commercial adjusted EBITDA was $161 million in the first quarter of 2026, a 34% margin and above the high end of our guidance range. Similarly, residential adjusted EBITDA was also better than our guidance range, coming in at negative $29 million.

CoStar posted positive net income and adjusted EPS of $0.23 per share for the first quarter of 2026, both considerably higher than our guidance. Our sales headcount at the end of March was 2,090. Homes.com reps make up our largest sales team, consisting of 570 individuals. Apartments.com is the next largest sales force with 520 reps, with CoStar at 475 reps and 225 at the LoopNet team. For Homes.com reps, we are focused on driving productivity and efficiency in 2026. With our other brands, we will be adding reps throughout the range of the year, given the significant opportunity that still exists across all our brands, and we expect productivity to ramp as our new sales reps mature over the coming years.

Our contract renewal rate has held consistently at 89% for the past 7 quarters. Customers who have been subscribers for at least five years have an impressive 95% renewal rate. Subscription revenue on annual contracts was 73% of total revenue for the first quarter of 2026, compared to 71% during the fourth quarter of 2025. As a reminder, Domain does not operate using annual subscriptions. Net new bookings for the first quarter were $67 million, a 20% increase from the first quarter of 2025. In 2025, we completed our first share repurchase program, buying back $500 million worth of stock or 7.1 million shares. We subsequently announced a $1.5 billion buyback program in January of this year.

Throughout the first quarter, we repurchased 11.4 million shares for $505 million, the majority of which was purchased through an accelerated share repurchase plan. We expect to repurchase an additional $195 million worth of shares during the remaining nine months of the year, bringing our total cash outlay for share buybacks in 2026 to $700 million. For the second quarter of 2026, we expect revenue to range from $922 million-932 million. This range represents an 18%-19% increase over the second quarter of 2025 or a 10% organic growth rate at the midpoint. Commercial revenue is expected to grow between 7%-9% to a range of $479 million-484 million.

We expect residential revenue of $443 million-448 million, an increase of 32%-34% year-over-year or 12%-14% organically. Adjusted EBITDA is expected to range between $160 million and $180 million, representing a margin of 17%-19% or roughly 700 basis points higher than Q2 2025. Commercial Adjusted EBITDA is expected to be between $160 million and $170 million, a margin of 34%-35%. Residential Adjusted EBITDA is anticipated to be positive in Q2 2026, ranging between break even and $10 million. Our Adjusted EPS guidance for Q2 2026 calls for a range of $0.27-0.30 per share on 409 million weighted average shares outstanding.

For full year 2026, we are reaffirming our previous revenue guidance range of $3.78 billion-3.82 billion, a 16%-18% annual growth rate. Commercial revenue remains at a range of $1.955 billion-1.975 billion, and the residential revenue range remains at $1.825 billion-1.845 billion. Based on the strength of the first quarter and the expectation of continued personnel expense efficiencies, we now expect adjusted EBITDA to range from $780 million-820 million. This is an increase of $30 million at its midpoint and a full percentage point increase in margin. Our adjusted EPS range is also increasing for the full year.

The accelerated share repurchase program in the first quarter retired more shares than we had forecast, and the previously mentioned expense reduction initiatives are primarily driving our guidance increase to adjusted EPS. Our new adjusted EPS guidance range is $1.32 to $1.39, an increase of $0.09 at the midpoint. I will now turn the call back over to the operator for questions.

Analyst Q&A

Ryan Tomasello — Managing Director, KBW
Thanks, everyone. Two-part question on bookings. First, was the $67 million of net new in line with generally what you were expecting for the quarter? Then second, there seems to be some variation in how we find investors are translating bookings into revenue growth expectations. Given our bookings don't underpin 100% of the company's revenue base. Chris, I was hoping you could walk us through how you think about the appropriate math around the percentage of bookings-driven revenue and how that translates to the level of bookings needed to achieve your low- to mid-teens revenue growth targets embedded in your financial framework. Thanks.
Christian M. Lown — CFO, CoStar Group
Thanks, Ryan. Sorry. Thanks, Ryan. A couple of comments there. First, as you heard from our comments, we reaffirmed our guidance range for revenue and increased our EBITDA guidance. Broadly in line with what we're looking for from a net new perspective and from a revenue development perspective. Your second question is a detailed question, let me sort of think about it. Let me try to break it down this way. Today, around 15% of our revenue is non-subscription, that increased as a result of the Domain and Matterport acquisition last year.
We are currently, if you look at our guidance, currently expecting revenue to grow around $550 million at the midpoint of our range, and around 40% of this increase is from acquisitions or non-subscription revenue growth. Therefore, the remaining growth is around $330-ish million, which is the revenue driven by net new. That is what 2026 represents it. I think then you're rolling forward to sort of 2027 and 2028. I think a couple building blocks there to think about. If you assume the non-subscription revenue growth is sort of in the low double digits, that results in subscription revenue needing to grow by around $1 billion in total between 2027 and 2028.
I think what's important to note is during that period, we're expecting, you know, meaningful, significant growth out of Homes.com, you know, meaningfully faster than our other brands, with our other subscription businesses also growing in the low double-digit range, along with the other group, which is consistent with our historic growth. Remember, timing has a big impact here, obviously, when these bookings happen and how that rolls into revenue. I think those are sort of the building blocks. I also think, most importantly, is we are committed to delivering on the adjusted EBITDA targets we set out for 2028 and 2030. This can occur in a number of ways. We can deliver it through our 15% revenue CAGR, which we're very committed to.
We can over-achieve our revenue targets and invest in additional growth opportunities, which would, you know, continue to promote additional longer-term growth. Finally, we can rationalize costs if revenue growth is less than a 15%. Importantly, as Andy mentioned on his call, we are fully committed to our stated Homes.com net investment number. We're well on track to hit that number this year, and we gave you guidance through 2030, and we will hit those numbers. Our primary focus at CoStar today is to drive revenue, to drive EBITDA growth and margin expansion through 2030 and beyond. I think that, Ryan, gives you the building blocks to start thinking about your question.
Ryan Tomasello — Managing Director, KBW
Thanks, Chris. Appreciate the detailed color.
Peter Christiansen — Analyst, Citi
Good evening. Thanks for the question. Really good script this quarter, guys. Lot to like and appreciate the transparency on a number of fronts. That said, I wanna dig into bookings again a little bit here, and particularly apartments pricing. You showed some really good rooftop growth last quarter, and we know that you've been winning back some share there, and some of that share has been lower priced opportunities. Also thinking about the competitive dynamic, how that's changing, maybe that's shifted the mix shift on tiering of ads there. Just wondering if you could give us a sense of what has been generally the pricing impact and maybe how that might be impacting overall bookings production. Thank you.
Andy Florance — Founder and CEO, CoStar Group
I would comment on one thing that I think I commented on last quarter. I would comment on one point that I think I commented on last quarter. We picked up a lot of rooftops from Rent.com. As that whole thing went the way it went, there was an opportunity that became a primary focus for our sales force to go after those rooftops when they were in transition. They put a lot of effort into that. That's a once, you know, in a decade opportunity to try to do a share shift. The nice thing is, we weren't buying those from anyone. We were just winning them in the organic market.
Now those advertisers had been with Apartment Guide, Rent.com through a bankruptcy and through a degradation of a business over several years, so tend to lean towards lower ARPU rooftops. You know, often lower rental rates, smaller unit counts, that kind of stuff. That drove our, that has driven for several quarters our rooftop revenue, ARPU, whatever, down somewhat. I'm not seeing, unless Chris has got a different view on it, I'm not seeing a major shift in levels or depth advertising. The thing that really struck me was these folks coming out of Rent.com were lower end very important customers. They just happen to have more budget properties.
Peter Christiansen — Analyst, Citi
Thank you.
Christian M. Lown — CFO, CoStar Group
Mm-hmm.
George Tong — Analyst, Goldman Sachs
Hi. Thanks. Good afternoon. Sticking with Apartments.com, the revenue growth moderated sequentially to 10% year-over-year. What would need to change to drive a re-acceleration from here? Do you think this is the right long-term run rate growth for the platform?
Andy Florance — Founder and CEO, CoStar Group
I think the thing that re-accelerates revenue growth is our target continued growth in the sales force. We have, as the revenue gets bigger and bigger, you need to have more salespeople to deal with the revenue opportunity. There's clearly plenty of open opportunity out there. We are still relatively early in penetrating the opportunity. I think Homes.com presents an important strategic opportunity, and that it can grow more traffic. It's already our biggest syndication partner into Apartments.com. It allows us to strengthen our single-family presence there and draw renters in from multiple angles and multiple perspectives. You know, I think that I think we can continue to improve on the current growth rate. I think we still remain significantly competitively advantaged. You wanna add anything to that, Chris?
Christian M. Lown — CFO, CoStar Group
No, that's great.
George Tong — Analyst, Goldman Sachs
Very helpful. Thank you.
Andy Florance — Founder and CEO, CoStar Group
Mm-hmm.
Alexei Gogolev — Analyst, J.P. Morgan
Hi, everyone.
Andy Florance — Founder and CEO, CoStar Group
Hello, Alexei.
Alexei Gogolev — Analyst, J.P. Morgan
Hi, great to hear from you. Both you and Chris mentioned the sales productivity ramp. With the headcount additions across the sales organization, what are you seeing in terms of ramp times or quota attainment, maybe some productivity by cohort, and how does that inform your hiring pace for the rest of the year?
Andy Florance — Founder and CEO, CoStar Group
It would vary by brand. I think we're seeing CoStar accelerating productivity per rep. I thought it was interesting to see that the broker sales, tenant sales are up in CoStar. That's generally an indication of improving commercial real estate market conditions and more robust selling opportunities. On Apartments.com, as your revenues have grown, and you need to keep growing the sales force to match, they're handling even at 99% monthly renewal rate, they're handling a larger absolute cancellation level, so you need to keep growing that sales force, and actually grows productivity as you grow the sales force. On LoopNet, we definitely wanna continue to grow that sales force. The asset-based pricing will increase productivity for sure.
You have a relatively large base of revenue compared to the size of the sales force. ROI across all those sales forces is very solid. I would say with Homes.com, you are still dealing with a very rookie sales force. I mean, it's unprecedented to have that many sales people with that little tenure, given the fact that we really just launched that group a year or so ago. I am spending myself a bit of time, more time now that I've got a little more free time on my hands with our sales force, and feel like we're making some good headway improving sales force productivity. It feels good to be back in there working on sales force productivity.
I see a lot of opportunity to improve sales force productivity. With a group like the Homes.com group, we are gonna be continuing to grow our sales force in the field because we're seeing higher productivity in the field salespeople than we do in the centralized sales force. We're also seeing high sales productivity with our new homes advertising salespeople at Homes.com. I am also optimistic that we're gonna see productivity improvements with our inside sales team with Homes.com. The growth in that group is really field and new home sales, where the numbers are pretty good. I am working on bringing up the core inside group, and I think we're having some success there.
Christian M. Lown — CFO, CoStar Group
Andy, the only thing I'd add is that it's important to realize that we really started on this journey to increase our sales force roughly about this time last year. There's been pretty significant increases in sales force across all of our brands, and they all came in at different times. For instance, LoopNet recently added a lot of sales people to get to the number I talked about. While we do an incredible job tracking the cohorts, we look at their evolution. They, you know, we track them on a six-month, 12-month, 18-month cohort basis. We see the development that we wanna see. It is important to note that, you know, really we started on this journey basically about a year ago and then accelerated through last year.
We feel good about that productivity and cohort, development, but it just does take time to get them up to full productivity.
Andy Florance — Founder and CEO, CoStar Group
I believe the number for Apartments.com is at year five, they're twice as productive as they were at the end of year one. That is something where it's a, it is like a multi-year scale-up. Some people enter at a really high level. Some people scale up through a couple of years.
Alexei Gogolev — Analyst, J.P. Morgan
Thank you very much, Andy.
Andy Florance — Founder and CEO, CoStar Group
Mm-hmm.
Alexei Gogolev — Analyst, J.P. Morgan
Thank you, Chris.
Stephen Sheldon — Analyst, William Blair
Hey, thanks for taking my question. Just wanted to follow-up on the sales, kind of capacity and productivity.
Topic, you know, I guess high level, what has changed, if anything, in terms of where you'll deploy incremental sales resources over the rest of the year and into next? You know, are there certain areas of strength where, you know, either by segment or geography where you're maybe pushing the pedal more? On the flip side, are there any areas where productivity maybe isn't progressing the way you'd expect, where it could make sense to cut back and, you know, or potentially shift into other areas? I guess from here, where, what's changed in terms of your plans for incremental sales capacity investments?
Andy Florance — Founder and CEO, CoStar Group
Sure. I hope I give you a good brain dump of all things we're thinking about there. Again, I'm seeing, and I'll run through a couple different parts there. I am seeing really good results with our new home salespeople. The folks who are going out and dealing with major home builders and giving them enhanced exposure on homes.com. Those folks are very productive. We will grow that at a measured pace 'cause you don't wanna slam too many people into a segment at once.
We are gonna invest in adding 50 more folks or so into our field sales for homes.com because those field sales folks who can actually have one-on-one meetings, show up at open houses, show up at brokers' offices, are more productive than the people in the inside sales org. We are going to do that in batches of five cities at a time. We might hire up eight people in Washington, Dallas, you know, 3 other markets, stabilize it, have an RD in each market, do the next round. We would likely prioritize our marketing spend SEM investment around those markets. We're building that field sales team up. We've always felt that the field sales team, through time, would be the most productive for homes.com.
I'm actually enjoying working a little bit more with the inside sales team, making sure that they've got the right value propositions, improving their pitch. We believe that we've got the right number, but we want to tighten the pitch, the service and the pricing, frankly. I think the product is currently underpriced. When I look at the, when I look at the kind of benefit these folks are getting when they get the marketing benefit of Homes.com, we're not charging enough, and we need to be bolder about that pricing because we're delivering enormous value. On the Apartments.com group, I would like to see our field sales team continue to grow at a measurable pace. The field sales team with Apartments.com is consistently the most productive.
With loopnet.com, I'd like to see that field sales team keep growing at an incremental measured pace because again, their head count is too close, is not quite adequate as a ratio relative to their growing revenue base. I think with Ben focusing on the asset-based pricing effectively now, I think that there's a lot of opportunity there. We are growing the Matterport sales team. Again, we're doing that in measured batches of, you know, probably 20 at a quarter or something like that. We're not, we're holding our productivity up. It is nice to be back in the game and spending more time on sales than on other things.
Christian M. Lown — CFO, CoStar Group
Yeah, and the Matterport comment was a great one because it's such a huge opportunity, given the limited sales force we had when we acquired the company. We've really put in place go-to-market TAM strategies, et cetera, and we're expecting great things out of Matterport sales force over the coming years.
Stephen Sheldon — Analyst, William Blair
Good to hear. Thank you.
Jeffrey P. Meuler — Analyst, Robert W. Baird
Yeah, thanks. Can you just help put the sequential trends in net bookings the last few quarters in context? This is the third straight quarter of sequential decline in the net bookings number. If you started picking up the pace of hiring a year ago, I would think that productivity would be building over the last year. I get it, Q2 2025 was a good quarter, but this quarter is still quite a bit below what it was in, like, Q1 2023 before you launched Homes and when you had a much smaller sales force. I'm just. I know you're getting a million questions on sales productivity. I think we're struggling to understand it. Thank you.
Christian M. Lown — CFO, CoStar Group
Yeah. I'm not, you know, I'm not sure the angle. I understand obviously we started putting out the quarterly total bookings. We thought that was important for people just to see the trends. Obviously, there's variability. As you said, last year we had a very interesting situation, right? In the first quarter, it was deemed weak. The second quarter was great. You know, there's some variability. I think we feel really good about the opportunity set, the underlying productivity we're seeing out of the sales force, and the flywheel should really start in the second half of next year. I think we feel really good about the productivity.
I think the hiring was a meaningful amount across our brands and that creates a little bit of lag effect, but I think we feel good about the direction.
Andy Florance — Founder and CEO, CoStar Group
I think we have the same conversation every first quarter. It's like Groundhog Day. Our first quarter tends to be a little lighter. Our second quarter always tends to be our stronger. When you talk about three quarters down, well, second quarter is our strongest. Remember, as I mentioned, the Apartmentalize. That's a huge bookings opportunity for the residential segment. We enter that this year with incredibly strong product with Apartments AI, Homes being a major contributor. Our product teams have been pushing aggressively to make sure that we have a bunch of new rental features in Homes.com, and we'll enter that in a strong place.
You're still dealing with, you know, again, you don't have very many folks with more than a year of experience at Homes.com, so it's still a relatively junior sales force. It won't be a junior sales force in two, three quarters. It will start to move into post-rookie status.
Jeffrey P. Meuler — Analyst, Robert W. Baird
Okay. Thank you.
Andy Florance — Founder and CEO, CoStar Group
Mm-hmm.
Curtis Nagle — Analyst, Bank of America
Okay, great. Thanks very much. Yeah, just in the press release, you cited some pretty strong numbers in terms of engagement and member agents coming on from Homes.com. Right now, kind of near-term, how is this translating into revenue momentum within the segment? Could you comment on that?
Andy Florance — Founder and CEO, CoStar Group
Sure. I would say the most important thing when you look at translating into revenue momentum is, now that we have about a year or so with this, I guess we had 10,000 users in the Q1, Q2 of 2025. Now we're up to 35,000. We have a lot more information on how the product is impacting their earnings, and the results are phenomenal. That gives me comfort, that we can actually begin to bring the ARPU up, pretty materially. And that we'll have growing productivity, with that group. And you've got good synergies with apartments.com and their productivity. All of that is why we have the confidence that we are, building revenue momentum.
Curtis Nagle — Analyst, Bank of America
Okay. Not to belabor a point, but it's obviously top of mind. You know, would you be willing to provide bookings guidance for 2Q just at a minimum? You know, so we don't continue to see such a mismatch between internal expectations and investor expectations.
Christian M. Lown — CFO, CoStar Group
Bookings is a number we've never guided to. There's only, I think, two or three of you actually put out a bookings number. I think if you look at it back historically, you see variability in quarters. Last year, Q1 2025 was 18% of bookings for the full year. You know, you look at these in different elements, but we provided booking numbers for homes.com because we wanted to increase transparency. We wanted people to understand the investment, what's going on. You know, getting into guidance around bookings is not something we're going to do.
Andy Florance — Founder and CEO, CoStar Group
Again, remember, bookings are up 20% quarter-over-quarter.
Curtis Nagle — Analyst, Bank of America
Year-over-year.
Andy Florance — Founder and CEO, CoStar Group
Year-over-year. Year-over-year.
Curtis Nagle — Analyst, Bank of America
Okay. I appreciate it. Thank you.
Surinder Thind — Analyst, Jefferies
Thank you. Andy, can you maybe just talk about the decision or the pricing strategy in Homes.com at this point and the idea of raising pricing for new members on May first? Just why not maybe wait a year? You know, obviously, the metrics are very supportive of that pricing action, but just maybe to build the user base further or help us understand the timing there.
Andy Florance — Founder and CEO, CoStar Group
I think we can do both. I think we can grow the user base and capture more of the value. Particularly in the folks who are earning under $250,000 a year, in agents earning under $250,000 a year, there are many, many of those agents. I'm looking at the close rates for the folks who are well-trained and who have, you know, the upper half of Homes.com salespeople, and the close rates are extremely high. It feels like they're north of 50%. Once you get to that high a close rate, you start to feel that you need to bring the price up.
I think that there is room to recognize more value, and at the same time, continue to keep the same growth and possibly accelerate the growth in the number of members. There are a couple of places in looking at the different cohorts of agents and profile of agents. There are a couple of areas limited that will probably bring the pricing down a touch. In the biggest bulk of cohorts of agents, you know, we're leaving too much on the table. We're providing a lot of value, and I think we can push pricing and keep headcount growing, keep member count growing. You know, we'll play with it in each of the cohorts to optimize it, but feel pretty good about that right now.
Surinder Thind — Analyst, Jefferies
Thank you.
Brett Huff — Analyst, Stephens
Thanks for taking the question, and good evening, guys.
Andy Florance — Founder and CEO, CoStar Group
Hi, Brett.
Brett Huff — Analyst, Stephens
Thanks for the ROI stats on Homes.com. That's super helpful and something we've been focused on. My question is on Matterport. We've been feeling that that's a really big underlying structural kind of piece of the business that's underappreciated. You gave us some great stats on lingering on the site and things like that. It's clearly just a great enhancer to all of the, you know, the products that you have. Can you talk balancing that and how you price it and distribute it just to improve the product generally? Also talk a little bit about Matterport as a function or a module or of data that's gonna help you differentiate and remain sort of on the edge of proprietary data.
'Cause I kinda heard both of those themes, and I'm wondering if there's a pricing. Given trying to maybe do both of those, how do you think about pricing and distribution of that? Thank you.
Andy Florance — Founder and CEO, CoStar Group
Okay. In pricing and distribution, I mean, there are a lot of elements there. In pricing, first of all, if I go from the last question backwards, part of my thinking around bringing the price up a bit in homes.com is a core value proposition. There is the Matterports and the exterior 3D's we build, and then the floor plans we build. That delivers a lot of value. I believe there's. You heard the conversion stats. When people have a Matterport, they're getting 30x the views, getting 54 times the tours. There's a part of the Matterport pricing that's actually embedded in a monthly subscription fee or a monthly advertising fee for either Apartments.com or for Land.com or for LoopNet or for homes.com.
You can recognize a little bit of pricing value there with Matterport. With Domain, it's a little bit different. There we are using Matterport to get people to upgrade to higher depth level advertising. You're getting price appreciation, but you're actually giving them value, so effectively you're selling a Matterport when you do that, and there's a lot of that going on, and we're getting a very favorable response to that in Australia. A big change with Matterport is when we acquired Matterport, they were very focused on the a mass subscription of low-end accounts using the iPhone as the capture device.
We actually feel that the professional user of Matterport, the real estate agent, the leasing company, the architectural engineering construction company, is the biggest part of the market, and they want speed of capture, quality of capture. We are refocusing folks towards a more aggressive price point on the Matterport Pro3 camera, and then a higher SaaS subscription price for regular users. We're pulling the hardware down and focusing more on the SaaS subscription side. That's sort of a razor and razor blade strategy. We are working aggressively on the Matterport Pro4 camera. I know there's an engineering team meeting right now in Mountain View on reviewing the final specs on that.
There it's, you know, you're gonna have more SaaS revenue, slightly higher price points, lower hardware revenue, and then the pricing is reflected in across the board in the subscription rates or advertising rates with LoopNet Apartments.com, Homes.com, and Land.com. In terms of competitive differentiation, very excited about that. I mean, I described the X-ray function. It doesn't do it justice. The ability to do what our team is, our brilliant team is doing, which is produce these Gaussian splats that make an exterior model that allows you to see the neighborhood, fly around the house, and then as you approach the house, the walls disappear and you move into the house.
As you approach that, as you fly a synthetic drone, a virtual drone towards the house, the ability to take off the roof and look into the second floor, pull it up and look into the first floor. The ability to do the side-by-side comparisons in AEC. We have a very robust product roadmap right now, that will continue to differentiate, so we don't feel that there's anyone really keeping up with our innovation pace or development pace. The earnings call sounded a little bit like a Matterport earnings call, 'cause it sort of came up in every other thing I said. But, to the credit of the development team and the leadership team at Matterport, they're leaning in to facilitating success in all of our products with that differentiating technology. It's good stuff.
Brett Huff — Analyst, Stephens
Great. I appreciate it.
Andy Florance — Founder and CEO, CoStar Group
Oh my gosh. Well, I'd like to thank everyone for joining us on this first quarter earnings call, and I look forward to reporting our progress in the second quarter earnings call. Thank you very much for joining us.
Source: COSTAR GROUP, INC. earnings call transcript (2026-04-28). Management commentary and analyst Q&A are reproduced as delivered; speaker roles as stated on the call.

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