Over the weekend, CoStar Group announced that it has agreed to acquire real estate tech company Homesnap. The acquisition was made for $250 million in cash and is expected to close by the end of this year, pending closing conditions and review, according to a release.
The addition of Homesnap will increase the number of brokers and active agent users on CoStar’s platforms from approximately 100,000 to over 400,000, the company said. The number of property listings across CoStar’s brands will also double, from about 1.35 million to over 2.6 million.
“Homesnap has spent years building tools that reinforce the agent-client relationship and arm both home buyers and agents with the data and software they need to find homes and do their jobs,” said John Mazur, CEO of Homesnap. “We are excited to join CoStar Group and leverage their 30 years of knowledge and experience in property data, software and marketing to take advantage of this significant growth opportunity.”
CoStar’s Founder and CEO Andy Florance said that this acquisition will enable the company to enter a new space and expand market presence.
“Homesnap has great relationships, data, software, and tools for residential real estate professionals that are complementary to our existing offerings,” Florance said. “The tools and functionality developed by Homesnap for residential property agents, such as lead generation, client collaboration, and digital advertising, have direct applicability to commercial brokers.”
Urban District Realty has announced it will begin licensing the use of PROJETO, its virtual reality real estate listing system, to firms throughout the U.S. starting in January. PROJETO was originally only made available to the firms own clients in September.
PROJETO uses virtual reality technology which allows clients to be put in a virtual representation of a property that hasn’t been built yet. Principal Broker and CEO of Urban District Realty Ryan Fiero said that demand for the product led to the decision to make PROJETO available to more in the industry.
“We always had plans to grow PROJETO, though we didn’t necessarily anticipate it happening this quickly,” Fiero said.
According to the company, it will also be launching a proprietary real estate scanning system, which will allow clients to list existing properties in PROJETO at an accessible price point. This scanning service will focus on custom model creation for properties that are still under development and/or construction.
