My name is Ryan Tomasello. I'm on the research side. I cover real estate, internet technology, and also a range of fintech companies. We're excited to have up here today CoStar Group, two folks who just joined within the last six months, bringing a lot of new, fresh perspective to the story. Chris Lown, CFO, and unlike how it says up there, Rich Simonelli, head of investor relations. Thanks, guys, for being here today.
Thank you for having us.
Just starting on that point, just because I think it is interesting to hit on your backgrounds with the company quickly, where you joined from, just given the fact you both popped on to the CoStar brand in the last few months.
Sure. So I recently joined, but I'm kind of like the old new guy or the new old guy. I'm not quite sure how to phrase it properly. So I came back to CoStar after a five-year hiatus. I thought I wanted to be a consultant and just hope for PMs to send me all their problem companies and do consulting work, and got pretty bored working from home. Actually, I was hired by one of my clients, which was Compass Group, largest residential real estate business in the country, and it turned out to be fortuitous coming back with all the work that CoStar is doing on the Homes.com front. But prior to that, I spent 10 years at CoStar from 2011 to 2020. Market cap went from $1 billion to $25 billion at that time.
But more importantly, transformed from a data and information company specifically for information and commercial all the way up to LoopNet, Apartments.com, and the others. So I've had a nice history of the progression of the company. And going a little bit back, I was an investment banker most of my career postgraduate school. I was at Morgan Stanley. My last two jobs at Morgan Stanley, I was global co-head of financial technology, and I was also co-head of North America Banks and Diversified Finance. Someone was fortunate enough to take me out of banking and make me the CFO. And so I went to a company called Navient to be the CFO there. Then got a call, and Freddie Mac was looking for a CFO. And I knew the CEO because he was a client. I went to Freddie Mac to be the CFO.
And four months ago, about six months ago, I got a call from CoStar. And I knew the company. I didn't cover them as a banker, but I knew the company because they were always on our comp sheets as bankers. I mean, the growth and the margins were always incredible. So I knew who they were. And when I got the call, to me, it was an incredibly interesting opportunity. And I was fortunate to be selected. And so I'm four months in. Here we are.
I wanted to start on still probably the equally largest business in the company, CoStar Suite, the core information product. That business has, I think, shown a lot of resiliency in light of how terrible the commercial real estate backdrop has been, still growing mid-single digits currently. I guess, given how volatile the rate backdrop has been over the last 90 days, what are your updated thoughts around the cyclical tailwinds coming back online for that business? And then from there, we can chat about the structural dynamics, but just curious about more of the macro here.
I think your first point to that question was, I think the most interesting thing going on in the markets today is that sort of this struggle between the capital markets and the Fed on rates. We're down 75 basis points, and 30-year mortgages are higher than they were three months ago. So to me, that's a pretty interesting backdrop of what's going on and how that's going to be a challenge for the administration to get rates down. But inevitably, rates are impactful to both commercial and residential. A lot of commercial leverage is floating rate, and so they feel that pain, and they feel the issues when rates are up or elevated. We've managed to do a great job.
I think your resiliency point is spot on in that even in a very difficult commercial real estate market, maybe the worst we'll see in our lifetime, and in an elevated rate environment over the last couple of years, we've added subscribers. We've increased pricing. And so there is resiliency. I think it's for a couple of reasons. One, it's a pretty critical product to own. The capabilities, the data, the analytics are becoming must-haves, not need-to-have. But I also think what's been incredible for us is we've continued to expand our TAM. So not only are our historic TAMs still under-penetrated in our view, but we've increased TAMs by the owner's module and the lender's module. So we've expanded TAM, which has allowed us to sort of grow through this very difficult period.
So inevitably, when rates do come down, and inevitably they will when this sort of battle is over, it'll be a definite tailwind more broadly for commercial real estate. But even in light of that, I think the resiliency and the ability to have growth and margin expansion, because incremental dollars coming in or at higher margins is a pretty, I think it's why we trade where we do and we do what our stock is still going to strong.
One of the most common questions we get when folks are looking at CoStar Suite is the core agent broker TAM in that category, and I think investors sometimes overlook that there is still white space there.
Yeah, a lot.
So I just want to hit on that because I feel like it's important.
Yeah, I think we're 50%-60% penetrated in a platform that was really built primarily at the beginning for the broker market. And I think if you were for a broker, the value proposition is just continuing to grow because you can expand your space. You can expand sort of areas you represent. It just gives you a lot of opportunity to be more expansive in your thought process. So there is TAM. And we're kind of at the low part of the broker market too. Obviously, there was a lot of shedding of expenses over the last couple of years, but that seems to have bottoming. There seems to be, I don't know if it's green shoots, but there clearly are signs that we are at the bottom. Whether we drag for a while or bounce off, we'll see. But all the commercial brokers are increasing their forecasts.
They're talking about more leasing activity. Grade A office property seems to be doing well. And commercial real estate is a tale of many cities. There's retail's done pretty well through the crisis. Obviously, data centers have done incredibly well. Multifamily seems to be at a bottom, bouncing off a bottom. And office, just because the size of the asset and the visibility of the asset has gotten a lot of attention. But even there, Grade A newer properties seem to be bouncing off bottoms. And there is a return to work momentum that seems to be gathering as well. So I think that all of that adds up to a pretty good picture for us.
Before we went through this down cycle in commercial real estate, CoStar Suite was a pretty steady at a double-digit grower. Are you confident that that business can still support that growth profile in the right environment, and in terms of that environment, do we need to be back at peak commercial real estate transaction volumes for the business to be humming along again, or is it a bit more nuanced than that in terms of just riding that initial recovery?
Yeah, I think it's not always more nuanced. I think we just see this headwind is pretty dramatic, so we've expanded our TAMs through the investment in the business and releasing lender and releasing the owner modules. And so there's pretty significant under-penetrated TAM plus the TAMs that exist that still have plenty of room, so like you said, great resilience, mid-single digit grower, margin expansion, and a tailwind. I think it just kind of goes, and I won't use my words. I mean, Andy would absolutely say this is a double-digit grower in that environment, and it's been an incredible result in the environment we're in.
Before we shift gears to the apartments business, most of the overwhelming majority of the success in CoStar Suite has been domestic growth.
Yeah, absolutely.
And outside of the U.S., you guys have obviously been slowly sowing the seeds and the infrastructure there. And I want to bring LoopNet into this, the commercial real estate information marketplace. I'm sorry, the commercial real estate marketplace. What is the work you've been doing internationally? And when does that start to become a more meaningful driver for LoopNet and CoStar Suite?
So one of the things we've done over the last couple of years, we've bought a number of small properties in Europe, so Germany, Spain, France, and the U.K. And they've been information assets, news assets. But what we're in the process of doing right now is ring-fencing those businesses, getting those businesses into our two products, LoopNet and CoStar Suite. And then we will launch with those products within the market. We're also currently, we've released researchers in some of the bigger cities. We're hiring into that research effort to build the CoStar Suite information. And so we're sort of like midstream in that. That should be all sort of wrangled by year-end 2025, technology, et cetera, and the decommissioning of a lot of other things. And so it really is a 2026 and 2027 story.
We want to be very conscious of really only having a couple of products. Our benchmark products are the products we always want to have: LoopNet, CoStar Suite, Apartments.com, obviously in the U.S. And so even when we buy assets, it takes some time to make sure that we can get them in the right place, get them into our systems, our technology, our brands, and then from there really launch them into it. And it's a shoe leather business. I talk about this a lot, but CoStar Suite, at least the core of its business is a shoe leather business. You need to get researchers into the cities, walking around, mapping buildings, seeing who the tenants are inside, calling brokers, getting information. And so we're at that process. But the interesting thing is that's a great thing for us because it's a very hard business to replicate.
There are no CoStars around the world. We are really the only CoStar. And we have a great system. We have a great proven track record. We know how to do it. So it's sort of our opportunity to take advantage of. And that's what we're kind of now about to expand on in Europe.
And how are you feeling about the competitive moat domestically? I mean, there's been a lot of movement in that space and players like Moody's and
A lot of M&A and activity.
How do you feel about it?
Based on the growth, I think it defends itself. Has that changed at all in the last few years?
No, I think the moat's only gotten deeper because I think if you look at the lender product and you look at the owner's product and the additional data and information and capabilities we're applying to CoStar Suite, I think we're outdistancing ourselves. I mean, if you look at some of the platforms that some of our competitors have bought, they've sort of atrophied. They haven't really been able to do much with them. I think that speaks as much to our competitive position as what we've done. And so I think, listen, you never take anything for granted. But we're hyper-focused on making sure we invest in the platform, we grow the platform because we want to deliver value to the ecosystem. And I think that's where we are today.
And switching gears to the apartments business, obviously a major success story over the last decade. Apartments.com, obviously coming off of a very positive countercyclical backdrop with high vacancies, a lot of new construction coming online. From our lens, I think investors maybe are scarred by how much volatility the growth profile of that business experienced in the immediate aftermath of COVID.
Yeah, sure.
And so that's when the countercyclicality first kind of reared its head for you guys.
Yeah.
How are you thinking about that countercyclicality materializing next year or in the years following, just given where we are in the multifamily cycle and completions kind of tailing off here?
Yeah, so the great offset to that countercyclicality in a normalized world, obviously the COVID was a very unique world because you had two things, two factors at play. You had the rate drop, but also you had a very unique backdrop for the workforce and how people lived and where they wanted to live. My view on this is that TAM satisfies the cyclicality for at least probably one interest rate cycle, if not two. What I mean by that is we believe that in the markets that we spend most of our time and have very large market share, which is sort of the 50-plus unit market, that we can double our revenue. So we can take that $1.1 billion-$2 billion just in that TAM. So that's huge opportunity. And that's regardless of rate environment.
Those are customers that should clearly be on our platform, get the benefits of all the things that we provide: great leads, great lead-to-lease times, the ancillary service payments, et cetera. We have a lot of capabilities that we can bring to bear. So even in a cyclical market, we can add customers in a way that will be beneficial. The biggest driver ultimately, obviously, is vacancy rates. Vacancy rates do drive a lot of behavior in that market. And we're still at a pretty high vacancy rate. And so our customers are really pushing themselves hard. They need to get their apartments leased. They need to get their assets leased. If you think about it, if you're a 50+ asset or a 50+ a partment owner, you almost inevitably have leverage against that asset. So your equity is levered. You're trying to make monthly interest and principal payments.
So by far the most important thing for you is to get that asset leased. You need cash flow to help pay down that leverage and protect your equity and make money off of your equity. We feel really strongly, and the data would suggest, our platform provides the best capabilities, the best leads, least lease times. And therefore, we will continue to have a very dominant presence in those markets even when vacancy rates come down because the pie will shrink, but our slice will grow because they will be jettisoning number three, four, and five players and concentrate their dollars to the platform that provides the most benefit to them.
I do think, to your point, though, I don't know if it's six, eight, 10 years out, the cyclicality of the interest rate market will come to bear more on that industry because our TAMs will be maxed out. Our competitors' TAMs will be more maxed out and will be more of a head-to-head competition. But I like our position in that outer date, i.e., the larger player, attractive margins, great statistics and metrics to bring to bear to our customers.
On the competitive front, have you seen any noticeable gains being drivers of growth from, call it, the number three-plus players, the Redfin product, the Apartment List?
You didn't mention the other one.
We're going to get to the Zilltow, but.
Yeah, no, listen, A, we applaud our competitors for the businesses they build. Great, but we haven't seen any deterioration. Once in a while, someone will come in and say, "Oh, I heard this. I heard that." But from our lens and where we are, the answer is no, and like I said, there's a lot of TAM. There's a lot of opportunity of growth. It would be almost illogical to start banging against each other when there's a lot of opportunity. Our sales force, we believe, well, we don't believe, we are going to invest and increase our sales force by about 25% over the next year because there's still so much TAM out there that we're not realizing and we're not taking advantage of, so we're not seeing it. People talk a lot about the quote-unquote deceleration of our growth. I mean, it's a high-class problem.
We grew this business to $1.1 billion in revenue. And so it's pretty hard to sustain a 25%, 30% growth rate as you've scaled to such a size. But we still have an incredibly attractive growth rate at attractive margins with a great product. I like our position.
I mean, you already kind of hit it, but with respect to Zillow making a renewed push into multifamily, I think historically they've built more of their moat in the longer tail of the category and have more recently been adding more resources to the upmarket space. So that's not been anything concerning on your front in terms of competitive dynamics there?
No, you know, Rich raises the point is that when we bought Apartments.com, Zillow was in the apartments rental business, and we're a $1 billion business today. And so, listen, Zillow's done a great job. They built a great business. They're doing a nice job in their end of the market. I think what gives me a lot of comfort is we can increase, we can double our revenue in our TAM, and they can double their revenue in their TAM, and we don't have to, we don't really have to bump into each other. Ultimately, that'll be that day, but it doesn't have to be today or tomorrow, and we're not seeing the competitive pressures or we're not seeing attrition out of our portfolio today. But they've done a nice job.
If you think about the broader opportunity around the apartments business, I mean, to date you've stuck down the fairway of just traditional advertising. Longer term, is there any interest in expanding that business into other areas that are more software-oriented, like accounting software or other types of lead gen to capitalize on that?
We're doing payments. We're doing some payments and we're doing verification work for customers. What you're talking about is what I love for CoStar because anytime you can take a platform or a capability and add the first derivative to that or tangentially add services, the returns on that are very high and they're very attractive. I think we're always looking for those opportunities to do things like that that make sense. Apartments is clearly a platform that has a lot of that possibilities. CoStar Suite is, there's endless possibilities in that platform. I think that's really the interesting value proposition of our business. We can deploy capital at returns that are well better than our cost of capital very quickly because we can put it on a platform in an ecosystem where we can generate real significant expense and revenue synergies.
Wrapping up on the commercial and apartments business for now, you recently announced that you're going to be investing to grow each of your primary sales forces, which I think is around a 25%-30% growth in the overall sales force and the core business.
About 20%.
20%. Why is now the right time to do that? And if we think about the very pristine margin profile of the core business in the low 40s, how does that play into kind of the near-term trajectory of margins as you kind of scale that sales force?
Well, it'll happen over a year. They'll get productive in six, 12, 18 months depending on the product. And so it'll come through, and there'll be some investment of de minimis impact, but it's not going to be massive. And the question of why now, I'd actually tell you, why haven't we been doing it over the last couple of years? If you look at our sales force over the last few years, it's been flat. So this business has generated all the growth, the margin expansion, the price increasing, the customer account increase with a sales force that was basically flat over that two years. Now, obviously, we had attrition, so we were hiring to fill that attrition, but we haven't expanded our sales force. Our view is, A, we've expanded the TAMs like in CoStar Suite. And so there's opportunity there to add to those products.
But even in our core products, you mentioned the broker TAM, we're still under-penetrated there. We still have opportunity, and we are a much more robust, much more interesting, much more valuable platform today than we were two or three years ago, so I think our view and belief is we should be investing in salespeople. Our salespeople are maxed out. When you speak to them, in our model, our salespeople service too, so if you're a salesperson, you've got to service, you've got to sell, so they've been pretty maxed out. It's not like there's capacity, and we should always be investing in the sales force, but there clearly has been an opportunity to generate value for shareholders by increasing the sales force, and I almost think it's always the time, so why now? Why not a year ago? It should be continuous and part of our ethos.
It's one of the places I think that you shouldn't be trying to save money when there are people that could actually affect the growth of the company, so as long as your marginal revenue exceeds the marginal cost, and it always does with the sales expansion, it just makes perfect sense, and there's other places where you can save margin and not affect, but we're doing a good job on growing the sales force, and I think what's really exciting about coming up in the coming year is that with the sales force back, selling back to their original positions and the products that they're used to selling, you get a first wave of productivity back that you've lacked over the last three quarters, and then as you're adding more sales reps in over time, you're going to get that second wave into the end of 2025 and 2026.
Yeah, I think what's unique about our business is where we are in the life cycle of what we're trying to achieve. And so our backdrop of what we're trying to achieve, and our mission statement is to digitalize the real estate markets, commercial, residential, real estate. Well, in the scheme of where we are in that process in the U.S. and globally, we're in the early innings. There's just a massive opportunity to continue to invest, to make returns better than your cost of capital, to strengthen your portfolio, to expand your capabilities. And to that regard, you kind of have this continuing investment phases that just keep rolling through the company. And I think to some degree in your end of the market, and on the buy side, it creates a sort of like trying to understand how that works.
But our view is like there's just so much runway and so much opportunity. You want us to keep investing in these businesses because the end goal or the end state is just so valuable.
And moving to probably the most debated topic around the company, what you're trying to do with Homes.com, save the best for last.
It wasn't adding to the sales force? That's not the thing you get the most data.
Yeah, I view that as completely separate, 600 versus three. Obviously, you guys have acknowledged the fits and starts and some of the missteps out of the gate around homes, but still very, very much confident in that product and the differentiation versus the existing portal products out there. Just walk us through some of the changes that you've made more recently, including investing into the sales force and what the playbook is for 2025 on executing on that.
Yeah, well, I think that's a great question. So as you said, we came out of the gates and we kind of threw a lot at the market. And what you've seen happen over the last six months is really a number of key changes to really refine the message. So we've really refined the value proposition for the agents. We are now ensuring that the people we're selling to are really only the agents that would value what our value proposition is. And that's really listing agents or people who really aspire to be leading listing agents, which we think is a, I don't know, 500,000, 600,000 agent opportunity. So that refinement of the message, the targeting of who we're selling to are pretty big changes because when we came out of the gates in February, we told our sales force to sell and they sold.
They did exactly what we asked them to do. They went out and they sold. But inevitably, we sold to a lot of the wrong agents. We sold to agents who didn't have listings. We sold to agents who were new and thought they were getting buyer lead generation, and we are the exact opposite. People like to talk about Zillow versus CoStar, Realtor, et cetera. To me, I think it's sort of an apples-to-oranges discussion. Our value proposition and our business model is exactly opposite of theirs. They've built business models, right? $1.7 billion in revenue, $500+ million revenue. Great, good for them, but that's not what we're doing. We're not competing with them to generate buyer leads to sell to the market. What we're doing, and it's a multi-legged value proposition, is we're trying to tell the market like there's a much better way to market yourself.
You should be using your market dollars on our platform, not like buying newspaper ads or magazine ads or radio spots or Facebook, et cetera, but use our platform. Our platform is a much more valuable platform when you go to compete for listings and you try to win listings because our stats are so strong around you can demonstrate how much we market your property and how we retarget your market, your property. Our platform is the only platform where your picture, your name, and your contact details are on it. And the value of that is not only in the listing process, it's also just generally. People can find you.
Rich's wife is a real estate agent and she got a sale of a property because an agent who wasn't related with her company from another agency like 100 mi away called her and said, "I found you on Homes.com. I found your contact details and your picture. I saw your stats. I saw what you do. My client needs to sell their house in your town. Will you do that? And I'll get a referral fee." That can only happen on our platform. So these value propositions are just different than the other models. And so we compete for consumer eyeballs, but we're really competing in just a different world than them because we're trying to really provide a lot of value to listing agents and agents who aspire to build listing platforms. So that's our goal. And I think it's just a difference.
You're spending a lot of money to do it, to say the least, but into a big opportunity.
We are.
I think this year, when folks look at the Homes.com and broader residential P&L, you're essentially reinvesting all of your core EBITDA into this business. The line of sight to narrowing that loss to at least a break-even is tough math to do without taking some leap of faith in what the vision is. Help us wrap our hands around gaining comfort with the ability to kind of narrow this plus or minus $1 billion investment into at least a break-even business and what it will take to get there. Is there levers to reduce that spend or is it really just about scaling the revenue, a combination?
So it's a broad question. We get asked the question a lot. A billion-dollar investment, any investment is a leap of faith. So the leap of faith is in this new business model and how we're going to monetize the value. I think there are a couple levers inevitably. Obviously, revenue is the first one. Andy in the recent earnings call put out a number that he believed that our cohort data would suggest that four-month plus tenure salespeople can generate net gross and net new of X. Therefore, you can kind of roll that out and you can make a determination based on sales force, what that revenue profile looks like. Inevitably, the expense base isn't $900 million forever. When we get, we've done this, the marketing has been incredibly effective along a couple of funds.
We took unaided brand awareness from 4% in February to 33% in the most recent quarter end. That's an incredible increase. I mean, from our perspective, it's just massive. And you all may say, "Well, what does that matter?" Well, it matters because if you can get that number up another 15-20 points, then you start to get real significant organic search. And therefore, you can reduce your SEM and SEO. And so you can start to really consolidate your expense base and reduce your expense base there. So that's very beneficial to the business model. And there are other levers as well. But I think that there clearly is the investment isn't constant forever. The revenue, as Andy mentioned, there is a revenue target there out there for us. And we'll be held accountable in that in 2025 for those numbers.
And then it's about working the opportunity. And then I think inevitably, when you get an ecosystem within our model of scale, you have the ability to generate additional revenue because you have competition within that environment. And it's a fairly attractive environment for everybody. So there are a lot of levers, but we're in this odd pocket, a vacuum of information and timing. We do have some revenue. We've got subscribers. But clearly, 2025 is going to be important year for us.
Before we open it up to see if there's any questions, I wanted to ask about M&A. You have a large billion-dollar net deal in the hopper with Matterport. Obviously, last week's events changed the M&A outlook for a lot of industries in terms of how that could be a bit more of a growth lever. What's CoStar's capital allocation strategy as it relates to M&A? Is there appetite for large deals? And does that change just based on this optimism that's been brought to the M&A markets in the last week?
Yeah, so our capital allocation thought process is we have to beat our cost of capital with any capital we deploy. Organically or inorganically, we have to beat our cost of capital 10%, 11%. So that's our hurdle rate. The beauty of our platform is we just acquired this company of Visual Lease a couple of weeks ago. This is, to me, as an ex-banker, is about as pure great M&A as you can get as a corporate. So we acquired a platform that was very similar to our platform. We can put that platform on our platform. We can create great synergies out of it. There's data play in there. And we will well earn our cost of capital. We will earn our cost of capital within six months. And after we've kind of rationalized it, we will blow through our cost of capital.
And the beauty of the CoStar platform is like we have an incredible opportunity to do that, how broad our platform is. And so I think the appetite is obviously dependent on the opportunity. But for opportunities where we can beat our cost of capital, you should want us to do that. We should want to do that. That's a home run. And we'll see how the FTC shakes out in their thought processes. Obviously, we're still trying to get through the second round of Matterport.
Do you think it's more likely we see stuff like Visual Lease going forward? Or are you also out there whale hunting, especially internationally?
I think we're just looking for anything that we can beat our cost of capital in.
Any questions from the audience? Just on market structure as it relates to Homes.com, obviously the last year brought a lot of change to commissions, and a lot of time has been spent on how that may or may not accrue to the benefit of the portals and players like you guys. One of the more interesting developments recently has been this shift in focus to other MLS-related policies that essentially govern the role of the MLS and the stronghold that that system has on supply in the United States. To the extent we did see some rollback in these rules and policies that uphold that legacy MLS system, what does that mean for the portals and what does that mean for Homes.com?
Well, I think it clearly creates opportunity for the portals. The window starts to open in a way that didn't exist before. If Clear Cooperation, and Clear Cooperation is sort of going away in some places. Some MLSs are changing their policies and providing a little more window or lessening it. That's right, right?
Clear cooperation.
Yeah. And so I think for all of us, it provides an opportunity to provide what we have. We have these incredible national global networks that provide incredible capabilities to provide a captive audience and to market and demonstrate a listing, a house, et cetera. And so I think it opens the window. And then the question is who takes advantage of that open window? And our view is we are the platform that is trying to support the listing side of the business. So if you're a listing agent, if you're aspiring listing agent, you want to build your business around that, we are the platform behind that. So our hope would be that we would be able to take advantage of it in an outsized way. But clearly, we need to see some things change.
Is there an opportunity for you to form direct rails with some of the larger national brokerages, regardless of what happens with the MLS system that could accrete to your benefit?
I think there are a lot of opportunities to do a lot of things. I'd just highlight the brokerage firms are made up of independent agents, and it's more of a broker decision than an agency decision. Although we would welcome any discussion with a brokerage firm to want to use our platform to their advantage.
Any final questions from the audience? Chris, I wanted to wrap up on something you kind of alluded to earlier, but your background as a banker, you spent a lot of time with the exchanges in the exchange space, and you saw that industry consolidate and digitize. Now that you've had enough time you spent with CoStar and the real estate space, what kind of parallels can you make between those two industries?
Yeah, so whatever success I had as a banker, a lot of it was around the financial markets, the exchanges, the information players, et cetera, and taking them public, merging them. It was really incredible what happened between the late 1990s through to today. That was the digitalization of the financial markets both domestically, globally, by product. Even finally, the corporate fixed income market digitized. That was hard work. But the value creation during that 20-year period was like incredible. It was just absolutely incredible. The companies, the scale they got to, the M&A they got to do, the synergies they're able to realize in these businesses built to go global, take some products global to an audience that they couldn't get to today. So in my view, I don't know where we are. They're in the seventh, eighth inning of sort of that trend.
In the real estate industry, it is a far bigger environment. It is a far bigger TAM and opportunity. It's very broad, and we're like in the second inning. That to me was the most compelling thing about the CoStar opportunity when you really understand and see it. There's just this massive opportunity to really provide an immense amount of value to these markets by digitizing them, making them more efficient, and creating significantly more exposure to people through technology platforms, so to me, that is a compelling opportunity. We're in a great position to take advantage of those trends given who we are, given our size, et cetera, and so to me, that's an incredibly exciting opportunity, and it's organic and inorganic, and again, the basic thesis in our capital deployment, we have to beat our cost of capital.
But I think as we scale and get bigger and even more entrenched, it helps us in that capacity.
I think that's a good note to end on.
Great.
So thank you, Chris. Thank you, Rich, for being with us. Thanks to everyone in the audience. Thanks.
Thank you all.