Good morning. My name's Brett Huff. I'm one of the tech analysts here at Stephens. Last day of the conference. We're running it in. Thanks for being here. We hope you've had good meetings. We hope you had some good hot chicken while you're here. Maybe had a few PBRs at some of the honky tonks. I can't believe without doing that. Do hope you have had some good meetings. We appreciate your being here and the partnerships with all of you. Also want to say thanks to Rich, who's the Head of Investor Relations at CoStar, and Chris, who's the CFO, further to my left. Also, thanks for the partnership and for being here. We know you guys are busy. Appreciate the time. There's lots of good stuff going on, lots of interesting things going on with CoStar.
Before we kind of dive into the meat of this, do you guys want to do introductions and say hello and do any backgrounds for folks just to introduce yourselves?
Sure. Chris Lown, I'm the CFO of CoStar. I've been at the company about almost a year and a half now.
Rich?
I've been back about a year and a half, but I spent almost 10 years from 2011 to 2020 in IR and have a long relationship with the guys at Stephens. Brett was the guy who dragged me to places like Minneapolis and Kansas City and said, "These are really good places to get long-term investors." Even to this day, from those first meetings we went out in 2011, 2012, 2013, we still have many of those investors. Lots of thanks to him, and we appreciate the opportunity to spend time with you today.
Sure. Thanks. The key questions we've been getting on CoStar are kind of Apartments, AI, Homes. We will start with those, and we got lots of other content. I want to start with those because I think that's what most investors are interested in. I'm sure you guys have been talking about it a lot. On Apartments, can you guys talk about where we are in the evolution of that? It's been an amazing business. It's grown incredibly. Market dominance. Low teens growth in 3Q. Growth drivers are many and varied. We've got some high-end stuff where you guys have a lot of share. You're moving down market. Some of that, it takes time. There's a different customer base, et cetera.
Can you talk about how that strategy is going to work over time, how that should impact bookings, pricing, kind of near-term and long-term as you see growth?
Yeah, we remain extremely excited about our position and with the apartments business. I mean, this business for 13 consecutive quarters has had double-digit revenue growth. Go back when we bought the company over 10 years ago, there were seven competitors. Basically, they were basic ILS platforms that just had a photograph and a place to contact somebody. What we did and how we became by far the market leader in the industry is by bringing a lot of technology, better consumer experience to the market. That resulted in the company growing from a $50 million-plus revenue base to over $1.2 billion today. We are by far the market leader. It's boiled down to, it's really boiled down to two players in the market. There are some others out there, but really two players. We're twice as big as the second player.
We know we have margins that are in excess of theirs. There is a reason why. It is because we bring renewed technology, and we focus very much on the technology, the consumer experience. For instance, we just launched the Matterport Plus program, which brings Matterports into the Apartments.com capability. It serves a multitude of purposes for the owners. It gives lower bounce rates, much more time on site. People are actually signing contracts without ever going to the apartments. We obviously brought much better customer experience and technology over time. We are integrated into their back end, so we can give people real line of sight on expenses and fees to get into the apartments. There is a huge opportunity set still out there. We think the TAM is over $9 billion collectively between us and Zillow. We have $1.7 billion of revenue.
Huge TAM, huge opportunity, but still a lot more technology to bring, a lot more capabilities. AI will really help transform the industry as well. We're along that path, which will bring, again, better customer experience, better search capability, which will also increase time on site, which will lower bounce rates, et cetera, will increase leads. We're excited about where we are, and there's still a huge runway ahead of us.
Yeah. The other thing I was going to add is that the amount of original content that is on this site, this isn't just a listing site that says there's an apartment available. Matterports have been a very big part of our business proposition for Apartments. Clearly, we're bringing that over to both LoopNet and to Homes.com. We shot a lot of video that's original, millions of actual copyrighted photographs that sometimes people borrow. Those are all things that are differentiators. I think it's one of the things that Andy realized on the industry. We first got there, people were putting up a listing with a postage size stamp of a photo and running banner ads and skyscraper ads and calling it an internet site.
He said, "No, there's an opportunity with the internet to put tons of original content and make it differentiated and make it a destination site." If it was nothing but a listing site, right, nothing added value, but there's a ton of added value here that we're doing.
That's helpful. As you guys think about how the competition is going to play out, you guys rolled up a bunch of them and did the operational effectiveness and technology injection that you guys usually do when you make acquisitions. How do you think about competition, not just with Zillow? There's three or four other smaller players. How does the differentiation between the sites happen? My view is that you guys are better at the bigger buildings, that they tend to focus on the lower sizes just because of where they started in single family, that maybe the next battleground is in the middle. How do you view that both near-term and long-term, and not just with Zillow, but how people interact with the sites over time and where that value proposition goes?
Yeah. Actually, there's so much TAM and there's so much opportunity, right? You're 15%-20% penetrated in an industry that should be 70%-80% penetrated. I mean, why if you have real estate that you need to let and you're not digitizing it, it just seems at this point where we're on the technology cycle, that's odd. I think that there's a huge amount of opportunity. I think technology clearly is going to win the day. I think the connectivity in the back ends and understanding how these companies work and ensure there's fee transparency is really important. The next big wave to come through really the portals is really going to be AI. What that means is there's going to be conversational search, it's going to be table stakes.
You're just going to get online and you're going to speak to your computer and you're going to speak to the portal and all the things you used to check. When you check the box, you're just going to talk to the, you can do it today. You're just going to talk to the computer and you're going to provide much more listings. You're going to have higher listings to view. You're going to have more interesting discussions. The information that the portal is going to have is going to be far greater, right? Because you're going to be able to just ask it things and things that you probably wouldn't have asked the portals before. I think technology is going to be critical. Consumer experience is going to be critical. Those are all places we know we're market leaders in, so we feel good about that.
Got it. I'll do a couple more questions and we'll pause. I know there may be questions in the audience before we move on from Apartments. Staying with Apartments, new sales staff, the sales team has been incredibly successful, but had been not growing very much for the last few years, even though there's been a lot of TAM. There's been a renewed focus on that. I think the number is roughly 20% higher, kind of across a lot of your business lines, but particularly in Apartments. Given the TAM, sort of why now, what's changing, how's the training going, how's the productivity, and all that kind of stuff with these new folks?
Yeah, why now is simply, I think the company got busy. We got busy on doing a lot of things and therefore was not growing the sales force in the way that it should have, right? Looking at sort of the KPIs of those sales forces, making sure that they were not overburdened and could tackle and aggressively go after new business. We run a very unified sales program. If you make a sale, you have to service that account. You think about this business, how much it has grown. Our salespeople really had to deal with servicing the accounts they had and try to find new business. We simply just realized that we had to be more programmatic about investing in the sales force. It is a little bit more of a catch-up.
We're catching up and I think we'll do a better job at just managing that and trying to keep it going. It really is just making sure that we can tackle the opportunity. I mean, as I said, we think the TAM's at least $9 billion. We're sure it's more than that. There's a huge opportunity and we have to have a sales force appropriately sized for that opportunity.
I think the stat on the last call, and I do not think it is quite right, but maybe there are 200,000 actual meetings that happen and 100,000 of them were maybe in person. I mean, so the scale of that is pretty large.
Yeah.
Can you talk a little bit about that and the sales channel? You guys are selling to the owners of these properties and they own them. Can you talk about that sales process and maybe how that evolves?
Yeah. Our sales team at Apartments.com runs an incredibly efficient and dynamic operation. I mean, I've seen a number of sales organizations in my career and they are just very metrics-focused. Andy is adamant you have to meet people in person. He can't run it out of just an office in one place and call people. I think that was one of the professionalizing and standardizing the sales call was probably one of the first big things that they did at Apartments.com. That just continues. We run a very aggressive nine-block system like in the sales force. You have to produce, you have to do your meetings, right? These things are programmatic. I think that they probably run the best sales outfit. They run one of the best sales outfits I've ever seen regardless of industry.
Last question for me on this one, then I'll see if we'll check with the audience. Getting back to the TAM a little bit, the world is divided up into sort of the 100 plus, the middle, however you define it, and then maybe the 20 units and below in the single family. How do you all think about prosecuting those? I mean, is it right to think that you guys have been mostly focused on the bigger buildings and are now moving down? Is that the right way to think about it? How does the, I don't know, sales structure or maybe value proposition or et cetera change as you do move down into those new markets?
Yeah, I do not think it is moving down. I do not think that is the wrong way to put it. I mean, my view is that there is a $9 billion TAM. We need to penetrate it. Clearly, out of the gate, our penetration was in the 50-100 plus market. Even still in those markets, we are 30-50% penetrated, right? There are massive opportunities there. It is really just saying there is this massive TAM. We have to make sure we have the sales force to go after it, and we should be in that position. The biggest TAM is in the 1-49 market. All these markets are very attractive. This is a fixed cost business, basically, right? Every incremental dollar that comes in from a revenue perspective is at a very high margin, right? Talking 90% plus on incremental dollars.
Inevitably, obviously, a 100 unit plus market may have bigger sale, but there's just a different sales strategy as you go at the 1-49 or 50-99 markets. Inevitably, the margin profiles are relatively the same. Now, absolute dollars are different, but margin profiles are the same. We should be attacking the entire industry, right? That's the focus now, just to be more holistic in our view of the entire Apartments.com business.
Yeah. When you look at Apartments, the 1 to 49, we're less than 1% penetrated. And even 20 to 49, we're just 7% penetrated. And surprisingly, 30% penetrated in 50 units and above. There is a lot more to go and grow. I think it's kind of an unfair thing to call the whole thing multifamily because clearly the needs of somebody that runs a quad versus 20 versus 100, there's a very different model. One of the things talking with Fred Saint and Paige Forrest, who runs the business sales forces, the other positive thing about getting more sales reps, it gives you the opportunity for in-person. What we found is that in-person is a great way of doing business for CoStar, for LoopNet, for Apartments.com. This gives you more opportunity to do that.
We still have a great inside sales team, and that's very important. Clearly, part of it is to get more in-person meetings as we go along.
That's helpful. Let's pause there. I have a few more questions on Apartments. Can always do that, but open it up to the audience. Is there any follow-up questions on that?
Yeah. Can you talk about how you are protecting your content from your primary competitor? And then kind of related question is, how do you ensure that consumers are coming to you as opposed to using other kind of front ends? I'm thinking about AI and chatbots in terms of whether they can actually scrape your data or not. How do you make sure that you're getting the consumer home?
Yeah. It's a great question. One of the things Andy Florance is adamant about is protecting the IP of this company. We've invested well over $5 billion into CoStar, and protecting that IP is critical to him. You actually saw recently our biggest competitor has been using nearly 50,000 copyrighted images, our copyrighted images on their site. Our legal team is always looking and reviewing the market to see who may be using our IP. As a result, we sued. We think it's a massive copyright infringement case. It's probably one of the biggest that's ever been filed. What's also happened is our competitor automatically started taking them down, right? I mean, they started removing those because there was a realization that they should not have been using our copyright material. I think what you'd see is we are hyper-focused on protecting our IP.
That's one instance. Another instance, we don't let APIs into our ecosystem. It's something that gets asked often. Again, Andy is very adamant about making sure that we protect our IP. Scraping is technically illegal, right? We would obviously go after, if we saw that, we would pursue those avenues. This AI question has come up around the world changing, how we should think about it. We believe we are absolutely AI winners across all of our businesses. There's not a single business where we see internally that we have a real threat today from AI. In fact, we think they're accelerators. They will improve and enhance our platforms. What we're really talking about is the top of the funnel. If the top of the funnel is shifting, we're agnostic to that.
If it means we have to pay Google less and we have to pay one of the AI companies more because they're delivering top of funnel, that's fine. I mean, we don't see that as an issue. In fact, I'd ask you all, why don't you experiment and go on one of the AI platforms and search for real estate and see what you get, see what you get compared to our products, see what you get to other products. I mean, it's not even close. It wouldn't make sense for these companies to try to go down market and attack our businesses. Really, the money should be made at the top of the funnel, right? That's how you monetize. These businesses will start to monetize. Today, they represent a very, very low percentage of the top of the funnel.
We are agnostic to paying at the top of the funnel. We do today. We may shift our allocation of who we offer money to.
I think it's clearly on content protection. AI agent cannot go out and Matterport a property. They can't go out and take video on their own. I mean, they still have to go find that data someplace. If all of a sudden someone's taking Matterports and putting them up on their website, that's a problem no matter how they're getting there. I think that Andy has been maniacal about getting original content all over our sites to make it unique and different. It's not just a, let me cleanse the data that's out there and put it up on my website, like taking MLS data and just putting it on our site. We easily could have just done that on Homes.com, but instead we added Matterports, videos, customer reviews, all kinds of information about neighborhoods and things.
People say, well, why the hell are you spending all the money on that? That's crazy. No, that's the differentiator that keeps you different from everybody else. If all you're doing is putting MLS data up, you're not winning at the hearts and minds of anyone's. You have to believe that the copyright laws of the country still matter. You have to believe that you can't scrape. The other thing you have to know is that internally we're using AI to build new ways to save money, to build new features on our websites. We're actively working with a lot of AI companies. It's not a PR stunt to just go out there and say, hey, I partnered with these guys and now my app is up on the internet. It's much more serious than that.
Those are the things that we're doing inside the company. It's integrating very significantly with the AI companies out there and making our products better and saving us money.
The value of our Matterport Application is going to really come through over the coming years because we can't comprehend, and I really can't comprehend this, how much data is embedded in the Matterport, right? You're not only talking about the dimensions of every room, but you're also now picking up the models of the appliances and the kitchen and the bathrooms, et cetera. All that stuff is going to be able to be recognized. That is going to be an incredibly differentiated capability for us, for new products, but also for homeowners, for sellers, for apartment renters, as people going to look at what they're looking to rent. I think you'll see that, again, we see ourselves as huge winners because the data and the capabilities embedded within that will really be able to be brought out as AI is more utilized.
What are you doing specifically to drive penetration on Matterport, especially in the apartments business? If you own the whole company, would you be stepping on the gas more? Is there a way you could be more aggressive?
We launched the Matterport Plus program for the apartments, and we've sold over 500 packages. We think that'll continue. I actually believe it just becomes a requirement. If you're trying to land an apartment, you're going to need a Matterport because people are willing today to rent an apartment without going to see it. If you have a Matterport, people will rent it, will sign the docs, they'll do the payment all through our platform. I think that's a big accelerator. From what we have to do and what we've done already, the apartments, we need to integrate Matterport directly into all of our products to make sure we have that capability and they become synonymous with our products. We are now building out the commercial application, which is a huge TAM.
We bought a company that had incredible technology, but was really lost from a strategy perspective. What we've been doing over the last six, seven months is realigning the strategy, realigning their TAMs, ensuring that we integrate the core capability into our core businesses, but then making sure we also build out this great commercial application, which is a global application. Matterport is a clear leader in that space.
Would you give it away? What would be the downside?
I don't think we need to give it away. I think it's incredibly valuable, but we clearly are integrating into our platforms and there are synergies and that integration. There's huge value, and it's a great business. The storage and the analytics and models in the cloud is a great margin business. The sale, the front end sale is a great business. We just need to accelerate the integration and the growth of the business, and we think we have an opportunity to do that.
Incredibly sticky on all the sites too. You see it on Homes.com that if you have a Matterport on there, people are going to click on it, number one.
9 out of 10 people will see a Matterport, click on it.
It's a big deal. I was talking about my wife, who's a Resi agent and a Homes.com proud user. More importantly, what she uses it for and other agents is that it's not only a 24/7 way of doing an open house, but it also demonstrates to the client that you're doing something similar to a lot of other businesses. It's hard when you don't have data to support the efforts that you're doing on marketing. What Matterport does, clearly on Apartments.com, we see it all the time, but now we're also seeing it on Homes.com, is it demonstrates that I'm getting people to look at your house, even if they're not showing up at the physical open houses. That's helping agents demonstrating that I'm still marketing your property along the way.
The other final thing on Matterport, I think the prior owners really focused on a B2C format on Matterport. Realistically, we're building a whole B2B capability here. You heard both Chris and Andy talk about this on the calls, but we want to build up that Matterport Salesforce from a B2B perspective. We shouldn't be selling a camera to a single photographer in Chicago to shoot the Hilton Hotel there. We should be selling Matterport to Hilton, the company. I think that that's going to be a major shift on how we get Matterports out.
Just a little detail on Matterport. Can you just talk a little bit about the different strategies or methods that you're using now to roll out across those? Because it's a little bit different depending on the business.
It is like I said, we are integrating into our product. If it is in Homes, it will be much more integrated into Apartments. It will be in LoopNet, and there will be commercial applications. It will actually end up being CoStar too, right? It will be part of that package as well. It will integrate completely, and it will have its own avenue.
Got it. Any other questions in Apartments before we move on? Great. A little bit more on AI. We talked a little bit about it already, but one of the things that always strikes me about CoStar is that you have organized a bunch of the public data that theoretically anybody can go get, but it's sort of brain damage to get it all right and tag it all, et cetera. It's also the proprietary data that you all have. Then it's not only that, but it's the bringing together of those two things that provides sort of the full view. To me, that's one of the AI defensibilities that you all have. Is that how you view the world, or how does that work?
Yeah, you know, obviously AI has become a big topic, and all we see is ourselves being AI winners for a number of reasons. Just what you talked about, I mean, one, we have over 2.4 trillion records in our databases, most of it proprietary. Yes, we do take some public data, but cleansing and organizing and putting it away that people can consume it obviously is very important, but it also interacts with very large banks, real estate portfolios, it interacts with leases, it interacts with hospitality, incomes, and bookings. I mean, there is just a huge amount of data within that database that does not exist outside of our SOC compliant infrastructure. Bringing that all together is clearly highly valuable to our customers, and they rely and depend upon it. Our researchers are calling people directly and getting information that is not in the public markets.
Those people are actually going onto our site and actually putting the information in. So we're actually sort of a Give-Get Model as well. We think it's not only highly defensible, but we think we can generate huge opportunities with AI going forward. In fact, you're seeing it already happen. When we bought Visual Lease a year ago, the business plan was to create a Lease Benchmarking capability that we could roll out across the country. We are in the process of doing that. When we did it, we thought we were going to have to hire hundreds and hundreds of people to go through those leases, open the PDFs, go through leases, extract information. Over the last nine months, we've been using AI agents' training models to pull that data out.
The accuracy levels and how quickly they can go through them is massively different than what a human can do. What was a 300-400 person business plan is a 100 person business plan today, right? Cost down, efficiency up, accuracy way up. We can do a lease in minutes versus hours. We just think our ability to monetize our data and information, deliver new products, especially deliver new value to our customers is exponential. You will see that happen. You also hear, you know, you have SmartSearch on Homes.com, where you basically just go on and you talk to the computer and tell it what you're interested in. That will accelerate massively in 2026, and that will be in Apartments.com, et cetera, and LoopNet. This will all be across all of our platforms. It is not specifically focused on just one product.
I think you said just as a level of commitment, I think you said 50% or so of the Homes engineering effort is now going to be mostly on AI, not new, but sort of reshuffled. That's at Homes. Have you talked about the level of spend at the other business units, or is it?
Yeah, IT capacity is IT capacity. We're not increasing our IT capacity, right? Clearly we will be decreasing our IT capacity at Homes.com and deploying that in other places. There's no doubt. AI will be a clear focus on 2026 and going forward, just monetizing and utilizing all these tools. We're already working with a huge number of partners and models, Microsoft, et cetera, to integrate into our platform, to use in our platform. We're already well down this path. It will be ubiquitous across all of our companies.
That's helpful. Any AI questions? I'm just going to ask whenever you want, but moving on. Moving on to Homes, we've talked about it a few times. To us, one of the key insights that you all have had is that there's actually not just one residential portal market. There's at least a couple, maybe one buy-side focused and one sell-side focused. Can you talk about that insight and how that rolls into the strategy of Homes and the SEM and that kind of retargeting?
Yeah, we are the only platform that's a platform that helps a listing agent or a home seller sell their apartment, right, or their house. That's what we do. It's digital advertising and digital capabilities for that market. That is a much bigger market than a buyer agency market, which the US portals have been built upon. We are excited about that. Today we have over 26,000 subscribers, over 130,000 homes are now paid listings on our site. We are the only portal doing that. People like to talk about Zillow, they talked about Redfin, they talked about Realtor.com. We just have different models. They are trying to capture 5% of the market for buyer agency in a lead diversion model to sell those leads. That's fine. That's their model.
We are trying to work with listing agents and with home sellers to actually help them advertise, retarget, sell their listing to improve their outcomes.
Any additional anecdotes that you guys hear from as you guys roll out and the value prop, you were looking for the right value prop, clearly you found it. As you talk to folks, are there anecdotes that kind of help demonstrate either from the consumer's point of view or even from the agent's point of view, "Hey, this is how it's working for me. This is how it's making my life easier or better." I mean, can you give us just a little?
Yeah, we hear a lot of things where they love the retargeting. They love the fact when they go to a pitch for a listing pitch, they can show, "Look, I'm working with this company," and you get all these, you get tens and tens of thousands of views versus the other platforms where you get views in the hundreds. They're retargeting you. I'm advertised when a lead comes. You may not believe this, but on the other platforms, it goes somewhere else, but the lead comes to me, so I can help monetize, track it, use it to your advantage. They love the Matterport capability. We hear all very positive things. The business in the last year, it's really started to get on a flywheel and grow.
Like I said, we have 26,000 agent subscribers today and 130,000 paid listings, which in this model clearly makes us the market leader.
As you guys have honed the value proposition, talk a little bit about the retention and sort of getting through the wave of the cancellations as you guys honed in on the value prop. It seems like we're past that. Even I think one Q was the last tough quarter, two Q, and then three Q was much better. Talk about kind of that retention and how that's trending.
Yeah, retention is something we focused on. Every month I look at the retention number, and every month for the last, I want to say nine, it must be nine or ten months, every month retention has been coming in percentage points every single month. It's clearly going the right direction. The NPS on the product is now 43. I mean, a 43 NPS, when you look at the scale, makes it a really good, it's a really good NPS score and a highly attractive product. We moved it. It was negative a year and a half ago. Clearly the agency, the value in it. We're just kind of moving through that timeline.
With the dedicated Salesforce, who are still pretty immature, but obviously every day are growing in their knowledge and the capability, we'll just continue to have strength for strength as we go down this road and develop it over the next couple of years.
Just thinking more longer term, we get a lot of questions on sort of what does the business look like long term? Is it bigger than LoopNet? Is it smaller than? Have you guys thought about that when you project out in the future? Andy, I think, mentioned he thinks that this could be a 40% margin business. Taking that into consideration, over time, how do we think the TAM is big. Y'all can exist with other folks, other portals in the world. How do you think about that, dividing up that TAM?
Yeah, I think obviously we believe, because you see our investment in it, this is a multi-billion dollar revenue opportunity and margins that are, you just have to look around the world, margins that are 50% plus. We do not think this market is any different than any market around the world once people understand the value proposition and adopt the business model. People confuse the MLS with digital marketing and digital advertising. It's not the same. I think there's a much different capability and technology that's brought to bear. We look to the broader international markets as a guide, but the U.S. is the largest residential property market in the world, meaningfully larger. We believe that is the opportunity set.
I have a couple more questions just on Homes, but I want to talk one question about platform. It seems like homes or resi was one of the few asset classes that CoStar hadn't addressed yet, right? There's a finite number of them, and this was one of the final pieces. As you all think about the flywheel, the platform, and the old CoStar thing of exhaust from one business is monetized in another one, it's a wonderful thing. Can you talk a little bit about how that works within CoStar with Homes and how that works with some of the other international competitors or companies that we've seen do this for years and years and years? What does that final piece kind of bring you?
Yeah, it's a great question. First, I'd argue that we probably entered residential departments, obviously in a different way, but we clearly were entering residential with the Apartments.com business. The genius that Andy built over the last 40 years is exactly what you talked about. It's not even the exhaust of one system going to the other. It's sort of the integration of all of these products and businesses all feeding each other and providing data and information for each other. I'll just sort of give you a framework. For instance, look at our Lender.com platform, right? Lender financial institutions load their loan portfolios into our SOC compliant database. Why people want to do that is for two reasons. One, there's great models. We have great models and capabilities that have been tested over time with the best data and information.
As they do their stress testing, they do the regulatory requirements, et cetera, as they do their own risk analytics, it's the best place to do it. Two, the information from LoopNet and from Apartments.com is feeding back into that to provide best in class, just in time information to help them determine their mark levels and if they're right and if they should be thinking about it differently. It's the marketplaces feeding the information businesses and the financial information businesses feeding the marketplaces. It's this great symbiotic relationship, and the whole ecosystem works on it. By the way, the whole thing is built on one technology platform. Now, people say that. What they'll often talk about is there's some front end that's unified, and then there's a lot of spaghetti behind it. That's not what CoStar is. CoStar is one technology platform.
If we buy a business that's not on that technology platform, over time we write the whole thing into our technology platform. So that capability to share information and work across the platform is real, and it happens every day.
I'll pause there for a minute. I have a couple more questions, but questions from the audience on Homes or related. Okay. On pricing, you guys have experimented with the pricing along with the value proposition, a little up, a little down, et cetera. How do we think about pricing relative to the value that both the consumer on Boost, if you want to talk about that, but also the resi agent that's selling, how do they think about that value prop relative to the pricing? One of the great things on CoStar we used to talk about in Suite is if you sell half another commercial real estate building, you pay for CoStar for the whole office kind of thing. How do residential agents think about that pricing?
Yeah, over the last year, as we've accelerated the build-out of the Salesforce and we've continued to expand the capabilities of the platform, Andy has been sort of moving the dials on building the business. That's sort of price penetration, right, are kind of two big things to think about. Clearly, penetration is really critical. More agents begets a flywheel where I think actually it becomes a point where you have to subscribe, right? If all of your competitors are subscribing and they're going in with their pitches saying, "We have all these capabilities," and you don't have it, you inevitably have to become a participant. One of the things I always talk to people about is we're not asking them to spend more money. It's actually just shifting some of the spend they already have.
Like an agent's already spending tens of thousands of dollars on marketing. It's just changing their spend to digital marketing. We've been adjusting the pricing model. Obviously, you've seen penetration increase. We're now at 26,000 agents, like I discussed. I think what you'll see over time is penetration increase and then pricing start to move up because pricing did come down over the last couple of months. Actually, Andy's been dialing it up and down. When you have real penetration, the most important thing you get is tiered advertising, right? You go out to the agents and you say, "For X amount more dollars, you can be at a different level. You can always end up on the top." The same thing we do with Apartments, et cetera.
Penetration will bring new products, more capabilities, drive more value to the platform and to the agents as well. I think that's what we see happening over the next couple of years. Those two dials are the ones that have been adjusted over the last six months.
The math is similar like what you see on an office and just CoStar in general. If you win one listing as an agent, after you pay the brokerage firm, you're going to make about 2% on the property. If I sell one $400,000 house or get one listing, I get $8,000. That's much more than what we're charging. I think the value prop is there and it's real.
As Chris mentioned, there is $10 billion-$15 billion of agents spending money on crazy stuff like squeezy balls and calendars and doing things like sending out postcards. This is not like I'm trying to go get tons of money from people out of the blue. It's shifting the budget from one thing that might not be working, where you think you're doing something that's marketing, into something that can actually get you and help you win more listings.
Sounds a lot like LoopNet.
Yes, exactly.
Andy, I'm going to keep going. Any questions, more questions on Homes.com? I did want to revisit the Matterport thing. We talked a little bit about it. To us, it seems like a foundational technology, right? It's going to stand on its own, but it's going to be built in. Any other additional stats? I think the last stats you gave us were maybe 40x more listing views, deeper views that people are clicking through on a Matterport, 37% higher renewals for folks who are using Matterports. Are there any other anecdotes that you can give us that give us more of the sense of the power of that particular product?
9 out of 10 viewers when they click onto a product, they will click on it if there's a Matterport. 9 out of 10, that's a massive number, right? If you're selling a house or an apartment or you're trying to rent one and you have a Matterport, 9 out of 10 people are going to click on it. That's pretty impressive. The bigger unsung hero is the AI capability that we're going to monetize over the coming years and organize and be able to do things like valuation tools to get people better line of sight on what's actually in a house versus just a picture. I think you'll see that come over the coming years as well.
The last big question that we've been asked is around capital use and planning, the new Capital Committee, how you guys think about capital deployment. You still got a lot of cash on the balance sheet. We'll talk about that. I have some questions on Suite and LoopNet International, but I want to make sure we covered off on that. Can you just tell us about how you're all thinking about that? Things have changed a little bit. You've deployed some capital. You've always had a lot of capital. You're a highly capital-efficient business in terms of the M&A you've done. Can you just talk about how you're thinking about that, if it's different change, priorities, things like that?
Yeah, so the Capital Allocation Committee has been fantastic. We've had great conversations. You actually can see the charter in April. We filed an AK. We've had these discussions. They're coming up on making final recommendations for the Board. One of the things I'd highlight is through these discussions over the last month or so, the capital allocation has made a decision. We've accelerated our buyback program. As you know, in February, we launched a $500 million buyback program. At the time, as the first step, we were doing it really to neutralize stock-based compensation. We now expect to complete that entire $500 million buyback program by the time the Capital Allocation Committee makes its new recommendations. That's a pretty meaningful change in how the company thinks about capital allocation.
I think capital allocation buybacks will be part of that recommendation that they're reviewing and will recommend to the Board in December.
Capital allocation questions on more generally? Okay, that's helpful. I want to talk a little bit about Suite, the original, and not to be left behind as an unsung hero. We get a lot of questions about the green shoots nature of where we are in commercial real estate office. It seems patchy and it seems very early, but people are finally starting to take marks on some of these buildings. It's sort of time to do it. Can you talk about where we are on that? I don't think we can oversell it a little too and oversell it, but we are starting to see some unsticking. Is that what you all are seeing too?
Yeah, so I've been at the company, like I said, almost a year and a half. Actually, in the last month, this is the first time I actually feel like I can say we're on the other side of this. We're not way off the other side, but we're on the other side of it. I used to, people would ask me this, and the only thing I could really give them evidence was if you go to New York City and Class A real estate, it's like back, it's through, it's off the charts, right? It's back to where it was before. There really weren't a lot of things to look at besides that. Today, you have a, in the third quarter, you had a 54% increase in transactions, 54, 56, somewhere around that.
That was across every single subsector in the commercial real estate market, right? That's an incredible outcome. Absorption rates are doing better. It's not just New York City. It's Dallas, even San Francisco, which was once one of the most problemed office markets, is now because of what's going on in AI, seeing a resurgence in commercial real estate. Increase in transactions, higher rates, absorption, still no new ads, right? Building is, there's still not a lot of starts, right? Inevitably, this flywheel will continue. Andy talks about this a lot. What I'll say to you is like, I've seen this three or four times before, and it's going to unfold exactly the way it did last time. It's exactly what's happening right now. It's unfolding exactly the same way.
People stop building, people going back to the office, absorption increases because there's no new building, transaction volumes go up, new market, new money comes into the market. We seem to be now at sort of stage one of that recovery.
Okay. Can you talk a little bit too about there's some additions in products and features in Suiten. It's been a juggernaut for years. You talked a little about the bank lending business. Can you talk a little about hotels? Because there is an integration there. You talked a little bit about leases, but we think lease is one of those unsung businesses that you guys bought Virtual Premise ages ago and now kind of have added to it. It's much more software-driven and is a big part of the user interface changes in Suite. Can you talk about how those businesses will help or change that business?
As you said, the lease business is a great business. It's a SaaS platform really for lease accounting and for lease organization for companies. The original business we bought was very much at the higher-end level, corporate-level application. We bought a business a year ago. Like I said, we're integrating those businesses now. Most importantly, what we're doing is we now have a scale of leases that gives us the ability to create benchmark products across the country at a sub-market level. We have been able to give the market information that it's never really had before. It's had pieces of it, but it's never really had a unified source of truth around it. We will be providing that to the market early in the first quarter of next year.
By the end of next year, we will have rewritten the entire application, the entire technology stack for that business. We will integrate that into CoStar Suite, and that will now become just like STR, a product within CoStar Suite. Just think about the capabilities and application that delivers for people who are managing their leases. You have all that information, the ability to look for new places, be able to benchmark, to be able to compare, to run your leases through, et cetera. It will just revolutionize the market. We are excited about that capability and opportunity. Like I said, that will be delivered next year.
We just have a couple more minutes. The last two questions I have, one on LoopNet new pricing strategies, the portfolio stuff and asset-based pricing. Then number two, we'd love to get a comment on international. We've just done Domain. We've got some U.K. properties. We've invested lots of little things in Europe. Starting a little bit of a new chapter there. Can you talk a little bit about LoopNet pricing and strategy and then a little bit on international?
Yeah, LoopNet's had a great year, right? Partially because we reorganized the management team and the sales team, partially because commercial real estate markets are coming back. Also partially, but probably more so, we reoriented the business, the go-to-market strategy. What we really focused on, what we're focused on is getting increasing the number of paid advertisers on the platform. What we realized is we were under-investing in getting people on silver packages and probably over-indexed towards getting people on platinum packages. What we're really trying to do is get more paid listings from portfolio owners on our platform and really telling them the advantages and statistics around if you buy a silver, it's this time, it'll lease this much quicker at these percentages, this much more exposure, et cetera. We're sort of early mid-market and kind of making that change.
There's two really important things to note there. One, silver packages retention rates are massively higher than platinum, which makes sense. If you're buying a more expensive platinum package, you're probably doing it to try to get something leased for a specific reason, specific period of time. You're willing to invest a lot in it. A silver package is more of an ongoing commitment just to get the exposure, to make sure it's out there, people understand it. Retention rates for platinums are in the teens, whereas retention rates for silvers are in the high 80s, low 90s. As that business rolls forward, that means our sales force is going to have to fight less against cancels every month because there'll be more retention. That flywheel will increase going into the future. That's really important.
The other positive thing is we were unsure how much of an impact it would have on platinum sales. Platinum sales haven't had that much of an impact, right? It's actually there's still people who want that advertising package. They want to be there. We really haven't seen much change or decline. That business is well back onto a double-digit growth profile that is clearly the most global platform today. In my view, it's clearly a billion-dollar-plus revenue business. International, right? U.S., Canada, U.K., we'll put it in Spain. We have it in France. In Europe, we have over 100,000 listings today. I mean, that's already huge penetration. We're really the only pan-European capability. We will, in the first half of next year, introduce LoopNet into Australia.
We will have the Australian market, which is a really attractive market, and we will be able to bring really differentiated capabilities and technology there. We are really excited about the growth path and the opportunity. Finally, asset-based pricing. We have started a new paradigm to work on asset-based pricing to make sure our customers know the value proposition they are getting, to try to align that with what they pay. It will take time. This is a multi-year process, but we started down that path. A lot of exciting things are happening there, back onto a well into a double-digit growth profile.
We're just at time. Thank you for being here. We appreciate you guys. Thank you all for being here. Hope you have a good last day of the conference.
Thank you all.
Thank you.