Andy Florance

Andy Florance founded CoStar Group in 1987 and has served as its CEO for over 35 years, building the company from a small commercial real estate data provider into the dominant information, analytics, and marketplace platform for the global commercial real estate industry. CoStar's database — covering millions of commercial properties with detailed lease, tenant, sale, and building information — is the essential tool for virtually every CRE broker, investor, lender, and appraiser in North America and increasingly globally. CoStar's competitive moat is extraordinary: the company employs over 3,000 researchers who physically visit and photograph commercial properties, creating a proprietary dataset that would take decades and billions of dollars for a competitor to replicate. This data is monetized through subscriptions to CoStar, LoopNet (commercial listing marketplace), and Apartments.com (the leading U.S. apartment listing platform, acquired in 2014 for $585 million and now generating over $1 billion in annual revenue). Florance's most controversial and ambitious strategic bet is the multi-billion dollar investment in Homes.com, CoStar's challenge to Zillow in residential real estate. Florance believes he can disrupt Zillow's model by offering free leads to agents rather than selling them, attracting agent adoption and eventually advertising revenue. His decisions on Homes.com investment pace, residential market strategy, international expansion, commercial CRE data platform growth, and capital allocation between Homes.com investment and profitability are the primary drivers of CoStar's highly debated valuation.