CoStar Group reviews

99.9% of the job is just cold calling people who don't want to talk to you in an attempt to get free information out of them that the company then turns around and sells to other clients for a large profit. There is no research as a "research associate". This is a glorified call center where you will be expected to make at least 80 calls a day, trying to talk to at least 20 people for more than 90 seconds each call. It is very metrics based. If your calls are less than 90 seconds they don't count. If you communicate with someone by email it doesn't count. The company cares less about research and acquiring information, and more about just unabashedly branding itself. You must constantly brand the company using a bunch of statistics multiple times during each call, so naturally, most people think you are trying to sell them something, and usually hang up on you immediately. It feels very slimy and a bit shady and definitely degrading. You will be hung up on constantly, often times yelled at because the company keeps calling the same people at least once a month (often times multiple times a month, especially in training) just to verify the same information over and over again. You are literally just harassing people about the company nonstop, calling them repeatedly on every number they have - at home, their cell, work, multiple times a day. The work is very competitive and fosters an environment where the people at the top (who make the most successful calls) are constantly praised, while the people at the bottom (who can't get someone to answer the phone or who don't want to talk to them) are told to find more effective ways to get the job done. They make it out to be your fault if people don't want to talk to you or won't answer the phone the 6 times in a day you call. Also, all your calls are recorded (where state law allows) and your computer screen is recorded as well, so they can know what you say and what you're doing on the call. It's very big brother and invasive, there's no privacy whatsoever, and a constant fear of being replaced if you can't meet the quota for your calls. The money is not worth the loss of sanity and dignity that comes with the job.

Research is a call center. It's a well paid call center, and it's not telemarketing, but it's a call center. Performance metrics frequently change, poor communication regarding changes. Highly repetitive work, very little analysis or creativity required. The company has decided that the best way to gather data is by having a conversation with every broker, every month. Honestly, I agree. The problem is that it is an ideal result and ideal results are hard to achieve. Some brokers have neither the time nor the inclination to have a detailed call each month. It's tough to have a quality conversation with a busy broker when they know you're not buying, they had the same conversation last month, and they're not a CoStar client. Brokers frequently ask researchers not to call, or to call administrative assistants, or to email. However, metrics require researchers to have a phone conversation with the broker and therefore these requests are often ignored. Most researchers do the best they can to keep things civil while also hitting their metrics, meaning they email an admin for the bulk of the data then place a (sometimes meaningless) call to the broker and pretend to have some clarifying questions in order to speak long enough for the call to register. Additionally, there are frequent changes to how the metrics are calculated. Managers can't, or won't, explain how some metrics are calculated. It is incredibly disheartening when a manager cannot explain why a call didn't flow through to the metrics correctly, especially when their best advice is to make up a reason to call back tomorrow. Most of all, you start to feel like quality work for actual clients is discouraged. There's very little incentive to work on client requests when the only praise and rewards come from hitting call metrics. At the end of the day, anyone can simply get by in this job. If you want to excel, you can't care about what the brokers think or say about you. You have to be willing to get chewed out by a broker in July and then call them every day for two weeks in August until they answer. You have to be willing to dial 80, 90, 100 times every day to hit your numbers. Brokers, even clients, will block your number, hang up as soon as they hear CoStar, or swear at you. Your manager will expect you to start dialing as soon as you punch in and to keep dialing until you hit your metrics, regardless of whether you finished your data entry and client requests from yesterday.