The base pay is laughable. Commission is how you make money at CoStar and expect no work life balance if you plan to achieve that. 12-hour days and putting in 4-8 hours on weekends is the norm if want to be successful. The hustlers were okay with this while the commissions rewarded the effort. That’s no longer the case. We had a temporary spike in sales that was caused by the elimination of a competing service. Executives used this as an opportunity to justify a 40% quota increase along with a complete restructuring of the comp plan. Even if you can maintain the same percent of quota attainment, the new structure will pay out at almost half of the previous plan.
They’ve also started withholding commission on what they regard as “bad deals”. Commission were being pulled before they clearly defined what constituted a non-commissionable sale. Implementing and penalizing the reps for failing to meet poorly communicated guidelines is par for the course at CoStar.
The majority of these decisions are being made with one thing in mind, wall street. With the economic downturn in sight, this is a play to show continued profitability and to compensate the executives at the detriment of the sales force.
CoStar is known as the 800-pound gorilla when it comes commercial real estate data providers. Our core group of clients are with us out necessity and not by choice. They view the company as a monopoly and have bad tastes in their mouths over recent changes. Although most of these changes are justifiable, it’s become completely demotivating to defend an organization that doesn’t look after its own.
Commissions and withholding pay aside, lately the CEO has been putting an emphasis on client meeting metrics that do very little further sales. Although we need to be more present with existing clients, that's not achieved by forcing the reps to bother our already busy customers with unsolicited drop-ins and schwag hand outs. It's also been putting us in the position to deny issuing immediate remote assistance. Instead we push for unnecessary (and often unwelcomed) in person meetings.
In short, unless conditions change, I would not recommend this job to a new hire and I don’t see many of the top performers sticking around either. Those of us who used our tenure to understand commercial real estate, and how CoStar’s information is used to make money in the industry, were previously handcuffed by the comp plan. That’s no longer the case.
