CoStar Group reviews

- The entire organization is a ship without a captain. If there is a captain, they are running it right into an iceberg. There doesn't seem to be one unified company culture, and blaming that on acquisitions is passing the buck. Every office creates its own environment, and how things are done in one location is not how they are done elsewhere. This creates spotty data, and lowers their product. - Senior leadership is opaque at best, deceitful at worst. The leaders preach that there will be time to learn and grow in your role, but after only a month, new hires are expected to compete with employees who have been in the role for years. Further, they make decisions without sharing this knowledge, creating rumors which ultimately hurts their organizational culture. Everyone knows that no one trusts senior leadership, so rather than fixing that and increasing transparency, the organization opened a new office and paid the employees 20% more than those in DC. This does not foster trust. You cannot buy engagement. You cannot buy trust. - There is NO focus on career development at all. The heads of the organization don't care, because the role is easy and they can burn and turn people. But, when a senior member of the team is doing the same job as a brand new person with a different title, that's a problem. Training is focused only on new hire, once you leave you get no more guidance. - The management team wants to do well, but is not given the tools to do so. When SMEs are promoted to the role of manager, there has to be some training there. Just because you know how to balance your time and pay attention to detail does not mean you know how to inspire others to do the same. - The metrics are silly. I have no problem with a metrics-based environment, and I was a top performer when I was a researcher at CoStar. However, the numbers NOW are insane, and do not reflect reality. With the way the job is structured, it is impossible for anybody to achieve the number of 1 minute calls they want. The system they use is so outdated it takes 6 weeks to teach it, the employees have to open up the website for a company CoStar owns, log in almost each time, and then fruitlessly search for a property. How it doesn't happen automatically is beyond me. - all the above boils down to this: CoStar has never had a real competitor before. They have floated by on being the only, the biggest, and the first. Now, they have a real competitor and they have no idea how to handle it.

Since I was not in Research, I originally assumed the dreadful treatment so many people wrote about being subject to at the company would not happen to me. Now I know people in all departments and at all levels, including his direct reports, have varying degrees of fear of the CEO. It is well-known that the VPs who manage to survive do so by going along with everything Andy Florance says, deducing what he will be expecting them to claim to believe, looking the other way when he flies off the handle to publicly accuse them or one of their people of being everything from morons to Marxists, and running back to instruct their departments to drop what they were doing to meet his latest demands. Andy seems to love ranting about the “idiocy” of specific employees – both with them in the room and behind their backs. He also revels in telling people they’re fired, and then taking it back, which is not funny considering the number of people who have been fired on a whim because it’s Andy’s company and everyone is replaceable, especially if they are older than 25 and not blond. Andy also enjoys calling on people to answer random questions and then making fun of them and telling them they are stupid for giving the "wrong" answer. The nervous laughter and averted gazes that surround Andy when he’s in these moods are painful to experience. The other issue is the lack of respect the company overall has for the efforts of its people. This is especially true of salaried employees, who have to burn 3 hours of PTO to attend the occasional doctor’s appointment even though they regularly work 12+ hours/day. The joke is that CoStar’s idea of work-life balance is that they bring in free yoga a couple times a week so you can practice improving your balance for an hour and then get back to work.