Everything else about this company! If I could give this company a 0 I WOULD! This is not a research job this is a glorified call center. They do not listen to their clients and they definitely do not care about their employees! They also force employees new and old to post fake reviews so their company will have a high rating! When the office was going to close there was a spike in positive reviews over the course of 4-6 days. In addition to posting fake positive reviews they actually have to go out of their way to deter people from writing other negative reviews by threatening legal action against them because this company SUCKS!
The metrics change whenever upper level management feels like changing them and then by the way no matter what point of the month you are in it affects your whole month. If you do not meet the metrics you better have a good excuse as to why otherwise you get put on a list. The brokers/clients hate the monthly phone calls from us but CoStar won't hear or understand them and makes us continue calling. There has been more than one occasion of "Yes sir, I know we spoke last month, yes sir I know the info has not changed but I need to read the info, yes I know, yes I know." then usually a give up by the researcher to just take the hit on their metrics or a hang up by a client. To avoid this most people leave long voicemails, dial through the directory, or dial the office to be transferred to the cell to increase their interviews every day! When researchers should be actually looking for commercial real estate information to IMPROVE THE DATA the really can't because people are too caught up in reaching their metrics to do any other kind of research.
Also CoStar is the place where they reward you for cheating and for being lazy. When we are assigned a team project if you do really well and do your work you get rewarded with the remainder of the work that your lazy coworkers didn't do. You also know they didn't do anything because they stood around chatting or purposefully muttered to themselves that they weren't going to do it because they didn't agree with it. Even though we were all assigned the same amount and we'll all be spoken to when it is not completed they don't care, no one seemed to care even when the office was thriving. This was a re-occurring theme with projects within the team or even within the office, you didn't have to do your work because if you didn't you would get a "talking to" and then the rest of the office would do your work for you. Some of us care too much about our work and credibility to make someone do our work for us. I understand being a team player but this is ridiculous. The managers know it's the same people too because they consistently boycott the work but their call numbers are good so it doesn't matter or the manager doesn't care enough.
Speaking of managers I have worked under some of the most lazy, irresponsible, ignorant managers I have ever worked for. Senior and Certified researchers with 5-9 years of experience could run circles around most of the managers there but because they don't have a degree they couldn't be promoted. I could count on one hand the amount of research managers that were actually good at their job. The company plays favorites! They didn't even offer our upper level manageable jobs to continue with the company because they didn't get along with management above them even though they had been with the company a long time.
Again I reiterate they don't care about their employees. I have offered several suggestions on how to re-format our job to help the environment not be so toxic, but my suggestions were never passed above my manager because it wasn't worth it to them to pass it along. It has never been in CoStar's best interest to listen to their employees at all, you would think the person who does this job every day might be able to offer some insight to the tools I need to succeed but that is not their view. They even created a spreadsheet that showed us who was remaining on our list that we could call in order to fulfill our requirements which seemed like a step FINALLY in the right direction. But one month it was given to us, the next it was taken away because we were "cherry picking" our clients. We were only given enough clients to have approximately 5-8 calls a day, but we were expected to get closer to 15. How do you pull clients out of thin air?
When they came to announce our office was closing the person actually made jokes while they announced it. If that doesn't deter you from working for this awful company I don't know what will.
Finally the company's turnover rate is very high, most people only stay for 6 months to a year because it's not worth it! Crying in my office was common due to the high level of stress by certain individuals, one person even threatened violence on the company on several occasions.
