Pros
- Their product is great. It really captures most of the market, and the tools are fantastic. - TONS of people in the industry use CoStar, and having the experience with it gets you in a lot of doors - Your coworkers are amazing. Lots of young, motivated, pleasant people who make the job worthwhile. For a bit. - Free food, drinks, gym, etc. I think they know it's a terrible place to work, so they compensate? - Benefits and salary are insane. The amount they are paying for the work you do is astronomical. - Work/life balance is good. Hourly work, so you only work 8 hours. Sometimes allow overtime, which is some nice extra money.
Cons
- 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.