The TL;DR
CoStar Group is acquiring Zonda, a leading new home construction data and marketplace platform, for $800 million. The deal fills the last gap in CoStar’s real estate data empire, which already includes commercial, multifamily, residential resale, and property data through more than 40 acquisitions totaling $7.3 billion.
CoStar Group has agreed to acquire Zonda, a leading provider of new home construction data, home builder software, and residential real estate markets, for $800 million. The deal, announced Thursday, is expected to close in the second quarter of 2026 and will be accretive to adjusted earnings per share in its first full year.
Zonda serves more than 3,000 customers throughout the homebuilding industry, including many residential builders, developers, suppliers, and lenders in North America. Its platform covers the full life cycle of new home development, from land acquisition and construction forecasting to social marketing and online marketplaces, tracking more than 500 real estate metrics.
Filling the new construction gap
CoStar has spent the last 15 years putting together what is arguably the world’s leading real estate information platform. Its CoStar Suite dominates real estate research. Like other data center operators that are consolidating their markets, the company has expanded through acquisitions, completing more than 40 deals for approximately $7.3 billion during that period.
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Apartments.com now generates $1.1 billion in annual revenue. Homes.com, a consumer real estate marketplace, has grown subscribers by 337% since the first quarter of 2024 and claims to be the second largest and fastest growing real estate marketplace in the United States. CoStar completed its $1.6 billion acquisition of Matterport, a 3D digital twin and AI company, in February 2025.
The pattern is clear. CoStar includes real estate through its flagship product, multifamily rentals through Apartments.com, residential resale through Homes.com and Matterport, and physical space through Matterport’s location data. The construction of new houses was the remaining gap. Filling Zonda.
What exactly is Zonda doing?
Zonda was created through the 2018 merger of Hanley Wood, a B2B information services company serving the US residential construction industry, and Meyers Research, a provider of real-time market data for homebuilders. Private equity firm MidOcean Partners planned the merger and rebranded it as Zonda in 2020. The $800 million sale to CoStar represents the type of PE exit that has become common in the SaaS and data platform industry, where specialized vertical data companies are built by merging and selling to larger platforms.
Zonda’s three primary products are subscription-based data and intelligence covering the new home market, online marketplaces for new homes in the US and Canada, and a range of visual home inspection software tools including visualization, customization, and tours. The data side tracks everything from lot availability and letting activity to price trends and occupancy rates at the community level.
CoStar’s financial situation
CoStar reported first-quarter 2026 revenue of $897 million, up 23% year-over-year, and expects full-year revenue of $3.8 billion, an 18% increase over 2025. Adjusted EBITDA is expected to reach $770 million, up 83% from 2025 and 20% average. The company has an $800 million contract acquisition balance sheet without significant pressure.
The stock, however, did not show any momentum. Shares of CoStar have fallen nearly 49% over the past six months, a decline attributed in large part to an investment in Homes.com and in part to broader market skepticism about the housing business’s profitability timeline. CEO Andy Florance has been buying shares on the open market, buying more than 70,000 shares at prices between $34.67 and $36.00 earlier this year.
The data monopoly question
With Zonda, CoStar will hold top or leading data positions in all major segments of the US housing market. Proptech startups building AI-powered tools for real estate development, valuation, or investment will increasingly find that the underlying data they need flows through CoStar’s pipelines.
That integration carries the same potential seen in other data-platform markets. A single user who controls industry reference data can set prices, shape how stakeholders perceive their market, and create switching costs that strengthen its position. What CoStar says is that the integration creates value: homebuilders using Zonda data will be able to list on Homes.com, track their competitors’ prices through CoStar analytics, and market to renters through Apartments.com, all within one ecosystem.
Whether that integration brings value or simply concentrates pricing power will depend on implementation. Meanwhile, CoStar has spent $800 million to ensure that the next generation of architectural intelligence works in its own space, not someone else’s.
