Pros
Compensation, benefits, strict eight hour day, company is the market leader, room to move up, company is full of pleasant people. Setting aside job duties, CoStar is a nice place to work. Research Associates are paid well, you never take work home, and you'll learn a lot about commercial real estate. If I could have transferred to a different position within the company then I would have gladly stayed at CoStar.
Cons
Research is a call center. It's a well paid call center, and it's not telemarketing, but it's a call center. Performance metrics frequently change, poor communication regarding changes. Highly repetitive work, very little analysis or creativity required. The company has decided that the best way to gather data is by having a conversation with every broker, every month. Honestly, I agree. The problem is that it is an ideal result and ideal results are hard to achieve. Some brokers have neither the time nor the inclination to have a detailed call each month. It's tough to have a quality conversation with a busy broker when they know you're not buying, they had the same conversation last month, and they're not a CoStar client. Brokers frequently ask researchers not to call, or to call administrative assistants, or to email. However, metrics require researchers to have a phone conversation with the broker and therefore these requests are often ignored. Most researchers do the best they can to keep things civil while also hitting their metrics, meaning they email an admin for the bulk of the data then place a (sometimes meaningless) call to the broker and pretend to have some clarifying questions in order to speak long enough for the call to register. Additionally, there are frequent changes to how the metrics are calculated. Managers can't, or won't, explain how some metrics are calculated. It is incredibly disheartening when a manager cannot explain why a call didn't flow through to the metrics correctly, especially when their best advice is to make up a reason to call back tomorrow. Most of all, you start to feel like quality work for actual clients is discouraged. There's very little incentive to work on client requests when the only praise and rewards come from hitting call metrics. At the end of the day, anyone can simply get by in this job. If you want to excel, you can't care about what the brokers think or say about you. You have to be willing to get chewed out by a broker in July and then call them every day for two weeks in August until they answer. You have to be willing to dial 80, 90, 100 times every day to hit your numbers. Brokers, even clients, will block your number, hang up as soon as they hear CoStar, or swear at you. Your manager will expect you to start dialing as soon as you punch in and to keep dialing until you hit your metrics, regardless of whether you finished your data entry and client requests from yesterday.
