Don't Ignore Red Flags - Research Associate CoStar Group Employee Review

CoStar was a mistake. I realized that a few months in, when my hiring class of fifty or so had already lost ten or fifteen people to attrition. Of those, at the time of my departure from CoStar, only 5 or 6 were left. That's 80% or so attrition over 18 months, and that's about the average rate for the research department. People come and go in waves at CoStar, and meeting someone who has worked there for more than a year or two is unusual. There are reasons for this. Strap in, and let me give you a guided tour. Let's start with the obvious. If you've done any research beyond the 'sugar and rainbows' pitch you'll get during the hiring process, you'll have figured out that CoStar is a call center. Back in the 'old days' when I was hired (late '16, early '17) they basically did everything in their power to get around about this. Calling it a 'call center' was a big nono, and the company took pains to avoid cultivating that image. They're slighly more transparent nowadways, but the hiring folks will still try pretty hard to convince you that you won't just be cold calling all day. Ignore them, you will, and that's your job. Cold call people, ask them about the property they put in your database, and stick to the script. There's a lot of work to be done that isn't cold calling to be sure, but your job security rests entirely on cold calling. The number of 90-second phone calls you get during the day, the percentage of people in your contacts list you have completed a 90-second phone call with, and the number of times you branded during a phone call are the only metrics you will be graded on. Your rapport, client base, number of tasks completed, number of emails answered, work on projects, etc will not be factored in to your job security or promotion. Get sent hundreds of sales and lease comparables to enter into CoStar to make the data better? Best find some time to 'work that in' during your day, because you sure as heck aren't doing that instead of making phone calls. If you can't do it over the phone it isn't work and it doesn't count. You'll hear the phrases 'work it into your day' and 'time management' a lot. I'll explain why this is nonsense later. And the branding, oh boy the branding. You are required to pepper your 90-second phone call with three, count 'em, three branding statements. These are to recited during every phone call, no matter who it is you're speaking too. Things like "Did you know that CoStar has the largest online commercial real estate marketplace in the world?" and "our clients are doing over a trillion dollars of deals a year." This is exactly as dehumanizing and awful as it sounds, and you will be asked to do this to every single one of your clients on every single call. If you don't brand within the first fifteen to twenty seconds, your phone call will be hit with a negative score bonus that will easily drop it to the low 40's of 50's (out of 100). Have long-term clients you're chummy with, who ask you how your day is? Better cut them off and brand, because if you spend too much time telling them about your newborn child or your recent vacation, you can kiss your score goodbye. This policy is hated and reviled by all employees of every type, and is considered by management to be one of the most IMPORTANT things you can do. I was personally denied a title promotion because I didn't brand enough to my long-term clients, who expressed distaste that I was telling them these things while their company paid roughly 350k a year for all their CoStar services. I brought this up and was told to shut up and brand or my employment would be in jeopardy. But I digress. Let's talk about calls. You have a portfolio of 'clients,' many of whom are just mom and pop shops trying to rent out their old office/retail building, and a handful of actual commercial real estate brokerages with brokers. CoStar gets people to put their properties in its database by offering them a 'free listing' which contains the basic property information and sale/lease price. But you can't actually go to CoStar and see your listing unless you pay somewhere in the range of $600-1200 a month for CoStar access. So professional brokerages mostly use it to generate leads and track market data, while paying enormous sums of money to do this. You are required to call every single person in your portfolio once a month, and speak to them for 90 seconds following the script. Easy, right? Well, sort of. Not at all, really. You see, you'll only have about 180-200 of these contacts. Management has decided that you need to make about 20 calls a day to show that you're really performing. If you can do basic math, you will realize the problem here. 20 calls a day for 20 working days a month would be....400? But oh, it gets better, because a great number of your contacts don't want to speak to you. You see, they've been called once a month for a year or so, and still haven't sold their little corner shop. In fact, the only people they've ever heard from have been CoStar employees, who ask them the same questions about the size, price, and age of the building over, over, over, and over again. So they're not actually super invested in talking to you for 90 seconds. Maybe they say "Oh hey, yeah, everything's the same as last time" and hang up. Congrats! You get NOTHING for that call. Better try again. Or get someone else on your team to call them and pretend like you're out of the office and hope that a fresh voice and stumbling through the same set of questions like it's the first time will buy enough time to get a completed call. And then we get to clients. Professional brokerages are pretty serious operations. You'll have the brokers themselves, office support staff (or 'admins' in the CoStar parlance), finance, property management, etc. But these brokers are busy, and generally have their office staff manage and upload their listings. The brokers are so busy in fact, that they'd really rather you NOT call them while they're driving around meeting clients, doing showings, and scouting leads. In big name brokerages, CoStar is a major lead generator, and is thus professionally handled by a few office staff. But CoStar can't be bothered with the petty realities of business. Sure, the office staff draft the leasing agreements, put all the comparables into the company systems to determine commission, etc. But this is ignored, in favor of the possibility of getting the broker on the phone and hearing about all the juicy 'deals' they're doing. Since CoStar harasses, upsells, and overcharges all these brokers with an entirely different set of TWO sales teams who are also calling them all the time, they are unsurprisingly not interested into talking to use for the most part, and attempt to redirect calls to their administrative and support staff. CoStar will tell you to ignore these protestations, and to call them over and over and over again desperately trying to babble enough to get them to speak to you for 90 seconds. These questionable tactics aren't secret either. These are 'strategies' regularly encouraged by floor managers, who do a pretty good job of imitating robots themselves. "I know all your people in your portfolio are hanging up on you and not picking up and screaming at you, but you're going to need to think of a way to get more calls." A classic is to call back on every email you receive, forcing the sender to then explain and repeat the request to you over the phone. Then call them when its done and talk to them for another 90 seconds. The best part is that you have a freaking leaderboard, so every second of every day you're aware of how you're 'under-performing.' The secret of success, therefore, is to be lucky or to cheat. If you're lucky enough to have a port of willing brokers who will tolerate you calling them all the time for every minor thing, then congratulations! You will be lauded and treated like some kind of nascent god-child. Even more so if you make sure to call into other peoples' accounts when they're sick, out of work, or late. Or just do it anyway when they're at lunch. These are the so called 'top performers' who will literally be given cash prizes for taking your work, while you sit and fruitlessly dial the phone over and over and over again. Earlier, I mentioned promotions. The good news is that because CoStar can't hold onto employees to save its life, you can be promoted very quickly! In fact, if you're a good little robot and do nothing but brand, hammer the phones, and exercise as little free will as possible, you will rapidly promoted over the heads of people far more experienced and skilled with the product than you are! This creates a bizarre Kafka-esque "The Office" scenario where floor managers cannot actually give answers or provide guidance on technical questions or issues for their underlings. The manager's job is to audit all the work you do, so they can make sure you're not wasting a single precious second of company time. Ah yes, I forgot to mention that CoStar is one of THOSE companies, where surfing the web for a few minutes or looking at your phone is forbidden, and will get you a stern talking to the first time, followed quickly by threats of unemployment. In fact, there are so many audits that need to be done that CoStar doubled its management staff to hire more people to do all the audits. So now, instead of making calls, you just get to listen to dozens of your former peers making calls, while grading them on a (and I do not exaggerate, dear reader) 56-page rubric to score it. So there you go. CoStar in a nutshell. I could go on, of course, fueled by bitter resentment and catharsis. But I think you get the gist. Don't work here. It's pretty terrible.