Chapter 3 · The Moat

Decades of data. One front door.

CoStar's edge is the deepest commercial-property dataset there is — and the marketplaces everyone already uses.

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✦ The bottom line

A moat keeps rivals out. CoStar's is its data: decades of property records and researchers in the field that a newcomer can't replicate quickly.

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✦ Teach me

Barriers to entry

What makes it hard for a rival to compete. CoStar's database took decades to build, and its marketplaces already have the buyers and sellers. A newcomer faces both a data gap and an empty network.

Hard-to-copy data plus a busy marketplace lets CoStar keep raising subscription prices.

...may enter a market, and competition may intensify, including from competitors that could have greater access to data, financial, product development, technical, analytic, or marketing resources than we do.

Deep data moat