CoStar Group announced Friday that it has agreed to acquire Zonda, one of the most influential data and analytics firms serving the U.S. and Canada homebuilding industry, for $800 million.
The deal expands CoStar's reach deeper into residential real estate and gives the company ownership of a platform used by thousands of homebuilders, land developers, lenders, building-product manufacturers, and housing investors across North America. It also brings NewHomeSource.com—the largest new-home listings marketplace in the U.S.—into CoStar's growing portfolio of real estate marketplaces, which includes Homes.com.
“Zonda serves more than 3,000 customers across the homebuilding ecosystem, including many of the largest residential builders, developers, suppliers, and lenders in North America. Its platform delivers end-to-end solutions spanning land acquisition, development planning, homebuilding analytics, construction forecasting, community marketing, operational workflow management, and online new home marketplaces. Zonda is an attractive B2B business with strong profit margins. The majority of its revenue is subscription-based, with an impressive 104% net customer retention.”
The acquisition continues CoStar's long-running strategy of expanding through acquisitions and building category-leading information and marketplace businesses. Over the past two decades, CoStar has acquired and integrated major real estate brands including LoopNet, Apartments.com, Homes.com, STR, Matterport, and Australia's Domain.
For CoStar founder and CEO Andy Florance, the Zonda acquisition fills an important gap. While CoStar has become a dominant force in commercial real estate data and has rapidly expanded its residential marketplace presence through Homes.com, Zonda gives the company a commanding position in the new-home construction ecosystem—a segment where CoStar historically had less direct exposure.
The long road from Hanley Wood to Zonda
To understand why this acquisition matters, it's worth understanding how Zonda itself was built.
The roots of Zonda trace back to Hanley Wood, a company founded in 1976 by Michael Hanley and Michael Wood. For decades, Hanley Wood was the dominant media and information company serving the residential construction industry. Its portfolio included industry publications such as Builder Magazine, Multifamily Executive, Architect, Journal of Light Construction, and numerous conferences.
Hanley Wood's evolution accelerated in 2013 when it acquired Metrostudy, one of the most respected sources of new-home construction data. The acquisition transformed Hanley Wood from primarily a media company into a hybrid media-and-data platform.
Meanwhile, on a parallel track, Jeff Meyers (the current CEO of Zonda) was building Meyers Research.
Founded in 2006, Meyers Research focused on providing market intelligence, consulting, and data products to homebuilders, land developers, and institutional investors. Rather than building media brands, Meyers Research concentrated on helping executives make land acquisition, development, and investment decisions using local-market housing data and advisory services. Over time, the company developed what became known as the Zonda platform, a technology-driven housing intelligence system used throughout the homebuilding industry.
The two firms (Hanley Wood and Meyers Research) merged together in 2018 when private-equity firm MidOcean Partners acquired Hanley Wood and merged it with Meyers Research. The combination united Hanley Wood's media brands, Metrostudy data assets, and industry reach with Meyers Research's consulting business, executive relationships, and technology platform.
In October 2020, the combined company officially rebranded as Zonda, retiring the Hanley Wood and Meyers Research names as its primary corporate identity.
What CoStar is getting
Today's Zonda looks very different than either Hanley Wood or Meyers Research did independently.
Zonda provides homebuilding data, consulting, forecasting, workflow software, digital marketing tools, and online marketplaces. Through acquisitions over the past several years, Zonda also expanded into satellite imagery, Canadian housing analytics, and consumer-facing new-home marketplaces. Most notably, its 2024 acquisition of BDX and NewHomeSource.com significantly expanded its marketplace footprint.
That combination of proprietary data, software, advisory services, and marketplaces is likely what attracted CoStar.
For CoStar, the deal represents another step toward becoming a comprehensive information and marketplace platform across virtually every corner of real estate—from commercial properties and apartments to resale homes and now new-home construction.
Why it matters
CoStar has spent the better part of a decade methodically acquiring its way into every major corner of real estate data and marketplaces—commercial, multifamily, residential resale, hospitality, and now new construction. The Zonda deal fills the last significant gap in that strategy. For CoStar, the prize isn't just Zonda's marketplaces; it's also the proprietary lot-level dataset and the deeply embedded workflow software that builders rely on daily to make land, capital, and sales decisions. That kind of data is extraordinarily hard to replicate, and it gives CoStar a foot in the door at virtually every large homebuilder in North America.
But for the commercial real estate and homebuilding sectors at large, it means their data world is getting more concentrated.