CoStar Closes $800M Zonda Buy, Now Owns Builders' Data Layer

CoStar Group closed its $800 million all-cash acquisition of Zonda on August 21, folding the new-home industry’s dominant data, survey and marketplace platform into the company that already owns the commercial real estate data layer most of the industry prices deals against. The deal, first announced May 29, gives CoStar control of Zonda’s builder software, its lot-level construction data, and consumer sites NewHomeSource.com and Livabl, according to Commercial Observer and CoStar’s own closing statement, confirmed same-day in a CoStar 8-K filed with the national market coverage this site tracks.

Why it matters

Land developers and homebuilders who license Zonda’s absorption, pricing and permit-pipeline data now buy it from the same company that sells commercial-side data to their lenders, their institutional competitors and, increasingly, to other builders on the same platform. That is not automatically a problem, Zonda’s subscription terms and data-sharing walls have not changed as of this closing, but a single vendor sitting on both layers has more leverage to raise prices, bundle products, or quietly change what data moves between CoStar’s commercial clients and Zonda’s builder clients than two separate companies ever did. CoStar CEO Andy Florance called it a business built “around information the homebuilding industry relies on every day,” which is exactly the dependency builders should be watching.

The numbers

Zonda generated approximately $170 million in 2025 revenue at a 23 percent adjusted EBITDA margin, and serves more than 3,000 customers, CoStar said in its closing announcement. CoStar is paying $800 million in cash, all of it disclosed in the August 21 8-K as a completed transaction, not a pending one. CoStar has pegged the addressable new-home information and software market at roughly $400 billion in annual U.S. new-home sales, the scale it is now underwriting against Zonda’s subscriber base.

What’s next

CoStar has not announced pricing changes, product bundling or platform integration timelines for Zonda subscribers, and Zonda President Jeff Meyers said the company will keep serving builders as it has for decades. The practical test for developers and land buyers comes at the next renewal cycle: whether Zonda subscriptions get bundled into CoStar’s commercial packages, whether pricing moves, and whether competitive data that used to sit behind a smaller, single-purpose vendor now touches a much larger one.