CoStar Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:CSGP) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

And as you know, we have not provided margins by businesses in the past, and we don’t intend to do that because of the integrated nature of the business we run. So what we found out this year was that as we go into this more integrated residential strategy that comes a lot of work and difficult to break that out. Now in broad sensors, I think you can get to roughly what that looks like given the commercial growth, the commercial margins, and we do give revenue breakouts by the different businesses. So hopefully, that will allow everyone to get a sense of where we’re going. And you can tell how important this residential strategy is to us by the amount we’re willing to invest, again, knowing that we’ve got a phenomenal opportunity in a few years for the revenue to get to that $1 billion or so in residential that we spoke about before.

Andrew Florance: And there is competitive elements here where you don’t want to be terribly transparent on every detail, and you want, we believe investors and analysts can figure some of the stuff out, but we don’t want to put it in an earnings call script to make it that easy.

Heather Balsky: Okay. Thank you very much.

Operator: Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Stephen Sheldon with William Blair. Your line is now open.

Stephen Sheldon: Hey, thanks. So it seems like you’re ramping the residential investments pretty heavily this year. And Andy, I think you said that you could start to see some better monetization of content, et cetera, later in 2023. It doesn’t seem like you’ve assumed that really in the residential revenue guidance that you laid out, Scott. So just curious to get some more detail on when you’d expect to see residential monetization really improve? And do you think that 2023 could be the peak drag or disconnect, however you want to frame it between residential revenue and operating expenses.

Andrew Florance: So I believe we met with a number of investors and discussed a point where we begin to do the first levels of monetization at 25 million uniques. And in January, we were at 24 million uniques. So we’re a little ahead of our plan there. And so we are focusing on the back half of the year to build out that product or to build out that offering and apply sales resources to it. It would be no way that it would be meaningful revenue in 2023, just because of the timing of the ramp-up. I think that the question of where you see peak investment includes a psychological element to it. So I think where the point at which you are an investor is not yet seeing the first stage of monetization or seeing traffic strategy or unique positioning of a product.

From that perspective, I would say that 2023 is probably the peak psychological negative operating margin time period. And we would hope to be showing signs of success of 24, 25. So we’ve done this a number of times. This is if you use the analogy of building a building and you’re building out first year, you’re acquiring the land, design the property second year, you’re getting the permits, bidding out the work, third year you’re building out, if you’re leasing it up. We’ve built a number of buildings just like this before. And so typically, when people see the groundbreaking in year two, three and the buildings start to come up, they can begin to imagine it. And we’re still in the early phases. We’re near two really of this initiative. But eventually, people get pretty excited because they realize as a digital building and it has a fixed cost, and you can lease it up repeatedly and repeatedly, repeatedly to make a lot of money on it.

So I think 2023 is a substantial investment year. I would anticipate that there would be investment in 2024, but with more KPIs that the world could see and appreciate.

Stephen Sheldon: Makes lot of sense. Thank you.