In total, this person said, 1,546 workers departed in 2021 - about three-quarters of them voluntarily. About 37% of the nearly 4,200 people who worked for CoStar in the US as of January 2021 left the company last year, according to an employee with direct knowledge of its employment statistics. These people said that while CoStar's culture had for years been demanding, the conduct of the company's upper management grew more intrusive and abrasive, adding to employee dissatisfaction at a moment when turnover was already exacerbated amid the so-called Great Resignation brought on by the pandemic.Ī wave of departures followed in 2021, several employees said. They also said executives humiliated employees in front of colleagues to make examples of what was viewed as subpar work. They said CoStar surveilled workers, fired some for arbitrary or seemingly minor infractions, and attempted to censor or discredit criticism. Twenty-nine current and former employees said CoStar embraced steps that might seem out of the playbook of an authoritarian regime to make sure they didn't abuse their newfound autonomy working away from the office. The aggressive expansion led by Florance means that pricey access to CoStar's massive database of building and deal information is now considered essential in the industry.Īs the pandemic forced CoStar to adapt to working remotely, the combative attitude of its top executives was increasingly felt inside the company as well. Over the past two decades, CoStar has gained a reputation as a brass-knuckled $26 billion corporate behemoth that has sued and snapped up competitors who might challenge its place as the nation's dominant commercial-real-estate data provider. "It has made the world lazy and too comfortable."ĬoStar said in a statement that Ruggles "does not recall making any of these statements" and that "they would be out of character" for her. "It's this pandemic," Ruggles groused, according to the manager.
Ruggles, who is widely considered the second-in-command to the company's president and CEO, Andrew Florance, went on to suggest that employees had been working in bed and lounging in their pajamas all day. Another former manager at CoStar who was on the call backed up this person's account. "You're doing a shit job," Lisa Ruggles, a senior vice president of global analytics, research, and news, told dozens of employees on the call, according to a manager who attended the meeting and still works for CoStar. Last April, an executive at the real-estate data powerhouse CoStar held a video meeting to discuss the lingering difficulties of integrating a rival firm it had purchased two years earlier. In fact, the slide Florance presented said that the company expected 0.08 deaths in a year if all employees returned to the office and were between the ages of 30 and 49 and vaccinated. The company says it is unapologetically performance-obsessed and eager to get back to normality.Įditor's note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that CoStar CEO Andrew Florance presented a slide in a January 2022 all-hands meeting that calculated that if all of the company's then-4,900 employees were to come back to the office, only about one would be likely to die.They say they're revolting over surveillance by the firm, humiliation by managers, and access to remote work.CoStar, the country's most powerful real-estate data firm, has experienced an exodus of employees.