Earnings Labs

CoStar Group, Inc. (CSGP)

Q1 2010 Earnings Call· Thu, Apr 22, 2010

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen thank you for standing by and welcome to the CoStar Group's First Quarter 2010 Conference Call. On the call today are CoStar Group’s CEO, Andrew Florance; CFO, Brian Radecki and Communications Director, Tim Trainor. During today’s conference all participants will be in a listen-only mode, later there will be a question-and-answer session; instructions will be given at that time (Operator Instructions). And as a reminder, today’s conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to CoStar's Group Communication Director, Mr. Tim Trainor, please go ahead.

Tim Trainor

Management

Thank you, operator and good morning everyone. Welcome to CoStar Group’s first quarter 2010 conference call. Before I turn the call over to our CEO, Andrew Florance let me state that certain portions of this discussion contains forward-looking statements which involve many risks and uncertainties that can cause actual results to differ materially from such statements. Important factors that can cause actual results to differ include but are not limited to, those stated in CoStar Group's first quarter press release and in CoStar's filings with the SEC, including its Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2009 under the heading Risk Factors. All forward-looking statements are based on information available to CoStar on the date of this call and CoStar assumes no obligation to update these statements. As a reminder today’s conference call is also being broadcast live over the internet at www.costar.com. A replay will be available approximately one hour after this call concludes and remain available through May 6, 2010. To listen to the replay, call 800-475-6701 within the United States or Canada or 320-365-3844 outside the United States. The replay will also be available on CoStar’s website for a period of time following the call. Thank you again for joining us. I will now turn the call over to Andy.

Andrew Florance

Management

Thank you Tim, I appreciate it. Welcome everyone to CoStar Group’s first quarter 2010 conference call. I am very pleased to report the initial signs of economic improvement we reported last quarter had continued to strengthen throughout our business during this first quarter and this has all resulted in strong organic quarterly sales performance and a record $55.1 million in quarterly revenue. The $55.1 million in quarterly revenue for the first quarter of 2010 was an increase of approximately 500,000 over $54.6 million revenue during the fourth quarter of 2009. It was about a $5 million increase over the revenues a year ago same quarter. First quarter 2010 EBITDA was $8.8 million and the company’s net income was $2.9 million during the first quarter. We are investing aggressively in our business in anticipation of economic recovery. We had invested by growing our sales force 32% year-over-year with the addition of nearly 50 net new sales professionals. We have also invested in the quality and depth of our research by adding 100 net new researchers year-over-year. We believe that this distressed real estate market has presented a unique opportunity for us to control long-term occupancy cost. So we’ve invested by purchasing a new headquarters building and made the decision to consolidate leases in both Boston and London. We believe that advancing from what traditionally been a research focused business to one that includes analysis and applied research presents a tremendous growth opportunity for our company and so we've had a key personnel and have acquired and we are integrating Property And Portfolio Research and Resolve Technology in to CoStar Group. With these investments, coupled with ongoing our organic sales momentum, we believe the company is well positioned to achieve accelerated high margin revenue growth as commercial state markets recover. We are…

Brian Radecki

Management

Thank you, Andy. As Andy mentioned we are pleased to report we’ve achieved solid financial results for the first quarter 2010 with record revenues as we continue to see positive momentum in many areas of our business. Today I’m going to principally focus on the sequential results for the first quarter of 2010 compared to the fourth quarter of 2009 and also our outlook for the second quarter and full year of 2010. We believe the sequential trends offer the most insights into the performance of our business as we continue to progress through the current economic and commercial real estate cycle. As Andy mentioned, first quarter revenues came in stronger than anticipated at $55.1 million, an increase of approximately $0.5 million over the fourth quarter of 2009. A record revenue performance during the quarter was primarily driven by organic company wide net new sales as Andy mentioned. Subscription revenues in the first quarter accounted for approximately 94.5% of all of our revenues. On a functional currency basis, international revenue was approximately £3.1 million which had positive organic subscription revenues in the first quarter and in line with our expectations. International revenues were approximately 8.7% of the company’s total revenues in the first quarter. As of March 31, 2010 our 12 month trailing renewal rate which is a measure of renewing subscription revenue was approximately 86%. As I have publicly stated for about two years now we expect that our 12 month trailing renewal rates to decline from low to mid 80s in 2009 and then begin to recover in 2010. We ended 2009 at approximately 85% with our Q4 in quarter renewal rates turning out significantly. We are pleased to see our 12 months trailing renewal rate continue to increase and move back towards the historical average approximately 90%,…

Operator

Operator

Thanking you. (Operator Instructions). The first question comes from the line of Timo Connor with William Blair. Please go ahead.

Timo Connor - William Blair

Analyst

Couple of questions around the renewal rates. Do you have any additional color around the in quarter renewal rates for the first quarter?

Brian Radecki

Management

Yeah. The in quarter renewal rates was higher than the 12 months trailing and slightly lower than last quarter but it was higher than the 12 months trailing quarter. So we continue to see a lot of progress there. DSOs continue to get better, bad debt expense was down, write-off were down. So we continue to see progress there. We believe that the 12 month trailing renewal rate will continue to improve throughout the year, end up in the kind of high 80s.

Timo Connor - William Blair

Analyst

Do you see quarter-over-quarter remaining on the high 80s?

Brian Radecki

Management

Yeah. We have a reasonable visibility looking for the quarter and we don’t have any reason at this point to believe that we’re seeing anything but improvement in renewal rates. That’s correct.

Timo Connor - William Blair

Analyst

Thank you. Would you mind going over, I know you covered it earlier but again over the usage levels, especially customer segments.

Andrew Florance

Management

Sure. So I think you’re refereeing to our efforts with new customers?

Timo Connor - William Blair

Analyst

Yes, correct.

Andrew Florance

Management

Okay. Right so. We end up putting a hundred authorized users into a decent size site like a major institutional investor site that we do not expect of all 100 IDs to be used. We typically see about 80% plus of the IDs that are consistently actively used. One other things we noticed was that we have low renewal rates among the brand new customers that’s because basically a manager or an officer that’s signed up to take on the CoStar service, once they made a decision that’s necessarily mean the staff will use the product. And it can take up to five years before the staff has bigger location will really inaugurating CoStar into their day-to-day operations. Because of that we saw a lower renewal rate about 70% or 65% renewal rate among our newest customers. So we went at that by paying our sales people for actually getting new customers to use the services rather than to sign them up and has been extremely effective. The usage levels have gone from what, 37% to 50 some percent among the newest customers. And we’re now getting our new customer up to established customer usage levels within about two years or so. And that translated to us seeing almost the same renewal rate for new customers as for old customers. So we’re really quite happy with that. That said, accelerated our past few organic growth.

Timo Connor - William Blair

Analyst

And did you see the customer renewal rate from five year plus customers staying within their mind with fourth quarter?

Andrew Florance

Management

Correct.

Timo Connor - William Blair

Analyst

Thank you. CoStar progress with analytics, would you mind just covering that a little bit. I think mentioned 2 million in quarters three and four of PPR cross sold to CoStar subscription clients. Do you see that continue?

Brian Radecki

Management

Yes. That was two million sum in the first, in the third and fourth quarter of ’09. And we saw 1.1 million in the first quarter of ’10. So I couldn’t be after that. That’s a phenomenal level. And we’ve got a very large composition there. PPR has a 180, 190, 180 some customers and CoStar has hundreds and hundreds of institutional customers that currently subscribe to PPR. So we’re basically introducing the PPR sales team to those folks and continue to get good cross sales. And really CoStar resolves any product issues that PPR had where they didn’t have a granularity of data and PPR resolves a lot product issues where CoStar didn’t have multi family or didn’t have forecasting or debt modeling. So we really got a new solution that is meeting a comprehensive need set for the institutional players. And we’re having a lot of competitive wins. So as I understand it, I’m hearing that a very high percentage of these cross sells are wins from a direct competitor. So that should continue on through 2010 and we’ll also be looking to release a new product that is some where between the CoStar lower price point for institutional player and the PPR higher price point either late 2010 or early 2011. I think that will enable us to do even more cross selling. I'm very happy with that. Now we haven’t yet begun in earnest but we’ve not yet begun the cross selling process between Resolve, CoStar and PPR. For that I think that like wise has an awful lot of potential. We’ll be able to sell PPR data into Resolve and CoStar data in the Resolve and Resolve back to CoStar PPR customers.

Timo Connor - William Blair

Analyst

Great, thanks. And on the sale force you mention that new increase but what about on the retention side?

Andrew Florance

Management

Well, we’ve seen a dramatic improvement in retention. So the, obviously in this economy we’ve seen our turnover rate drop in half, probably across the board and we also are really quite pleased with the quality of candidates we’re selecting from right now. So we have going to bring on board some real players that are out there on the sale side.

Timo Connor - William Blair

Analyst

Okay. Average deal size increased slightly especially maybe driven by PPR. Could you provide a little more context about the increases especially on the subscription side?

Brian Radecki

Management

Sure. This million dollars in cross selling activity in PPR was probably 10 accounts or nine accounts. So we are selling in the lot high value solutions into large institution on the PPR side. So that’s driving the averages price point where the headcount. And as we put financial sales people out there, we should see that continue to go up. In the CoStar traditional product lines, subscription product lines in the U.S. I think they’re basically stable, roughly the same price point. We do have some initiative in the rest of the year which will be targeting, actively targeting higher volume low price points on a particular, some particular customer segment. So it will probably drive the CoStar side down a little because of high volume in the low end and the PPR the pulling it back up. So we are at build up the high end and we’re doing well at low end pretty much with the competing forces.

Unidentified Analyst

Analyst

Okay. And then finally just to a real quick question on trends and broker headcount, what do you think when your customer specially on the mid sized brokers?

Andrew Florance

Management

Well, I think that many of those who were going to die in this downturn has died and I had a couple of lunches with industry leadership recently where they are extremely bullish. So, if you’re looking at commercial real estate brokerage firms out there, I think many of them that has had their best quarter ever and I wouldn’t be surprised if you did some earnings surprises. So this whole thing with leasing activity, hitting a new high it’s really real. We hit the highest leasing activity number in the fourth quarter of '09. It takes about a month or so after the end of the quarter really getting good sense of where it’s going to finally land. But the fourth quarter leasing number of '09 was blow away number. It would likely be higher than the leasing activity number we saw in 2000 which was you still in that .com zone. So it's well above anything we saw in '07 or '06 and that could translate into leasing commissions which is broker revenue. So I don’t see brokerage firms today reducing headcount. The only folks to be reducing headcount would be boutique shops that really did investment sales only. But they would have reduced their headcount in the middle of '09 and their watching their brethren over on the leasing side of the equation make a lot of money right now and they are hoping that their turn is next. So, I think we’re sort passed the headcount reduction phase.

Unidentified Analyst

Analyst

One more probably this is the last one. Any changes in non-customers are paying payment cycle that you seeing that move from one year to quarterly perhaps?

Brian Radecki

Management

No, actually they’ve been pretty consistent. The majority of our customer base pays monthly and we do have some larger accounts that like to pay quarterly or annually. But the majority have always paid monthly even though they are under contract for a year or longer. Well I can say that the as I mentioned earlier the accounts receivable, the days that people are extending payment is reducing receivables are getting much better, bad debts write off also reducing. So you can definitely see in lot of different metrics in the business effect, the clients are starting to get healthier.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Jon Maietta with Needham and Company. Please go ahead. Jonathan Maietta - Needham & Co.: Good morning. First question I had was around just to piggyback around that question around cross sell opportunities. To what extent is the CoStar's install base familiar with PPR, Resolve? I am just trying to get a sense of what level of education has to be put forth when you are trying to up sell those two platforms?

Andrew Florance

Management

I would actually think that the awareness would fairly low at this point for Resolve. Realistically I think Resolve has one sales person to cover the United States of America, PPR had four or five sales people to cover the United States. Neither firm engaged in aggressive marketing activities. So these firms are historically targeting the very top of institutional stock and what we’re doing is bringing a much broader sales and marketing approach to the organization. So with an average price points north of a hundred thousand annually where you’re expecting to have multiyear contracts, these are reasonably high end sales and they are done with direct field sales force and typically two meetings. So it's something with education process that occurs face to face and is fairly straight forward. But when you bring a 100 sales people to bear on something we had one or four, you can expect a lot of cross selling potential and these are great products, the PPR products have the forecast, the analysis with economist are doing there. It’s very high quality stuff. We believe it's industry leading. Their result product that we have a ton of potential. So once you get that meeting the education process is very fairly straight forward. And I think this whole cross selling has a lot of legs to it. Jonathan Maietta - Needham & Co.: Got it. Okay. That is helpful. And a question for you around property owners, that is certainly the segment in the economy that is suffering the most. Do you have a sense as to when do you think the owners face sort of the toughest time period? Is it 2010? Is it 2011? Is it 2012? When does print tenant extend and sort of come up and hit these guys in the face?

Andrew Florance

Management

Right. So I will also give you some specific numbers and we used to do a survey in the UK and 72% of the respondent were familiar with CoStar and I believe that single digit were familiar with PPR unaided very worthy. When the owners confront, extend and pretend. Well and as the owner of our building it's not turning up every other light in the stairwell and the lobby. So I am guessing that's an aggressive cost cutting move or an effort to try to get Energy Star. So I am thinking that you got a high percentage of the loans that were issued in 2007 at the peak of the market were five year bubble loans, non amortizing loan. So they are going roll the peak of the worst loan were roll in 2012 but there was still lot of very bubble like activity in 2006 which will roll in 2011. You look at the volume of activities that are occurred in '06, '07 and as phenomenal may so that will be '11 and '12 should be fairy hairy year and they are going to be hoping that the lack of supply will bring up rents in time to make a possible refinances loans. But I think you will be seeing a study stream of folks coming to reality, the mid part of '10 all they way through to 2017 because you got 10 years the CMBS loans from '06 and, 07 rolling 10 years off back. So I think you are going to have small percentage single digit percentage owners owner facing the music each year for the next five or six years. Jonathan Maietta - Needham & Co.: Okay. And then just the last question from me is where does the UK sit, in terms of what they are seeing with regard to absorption trends, vacancy rates, so on and so forth?

Andrew Florance

Management

Identical. For example they would argued that their I think they probably a bit euphoric about the pace of recovery. To me it feels about the same. As an example thought rents in the city are up 12% quarter -over-quarter and I think that not really looking free rent so they are probably out in a probably 7% 8% but that's actually happening in a couple of US markets right now. So I think it's similar. One of the difference is they have got more supply than we do, so I think their vacancy recovery bill the slower pretty much atmosphere is identical in both markets, is an optimism of thing are actually improving dramatically

Operator

Operator

The next question comes from the line of the Ian Corydon from B. Riley and Company. Please go ahead. Ian Corydon - B. Riley & Co.: Thanks. On the SHOWCASE side, what is the renewal rate like for that product, and will you continue to give us subs on a quarterly basis just for modeling purposes?

Andrew Florance

Management

Yes, that's on quarterly base for modeling. The price is being as I guess there is two answer there. One is the firm level subscription where the renewal rate would probably closer to our traditional 80% plus renewal rates. We also have the individual subscription, which are going to be sold on a month-to-month basis, and often they are sold to people who have one or two listings, so when those listing actually release up they don’t renew so you have much lower renewal rate on the individual showcase. It is better, as I understand that, we have a higher renewal rate on the individual subs than do some of our industry competitors but it’s not as high as our firm level subscriptions and sort of stabilizing out, if it’s process finding a balance point. Ian Corydon - B. Riley & Co: And on PPR, you mentioned you’ve got a couple of competitive wins. On what basis are you getting those, and then are there any other milestones we should be looking at for integration of that business, besides the late 2010, early 2011 release?

Andy Florance

Analyst

We’ve got a incredibly compelling value proposition to an institutional player right now. Many of our competitors, if you look at the evolution at this business of providing analysis and forecasting for commercial real-estate, back in ten years ago, nobody had a database for commercial real-estates in the United States. So people are out there reading, economists would read the (tea leaves) of what was happening in employment and GDP and try to guess as to what was occurring in vacancy rates, leasing activity, rental rates and the likes. So, there was a lot of sampling and estimation occurring in producing a key industry indicator. CoStar Group if you look at our budget for research over the last 15 years its been approaching 10,000 people a year, are mainly are effort with nearly a $1 billion expended in collecting this information, and millions and millions of interviews. So we actually have the first census level representation of what’s happening in the market within CoStar Group. And that so we are sampling the majority of the active buildings on a 30 days cycle. Our second closest competitor is sampling a subset of that on an annual cycle. So, imagine that you were trying to buy equity’s information service from someone and you need to know what the NASDAQ closed at yesterday and one company was sampling all the stocks of the NASDAQ everyday, to come up with what the NASDAQ closed at. And the other company was sampling 150 second of the NASDAQ each week for the prior year, and they were the stocks they had a sample in 30 weeks. They were estimating what they will be here today based on what they had sampled yesterday. That’s what our competitor does they do a lot of sampling and estimation, where…

Andrew Florance

Management

I think it’s multi-hundreds of million of dollars. CoStar is doing 10s of millions of revenues selling the institutional customer’s; PPR is doing roughly in the 20 million plus range. We see competitors in other foreign cities dealing more than $10 million in individual cities in revenues. You can interpolate that out pretty correctly to that being a (north) of $200 million or quarter of billion dollar revenue market in the United States, if one competitor can do, those are kinds of numbers in one city. So we think it’s a very significant market place. Then when you start building in the ability to do what Resolve does which is warehouse all the different data streams on a portfolios of properties for an institutional player and apply continuous valuation and risk information of that portfolio. I think that’s a whole new market which I think is —I wouldn’t be ready to hazard a guess, but I think that’s pretty significant marketplace as well.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Brett Huff with Stephens.

Brett Huff - Stephens Inc.

Analyst · Stephens.

Somebody asked I think the beginning question and I was distracted what the in quarter retention rate was?

Andrew Florance

Management

Yeah, the in quarter retention rate is above obviously the twelve month trailing and that’s one of the reason why we believe that number will continue to go up. It was slightly below what it was last quarter but it was above the twelve month trailing.

Brett Huff - Stephens Inc.

Analyst · Stephens.

Did you give Resolve and PPR revenues? I know they are being integrated but just trying to get to an organic growth calc, any estimates there?

Andrew Florance

Management

No, I think last year when we talked about earnings for this year we said that you know PPR was in the $18 million range but still we got them. And Resolve was in the $3million -$4 million range so you’ll be able to kind of back into the organic growth rate this year based on those numbers.

Brett Huff - Stephens Inc.

Analyst · Stephens.

Okay. And then Andy, you had talked about organic sales strength; I guess both you and Brian did. When you say organic sales are you using sales and revenue interchangeably, or should we take that as both revenue organic growth was pretty good, but the sales and the bookings were also good and we should see that roll forward? Can you just distinguish those, if you can?

Andrew Florance

Management

Sure, I think they are both strong, so that would be -- you are right, so retrospectively and forward looking things were looking good. And the other thing is that its looking good across the board, so there is no one region in the United States that appear to be or United Kingdom that was still lagging all regions. All sectors appear to be doing well and moving upward so it was across the board good news.

Brian Radecki

Management

And Brat, Andy does do that interchangeably, what I’ll say to that is that, it’s not like we have big installation lag like some companies you might buy a product, you have to install it so you can kind of take a bookings number and say, well it's a really strong bookings number. It’s going to roll through the next quarter or two quarters. Ours is -- everything is obviously fairly instantaneous. So that you could have a little bit from, you know, March sales going into April but essentially us, believing that we are going to be organic, again for the second quarter is more about our confidence in the pipeline and what we actually think we're going to sell in the second quarter. So just to kind of keep a little clarity.

Brett Huff - Stephens

Analyst · Stephens.

Helpful. Can you just update us on what you think sort of the margin profile does? I know that you are optimistic that this is sort of a transition year and you have got some dilutive things going on that will help in the medium term. You have talked specifically about the $2 million year-over-year that should go away presumably out of G&A, because of the building costs. Can you point to any other things specifically where, the 2011, say expenses should be flat or down, versus what we presume will be sort of a rising revenue environment?

Brian Radecki

Management

Yeah, I think in my guidance I kind of always walk through the sections that we talked about cost of revenues. I believe that this quarter is kind of our first full quarter. You got PPR and Resolve. You have the investments and research. So it will fluctuate a little bit, a couple of $100,000 here and there, depending on the headcount we move down to DC that might fluctuate that number a little bit, but I think you can view that as a fairly stabilized rate. At some point here, we will go back to having, right now there is no CPI increases in revenue, there is also no CPI increases for the staff but at some point, you know, between here and the end of the year or next year, I'm sure we will get to that. So eventually you will get back to a normalized environment where all your cost structure will go up by some CPI escalation number. Of course, that will be mainly offset by revenue. So I think you can look at that line which is the $21 million dollars, it is the majority of our cost structure is relatively stable now. So as you start dropping revenue from the top line, it will obviously drop right through the cost of sales and into the gross margin line. But as far as the other operating expenses go, again I gave pretty specific guidance on each one of those. I think the sales force, as Andy talked about, is relatively stable; it increased a lot over last year. So when you look at year-over-year and those numbers are going to look significant but when you look quarter-over-quarter, they only went up three. So that cost structure is going to be relatively stable, also again taking into account just some of the seasonality of things that we do like our annual sales conference or ICSC, those types of things. Development line, again that's actually pretty small number, it’s always in $4.5 million range plus or minus $300,000. That might increase slightly this year and we are doing some investments and development in Resolve and some other areas, but again it is not significant. And then in G&A, of course, that's the big number that you talked about obviously, you will definitely see a $2 million dollar saving as we go into next year as we eliminate some of these duplicative costs on headquarters. So I mean, all in all, I think as you get through this year, it’s a transition year, and you get to dropping revenues from the top line and the bottom line is going to start looking a lot more like it did back in 2007 and you’ve got to remember what business the model can do when you are in a normalized environment and I think we're pretty excited about that.

Brett Huff - Stephens

Analyst · Stephens.

Okay. And then Andy, did you give new customer sites? I think you gave total new customer subs, but did you give sites?

Andy Florance

Analyst · Stephens.

I thought it was about, off the top of my head about…

Brian Radecki

Management

It was the same as usual.

Andy Florance

Analyst · Stephens.

About the same, I think it was 16,000 or so. So I can give you that exact number, it's about 16,000. It was pretty flat. New subscribing firms in quarter went from 423 in the fourth quarter of 2009 to 494 in the first quarter of 2010.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Jim Wilson with JMP Securities. Please go ahead.

Jim Wilson - JMP Securities

Analyst · JMP Securities. Please go ahead.

Again, thanks for all that demo I guess, two or three weeks ago. That was very helpful. I was wondering kind of out of, we talked a lot about cross selling and the distinct products of the three, and how powerful they are, which I agree from what I have seen. How about integration of them, and the process of it in the sense of being able to integrate the tools right inside a CoStar desktop of what PPR and Resolve offer, how long that will take, and how you see customer interest in that, or that some might be waiting for a kind of fully integrated desktop before they take the next step of paying you more money? How would you characterize that or outline it?

Andrew Florance

Management

We have a big conference on the institutional side up in Cape Cod each year in the fall and our goal is to demonstrate some prototype product for that conference. We will not actually release that likely until beginning of 2011. And then for the Resolve integration what you are really trying to do there is take key variables used in valuing or reporting on the assets inside the portfolio and automate the flow of those variables from CoStar and PPR into Resolve. I think that will likely happen in 2011 and that is in the process, one of the things we are doing which we mentioned when we consolidated all these leases in Boston or we consolidated various leases, we are putting the people from Resolve in the same physical office space of the people from PPR and the people from CoStar, we are moving technical and analytic personnel up to Boston. So everyone is in one zone, so they can work as productively as possible on this integration effort which is fairly quantitative and hardcore. I don’t think we have a big issue where customers are waiting to see this happen. I think they get it, they understand why when you put these things together they will be pretty powerful, the integration is already occurring. They are already seeing the number of comparable sales that go in for the analysis of valuation trends increase ten fold. So they are already seeing a benefit from it right now. I think there will be some things we look forward to getting past like when we change the forecast models, use a different data set and have to align the different index as you know, that will be something that happens within the next 12 months. But I think we’re already well on path and right now the IT organizations for CoStar and PPR are already integrated. So we’re already basically one group is already controlling the code for both organizations. It’s definitely easier than integrating a European and a US information set for instance.

Operator

Operator

The next question comes from the line of Vance Edelson from Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead

Vance Edelson - Morgan Stanley Research

Analyst

Hi, thanks a lot. First just a housekeeping question. With net new customers of 1,265, any idea what the gross add number was? In other words, how many actual customers came online before you back out those who left?

Andrew Florance

Management

Yeah, I don’t think we are reporting that, we have just been reporting the net number, so we’d probably continue to report the net number moving forward but it would be probably be similar to our renewal rates so you could back into it if you wanted to.

Vance Edelson - Morgan Stanley Research

Analyst

Okay. Got it.

Andrew Florance

Management

I am not sure what the number is.

Vance Edelson - Morgan Stanley Research

Analyst

Just trying to find out how many customers were added. Given that net adds declined sequentially, what would you say the reason for that was? It sounds like things are looking up a bit for the targeted customer base, with leasing activity picking up dramatically as you mentioned, so just trying to get a feel for why the net adds would decline? Is there some seasonality there?

Andrew Florance

Management

It’s actually the mix is the issue. So again our organization is selling product that is $600 a year to subscribe to and simultaneously selling product that’s $1 million a year to subscribe to. So what happened between Q4 and Q1 was the mix changed. And so you had fewer of the low end sales and more of the high-end sales occurring. And that’s why it went from 17 something, 1700 net new adds to 1200 but got more organic growth.

Brian Radecki

Management

I think that you are going to continue to see that flip around all year long because of some of the things that Andy mentioned before. We are kind of selling barbells at the high end, and cross selling with PPR, but like as Andy mentioned, we are also introducing some new lower end service products in certain geographies this year. So just depending on when we release those, that mix could keep flipping all year. And it will change based on for example, we had 20 sales people being repositioned and retrained for a new product area and so if those folks go online are being transitioned to the new product initiative, you got a brief pause in low end sales on another product area. So it will be a little bumpy that way but the overall revenue result will be fairly predictable.

Andrew Florance

Management

Yeah I think that’s right and Vance is that that could flip back and forth based on the initiative that we have going at lower end product or higher end product, but ultimately as we produce organic revenue growth, that’s really the end result.

Vance Edelson - Morgan Stanley

Analyst

Got it and that also covers what would have been my next question on the customer profile. Maybe one last one for you. The acquisition pipeline, anything you can comment on? Are you looking for more M&A out there?

Andy Florance

Analyst

We definitely are. We think that there are still opportunities out there we are interested in. We are actively and continuously out there talking to people and looking for things, so I would not say that shut down are over. It’s just a question of timing and when something we like comes up and we are probably walking away from 4 out of 5 deals because we don’t like the valuation So Vance and anyone listening out there, we are still very interested. It’s andy@costar.com or brian@costar.com. We would love to chat if you are reasonable on valuation.

Operator

Operator

We have no more further questions, please continue.

Andrew Florance

Management

Okay at this point I would like to thank everyone for joining us for the Q1 earnings call update and I hope you appreciate that I kept my comments down to nine pages. I look forward to talk to you again in the second quarter. Bye, bye