$CSGP CoStar Group Tape Reports
Per Ticker.id: $CSGP CoStar Group Tape Reports — 7 podcast mentions across 3 podcasts (30 days), latest 2026-08-27 00:00 UTC.
The boots-on-the-ground approach reminds me of CoStar, which is a SaaS company that we have in our Intrinsic Value portfolio. For decades though, they sent people to commercial properties to take photos and map it all, and they still do that, and they have armies of people that are creating this basically unique data that nobody else has because they're going out and physically documenting all the details of these properties. And that might not be the most efficient way to do it. It's not the fastest, but it definitely builds a moat because most of the competitors are not going to go that far into the weeds and would be hard. It would just take them many years to recreate something like the database that CoStar has. And so it seems like Palantir has maybe done something similar.
Preston Pysh — The Investor's Podcast (We Study Billionaires) - The Investor’s Podcast Network · TIP841: Palantir – Palantir is Cheaper than I Thought! w/ Daniel Mahncke & Shawn O’Malley · 2026-08-27Stig Brodersen: Actually also thought of CoStar when I heard about this, but obviously what Palantir does is 100 times more difficult. No disrespect to CoStar, it's a holding in our portfolio, but it's way more complicated. I mean, the biggest problem is that the data it needs to create these digital twins and highly capable and actionable databases, is scattered across the entire company. And often the data is only halfway digitized too. So I don't know, think about handwritten documents that were scanned to a PDF, but as you would know, that still makes it unsearchable, right? It's digitized, but you cannot just search it up, which makes things just way more complicated. That's just one out of 100 possible problems. Again, when I went through, you know, these ex-employee articles of what they encountered there, it was just sometimes it was almost unimaginable. Another very interesting part is that many ex-employees described internal politics as one of the toughest hurdles. So before Palantir comes in, everybody's doing their own thing. And because of inertia and perhaps also the fear that you just won't be needed any longer when Palantir software actually exists, many times the middle management more or less refuses to hand out the actually important data. So again, the stories you can read about that are actually quite funny, and I might link to some of them in the show notes. But of course, they can't blatantly refuse to give out the data when the company has actually hired Palantir to work with them. But they will just come up with these little excuses and be like, this specific database can't be accessed because, you know, security protocols. Or maybe they just literally keep delaying the meetings and, you know, cancel on calls. That's the stuff that people did in the past. So in short, I think it just turned out that a lot of the work has gone into figuring out internal politics. And then especially in high-tech industries or, you know, national security, there are actual concerns about how to best give Palantir the data they need without risking any espionage or just data leaks or whatever.
Daniel Mahncke — The Investor's Podcast (We Study Billionaires) - The Investor’s Podcast Network · TIP841: Palantir – Palantir is Cheaper than I Thought! w/ Daniel Mahncke & Shawn O’Malley · 2026-08-27Though building permits, a sign of future demand, rose 5% last month to 1.4 million, compared with the 1.37 million consensus in June. Pantheon Macro said, quote, a renewed decline in homebuilding is more likely than a recovery ahead. Affordability has worsened this year as mortgage rates have climbed and wages have risen only slightly more quickly than home prices. The slowdown in population growth brought on by tougher immigration curbs also will increasingly weigh on demand. And that's the end of that quote. In other news of note, AI joins the battle of the waistline. Nestlé is using AI tools to develop new products for consumers taking GLP-1 weight loss treatments like Ozempic. Nestlé's CTO Stefan Paulser said it's a huge opportunity, telling Reuters that AI tools can help analyze clinical research to develop products tailored to GLP-1 users. The products could address side effects associated with rapid weight loss, including muscle loss and loss of facial fat, a.k.a. what is known as Ozempic face. Paulzer said, a big part of weight loss is that people lose lean muscle mass. We found a combination of two micronutrients which we industrialized that stimulate the growth of muscle tissue. On one hand, you provide protein. On the other hand, you stimulate the muscle tissue to grow back faster. And it wouldn't be Wall Street Lunch without a Kim Khan joke. It sounds like perhaps they're developing a Nestlé Crunch that can simulate doing crunches. And in the Wall Street research corner, Goldman Sachs updated its screen of potential AI productivity beneficiaries after Q2 earnings, looking for Russell 1000 companies with both high labor intensity and high exposure to AI automation. The update follows a Q2 earnings season in which Goldman found that while 65% of S&P 500 companies mentioned AI, just 2% quantified the impact on earnings. Some names that could benefit most from AI productivity are CoStar Group, Dollar Tree, eBay, and Trade Desk. Check out our full list in our story on Seeking Alpha and look for that link and others in our show notes.
Rena Shirbel — Wall Street Breakfast · Meta faces high-stakes federal trial over child safety · 2026-08-18Stig Brodersen: We got to admit, Quality Company Bros did not have a good 1.5 years recently, and we could just, you know, keep going in that direction and talk about another business that is currently in our portfolio and is down about 25%. And That's CoStar Group. And I should say that for this company, it's not so much about figuring out any patterns today because it hasn't spent that much time in our portfolio. So I believe the price decline is mostly just volatility and momentum. It was going down the entire year. It continues to go down. And yet maybe there are some things that have changed and that we should cover. So yeah, I figured we should just talk about CoStar, which you pitched about 3 months ago now, and Since it might be a bit less known to our audience than some of the other companies we talked about previously, you might just want to give a quick pitch on why CoStar seems so interesting to you.
Daniel Mahncke — The Investor's Podcast (We Study Billionaires) - The Investor’s Podcast Network · TIP837: Adobe, Lululemon, PayPal – Are our Biggest Losers a Buy Now? w/ Daniel Mahncke & Shawn O’Malley · 2026-08-13Yeah, it's still really early in the CoStar thesis. It'd be way too soon to write it off in one direction or the other, but really the way to think about CoStar is that it's the Bloomberg terminal of commercial real estate. So it's this data business empire built over 40 years of research and physically visiting and cataloging properties. That gives them a monopoly-like grip on the comps and analytics that brokers and lenders and investors all depend on in this industry. So that core data franchise carries about 50% margins, and the business overall has a net cash balance sheet, and then has strung together something like 60 quarters of double-digit revenue growth. So it really is an impressive business. So the controversy and the reason the stock is down so much boils down to management having plowed billions of dollars into Homes.com, which is this residential portal meant to challenge Zillow. And most people are probably familiar with Zillow if they don't know what Homes.com is, but that investment has dragged the entire company's operating profits negative. And then actually it drew in an activist investor who was advising for change and Dan Loeb, who's a pretty famous investor. So the thesis is basically that the market is so fixated on the cash burn tied to Homes.com, that it's handing you this crown jewel commercial monopoly data business at a discount. And for lack of better words, the expression is throwing the baby out with the bathwater is really what it seems like has happened here with CoStar.
Shawn O'Malley — The Investor's Podcast (We Study Billionaires) - The Investor’s Podcast Network · TIP837: Adobe, Lululemon, PayPal – Are our Biggest Losers a Buy Now? w/ Daniel Mahncke & Shawn O’Malley · 2026-08-13If I were to assume the perspective of CoStar's CEO, I think part of what makes giving up on this bet so hard is that Zillow is such a dislikable company. They really have some uninspiring business practices and have incurred lots of lawsuits for how they've run the company and lots of allegations of theft and stealing from CoStar itself. So there is a pretty bitter rivalry between the businesses, and actually Zillow has not performed well as a company anyways. So it feels like things are really ripe for disruption where CoStar should be able to come in and just take over that business. But of course, there's a massive amount of brand recognition working in Zillow's favor that makes that easier said than done. And so it does give me some pause to see somebody like Dan Loeb, lose faith in the CoStar thesis, where he was primarily arguing to cut spending on homes.com. And there definitely is some thought of this maybe being an ego thing where, like I said, there is a pretty bitter rivalry between Andy Florence and Zillow. And it may simply boil down to not as what is the best economic decision, but a sense of pettiness and wanting to take down sort of an enemy. And so, All that said, CoStar has decided to drop its net investment into homes.com from $850 million last year to what will be about $300 million this year. And then in 2030, it's supposed to come down another $100 million. So even if the cutback in spending was not to Dan Loeb's liking, there is a cutback occurring, which gives me confidence in not just writing off the entire business and definitely going forward, Especially when the valuation stripping out spending on Homes.com is so reasonable for a business with the data moats that CoStar has that are built literally by photographing thousands of commercial real estate buildings across North America over several decades. So we do know that the worst-case scenario of them just blowing everything on Homes.com is very unlikely to come to fruition as they already cut back spending and Like I said, with this data moat that they've really built one building at a time, AI can obviously not replace that.
Shawn O'Malley — The Investor's Podcast (We Study Billionaires) - The Investor’s Podcast Network · TIP837: Adobe, Lululemon, PayPal – Are our Biggest Losers a Buy Now? w/ Daniel Mahncke & Shawn O’Malley · 2026-08-13And so the other thing that Dan Loeb has criticized that maybe deserves some attention from us is Andy Florence's pay package of $40 million a year. And I think he does have a good point there. It probably didn't help their relationship though, that he was suggesting that Andy makes too much money. So in the end, to me, comes down to this being a story about valuation, and it's become pretty absurd how much negative value the market is ascribing to Homes.com. The entire investment cycle cost CoStar about $3 to $5 billion, depending on what you consider as solely being an investment in Homes.com. And yet the market cap, however, has gone down from $40 billion to $11 billion. So it's done a lot, a lot of damage. And This is a very rough calculation since you also have to account for the fact that CoStar traded at a premium multiple that the market is just simply not giving to SaaS companies these days. But again, the point is that this Homes.com investment is not even remotely as impactful on the actual financials and prospects of the business going forward as the stock market is probably making it seem, or at least that would be my opinion.
Shawn O'Malley — The Investor's Podcast (We Study Billionaires) - The Investor’s Podcast Network · TIP837: Adobe, Lululemon, PayPal – Are our Biggest Losers a Buy Now? w/ Daniel Mahncke & Shawn O’Malley · 2026-08-13You mentioned earlier the presentation that we gave in Montana for our TIP Summit, and part of that was also understanding the importance of the market's narrative about a stock or a company. And I can only feel confident in my decision about a stock when I do feel like I understand what the market dislikes about the company when I look at it, and then when I have a different opinion and I have good reasons to believe that I'm right. And only then can I figure out personally whether that makes sense to me to invest into this stock. And I got to say, in this case, It's clearly homes.com, what the market has barked about. However, I think the market is also looking beyond that and it's just generally questioning whether they will ever see any of the cash flows that Costa produces. So, and still the more I looked at it, the more I felt like this is a massively mispriced opportunity. So, I actually got away from, you know, my research here feeling way more confident in it than I was just a couple of weeks and months ago. I've did some math and you just pointed out some of the points. The value that, you know, CoStar lost just because of this Homes.com bet, and the spend is not that massive, it's ridiculous. If you would have to give Homes.com a negative value just to make sense for the market cap to drop that much, it would be in the tens of billions almost. So I do believe it's way more mispriced than I first thought. And when I asked you about a week ago, you didn't seem to be worried either. So it was probably only me who needed more convincing anyway. I think the fact that the stock is so much cheaper now, it certainly helps with that.
Daniel Mahncke — The Investor's Podcast (We Study Billionaires) - The Investor’s Podcast Network · TIP837: Adobe, Lululemon, PayPal – Are our Biggest Losers a Buy Now? w/ Daniel Mahncke & Shawn O’Malley · 2026-08-13