CoStar Group - Earnings Call - Q1 2012

Transcript

Speaker 5

Welcome to CoStar Group's first quarter 2012 conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question and answer session. Instructions will be given at that time. If you should require assistance during the call, please press star, then zero. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to our host, Mr. Rich Simonelli. Please go ahead.

Speaker 4

Thank you, operator, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to our first quarter 2012 conference call. We're delighted you have taken the time to join us. Before I turn the call over to Andy, I have some important facts for you. Certain portions of this discussion contain forward-looking statements, which involve many risks and uncertainties that can cause actual results to differ materially for such statements. Important factors that can cause actual results to differ include, but are not limited to, those stated in CoStar Group's April 25, 2012, press release on the first quarter results. There are our filings with the SEC, including our Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2011, under the heading Risk Factors.

All forward-looking statements are based on information available to CoStar Group on the date of this call, and CoStar Group assumes no obligation to update these statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise. As a reminder, today's conference call is being broadcast live and in color over the internet at www.costar.com. A replay will be available approximately one hour after the call concludes and will be available until May 26, 2012. To listen to the replay call, 1-800-475-6701 within the U.S. or Canada, or 320-365-3844 outside the United States. The access code is 242-701. A replay of the call will be available on our website right after this call concludes. At this time, I'd like to turn the call over to Andy Florance. Andy?

Speaker 6

Thank you, Rich. Thank you all for joining us on this call to discuss CoStar Group's first quarter 2012 results. I'm happy to announce that the strong momentum we had in 2011 has continued through the first quarter of this year. It's great to come out of the gate so strong in 2012. Our revenue and sales growth has continued to accelerate. This is broad-based and coming from across our products in our geographies, both domestic and international. We record our 10th consecutive quarter of record revenue, with first quarter revenue of $68.6 million. This is an exceptional increase of 15.1% over the first quarter of last year. Our first quarter annualized net new sales increased 23% year over year. With $8.4 million of annualized net new sales in the first quarter of 2012, we achieved the highest first quarter net new sales quarter we've ever had. The U.S.

economy hit a bit of mild turbulence in the first quarter of 2012, and the first quarter is historically not our strongest sales quarter, so we're very pleased with the result. On the earnings side, our adjusted EBITDA for the first quarter of 2012 grew by almost 21% over the first quarter last year, and our non-GAAP net income for the first quarter of 2012 was up 32% year over year to $8.2 million. You can find reconciliation of adjusted EBITDA and non-GAAP net income to their GAAP basis results in our press release issued yesterday, which is available on our website, CoStar.com. Our in-quarter renewal rate for subscription-based services during the first quarter increased to 94%. That's the highest renewal rate we have had since the beginning of 2006 and is a very good number for us in a longer-term history.

I continue to be particularly proud of the 98% renewal rate with our clients who have been with us for five years or more. We added 1,560 new individual subscribers in the first quarter of 2012. We now have nearly 95,000 paying subscribers, the most we've ever had. We expect to hit and look forward to hitting the 100,000 paying subscriber milestone in the not-too-distant future. Overall, I'm very pleased with the financial results we generated in the first quarter, and I feel that our team performed brilliantly. I do not believe that improving economic conditions alone are driving our sales momentum. I believe that we now have the strongest sales organization we've ever had. We currently have more than 210 salespeople and sales managers, with 139 of those being quota-carrying field sales representatives. Our average field sales representative now has 39 months of experience.

That is an average with a wide distribution. Many of our salespeople actually have 10 or more years of experience at this point. We typically see sales productivity increase with tenure. This is the most tenured, scaled-up sales force we've ever enjoyed, which is a large part of the reason we believe we are seeing great results. In many organizations, salespeople focus exclusively on hunting new business. In our business model, the key to success is placing equal priority on pursuing new business while continuing to strengthen our relationships and reinforce our value proposition with our existing clients. Our sales organization is now seasoned enough to understand that principle. That is another core reason why we're succeeding right now.

Going into the last downturn, we, unlike many other companies, continue to invest in growing our organization in order to capture what we believe is a great, achievable billion-dollar revenue opportunity servicing the commercial real estate community's need for information. Because of that consistent approach to building our sales force, we have a large experienced sales force that had to fight hard to keep their customers during the downturn. The CoStar sales force is battle-tested, improving, performing beautifully with a slight economic tailwind now. This week and last, I had the opportunity to observe focus groups that a market research firm conducted with commercial real estate professionals who are both prospects and our customers. While I learned ways we can improve our performance from those folks, I also heard them clearly state two CoStar strengths.

The first was, as I just discussed, our local field sales organization does an outstanding job of supporting them and making our products work for them. Secondly, the participants unequivocally stated that they quote "love CoStar Go." They conveyed that with passion and conviction. They feel that Apple's iPad teamed with our powerful commercial real estate information app is transforming the way they do business and empowering them in the field. We just reached another milestone: 10,000 users for CoStar Go. In just over seven months since the launch, commercial real estate professionals have enthusiastically embraced CoStar's mobile technology and have made it part of their daily routine. I believe we are just seeing the beginning of the impact and potential of CoStar Go. I've heard very positive feedback from retailers, brokers, owners, and appraisers on CoStar Go.

Despite that, only just over 10% of our users today have discovered this new platform. I believe that eventually most will use it. From informal surveys, it appears that only a minority of our clients even own an iPad. We noticed a surge of usage over the holidays at the end of 2011 as clients received iPads as gifts, and we noticed a similar surge in usage when the new iPad came out recently. As the functionality and penetration of the iPad increases, we believe the appeal of CoStar Go will increase with it. I spent a day last week with executives on our development team reviewing new products and upgrades in our pipeline, and one of the things that impressed me the most was the wealth of potentially valuable new features we have planned for the CoStar Go platform.

One of the development initiatives that I would like to share with you now is our work on bringing CoStar Go to the UK market. We currently have a large component of our development team working on merging our UK research, fulfillment, and CRM systems into our U.S. software platform. That project has completed a number of key milestones successfully, and we expect to be done by late this summer. We expect to complete a UK edition of CoStar Go at approximately the same time. Unlike the U.S., where we provide CoStar Go at no additional cost to our customers that subscribe to property, tenant, and comps, in the UK, we plan to sell CoStar Go as an add-on to our existing service there. Over 90% of the top 50 brokerage firms in the United Kingdom currently subscribe to our services.

Our UK pricing is generally much lower than our U.S. pricing, and we feel that CoStar Go will give us a great tool to help raise our average revenue per client in the UK. We anticipate taking CoStar Go UK to market just after the London Olympics, and we believe it will drive solid UK sales figures beginning in the fall. We plan to follow the release of CoStar Go with a UK version of our successful property, professional, tenant, and comp suite of services. We believe that this initiative can add to the momentum we already see building in our UK sales numbers. For example, in Q1 2012, UK net new sales increased more than 70% over Q1 2011 sales results. In fact, this month, we just signed the final top 10 UK chart surveyor brokerage firm that was not already one of our clients.

We believe that in combination, these initiatives and accomplishments will return the UK segment to good profitability. Should we achieve solid profitability and good scale in the UK, we think that will be an indicator of the potential global scale of the opportunity that CoStar Group can address. In addition to our UK and CoStar Go software development initiatives, we are also progressing on several other key software initiatives, most notably CoStar Fusion, our next-generation web product that is expected to integrate the functionality of our current flagship product suite with elements of PPR analytics, showcase marketing, resolve asset management tools, virtual premise, and various other new tools we're currently building.

We believe that this is a significant software design project that could have a very positive impact on sales in 2013 in a similar fashion to the way CoStar Go positively impacted sales in 2011 and into the first quarter. I will update you further on these initiatives as they mature and they progress from product design phase into development in the coming quarters. I want to present a brief summary of current commercial real estate market conditions and how I believe they're giving us the economic environment we need to give us the kind of good performance we're seeing right now. We believe it is likely that this positive economic environment could potentially continue for years. If the commercial real estate market gets even better, we could expect similarly better results for CoStar Group.

Coming out of this recession, commercial real estate rents are well below the long-term inflation-adjusted averages. Employment, though inconsistent, is growing, and in particular, office employment is really showing strong growth. Corporate profits continue at record levels, and that's normally correlated with leasing activity. All of these facts are combining to drive a healthy level of property leasing activity. In fact, net absorption of office space had its eighth consecutive quarter of positive increase. Leasing drives commissions, and that supports our key clients' financial health. We are seeing very little construction activity, it remains at record lows. All of this means that office vacancy rates have fallen from 13.6% at their worst level in this cycle to 12.9% now. We expect that they will continue to fall for several years.

We are, in fact, just reaching the point at which tightening supply can create the environment where rents will rise, which could further increase revenues for our core customer base. This creates some justified optimism, as building sales in 2011 were up over 40% from 2010. In particular, because of increased financing availability, we've seen a noted increase in portfolio and large building sales. Since this increased volume means increased commissions, this is also a strong indicator for CoStar Group, as after leasing commissions, sales commissions are the next largest revenue driver for many of our clients and prospects. I continue to believe that commercial real estate markets are relatively stable, and that helps the outlook for CoStar Group in 2012 and beyond. Let's see, is there anything else I forgot? Oh, yeah. Finally, there's LoopNet.

We recently announced that we reached an agreement with the staff of the Federal Trade Commission on a consent decree that moved us closer to the completion of the merger with LoopNet. We are now awaiting final approval by the FTC commissioners, which, if granted, would allow us to close the deal. As of this call, we have not received the commissioners' approval, but we remain hopeful that we will receive such an approval and be in a position to close the merger by April 30, 2012. If that does not occur, the merger agreement does not automatically terminate on April 30, 2012, unless either CoStar Group or LoopNet exercise an affirmative election to terminate the merger agreement.

With the FTC commissioners' action pending and to deal with the possibility of not being able to close by April 30, 2012, CoStar Group has extended its financing commitments for the merger past April 30, 2012. We are not providing details of the consent order pending the FTC's review and approval, but we believe that the proposed consent order will not affect our ability to realize the material benefits of the merger. In the event that we do receive approval from the FTC, we expect to schedule a conference call with investors shortly thereafter to discuss the terms of the consent and our initial plans for putting the two companies together. We are not in a position to discuss the status of the potential LoopNet merger today beyond what we have said here and in previous statements. In summary, we're off to a great start in 2012.

I believe that we will continue to bring a series of innovative and valuable products to market, which will drive sales and grow earnings as we move towards our $1 billion revenue goal. I'll now turn the call over to our Chief Financial Officer, Mr. Brian Radecki.

Speaker 4

Thank you, Andy. We're very pleased with our performance in the first quarter of 2012. Once again, we delivered strong revenue growth and earnings while continuing to invest in our business. Today, I'm going to primarily focus and discuss sequential results for the first quarter of 2012, year-over-year trends, and also our outlook for Q2 and the remainder of the year. Now to review our results for the first quarter of 2012, beginning with revenue. The company reported $68.6 million of first quarter revenue, an increase of $2.4 million or 3.6% compared to revenue of $66.2 million in the fourth quarter of 2011. Revenue for the first quarter increased $9 million or 15.1% compared to Q1 of last year. Revenue growth was primarily attributable to CoStar Group's core suite of subscription services and, again, driven by CoStar Go.

We also reported $5.1 million in net income or $0.20 per diluted share during the first quarter of 2012, based on 25.5 million shares, which is consistent with the $5.2 million or $0.20 per diluted share, also based on 25.5 million shares in the fourth quarter of 2011. Non-GAAP net income of $8.2 million or $0.32 per diluted share in the first quarter of 2012 compared to non-GAAP net income of $8.4 million or $0.33 per diluted share in the fourth quarter of 2011. Non-GAAP net income increased $2 million or 32% compared to the first quarter of 2011, and adjusted EBITDA for the first quarter of 2012 was $15.3 million, an increase of $2.7 million or 21% compared to adjusted EBITDA of $12.6 million in the first quarter of 2011.

The company had $576 million in cash and investments as of March 31, 2012, an increase of $3 million since last quarter. As we discussed on last quarter's call, we entered into a credit agreement during the quarter comprised of a $175 million term loan facility and a $50 million revolving credit facility. Drawdown of these facilities is subject to the simultaneous closing of the proposed LoopNet acquisition. With the Federal Trade Commission commissioner's action pending, as Andy mentioned, and to deal with the possibility of not being closed by April 30, we extended the financing commitments for the merger until May 31, 2012. Our customers continue to renew subscriptions at very high rates during the quarter.

The in-quarter renewal rate was approximately 94%, which is the highest it's been since Q1 of 2006, and the 12-month trailing renewal rate for subscription-based revenue increased to approximately 93.4%, which is an improvement from the approximately 91.9% one year ago. The renewal rate for clients that have been our customers for five years or longer held consistent at an outstanding 98% in the first quarter of 2012, and the renewal rate from firms that have been clients for less than five years also increased two percentage points to approximately 88%, up from 86% in prior quarters. Subscription-based revenue accounted for approximately 94% of the company's total revenue in the first quarter, similar to last quarter, and subscription revenue grew a solid 3.8% quarter over quarter and continues to drive overall revenue performance.

During the first quarter of 2012, the annual average contract value was $8,683, up 15% compared to the first quarter of last year, and total sales headcount was 213, up from 193 of the first quarter of 2011. The total number of paying subscribers increased to 94,956 in the first quarter of 2012, and that increase is 6,633 from a year ago, as Andy Florance highlighted earlier. The total number of subscription client sites increased by 324 during the first quarter of 2012 to 18,507 company-wide. I will now quickly cover the results for our income statement, first of 2012, and also our outlook on the second quarter and full year. Gross margin was $44.3 million in Q1 of 2012, up slightly compared to $44.2 million in Q4 of 2011, and down slightly quarter over quarter.

As I stated on last quarter's call, we expected gross margin percentage to be slightly lower in the first quarter due to seasonal expenses and then grow thereafter. Total operating expenses in the first quarter of 2012 was $35.7 million, a reduction of $700,000 compared to $36.4 million in the fourth quarter. G&A expenses declined in Q1 as there were reduced legal expenses related to the proposed LoopNet acquisition. John Coleman's shaking his head. Thank you, John. Let's hope that keeps going in that direction in the next quarter. Sales and marketing expenses also declined in the first quarter. As I discussed in our earnings guidance in February, we were making incremental investments in product development this year, and those costs increased approximately $400,000 in the first quarter of 2012 compared to last quarter.

As I discussed in our last earnings release, one of our large customers filed for bankruptcy in the first quarter of 2012. We remain in contact with the senior management of that customer during the bankruptcy process, and we continue to provide services to that company. If that contract were eventually terminated at some point later this year, it would have a significant short-term impact on our reported renewal rates, reducing the in-quarter rate by approximately 5% and our annualized renewal rate by approximately 1.5%. We believe our revenue guidance ranges, which I've given, adequately account for the uncertainty related to this customer from revenue.

Turning to our outlook for the second quarter of 2012 and our outlook, which reflects all of our expectations as of today and takes into account recent trends, revenue growth rates, renewal rates, which may be impacted by the economic conditions in commercial real estate or by the overall global economy. Our outlook does not include the impact of the proposed acquisition of LoopNet or costs that are contingent upon closing the acquisition. We are not able to reasonably forecast whether or when certain acquisition-related costs may take place. Therefore, we are providing the outlook on a standalone basis, reflecting our current expectations as of today, April 26, 2012. Based on continued strong revenue and sales trends, we are raising 2012 revenue outlook by $3 million to a range of $284 million to $288 million. For the second quarter of 2012, we expect $70 million to $71 million in revenue.

Consistent with the strong revenue trends, we are raising the estimate for non-GAAP net income per diluted share to approximately $1.32 to $1.40 per share on a fully diluted share base of 25.5 million. For the second quarter, we expect non-GAAP net income per diluted share of approximately $0.32 to $0.35. As discussed last quarter, the company continues to invest in new products, software development, including CoStar Suite and CoStar Go in the UK, as well as the next generation of products in the US. If the LoopNet acquisition is approved by the Federal Trade Commission commissioners, and after the transaction closes, we expect to revise our outlook to include the impact of consolidating LoopNet on a pro-rata basis from the close date and for the remainder of the year. Additionally, we expect the acquisition will be accretive for the year of 2012 and beyond for non-GAAP earnings per share.

Our outlook will be adjusted to include LoopNet purchase accounting adjustments, including lost deferred revenue at LoopNet, as well as various fees and expenses associated with the closing of the transaction and integrating the companies. Remember that the accounting for deferred revenue adjustment temporarily reduces both top line and bottom line earnings and is not adjusted out of our non-GAAP net income. We expect our earnings guidance to be based on non-GAAP earnings per share format, which we have used in the past, which will normalize out many of the other items. Although, as usual, we will include a reconciliation of GAAP earnings per share. I should also note that our base of fully diluted shares will increase by approximately 1.9 million at the time of the close as a result of the issuance of the stock portion of the merger consideration exchange for LoopNet shares.

As we had discussed when we first announced the proposed acquisition a year ago, we believe there are significant synergies associated with the combination of CoStar and LoopNet. If we close the transaction, we expect to focus initially on ensuring the successful integration and refining our detailed operating plans, including plans for realizing these synergies. We expect the synergies to ramp up in 2013 and that we will reach our $20 million run rate goal of synergies by the end of the 24-month period following the proposed and projected close of the acquisition. Therefore, we are not projecting many synergies this year. If the Federal Trade Commission approves the acquisition, we expect to update our detailed operating plans with the LoopNet management team over the coming months. As we incorporate these plans into our outlook, we will communicate them to you.

In summary, I'm very pleased to be able to share with you another strong quarter for CoStar Group that continues to build upon the strong momentum in sales, revenue, customer retention, and earnings we saw accelerating throughout last year and through the first quarter. I continue to believe with the sales trends we are seeing and the investments we are making into our industry-leading products, CoStar is very well positioned to continue our progression towards a short-term goal of $500 million in high margin annual revenue over the next several years and on our way to over our long-term revenue goal of $1 billion. Now I'll open up the call for questions.

Speaker 5

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, if you wish to ask a question, please press star then one on your touchtone phone. You'll hear a tone indicating that you have been placed in queue. You may remove yourself from the queue at any time by pressing the pound key. If you are using a speakerphone, please pick up the handset before pressing the numbers. Once again, if you have a question, please press star one at this time. We do have our first question coming from Bill Warmington with Raymond James. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Speaker 2

Thank you very much. Congratulations on a very strong quarter.

Speaker 3

Thank you, Bill.

Speaker 2

I wanted to ask about the 15.1% revenue growth in the quarter. How much of that is, I think most of it's organic, but how much of it's coming from acquisitions?

Speaker 3

This is Brian. Hey, Bill.

Speaker 2

Hi.

Speaker 3

Yeah. The majority of it obviously is organic. It's a couple, I don't know the exact number, it's a couple % from virtual premise. Moving forward, it'll all be organic moving forward. You know, again, we give you guys the numbers after the quarter of a close, and we'll do the same with LoopNet. After that, we're just going to be presenting consolidated numbers. As you said, it's definitely mostly organic.

Speaker 2

Got it. If you could talk a little bit about the potential impact to R&D and marketing spending coming from the product pipeline.

Speaker 3

I don't see, we're going to do a much, much smaller version of the CoStar Go rollout in the UK in the fall after the Olympics. That'll be obviously since you're covering four or five cities in the UK as opposed to 35 in the US. It'll be a much smaller number than we saw associated with the CoStar Go rollout in the US this year or in 2011. At current, we're not anticipating a material big increase associated with that product pipeline. The CoStar Fusion I mentioned is not something that's going to impact 2012, that would impact 2013. There probably would be a rollout associated with that similar to the CoStar Go rollout in the US.

Speaker 2

I wanted to ask if you could talk about a couple of the add-on products, if you will, for CoStar Go, just to give us a sense of what you're working on.

Speaker 3

I'll just give you one that's probably out there. I don't want to disclose anything that is not out there because we do have competition. We have a really nice tour application, and it's something that gets historically, when I go to look for 10,000 square feet of space with my brokers in some city, they will give me a five-pound book with 60 pages of facts and figures and floor plans for the buildings I'm going to be looking at that day. That book is useless, and it really doesn't do you any good as you're moving around all these buildings, and you're seeing 20 buildings as you move through Phoenix, and you can't turn the pages fast enough, and there's very little content in there. When you get back on the plane and go home, you don't want to be carrying this five-pound, 20-pound book in your briefcase.

What's much more effective is giving the tenant an iPad as you go to look at the properties and have the information on the properties up, have information geo-aware, and as you arrive at the building, the information on the properties coming up, you've got 10 times as much information on the properties. The client can then put in feedback. The tenant can put in feedback about what they like about the building. They can rate the architectural appeal, how they think the location works for the company, how they think the space is built out, and the broker can instantly see that feedback as they move through the tour. There are usually multiple people on the tour, so they can all lock in their feedback as they go.

The brokerage firm can capture that information, use it in trying to formulate the best solution for that company after they viewed 10, 15 buildings. Typically, from when you see the buildings, when you first tour the buildings, to when you actually execute a lease, it's six months. By capturing that feedback sooner, I think you can bring in by a month or so that time it takes to execute a lease, which would be a significant value of the brokerage firms as well as the owners because it basically brings the revenue in sooner. It's sort of a stupid six months it takes from viewing the property to executing a lease. Doing this tenant version of the iPad app, I think, will help close that, and I think it'll be very well received by our customers.

Speaker 2

Wow. All right. On LoopNet, I just wanted to ask if you could just.

Speaker 3

The other 20 things I'm not willing to talk about.

Speaker 2

All right. On LoopNet, I just want to know if you could quickly mention or review for us what the timeline would be, assuming an approval by the FTC commissioner. You can pick a date. Say it's Monday the 30th is the date of approval. What would things look like after that?

Speaker 3

We're going to pull in a guest speaker to the call, so get the drum roll for John Coleman.

Speaker 6

Yes. Thank you, Brian. Let me get Justin to answer that. If we, you know, we're hopeful we'll get the approval, and our plan would be to close as expeditiously as possible after that. I can't give you a definitive date, but it would be quickly thereafter.

Speaker 2

Okay. All right. Thank you very much. Also, nice job on the end report. I like the 25-year timeline. Thanks.

Speaker 3

Thank you.

Speaker 6

Thanks, Bill.

Speaker 5

Thank you. Our next question is from the line of Brett Huff with Stephens Incorporated. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Speaker 0

Good morning, Andy, Brian, and John.

Speaker 4

Good morning.

Speaker 0

Congrats on another nice quarter. It's great to see the fundamentals continue to accelerate.

Speaker 4

You have to thank John Campbell for that.

Speaker 0

My first question is, and I apologize if you addressed this before I hopped on late, I think that you said that the UK pricing for Go would be a little bit different. If so, what was the logic for that? Why make it different in the UK versus here?

Speaker 3

The companies we acquired and integrated in the UK had fairly weak software or very weak software, and they also had weak information outside of central London. The price points we picked up when we acquired those companies were dramatically lower than the US price points, typically about a third of the US price points. As we bring in a very compelling product like CoStar Go, we don't feel that penetration is the right strategy in the UK. We've got great penetration in the UK. We think that additional revenue per customer is a better strategy there, and we think we can achieve it. We might potentially charge something nominal like $19 a month per user to get the iPad app. It could be $29 per user. We're going to execute a strategy in the UK of continuing to do something like that.

As we bring out the CoStar property tenant comps product in the UK, which has advantages over the product that's currently there, that might be another $19 a month per user. We're going to be working on bringing up the average price per user in the UK, and it's sort of appropriate to the different situation on the ground there.

Speaker 0

Great. That's helpful. Brian, I just want to make sure I understood what you said about LoopNet, that presuming it closes sometime in the near term, which we hope it does, that the cost synergies would be effectively starting in 2013. How did you characterize that they would ramp? Did you say they'd get to full $20 million run rate by 4Q?

Speaker 3

Yeah. I think, you know, obviously initially, we have to close the deal, and once we do, we want to work pretty closely with them. I think we'll have some, but I would just say very light this year. I think it would ramp up throughout the year, and I would say by the end of the, I'm just saying the end of the 24-month period because obviously I don't know exactly when we're going to close. As John Coleman said, we are hopeful that it's soon and expeditious. Whenever that closing is, you can sort of count down the 24 months. Obviously we will strive to beat that, but that's sort of the stated goal out there.

Speaker 0

Okay. Last question is just on revenue synergies. You know, you've talked a little bit about not very much overlapping customer bases and who has which products and sizes of those customers that aren't in the overlap base. Any more qualitative or quantitative thoughts on revenue synergies, both amounts and timing now that we're probably a year into looking at this?

Speaker 3

Due to the gun jumping rules associated with this process where we can't jump in and see competitively sensitive data with LoopNet until after we close and have permission, or I'm sorry, until after we have permission from the FTC to close, we've not been able to do detailed comparison of customer bases and come up with a more quantitative analysis for you. I can tell you that qualitatively, we are extremely confident that there is a large prospect base for CoStar's information services within LoopNet's customer base, and we believe we are very confident that there is a large potential to sell LoopNet's marketing services to CoStar's information customers. We are very excited about that prospect, and we think it's substantive, but at this point, we're not prepared to give detailed numbers.

Speaker 0

Okay. Last question for me is just on looking at the CoStar-based business. You guys talk about various penetrations in different verticals that you have, be it brokers and appraisers, etc. Have any of those really accelerated over the last several quarters such that things are really starting to click in a particular vertical that you've been working on?

Speaker 3

I would say that the good numbers we're seeing right now are, one of the things I like about the good numbers is that they are across the board. We are making good progress in the financial services space, but we're also getting good new brokerage firms, and we're getting some retailers. It's across the board.

Speaker 0

Okay, that's funny.

Speaker 3

I should say, you know, we could have 30 great quarters, and we're not moving the dial on the penetration, fortunately or unfortunately. We're still relatively lightly penetrated into the potential market. We might have one-seventh of the potential commercial banks right now signed up. We might have less than one-tenth of the potential owner-customer signed up right now.

Speaker 0

Thank you. I appreciate your time. Congrats on a good quarter.

Speaker 3

Thank you. Thanks, Brent.

Speaker 5

Thank you. We'll go to the line of Michael Wong with Needham. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Speaker 6

Thanks very much, and good morning, guys. Just a couple of quick questions for you. First of all, I know it's a little bit early to be asking about revenue growth in 2013, but with the rollout of CoStar Fusion next year and the UK launch, would it be a stretch to see an acceleration scenario in 2013, or what's your just high-level thoughts around that?

Speaker 3

It's still early, and some of that's going to continue to be sensitive to whether or not the commercial real estate recovery continues to accelerate or strengthen. During the call, I wrote down my sequential quarterly target for Brian, which I'm not going to share with you. We're optimistic, and we would like to see it accelerate in 2013, but it's still too early to really be able to talk about that.

Speaker 6

Right. Okay.

Speaker 3

A lot of things go on. If we should be able to integrate LoopNet, roll out this Fusion product, it would be a good environment.

Speaker 6

Gotcha. I'm not sure if I missed this, but did you share with us the contribution of CoStar Go to net new sales or the approximate contribution? As a follow-up to that, with 10,000 subscribers now on CoStar Go, do you have a target by end of the year, and do adoption rates accelerate at some point in time given the references that you're building around this product? Thanks.

Speaker 3

I'll take the first part of the question, and then I'll turn it over to Andy for the second part. In the first part, we didn't give a number on that. I think when we first started giving those out, I told people that we would give some initial numbers to start. We're still seeing, obviously, great traction. It's definitely one of the things we keep hearing when contracts come in. I signed up because of CoStar Go. It's what we hear in the focus groups. As I mentioned a couple of quarters ago, initially, when you roll that out, because we're not charging specifically, we're basically, it's for people that upgrade to the suite.

It'll be hard over time as you get further and further away from the product release to say, "Okay, did Rich Simonelli sign up because of CoStar Go, or did he just sign up because he was going to sign up for CoStar anyways?" I think we won't be continuing to give those numbers, but it is clear anecdotally that it's continuing to drive. You see the acceleration in sales, you see the acceleration in revenue growth, and there's no doubt in my head that that's behind it.

Speaker 6

Now, the exception to that is in the UK, we will be able to give you some clarity there, since we're charging separately for it.

Speaker 3

Correct. That is correct.

Speaker 6

Okay. Do you have a target number of users by end of the year on CoStar Go?

Speaker 3

We don't have a specific target. I think it's linear, and with searches around releases and holidays, which I take as a really good sign. When you get a 25% increase in usage because of Christmas, people getting iPads, that says that you've got a lot of traction ahead of you. We don't have a specific number, but you could just basically take what we've reported in the last several calls, and you could extrapolate it linearly and search it around the holidays.

Speaker 6

Okay. Last question on CoStar Fusion. Have you made any conclusions on how you're going to price this product both for new and existing customers? I know it's still early on that, but any thoughts on how this would be priced?

Speaker 3

We have not. That's an active ongoing debate. I can tell you that we will probably have two variations of it, one with advanced analytics and one with basic analytics. One version of CoStar Fusion will appeal to hedge funds, institutions who are typically PPR customers. That'll be the higher-end version of it. We will have a version that is geared to brokerage firms who have a need for analytics but do not have a need for advanced forecasting and the like.

Speaker 6

Great. Thanks very much, guys.

Speaker 5

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Once again, if you have any questions, we do invite you to press star one at this time. We will go to the line of Toni Katherine from Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Speaker 1

Thank you. Hi, guys. Thanks for taking my question.

Speaker 3

Oh, no problem.

Speaker 1

It looks like average new contract value was down sequentially. That was a little bit surprising to me. I would have thought that, you know, if people were signing up for CoStar Go, that might have been a higher ticket, you know, set of items. I just wanted to know if you could just talk a little bit about why sequentially that was a little bit lower.

Speaker 3

Sure. Hey, Toni. It's Brian. I think sequentially, and I think we've talked about this on prior calls, that number will jump around based on the mix of what we sell during the quarter. The fourth quarter is always our strongest quarter of the year, which people saw. You can see the first quarter, year over year, it was very strong. Of course, that number was up year over year. It's always hard to compare the first quarter and the fourth quarter because of seasonality. A better comparison, I think, is the fact that it was up year over year. It does focus on the mix. A lot of people signing up for CoStar Go might be upgrading from two to three products. Therefore, it's not the same as if, for example, we had a blowout quarter in financial services or something like that.

That's a number that's a good indicator. It describes what was happening in the mix of products during the quarter. Because we have so many different products firing on all cylinders, it is going to move around every quarter.

Speaker 6

You do get a financial services surge in the fourth quarter.

Speaker 3

Correct.

Speaker 6

That takes your average sales price up.

Speaker 3

One nice thing about a potential LoopNet merger is we have inverse cyclicality. It would actually do some smoothing between that first and fourth quarter. Correct. They typically have their strongest quarter in the first quarter, and the fourth quarter is usually not as strong.

Speaker 1

Got it. You mentioned earlier on the call, you know, the health of the commercial real estate market starting to improve. I was wondering if you could comment on the pricing environment. Are you able to, you know, push through higher rates as the environment gets better? Thank you.

Speaker 3

During the downturn, we suspended any kind of price increases, even CPI increases. We are pushing through basic approximate CPI price increases, and we're not getting any pushback that I'm aware of for that. If you were to take from 2005 to 2012, it's not an inflation-adjusted big jump. We still continue to believe that penetration is the more important thing to focus on. We also have the ability to keep on selling additional modules, which is a better received way to increase total revenue from a customer than price increases.

Speaker 6

Yeah, just to add on to what Andy said, that's been pretty typical over the past decade. Our contracts are annual contracts generally that auto-renew, and they have obviously protection in there, basically the CPI protection in there. Obviously, if CPI went up over that decade, it's averaged someplace in the 2% to 3%. It's not a significant number. Again, I would not anticipate much change from that moving forward. As Andy said, it's really more about penetration and people adding new modules, adding new geography, and those types of things than it is about price increases.

Speaker 3

CoStar products are still the best bargain a brokerage firm ever finds.

Speaker 1

All right. Thanks very much, guys.

Speaker 3

Thank you.

Speaker 5

Thank you. We will go to the line of Tim Conner with William Blair. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Speaker 2

Thank you. Good morning.

Speaker 3

Good morning, Tim.

Speaker 2

Morning. I think you touched on this a little bit, but is it fair to say that the net new sales attributable to CoStar Go were similar to the third and fourth quarters of last year?

Speaker 3

Yeah. I would say that they're similar, but again, I think it's getting harder and harder to sort of track those. When you first release it, you know, it's pretty easy. I think as time goes on, it's not like we're asking every single salesperson to ask the client, "Please attribute, did you sign up because you think the service is great or did you sign up from CoStar Go?" I think, you know, again, it's sort of something that when you initially release it, it's easy to track. It gets a little bit more difficult. Yeah, I would say that anecdotally, we continue to hear from salespeople that that's, you know, one of the reasons why people are signing up. Again, as Andy mentioned, in the UK, it will actually be priced, and we'll actually be charging for it.

Something like that in the UK, we'll be able to continue to track moving forward.

Speaker 2

Okay. Andy said you expect adoption for that to be linear. Is that in terms of number of users, or is it net new sales driven by the app?

Speaker 3

I think it would be number of users. I think it sort of holds the tailwind effect of having on sales for several years, but I think the user adoption actually goes a little higher. In the UK, it would be one-to-one. In the UK, it would both be user and revenue growth. Ultimately, we expect whether it be HTML5 on a tablet other than Apple or whether it's Apple, I would expect to see 75% to 85% of our usage eventually become mobile. In the focus groups last week, we had several people comment that they are using CoStar Go at their desk rather than using the web platform. I think it's an entire operating system shift or platform shift.

Speaker 2

Okay.

Speaker 3

Which is great. It's a much more powerful tool.

Speaker 2

Right. You mentioned that you're getting, I guess I would call it a benefit from good end markets on the sales side versus leasing. What is the breakdown for CoStar only of customers who are in sales versus leasing and then other, if you just had to break them into broad buckets?

Speaker 3

I would probably say that 50% or a little less than 50% of our customers are brokerage, and those are the folks who are going to be very sensitive to things like leasing activity and sales volume. Within that space, I would say that it is probably 75% to 80% leasing and 20% to 25% sales sensitive. Not every brokerage firm, but every significant brokerage firm is going to have a combination of both in their financials. It is sort of a blended result. We have been seeing a good environment in leasing now for more than 18 months, 24 months, and we are now beginning to see, we have been seeing a good investment sales environment for about a year, and we have seen a good general commercial sales, which is, you know, the $4 million properties, which is really the bulk of the U.S.

sales activity. We have been seeing a good environment there for about one quarter. That one is just starting to take off.

Speaker 2

What are the exposures for LoopNet?

Speaker 3

The last one I mentioned. I think LoopNet is very strong in the sub-$2 million sale area, general commercial. They'll have growth around that. Their other sensitivity is they have sensitivity to the leasing environment, but differently than CoStar does. When there's no leasing activity, like in 2008, people just don't have marketing budgets, so they see a little bit of drive for revenue. They move into a good environment when the vacancy rates just begin to move downward a little bit. I would think that when they get down to extraordinarily low vacancy rates, like San Francisco in 1999, they also do poorly because no one needs to advertise anything because everything leases automatically. They likely have a five-year positive environment from here, given traditional real estate cycles.

Speaker 2

Okay. Thank you. Final one for me is, I'm not sure if it was touched on today or in the first quarter call, but did Salesforce incentives change for this year, and then would you revisit those when or if the LoopNet deal gets done?

Speaker 3

Each year, in January, we tweak the sales incentives. This year, we turned the dial from client retention to hunting a little bit more. In the bad market, we put additional incentive on driving usage and retaining customers. Now that the economy has a little tailwind, we've moved the dial a little bit more towards net production or the hunting. It still has a major component for driving usage and retention. We also have some lucrative sales contests, which the Salesforce finds highly motivational. Last year, it was pure new client acquisition. This year, it is more about retention and overall year-over-year acceleration of performance on net sales. A little bit more summary, a little bit more aggressive on net new sales, on just revenue growth.

Speaker 2

Okay. Would that change post-LoopNet?

Speaker 3

It would likely shift to more teaming efforts between sales forces.

Speaker 2

Thanks very much.

Speaker 3

Yep.

Speaker 5

Thank you. There are no further questions in queue at this time. Please continue.

Speaker 3

Thank you for joining us from here in our San Francisco sales office for our Q1 earnings call. We look forward to updating you on our progress with LoopNet and our second quarter earnings call. Thank you for joining us.

Speaker 5

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. That does conclude our conference for today. Thanks again for your participation.