CoStar Group, Inc.
Q4 2015 Earnings Call Transcript

Published: 25 Feb 2016

[Operator:]

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to the CoStar Group Fourth Quarter Earnings Conference. 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. And as a reminder, today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to our host, Vice President of Investor Relations, Mr. Rich Simonelli. Please go ahead, sir.

[Richard Simonelli:]

Thank you, operator, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to CoStar Group's fourth quarter and year-end 2015 conference call. Thanks for joining us. Before I turn the call over to Andy Florance and Scott Wheeler, I have a few important facts for you. 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 February 24, 2016 press release on our fourth quarter and year-end results and in our filings with the SEC, including our most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K and Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q 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 whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise. As a reminder, today's call is being broadcast live and in color over the Internet on www.costargroup.com, where you can also find our CoStar's Investor Relations page. A replay will be available approximately one hour after the call concludes and will be available for approximately 30 days. To listen to this replay, please call 800-230-1074 within the United States or Canada, or 612-288-0329 outside the U.S. The access code is 385-653. In the Q&A section, just as a reminder, please limit yourself to one question and we'll have you rejoin the queue if you have additional questions. So, I'd like to turn the call over now to Andy Florance. Andy?

[Andrew C. Florance:]

Thank you, Rich. Good morning, and thank everyone for joining us for our fourth quarter and year-end financial results call. 2015 was an excellent year for CoStar Group. We generated excellent top line growth of 24% year-over-year closing 2015 with $712 million in revenue, up from $576 million in 2014. We had $100 million of net new subscription sales on annual subscriptions during 2015. For the fourth quarter of 2015, net new sales on annual subscriptions were $29 million, an increase of 69% year-over-year. We achieved our highest quarter ever for net new sales on our core CoStar information services. LoopNet did well in the quarter as net new sales and annual subscriptions accelerate 80% sequentially from the third quarter of 2015 and 52% over the fourth quarter of 2014. Our primary focus for 2015 was investing aggressively to integrate CoStar, Apartments.com and Apartment Finder in order to drive efficiencies and achieve sustainable long-term cost savings. In the fourth quarter of 2015, we increased net income year-over-year by 65%. Margin improvement was most dramatic in the fourth quarter of 2015 as we realized cost savings from our Apartments business integration efforts and increased EBITDA by 150% over the third quarter of 2015. Our EBITDA margin climbed 29% in the fourth quarter. We believe these results show that we are clearly on our way to achieving our stated goal of $1 billion revenue and 40% adjusted EBITDA margin exiting 2018. Before I update you on our progress on Apartments.com, I want to give you a clear picture of revenue growth in our core CoStar suite service and our other major products. Core CoStar Suite in North America grew 12.4% during the full-year 2015 over full-year 2014. And that is at the top end of our consistent 11% to 13% growth guidance. That is up in absolute dollars compared to the growth from full-year 2013 to full-year 2014 but down just 33 basis points from the 2014, 2013 growth rate of 12.7%, so they're roughly similar growth rates up and down a couple of basis points. Core CoStar revenue accelerated back up to 12.5% during the fourth quarter of 2015 over the fourth quarter of 2014. Core CoStar in the UK grew at a higher base of 13.8% year-over-year in local Great British pounds, but with the negative exchange rate effect, it grew at only 5.5% in U.S. currency basis. Despite the diversion of resources to the Apartment marketplace services, LoopNet Premium Listers still grew at 12% during the full year of 2015 compared to the full-year 2014. As we've mentioned before, we are de-emphasizing LoopNet information services and as a result, LoopNet Premium Searcher grew at 9% during the full year of 2015 versus 2014. For the full year 2015 over 2014, CoStar Real Estate Manager grew at 20%, our Businesses for Sale Marketplace grew at 16%, our Land for Sale services grew at 17%, and CoStar Portfolio of Strategies grew at 7%. We have eight other smaller services with a wide range of growth rates. We are no longer selling two of our smallest-producing services, so we expect their growth to be negative. The Core CoStar Services are consistently strong and growing. We believe that with the Apartment Services doing so well, we can balance our focus between our Core Information Services and the Apartment Rental Marketplace Services. As a result, we expect even more growth in the CoStar Core Services, going forward. In 2015, we focused on building the premier marketplace for renting an apartment in the United States. According to comScore, Apartments.com enjoyed more visitor traffic in 2015 than any other apartment rental website. During the fourth quarter, we achieved the number one position among major competing apartment Web sites in

[Scott Wheeler:]

Wonderful. Thank you very much, Andy. We have to call you Captain Florance going forward. But thanks for the warm welcome, Andy and team, and good morning, everyone. I do want to say that my first four to six weeks here with the group has been pretty eventful. I've had a chance to meet with a number of investors who I'm sure are on the phone. Also, I got to meet with our sales folks as they came in for annual sales conference. Last week, I was in Atlanta getting to meet with clients and hear from them directly. And of course, my favorite was getting to watch Lil Wayne kick a football for our commercial. Anyway, who would have expected that when you start at a new business? But over the numbers, as Andy mentioned, we're very pleased with our performance for the fourth quarter and for the full year of 2015. The relaunch of Apartments.com, the related marketing investments, the acquisition and relaunch of the Apartment Finder, and our Core information businesses all drove strong sales results throughout the year and they're expected to contribute to the top-line revenue growth, as well as continue margin expansion in 2016 and beyond. In the fourth quarter of 2015, the company reported $193 million of revenue, an increase of 24% compared to the fourth quarter of 2014. Full-year 2015 revenues were $712 million, an increase of $136 million or approximately 24% over the full year of 2014. Full-year revenue growth for our core CoStar Suite business is in the 11% to 13% range as expected. Our gross margin was $148 million for the fourth quarter, or 76.6% of revenue compared to 72.5% of revenue in the fourth quarter of 2014. That is a very strong increase against both prior year and the Q3 gross margin. We've completed the aggressive transition away from print at Apartment Finder and this now starts to show up in the improved gross margins, a margin which I expect to increase as our business continues its growth throughout 2016. Adjusted EBITDA was $65 million or 34% of revenues for the fourth quarter of 2015, an increase of 20% from the $54 million in the fourth quarter of 2014. Non-GAAP net income in the fourth quarter was $35 million or $1.10 per diluted share, an increase of 19% compared to the $30 million in the fourth quarter of 2014. Net income in the fourth quarter of 2015 was $23 million or $0.71 per diluted share, an increase of 65% compared to the fourth quarter of 2014. Now, in the fourth quarter we really started to see these impacts of our cost management efforts come through in the stronger EBITDA performance. Personnel costs were very favorable as we focused on integrating our Apartments businesses and we slowed hiring across the company. In addition, we tightened up on a number of discretionary expense areas and we were able to achieve our outstanding marketing results that Andy mentioned with slightly lower spending, an effective (36

[Andrew C. Florance:]

It would appear that we're going to do $1 billion of revenue someday, that's our goal.

[Scott Wheeler:]

Someday.

[Andrew C. Florance:]

40% margin.

[Scott Wheeler:]

That's right.

[Andrew C. Florance:]

2018 exiting. Great. Part of our new cost saving initiatives, Rich, would you put another quarter in the phone? Yeah, we are ready to open up for questions.

[Operator:]

Thank you. First, we'll go to the line of Andre Benjamin with Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.

[Andre Benjamin:]

Thanks. Good morning, guys.

[Richard Simonelli:]

Good morning, Andre.

[Andrew C. Florance:]

Good morning.

[Andre Benjamin:]

So, you gave a ton of numbers. I guess I was wondering how you're thinking about the growth in the Core platform in 2016 embedded in the guidance, given the puts and takes in the CRE market these days? How you are thinking about the broker versus institutional side? I guess specifically, I'm trying to make sure my math is right. If I add up all the pieces that you gave us, the Apartment growth implies about deceleration for the Core business to about 7% in the fourth quarter? So, I guess we'd like get this back up in next year and is the slowdown more driven by pricing or users? I only have one question, so I had to throw a bunch in there.

[Andrew C. Florance:]

No worries. So, we don't get the same numbers on that. We show the Core business completely stable at roughly at 12.5% year-over-year growth rate in the fourth quarter. So, it's been hovering at that 12.7%, 12.5%, 12.3% number consistently. And we would expect improvement overall in 2016 that number simply mechanically because in 2015, we borrowed a lot of sales people to supplement the Apartments.com sales force to sell apartment-related products. As we go – and then we merged with Apartment Finder in 2015 mid-year. And that entire team did nothing, but appropriately did nothing but convert people from print to digital for the second half of the year. And that was a large, 100-some-person team. So, as we move into 2016, those folks have completed that task, those Apartment people have completed that task for Apartment Finder and they're now available to do, they focus 100% of their energy on selling Apartments-related business, which gives us the size of scale of the Apartment sales force we want, and that allows us to bring some of the traditional CoStar people back to focusing on the Core. So, while we only saw a few basis points of reduction in growth that we accelerated in the fourth quarter in the Core, we should – as we bring more experienced sales people back into focusing on the Core product see continued robust growth. And then, the initiatives I talked about where we integrate the CoStar and LoopNet back-ends, I believe that is a powerful accelerant. But I believe that we'll see more of that in the later part of the year, so we'll talk about that as we approach delivery on that kind of product. I think that is a multi-year powerful accelerant. So, it could be that when you're doing the math, you're seeing FX effects, you might be seeing discontinuation of a couple of little products that may be small numbers, but from quarter-to-quarter, so there's some products like our product Resolve that we no longer sell that product because it is not scalable, it's basically software consulting services. We like the technology we pulled from it, but we're not going to continue to sell it. It's not going to be a profitable scalable business. So, that one is going backwards a little bit, and that could make the numbers look – it could be interpreted as something in (47

[Andre Benjamin:]

You did. Thank you.

[Andrew C. Florance:]

Let's try and wrap this call up before 3

[Operator:]

And next, we'll go to the line of Sara Gubins with Merrill Lynch. Please go ahead.

[Sara Rebecca Gubins:]

Hi. Thanks. Good morning.

[Richard Simonelli:]

Good morning.

[Andrew C. Florance:]

Good morning.

[Sara Rebecca Gubins:]

Just a couple of real quick ones. Could you quantify the headwinds from Services at Apartment Finder that you're shutting down in 2016 numbers? Would you characterize ad spend as being down $20 million in 2016 or was there some shift from the fourth quarter into the New Year? And then the contract sales were fantastic but they were sequentially down from the third quarter, so I just wanted to get your take on that. Thanks.

[Andrew C. Florance:]

Sure. So, simply put, what happened was we are taking the 2016 spend on marketing around the Apartment space down $20 million over the comparative numbers from 2015. The cost savings you saw in the quarter – in the fourth quarter were largely elimination of redundant positions, and that's probably, the single biggest beginning, middle and end of it.

[Scott Wheeler:]

Over two-thirds of it was from personnel-related costs.

[Andrew C. Florance:]

Yeah. 200-some people.

[Scott Wheeler:]

Yeah. Very small amount was from the marketing piece in Q4.

[Andrew C. Florance:]

So we think that's something that you'll see that the reduction in marketing spend, though, remember, at a reduced number, we are still the most aggressive player by a wide margin, and as you can tell like Super Bowl ads and so on and so forth. And we think that will give us significant advantage. And we think the marketing dollars at the lower level we are spending are highly efficient because if you're not competing with multiple other voices attempting to brand a similar product in the national space, you have very efficient dollars – there's very efficient dollars you're spending. So, in the fourth quarter, remember one of the things that was occurring. So, you asked about the Finder discontinuation of revenue, that number was $10 million, $13 million, something like that.

[Scott Wheeler:]

Yeah. It was roughly around that.

[Andrew C. Florance:]

$10 million, $13 million net. These were revenues – this was revenue that just in the long term would distract us from other higher margin revenue. So, it was negative or a flat margin revenue that couldn't scale and we thought it was frankly competitive and distracting, so we took that away to focus on the Core. So, you'll get a little bit of tailwind on that. Now, remember – a little headwind on that. But just year-over-year basis. Now, remember that we went in to Apartment Finder really aggressively. So, we were not messing around and other companies have done print to digital conversions in the course of two or three years. We did a – I'm sorry. A print to digital. We did a print to digital in four months. So, we want to be really quick about it. And we took 100 and some Apartment Finder sales people and said, go to your customers and migrate them from a print publication to a digital publication, keep the pricing the same, but go from a month-to-month contract to a six-month contract or a one-year contract and do it by next Tuesday. So, it was very rapid. But we did that because of the margin benefit and the ability to focus aggressively and produce a much better product at the end and have a scaled sales force and get scale advantage to these websites. One point of sales, multiple websites for the clients to enjoy leads from. So in doing that, we did have some folks not go from print publications to digital. In particular, you might be in Albany, New York or something, where they love their newsstand book. But we still turned the great results we did despite that, and going forward we're in a much better place than if we kept messing around with print. I hope that answered the question.

[Sara Rebecca Gubins:]

Great. The last one was just new contract sales trends.

[Andrew C. Florance:]

That's the new contract sales. There's a slight reduction there.

[Sara Rebecca Gubins:]

Oh, got it. Got it.

[Andrew C. Florance:]

We lost contracts when we lose that company in Albany that really wanted a book.

[Sara Rebecca Gubins:]

Okay. Makes sense. Thank you.

[Andrew C. Florance:]

We're not big believers in the book. Okay.

[Operator:]

And next we'll go the line of Bill Warmington with Wells Fargo. Please go ahead.

[William A. Warmington:]

Good afternoon, everyone.

[Richard Simonelli:]

Good afternoon.

[Andrew C. Florance:]

Hello.

[William A. Warmington:]

Well, a question for you on the new CoStar product, the inter-media product going between LoopNet and CoStar Suite. I don't know, you have a name for it or is it CoStar Light, something like that?

[Andrew C. Florance:]

Do you have a name for it?

[William A. Warmington:]

Okay. And so, the context of the question is given that product you have your Premium Searcher revenue. I'd like to ask about approximately how much we're talking there, that you're looking to up sell to CoStar Light or to up sell to the CoStar full test. What are the different price points? How do we sort of do some back of the envelope on the potential scenarios there?

[Andrew C. Florance:]

Sure. So, first of all I think you're asking a great question and it is one that I feel that is an important question for the company and I think that we have a good solution for that with a lot of potential. So, I'm feeling very good about that area. So, one of the challenges with the traditional Premium Searcher revenue, which is what, $34 million?

[Scott Wheeler:]

About.

[Andrew C. Florance:]

Roughly $34 million. Is that it was a relatively low-quality product for LoopNet historically, and it was a throwaway. So, they signed up a number of people at as little as $19 a month, which bears no resemblance to what CoStar charges for a higher quality information product. As the LoopNet brand has strengthened, the information has gotten better in LoopNet and they're getting a lot more value than they're paying for. Now, you can't increase anybody from $17 to anything meaningful at any kind of other than usurious interest rate kind of growth rate. So, it's not a great approach. So, we are creating a new product, so we will – those folks who have Premium Searcher can see both basic and premium listings on LoopNet. Once we do the conversion, the only people that are going to be able to originate basic listings on LoopNet will be people who are paying to advertise with us, at least some property. That means some of the basic listings will disappear reducing the value of the legacy product, somewhat. And we are offering the up sell product, which has twice the listing volume and more accurate listings as the legacy LoopNet product. We'll be offering that for probably in the $195 to $295 a month per person price range. The current legacy product, it was running at $115 average per month. Now, that average is very average because as you know, we took the price up to about $325 or something a month, about a year or so ago, so that $115 is a blend of the $17 person and the $325 person.

[William A. Warmington:]

Yeah.

[Andrew C. Florance:]

And also, it's not apples to apples. It's comparing yens to pounds because a user at CoStar Group has an enterprise license where all the brokers of the site need to be licensed before the first broker gets the service. On the legacy LoopNet, one broker in a 100-shop brokerage firm might be the guy who bought the password and shares it with the entire office. So that $34-a-month account might be servicing 100 brokers. So, as we bring the new products on board, it will only be licensed at the enterprise site level, and it will be moving up to a higher price point. So, it'll be significant up from where we are before. So, it's probably a – if someone chooses to get the more robust intermediate information products through the LoopNet platform, on average, it will likely be a 300% price increase or so. And we think it will be compelling to people because we'll use exactly the same methodology LoopNet used to get people from just using the free LoopNet to the Premium Searcher LoopNet where every search you do, you can actually see how much content you're not seeing if you're not in the premium class. And then the CoStar service is probably another 60% increase above the intermediate service. So, we'll move people between these different price points with very clear and very discernible value proposition. So, I'm very excited about it. There's a lot of software work to do this year, but clearly our team is pretty darn good at doing that. And we're – they'll hit this one as aggressive as they hit Apartments.com, and as aggressive as they hit Apartment Finder. And then I'm really excited about what we're going to deliver to our CoStar sales force. And then ultimately by coming up with a clear branding message around LoopNet that it's a marketing vehicle like Apartments.com is, we will ultimately, I believe, sell a lot more marketing revenue as well. And you didn't ask, but there, that's also another pricing opportunity because our average broker-client pays $17 per month for an ad on LoopNet. Whereas when we sell to owners they pay on average $400 or $500 and we're going to be moving more towards that, so.

[William A. Warmington:]

Wow. Okay. Well excellent. I appreciate the...

[Andrew C. Florance:]

I think you wanted (61

[William A. Warmington:]

I appreciate the insight. And I also want to say welcome aboard to Scott Wheeler.

[Scott Wheeler:]

Thank you very much. Great to be here. Look forward to meeting you soon.

[Andrew C. Florance:]

We call him – around CoStar, we call him continuous-margin-expansion-Scott. Is there an acronym for that yet?

[Scott Wheeler:]

CMX (62

[Operator:]

And next, we'll go to the line of Sterling Auty with JPMorgan. Please go ahead.

[Darren R. Jue:]

It's actually Darren Jue on for Sterling.

[Andrew C. Florance:]

Good afternoon, Darren.

[Darren R. Jue:]

My question is about how you guys think about prioritizing spending between the Apartments.com and the Apartment Finder brands? And then like how do you see the growth rates of those two brands trending, do they sort of converge in terms of growth rates over the long term?

[Andrew C. Florance:]

Yeah. Good question. They are – we are prioritizing the branding spend around Apartments.com. So we put all the major media dollars into Apartments.com. And then – but we can leverage that investment, Apartments.com, to Apartment Finder or to Apartment Home Living in that, as someone is acquired by Apartments.com, we cookie them. And when they search for – this is an example – they search for a pet friendly, one bedroom in Cleveland Park in D.C., we know that. And then we retarget them, we spend digital dollars retargeting them, saying that Apartment Finder is the ideal site to find a dog friendly apartment in Cleveland Park. And that's very successful. We capture a lot of traffic by – and what we're trying to do there, is a typical renter goes to two, three, four sites, and we would like to be half the sites they go to by moving them around through retargeting and so on and so forth. And then, the product is being sold – we are not, when we go out there today, we're not selling Apartments.com and we're not selling exposure on Apartment Finder, we're selling exposure on the Apartment Network. And that allows us to leverage the entire sales force across one clean selling message. It's much more efficient. Otherwise, you'd have to have two competing sales forces. The clients don't want that. The clients really like being able to pay one price and move across a whole network of websites. And the nice thing is, there was not a ton of redundant client base between Finder and Apartments.com. So, what we did is we really just increased share and then we're trying to move the overall forward.

[Scott Wheeler:]

Yeah. I think it's an important message to bring up because as we move forward into this year, as we're selling this network through the sales force, there's not going to be a visible separation between Apartment Finder and Apartments.com from a revenue growth perspective. So, when I gave the guidance of look for 20% to 25% combined growth going forward, that's all of our apartments, properties together in this network cell. And it is exactly at or slightly above the growth rates on an organic basis we're seeing coming out of the end of 2015.

[Darren R. Jue:]

Okay. And just to clarify, the 20% to 25% growth, is that a pro forma growth, assuming that you had Apartment Finder for the full year in 2015?

[Scott Wheeler:]

Yeah. That's right. That's assuming that. And the number I gave, I think, was $735 million as the pro forma base that we grow off of in total, it includes that 20% to 25% Apartment.

[Darren R. Jue:]

Okay. All right. Thank you.

[Andrew C. Florance:]

And we believe that combined business will be profitable in the fourth quarter.

[Operator:]

And next, we'll go to the line of Andrew Jeffrey with SunTrust. Please go ahead.

[Andrew Jeffrey:]

Hi. It is afternoon now. How are you doing, Andy?

[Andrew C. Florance:]

Good.

[Andrew Jeffrey:]

Welcome, Scott, look forward to working with you.

[Scott Wheeler:]

Great. You, too, Andrew. Thank you.

[Andrew Jeffrey:]

I guess what I'm to trying wrap my head around a little bit, kind of going back to Andre's question at the beginning of the Q&A session. Net new has historically been our best look-forward metric. It has accelerated to pretty remarkable levels, reminiscent of LoopNet coming out of the last recession. And yet, the implied rev guide for 2016 doesn't seem to capture that implied acceleration. So, I'm wondering if net new isn't the best sort of forward-looking metric anymore, or if there were some puts or takes or how we should think about your guidance vis-à-vis bookings growth and, perhaps, some conservatism? I'm just – give me a breakdown on the relationship, is what I'm trying to understand better.

[Scott Wheeler:]

It's a good question. I think as you think of – the net new is still the metric we'll be using in the annual subscriptions to show how that turns obviously into revenue in the future. The other thing we all have to get used to is now that we've got a really big multi-family Apartments business, it demonstrates a different seasonal pattern in its new and subscription revenue from quarter-to-quarter. Obviously, there's a peak season in the second and the third quarter for renting and then that cools off. That pattern is going to hold true for the sales efforts. It's also going to hold true for our marketing efforts. So, from what we've been used to in the past, we're going to see a more seasonal pattern that's decent in the first quarter, it grows second quarter, third quarter and then it softens in the fourth quarter when you look at apartment selling. So, when you peel all those pieces apart and we look sequentially and forward, each of the individual components, seasonality aside, continues to grow and will continue to grow in each quarter next year over the prior quarter. I know it's difficult to see because until we get annual periods of all this stuff in place, it's not as clear. But that's what we're seeing in the underlying metrics in the new business that we're putting on and then that's translating into consistent sequential growth going forward.

[Andrew C. Florance:]

So, I think – I do think that it is the best single indicator of future revenue and expectations. You do have a lot happening. So, you have the Finder conversion really coming to a head in the fourth quarter, where we did record reductions. We had the shutdowns of revenue. So, that moving Finder through in essence in a three-month period creates a little bit of noise. And then I think that we're not looking to be overly aggressive as we go into 2016. We would like to see us continue to put up these unusually strong sales results ongoing. And not – don't want to speak on behalf of Scott but coming in to the new CFO role you wouldn't amp up all the dials from the prior year with your over four weeks of high confidence.

[Scott Wheeler:]

Thank you for that good introduction.

[Andrew Jeffrey:]

Okay. So you wouldn't call out for example any inflation in the net new number which is resulting from the conversion of less than annual terms to annual terms, which would otherwise blunt future revenue growth, in other words, better retention, better economics but maybe less related revenue growth?

[Andrew C. Florance:]

No. And I believe our apartment renewal rates are doing really well. I think we're going to do a lot better in the apartment renewal rates than anyone in our industry has ever done. And anecdotally, there was one client that you would – we're bringing a lot to the table for the clients right now and so we have a much stronger hand or much stronger product than anyone has had in this space before. And there's one client that sticks in my mind that we saw a reduction in their spend, it was a major national player. Was the only major national player I was aware that we saw a reduction in their spend in the later part of the year, but they've actually brought that right back up online and above. So, I actually think our renewal rate in the Apartment side is pretty darn good. We'll be working hard to keep it up there, and I think it probably ends up being stronger than the LoopNet renewal rate. It's somewhere between the LoopNet and CoStar, and that makes that net bookings number actually a good fair representation of what's happening in the business. But don't- they're so – when you discontinue all that Finder Social on the fourth quarter, you take negative net news for terminating a book ad campaign in Albany. There's a little bit of noise there, but the big – and it's happening so quickly. I mean, remember, this is all accelerated in the last three quarters. But I'd say it's still the best indicator.

[Andrew Jeffrey:]

Okay. Great. Thank you very much.

[Operator:]

And next, we'll go to the line of Michael Huang with Needham. Please go ahead.

[Michael S. Huang:]

Thanks, and good morning, guys. Just a quick one for you. So, with respect to the annual sales conference that you – that you hosted, what were the key takeaways? And could you share how you're thinking about ramping head count across the product areas and maybe the profile of who you are hiring, and whether or not that's any different than kind of who you hired in the past? Thanks.

[Andrew C. Florance:]

So, well, one really nice thing about the sales conference was that I felt that there was really good energy and integration between the CoStar sales team, the Apartments.com sales team and the Apartment Finder sales team. So, this was the first time they all got an opportunity to get to the same room. And it was the first time that they had one relatively common set of products and it was also the first time that they had a really good – I think a really good territory system they get a hold of. So they could understand what their mission was in this collection of products. So, I felt there was really good energy. I thought there was a little bit of a morphing of the personalities as they, three different sales forces into a more corporate central casting, send me a high-end sales person look. I mean they were really dressed up. But the expansion areas would be we're adding customer relationship management people that the CoStar information sales team, about 80 people there. They have some selling responsibilities, but their core responsibility is driving usage. They're selling responsibility is really more around LoopNet to brokers. So, they'll sustain and drive the LoopNet PL. Then the other thing we did is Max and I spent a lot of time just saying very carefully about our rationales of potential revenue – existing revenue and just set slightly different target levels in different cities, especially cities that we think have a lot more revenue upside. So, it was a really good feel other than a blizzard that came in, and potentially was going to strand 700 sales people on my credit card for three days in Washington. So we had to get them out of there quickly ahead of the storm, and we only had to pick up the tab for about 30 Brits for the weekend, so, it turned out okay.

[Scott Wheeler:]

We'll also see the territories were aligned closely now in Apartments, and we have a couple extra regions we've done and a couple hundred territories that we've now aligned with the combined sales force. You're going to expect those number of territories will need to put more folks against. And so, that's the other piece besides the customer relationship piece that Andy mentioned. We'll see more sales force in multi-family going out to those territories.

[Andrew C. Florance:]

Okay.

[Operator:]

And next, we'll go to the line of Brett Huff with Stephens, Inc. Please go ahead.

[Brett Huff:]

Good afternoon. And welcome, Scott.

[Scott Wheeler:]

Thanks, Brett.

[Brett Huff:]

Andy, can you talk about lead quality? You mentioned kind of you're expecting high renewal rates from the multi-family folks, the investment you all made in getting real time availability, I think, sort of was the game changer you're going after – it was supposed to produce higher quality of leads. Can you give us if it's a metric or anecdotes just to compel us that that's working as you've expected and that it is – the leads are higher quality?

[Andrew C. Florance:]

Sure. So, again, there's not a – there is no sort of third party lead monitoring service that puts out a – a metric that we can use. But I can take an anecdotal from our biggest customers where they are watching that lead flow and they're saying that one customer, one major customer said, look, you all came in in March of last year saying you're going to have this great traffic and great lead flow and you want us to immediately switch all our advertising to you after we have been doing this for 30 years. And so, we're not going to do that until we've watched results for a period of time. And they said that, they said, and it's consistent with what others are saying, that as they monitor it, they see a clear and growing differentiation between the leads they received from us and lead is a dirty word. Is what you're really looking for is lease. And so, the leases they're seeing come from us is differentiated from all the other sources. Which is why they're spending, as you can see, from any – just pretty clear there's a major shift from other sources to us, that is the best testament of lead quality. But we did an interesting study the other day and you'd go back to the old manual way of trying to lease out your apartment building. We know from digitally tracking the results of over 10 million phone calls into apartment communities in 2015, they only answer the telephone during normal business hours 27% of the time. So, they're only available to give somebody information on apartment 27% of the time and then working on a special project that we made 1,500 calls, that were all recorded legally, and that a separate person and each community was called and asked for a one bedroom availability by two different people. Each call was recorded, and then a third party determined whether or not an accurate answer was given on whether or not there's availability. The accuracy rate for when you call an apartment community and whether or not they have a one bedroom availability is 50%. So, when you call and ask the community if they have a one bedroom available, they're only able to give the right answer 50% of the time. So, you're down to, for every 100 calls that come in only 13.5 of them are answered correctly. So, the only way the industry's going to lease stuff up is through digital presentation right from the property management systems to the customer. So, what we're doing is we're giving consumers real information as to what's available. We're making it readily accessible. We're not playing any games where we serve up apartments that aren't in the neighborhoods they asked for. We're not playing any games where we serve up apartments that are not available. So, the quality of our lead flow would follow is much better. And I think that's just is evidence. My belief is that the competing companies are seeing significant reductions in revenue other than whatever they could pick up in the print to digital conversion volatility. I think they're seeing negative numbers and that basically follows from a lead flow.

[Brett Huff:]

Okay. That's great. That's what I need. I appreciate the detail.

[Operator:]

And our final question will come from the line of Peter Lowry with JMP Securities. Please go ahead.

[Peter C. Lowry:]

Oh, great. Thanks. Just one quick one. Can you give us an update on your current M&A stance or other capital allocation plans? Thanks.

[Andrew C. Florance:]

Sure. So, I would, I'd have to say there's more potential initiatives that we could pursue than I've ever seen before. There's a wide array, and they lie in our traditional business area, in the Core business area. They also are in the Apartments area. And then they're in related areas. We also separately are looking at smaller acquisition opportunities in Europe. But – so, we obviously – with growing cash balances and very conservative debt posture we have capacity. But I would not want to let anything right now interfere with our core priority of integrating LoopNet and CoStar. So, whatever happens, the first priority is getting the benefit integration done. And so, we're probably operationally adverse to adding additional workload for at least six months. But we – Frank Carchedi who's been with us for a long, long time, he's one of four CFOs that hang around here, former CFOs that hang around here, he has handed off his responsibilities for our very large research department and he's focusing on some of our subsidiaries and he's focusing on M&A. So, he's spending a lot more time on that. We are looking at a lot of things. But again, priority number one is operations and realizing the benefit of the resources and assets we already have.

[Peter C. Lowry:]

Great. Thank you.

[Andrew C. Florance:]

Thank you. So, what the heck? We're going to break the rules. We have one more question from Sara and then we're going to move to the second quarter results.

[Sara Rebecca Gubins:]

Thank you. So, I just want to clarify what the Apartments' guidance that you gave for 2016. You've been talking about 25% to 30% before. And I think that referred just to Apartment.com and you're now including Apartment Finder and probably some of the products shut down that's impacting in 2016. Is that the reason for the lower growth versus the 25% to 30% that you talked about before?

[Scott Wheeler:]

Yeah, Sara that's exactly it. When we talked in the last quarter, we said 25% to 30% for Apartments.com. And until we finish the wind-off of Finder, we didn't have a good base to start using in our go-forward organic growth calculations to know what that combine business is going to be. Now, as you point out, we have that clarity, we know where it's running. You combine the 30% from Apartments.com with the remaining base of Apartment Finder and on a go-forward basis you get 20% to 25% growth range, which is at or slightly above the equivalent of the 30% that we spoke about before. So, there's no decline there. There's no change there. It's actually a slight acceleration through each quarter we see next year from the "30%" (in quotes) that we said last year. Is that clear?

[Sara Rebecca Gubins:]

Yeah. That's very clear.

[Scott Wheeler:]

Perfect.

[Sara Rebecca Gubins:]

Thank you.

[Scott Wheeler:]

You're welcome.

[Richard Simonelli:]

Okay. With that, we will wrap it up. Thank you all for joining us and congratulations, Scott, on your first earnings call...with the CoStar Group.

[Scott Wheeler:]

Thank you very much.

[Andrew C. Florance:]

See you next time.

[Operator:]

And, ladies and gentlemen, that does conclude our teleconference call for this morning. Again, thank you very much for you participation and for using the AT&T Executive Teleconference Service. You may now disconnect.