The CoStar challenge
CoStar is a real estate analytics and technology firm that provides industry-leading data and information services for brokers, analysts and investors in the commercial, multifamily, industrial and other real estate sectors.
In 2018, the company set out to broaden its ability to deliver a comprehensive data-driven content experience through an expansion of its news-gathering and reporting capabilities in markets throughout North America. This included creating a dedicated newsroom helmed by a veteran Washington Post Business editor and team of experienced real estate journalists.
To achieve its vision of being a leader in commercial real estate news, CoStar needed a platform that could support its fast-growing team of writers and editors alongside the need for sophisticated publishing workflows and the ability to integrate seamlessly with CoStar's proprietary ecosystem of data sources.
The Brightspot solution for CoStar
Brightspot’s powerful content management system (CMS) platform empowered CoStar to:
- Create a centralized company news desk, CoStar News, to manage editorial copy creation, production and publishing.
- Integrate the new platform seamlessly into the organization’s existing tech stack with minimal business interruption.
- Maximize editorial efficiency with customizable workflows, tailored notifications, rich-text editing, live preview and a built-in digital asset manager that ties to CoStar's market-, property- and record-management systems.
- Manage taxonomy for consistent tagging, making it easy to find and manage all digital assets within a single, easy-to-use interface.
- Grow CoStar News value proposition with the company through expansion of email-marketing programs and subscriber-based access to premium content.
The outcome for CoStar
Costar News has the publishing platform it needs to deliver comprehensive data-driven coverage of the sectors, markets, transactions and dealmakers driving commercial real estate. CoStar content teams publish dozens of stories a day supported directly with insights from CoStar's market data. Furthermore, any story on the CMS can tie to underlying property records as well as detailed market reports, which help deepen the reader's understanding of each story and its context.
Personalization features powered by Brightspot ensure readers get the most relevant and recent stories based on their local-market interests, including location-based experiences when accessing CoStar News via the website and personalized content recommendations and highlights for subscribers working within CoStar's analytics platform.
Brightspot's multisite capabilities have enabled CoStar to expand its news coverage to teams in Canada, the U.K. and Europe, as well as to other CoStar divisions, including LoopNet.com, the web's largest online marketplace for buying, selling and leasing commercial real estate. Operational efficiencies have been further increased with the ability to translate content seamlessly when sharing content between CMS instances and sites.
CoStar in brief
