CoStar Group—a real estate information, analytics and online
marketplace company—plans to acquire hospitality analytics provider STR, which
has 370 employees in 15 countries. They expect the $450 million cash
transaction to close in the fourth quarter. STR was founded in 1985 as Smith
Travel Research. Today, the company aggregates data from more than 650,000
hotels, representing nearly 9 million guest rooms in over 180 countries. CoStar,which
owns Apartments.com, provides basic building information on 80,000 hotels, plus 45,000 hotel property sales transactions
and 4,500 hotel sale listings. CoStar stated that the combination of the two
companies will allow it "to create valuable new and improved tools for
investors, lenders and service providers for use in developing, financing,
valuing and selling hotel properties." The company plans to extend STR's
benchmarking expertise to other commercial real estate segments within CoStar.