- CoStar Group signed a definitive agreement to buy Vexcel Group for about $730M in cash, with closing targeted for early 2027 pending regulatory approvals.
- Vexcel posted more than $140M in trailing 12-month revenue, up over 30%, on multi-year recurring contracts and a roughly 20% adjusted EBITDA margin.
- CoStar plans to run the imagery through AI to pull hundreds of data fields per property, then sell Vexcel’s data through its roughly 2,000 salespeople.
CoStar Group has agreed to buy Vexcel Group for about $730 million in cash, adding a survey-grade aerial imagery business to its data stack.
The Vexcel acquisition, announced Oct. 27, should wrap up in early 2027 once regulators sign off.
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What Vexcel Does
The company shoots over 60 million images annually. Its footprint reaches 45-plus countries and 320 big metros, including 99.6% of Americans.
Big U.S. metros get re-flown up to 3 times annually, and crews reach disaster areas inside a day. Pixels measure 7.5 to 15 centimeters across, about 16 times sharper than what satellites typically deliver.
Vexcel builds its own UltraCam cameras and manages the planes and data processing too. Insurers, disaster responders, planners and mapmakers buy the output.
By the Numbers
Vexcel booked over $140 million across the trailing 12 months, a jump above 30%. Customers sign multi-year contracts that renew, and the adjusted EBITDA margin runs near 20%.
Cash on hand and the company’s revolver will pay for it. CoStar expects the purchase to lift adjusted EPS within the first full year.
The AI Play
CEO Andy Florance said CoStar’s edge has long come from researchers photographing properties on the ground. The plan now is to pair Vexcel’s imagery with AI to pull several hundred fields on each of the roughly half a billion properties Vexcel has captured.
Florance said the combination creates “a transformative, new, ultra-low-cost proprietary data source that makes CoStar even more valuable, more accurate, and timelier.” CoStar says the imagery will power richer search and discovery across its products, with tens of billions of new AI-derived data fields.
CoStar also plans to grow Vexcel’s sales by putting its 2,000 salespeople in front of Vexcel’s best prospects. Vexcel will keep its brand, and CEO Erik Jorgensen and his team will keep running it.
Zoom Out
The deal follows a rough stretch for CoStar. Activist investor Third Point ended its campaign and sold out in April 2026 after pushing the company to refocus on commercial real estate.
CoStar responded by adding independent directors, two chosen by Third Point, cutting net Homes.com investment and tying executive pay more closely to performance. Shares were down more than 40% for the year at that point.
Why It Matters
Vexcel is a data purchase aimed at the core business, not another consumer marketplace. It arrives with revenue already above $140 million.
That’s a different kind of spend from the one Third Point attacked. Its January letter said CoStar had put $3 billion into its U.S. residential push, and that Homes.com generated just $60 million in 2024 revenue, as CRE Daily covered in its brief on the Homes.com investment.
What’s Next
The deal still needs regulatory approval. CoStar lists a dependence on a handful of big customers at Vexcel as a risk, along with whether AI can pull property data from imagery at the scale, cost and pace it expects.
