WASHINGTON, DC—Information and analytics provider CoStar Group is bolstering its presence in the apartment rental marketplace with a definitive agreement to acquire Apartment Finder as part of ts acquisition of Network Communications Inc. The $170-million acquisition, at seven times Apartment Finder's annual EBITDA, is expected to close in the next 90 days and follows CoStar's April 2014 acquisition of Apartments.com for $585 million from Chicago-based Classified Ventures Inc.

With approximately 13,400 listings and a menu of services that includes digital advertising on ApartmentFinder.com, the 34-year-old Apartment Finder ranks among the top five multifamily property rental listing marketplaces based on revenue, says CoStar. The new owner plans to operate Apartment Finder as a distinct brand, although ultimately both Apartment Finder and Apartments.com will be powered by CoStar data.

The idea, according to CoStar, is that via access to two complementary online marketing solutions, property managers and owners will get more exposure for their listings and more effective and precise targeting of leads. CoStar expects to integrate the back ends of Apartments.com and Apartment Finder by the end of this year, thereby leveraging the same research, systems, support and sales platform to power both platforms. Furthermore, CoStar expects the integration to create “tremendous” cost synergies and greater operating efficiencies.

“Over the past year we have transformed Apartments.com into one of the fastest growing industry websites, and we are excited to do the same for Apartment Finder,” says Andrew Florance, CoStar's founder and CEO. He cites the “$2-trillion US multifamily asset class,” a sector that he described last year as “bigger than the office vertical, which is where we started many years ago.”

When the Apartments.com deal closed, Florance pointed out that the acquisition was not simply a matter of the online rental marketplace benefiting from CoStar's infrastructure. “We also expect that CoStar's multifamily information and analytics solutions will strengthen as we gain valuable demand-side data from Apartments,” he said at the time.

Since its acquisition of Apartments.com, CoStar Group has completely rebuilt and launched a new consumer-centric website that includes over 550,000 current availabilities. That compares to 18,400 Apartments.com listings at the time it was acquired in April 2014.

CoStar Group is actively driving traffic via a search engine marketing campaign in the industry as well as a national marketing campaign featuring actor Jeff Goldblum, which launched at the beginning of March. As a result, for the month ended March 31, Apartments.com moved to number one in traffic versus other apartment rental sites, says CoStar, citing data from comScore, Compete.com, Experian Hitwise and Alexa.

On a year-over-basis, traffic to Apartments.com more than doubled in March with 15 million visits and seven million unique visitors. Leads to property managers and owners are up nearly 67% Y-O-Y. The result, CoStar says, is the best sales month for Apartments.com to date, with an 827% Y-O-Y increase in bookings during the first quarter. 

Headquartered in Morrow, GA, Apartment Finder has approximately 400 employees, including approximately 120 field sales representatives located across the US. CoStar plans to combine the sales forces and eventually all sales representatives will cross-sell multiple marketing and information solutions. CoStar believes this will further increase sales force production. The company also owns LoopNet, CityFeet and Showcase.