CoStar Review: Using CoStar Reports to Analyze a Rental Market

What's a quick valuation? What's the back of the envelope for one investor versus another? On a high level, you're just looking online.

A lot of investors might look at CoStar reports. So let's talk about how effective they are.

Are CoStar Reports helpful? Are they accurate?

We have a CoStar subscription, which I kind of like. It's a rip-off. Okay. They might cancel us because they are kind of like the soup Nazi from Seinfeld. No CoStar for you. We have it in the budget to pay Seinfeld royalty rights. Don't we on the show? We don't okay.

CoStar has a lot of good information that you can see the typical rents for one-, two-, and three-bedroom units in your area. You can pull comps at half-mile, two miles, five miles as big of a radius as you want.

You can sort it by their star rating 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 stars or so. Right. So, you can go. Pretty deep in, in the back of the envelope, and get some really good ideas. But w once again, take it with a grain of salt. Cause like what chase was saying. Um, I have, I haven't always found CoStar to be very good at telling you the rest of the story.

Right. Do you know? Well, w is there a $50 parking fee? Some of the listings say that some of them don't CoStar is only as accurate as of the diligence of the animal. Right. We, I know the three of us get calls. This is Bob from CoStar. Hey, you got this property that just went to the city. Tell me about it. Or, Hey, you sold this one and we have to give the information.

So, it can be a case of garbage in garbage out. Right? If somebody didn't give the CoStar analyst, very good information. You got to take that into consideration. So, it's a high level, but you're definitely going to need to drill down onto it later.

Sherida Zenger: But if somebody doesn't have the funds right to pay for a CoStar account, they can use resources like rendler.com, apartments.com.

Some of those I know locally different places have their own platforms that they use as rentals. So that's a good place to start too. Usually, those are a little more detailed because they're looking for the tenant, right? So, they're looking at the tenant saying, Hey, come rent from me. So, they'll give a little bit more information. You know, maybe some they have on CoStar.

Chase Leavitt: This whole episode is doing it within five minutes or less. It's quick and dirty. And so, the way that you do that is yeah. The CoStar or the Rentler, when you start to call different places, that's going to be more time-consuming.

Steve Olson: We're probably off the back of the envelope and onto the spreadsheet by then.

Chase Leavitt: Yeah. So, the quick and dirty Rentler, Zillow, any place where you can just get an understanding of what the rents are going to. And then once you understand what the rents are going to be, we can talk expenses.

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