CoStar has paid $800m in cash for a homebuilding data business that turned over about $170m last year, and the whole of it is smaller than one quarter of CoStar's residential arm
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CoStar Group closed the deal on Friday and told the market the size of the target in a single sentence.
The company said it has completed the purchase of Bora, Inc. and its subsidiaries, which trade as Zonda, for $800m in cash. Zonda sells new home construction data, software for homebuilders and two residential marketplaces, NewHomeSource.com and Livabl. CoStar announced the agreement on 29 May and says the regulatory approvals and customary closing conditions have now been satisfied.
What $800m bought, on the company's own numbers
Zonda generated approximately $170m of revenue in 2025 at an adjusted EBITDA margin of 23 percent. Adjusted EBITDA is a non-GAAP measure and the release points to the quarterly earnings statement for the reconciliations. Take the two figures together and the earnings measure is about $39m, which puts the price at roughly 20 times it and about 4.7 times revenue.
Set the same $170m against CoStar's own scale and it is small. The company's residential segment took $444m of revenue in the June quarter alone, up 33 percent year on year, so Zonda's entire 2025 revenue is a little under 40 percent of one quarter of the arm it joins. Group revenue in that quarter was $925m, up 18 percent, with adjusted EBITDA of $184m.
Zonda has more than 3,000 customers, which CoStar describes as including many of the largest homebuilders, developers, suppliers and lenders in North America.
The market claim is the company's
CoStar puts the American new home market at approximately $400bn in annual home sales and says that is larger than the multifamily rental market. That figure is the acquirer's characterisation of the opportunity it has just paid for, and it appears in a release furnished under Regulation FD rather than filed, which means it does not carry the liability that attaches to a filed document.
BofA Securities advised CoStar and Latham & Watkins acted as legal counsel. The release gives no figure for what the business is expected to contribute.
