Side vs CoStar
Side-by-side comparison of AI visibility scores, market position, and capabilities
Brokerage platform for top agents; launch a boutique brand with Side's compliance, transaction management, and tech back-office; agent-first model with higher commission retention.
About
Side is a San Francisco-based real estate brokerage platform that enables high-performing real estate agents and teams to operate as independent boutique brokerages with their own brands, websites, and marketing while leveraging Side's enterprise-grade back-office services — compliance, transaction management, technology, and licensing infrastructure. Rather than the traditional model where top agents work under a brokerage brand and split a significant portion of commission, Side's agent-first model allows agents to present themselves under their own brands and retain more of their earnings. Side handles all the regulatory, operational, and technology overhead of running a licensed brokerage, allowing agents to focus entirely on client relationships and transaction volume. The company is particularly attractive to top producers who have built strong personal brands but lack the resources or desire to manage brokerage operations. Founded in 2017, Side raised over $300M and reached a unicorn valuation in 2021, backed by investors including Sapphire Ventures and Trinity Ventures. It competes with eXp Realty and Real in the agent empowerment brokerage model.
$2.74B revenue 2024 (+11% YoY); $732M Q1 2025 revenue (+12% YoY); 56th consecutive quarter double-digit growth; 134M+ monthly unique visitors Q4 2024; 6,400+ employees in 14 countries
About
CoStar Group is the leading provider of commercial real estate data, analytics, and marketplace platforms, founded in 1987 in Washington, D.C. by Andrew Florance. The company was built on the conviction that commercial real estate — one of the world's largest asset classes — was fundamentally underserved by reliable data, and that building a proprietary research infrastructure to collect, verify, and distribute property information would create a durable competitive moat. CoStar's core technology combines a massive field research organization with digital data collection tools to maintain the most comprehensive commercial real estate database in the world.\n\nCoStar's product portfolio spans multiple platforms serving different segments of the real estate market: CoStar for commercial real estate professionals, LoopNet for commercial property marketing, Apartments.com for multifamily rental search, Homes.com for residential real estate, and Ten-X for online commercial property auctions. This multi-platform strategy positions CoStar Group as the data and marketplace layer across every major real estate segment. The company attracted more than 134 million unique monthly visitors across its networks in Q4 2024, demonstrating the scale of its audience reach.\n\nCoStar Group reported $2.74 billion in revenue for 2024, an 11% year-over-year increase, marking its 56th consecutive quarter of double-digit revenue growth — a remarkable consistency streak in enterprise SaaS. The company's combination of proprietary data assets, marketplace network effects, and expanding residential real estate ambitions gives it multiple growth vectors as it targets the vast residential brokerage market that dwarfs its existing commercial business.
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