The entire research department (which constitutes the majority of the company) is based on a set of seemingly arbitrary metrics that are frequently changed from on-high and with no input from the researchers themselves. This culture leads to a lot of grumbling, a lot of wheel-spinning, and thus some superficial team-bonding. But not a lot of good market data.
The company teaches you enough to do your job functions (speak to people for 2 minute intervals, use databases, that's about it actually), but not enough to do much critical thinking. Nor do they want you to: once you know how to critically think about real estate, you are probably looking for a better company.
The Sales division of this company is really despicable! I cannot tell you how many times I had to calm down a single-property owner who was conned into buying the most basic (useless) product offered, which sales associates must sell before they are trusted with real products like CoStar or LoopNet. "Yes ma'am, I am afraid you literally have no choice but to wait until your contract is up. In the meantime I will still be calling you once a month anyways. Yes, that means you're paying for absolutely nothing. Well, my two minutes are up, until next time!"
Paid Time Off. You earn one vacation day (8 hours) per month worked (starting after the first month I believe). That is, unless the city public transportation and roads are shut down for snow, in which case you need to sacrifice a vacation day because you cannot get to work.
Awful data and half-baked strategies. This is the most disheartening part of working at CoStar. I spent about half the time that I worked there on a team project to clean up the data in a market that had formerly been mishandled by researchers in a different office (one with tenured employees in a non- phone call recording state. Therefore much less quality control). Day in and day out, we were trying to quietly clean up blatantly inaccurate data that we had been selling to subscribers for years. The work really defined our team and made us feel like we were doing something important vs simply meeting the arbitrary call metrics. One day, the powers-that-be decided to put the market back with the research office that had screwed it up so bad in the first place. Our team was dissolved and scattered to the wind, months of our hard work for naught. It was a more poignant ode to bureaucratic inefficiency than Catch-22, The Ugly American, and Office Space rolled into one.
