Real estate tech companies Xceligent and CompStak reached a deal to integrate their online platforms, in an apparent bid to better compete with New York market leader CoStar.
Xceligent, a commercial property database, will now link its platform to CompStak, a crowdsourced database for leasing comps. Users who subscribe to both products can look at an office property on Xceligent and then click on a CompStak widget to get leasing comps for the building.
The move comes as Xceligent, which is backed by the Daily Mail Group’s private equity arm, is expanding into CoStar’s biggest market: New York. Both firms offer similar products and former has tried to differentiate itself by giving its platform a so-called open architecture, meaning users can combine it with other software tools.
Xceligent’s CEO Doug Curry claimed that CompStak has a “unique dataset that it quite frankly unavailable anywhere else in the industry” and would help it gain a foothold in the Big Apple. CompStak’s co-founder Michael Mandel said partnering with the Missouri-based firm, which has a dominant position in several secondary markets, would help it expand beyond New York. The company already has a content-sharing agreement with VTS. In that partnership, launched in April 2016, VTS users had free access to some of CompStak’s aggregated data
In December, CoStar filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Xceligent, alleging its researchers stole data and images. On a recent earnings call CEO Andrew Florance said the Washington, D.C.-based company could spend up to $20 million on the suit this year alone. Xceligent denies the charges and accuses its rival of anti-competitive behavior.
CompStak [TRDataCustom] has also had its own legal troubles with CoStar. In early 2014, Florance’s company filed a John Doe lawsuit against CompStak users for allegedly stealing images. The lawsuit was eventually discontinued.