STR hotel data giant sold to CoStar Group for $450M

Real estate analytics group CoStar has paid $450 million to acquire STR, formerly Smith Travel Research.

The deal is expected to close by the end of 2019.

STR was created in 1985 by Randy and Carolyn Smith as a benchmarking and analytics service for hotels.

It has since grown to include consulting services, market intelligence, training, forecasting and competitive analysis.

CoStar says it will use the STR acquisition in the same way that it did with its purchase of Apartments.com in 2014, to integrate and extend the tools to its investor and service provider customers.

The company says: "Among many other things, STR’s information provides aggregated anonymized information on occupancy rates, average room rates, and revenue per available room.

"We believe that the combination of the two companies’ offerings will allow us to create valuable new and improved tools for investors, lenders, and service providers for use in developing, financing, valuing, and selling hotel properties."

STR currently gets data from around 65,000 hotels in 180 countries around the world, which then feeds into its core STARreport service.

Some 1.2 million reports are distributed every month, it claims.

Randy Smith, now chairman of the business, says: "The growth and success of STR far exceeded the expectations we had in place 34 years ago.

“To say the results of these past three decades have been gratifying would be a great understatement. But in the end, I’ll be most proud of knowing that so many people were able to build long-lasting careers with our company—and that, as a team, we were able to make significant contributions to the advancement of the hospitality industry."