Real estate data company CoStar Group Inc. has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Vexcel Group Inc., the operator of one of the world’s largest survey-grade aerial imagery programs, for approximately $730 million in cash.
Built on decades of investment in aerial capture technology and data processing, Vexcel captures more than 60 million images a year drawn from millions of square kilometers of aerial collection. Its geographic scope spans more than 45 countries and 320 major global metros, covering 99.6% of the U.S. population. Its program includes refreshing major U.S. metros up to three times a year and flying disaster zones within 24 hours of the event, giving up to date intelligence on changes to real estate.
Vexcel also designs and manufactures the UltraCam family of aerial cameras and controls the capture technology, the aircraft and the processing pipeline end to end. This enables them to deliver resolutions of 7.5 centimeters to 15 centimeters, roughly 16 times finer than typical satellite imagery. It converts that imagery into survey-grade property, parcel, and infrastructure intelligence used for insurance underwriting, catastrophe response, infrastructure planning, digital mapping, location intelligence and AI applications.
“Since 1989, CoStar Group has deployed thousands of researchers in vehicles driving tens of millions of miles across hundreds of cities on multiple continents to find, document and photograph real estate, tenants and construction. Since then, we have inspected and photographed millions of properties,” said Andy Florance, founder and chief executive officer of CoStar Group. “Rapid technology advances in aerial photography and lidar are enabling Vexcel to produce extremely high-resolution images and survey-grade measurements of land, houses, office buildings, industrial properties, retail properties, apartment buildings, construction sites and other infrastructure in the built environment. Combining these high-resolution images with the rapidly evolving capabilities of AI to semantically recognize and extract information and features from properties, we believe we can capture hundreds of data fields per property, across the approximately half a billion properties captured by Vexcel, creating a transformative, new, ultra-low-cost proprietary data source that makes CoStar even more valuable, more accurate, and timelier.”
“For decades, Vexcel has invested in creating highly accurate geospatial data that customers rely on every day,” said Erik Jorgensen, chief executive officer of Vexcel. “By joining CoStar Group, we gain the scale, technology and resources to broaden our reach, accelerate innovation and deliver even greater value to customers worldwide.”
Following the closing, Vexcel will continue to operate its data program under the Vexcel brand and to serve its customers and partners worldwide. Erik Jorgensen and the Vexcel leadership team will continue to lead the business.
Goldman Sachs served as exclusive financial advisor and Latham & Watkins served as legal advisor to CoStar Group. William Blair served as exclusive financial advisor and Snell & Wilmer served as legal advisor to Vexcel.
