CoStar Group has acquired an approximately 30% stake in Wikicasa, an Italian real estate marketplace, the companies announced July 1.
Wikicasa is unusual for a listings platform in that its owners are also its biggest suppliers. Shareholders include Tecnocasa Group, Gabetti Group, RE/MAX Italy and Tempocasa, four of the largest brokerages operating in Italy. The site carries more than 600,000 listings, over 100,000 of them commercial.
“We are delighted to have reached an agreement to invest alongside Italy’s leading agents in Wikicasa,” CoStar Group founder and CEO Andy Florance said in a statement.
Wikicasa CEO Pietro Pellizzari called the investment “a significant milestone in our growth journey.”
CoStar plans to route Wikicasa’s commercial inventory into LoopNet, its global commercial listings platform, which gets roughly 13 million unique visitors a month. Italian commercial properties listed through Wikicasa would gain exposure to LoopNet’s international buyer base under the arrangement. On the residential side, CoStar said the deal will help expand adoption of Matterport’s 3D digital twin and AI-powered listing tools across Wikicasa’s agent network, technology currently used by only a small number of Italian agencies.
CoStar shares rose 5.4% the day the deal was announced.
The Wikicasa investment came one day before CoStar announced a separate expansion, the launch of its CoStar Platform in France, on July 2. The two moves mark CoStar’s latest push into European commercial real estate markets, following a pattern of recent acquisitions and partnerships aimed at extending LoopNet’s reach beyond the U.S. and U.K.
Terms of the Wikicasa investment, including the purchase price, were not disclosed.
