CoStar Group launches new benchmarking tool for hotels

CoStar Group, a provider of online real estate marketplaces, information and analytics in the commercial and residential property markets, has launched STR Benchmarking, a “transformational” benchmarking platform for the global hotel industry. STR Benchmarking represents the next generation of STR, with the company’s hotel data benchmarking, analytics and marketplace insights integrated into CoStar’s industry-leading information, analytics, and data-driven news platform. Acquired by CoStar Group in 2019, STR is the leader in the hotel benchmarking space with a sample of 77,000 participating properties representing 10 million rooms around the globe. Andy Florance, founder and chief executive officer of CoStar Group, said: “This is a historic day for CoStar Group, and most importantly, for the global industry that has based its business decisions and success on STR’s reports for nearly four decades. “STR Benchmarking is one of the most sophisticated software products CoStar Group has taken to market, with STR’s industry-standard metrics and reports centralised and digitised to deliver real-time analytics, intelligence and functionality. This software is built to evolve and scale with new data sets and property types.” The first release of STR Benchmarking focuses on property-level data and analytics for hotel owners and operators with enhanced functionality built on the foundation of the renowned STAR Report. The multilingual software also rolls out new functionalities, such as user and competitive set self-management as well as high-frequency updates to data. Future product enhancements, which are expected to begin rolling out later this year, include portfolio-level benchmarking, monthly P&L, average-length-of-stay data, and forward-looking occupancy. Amanda Hite, president of STR, said: “STR Benchmarking honours the legacy of STR’s reporting while meeting the evolving needs of our industry. Through this product, our clients will optimise their strategic internal collaboration and decision-making across their own hotel portfolios, sales & marketing departments, revenue and performance management teams, operations, finance and development. “By building a comprehensive benchmarking solution, we are unlocking tremendous potential for our clients and positioning CoStar and STR to increase the value of our product.”