What is overtime like at CoStar Group?

Great work life balance, never work overtime

A bit disorganized, startup culture for a big corp

Good benefits, one WFH day, no overtime

Micro-management, lack of innovation, no career development

- The company is growing domestically & internationally. - Location is great both for working and living. Great views of the James river and the cost of living in Richmond is lower than many other cities. - Good Salary for the role with opportunities to grow within the company if you are willing to wait for them. - Most Managers actually care deeply for you and want to see you succeed. - Once you are done with work for the day you are done, there is no overtime or managers reaching out to you after the day is over. - Work from home on Fridays (Contingent on good performance) is a very nice perk.

- Everything you do is monitored through a monthly scorecard that often breaks or changes, so knowing how you are supposed to do your job and stay out of trouble can be challenging. - Opportunities to move or exceed within the company are contingent on current performance, but no two portfolios are the same and moving goalposts make it difficult to stay consistent. - Constantly moving goalposts. If you are succeeding, they will increase the number of things you need to pay attention to or make the job more difficult. - Top-down missions and directives often do not align with the needs from the bottom-up. It feels as though the top down of the company doesn't care much for it's employees or it's customers by lowering the value of the products but increasing it's costs. Then the employees themselves actually care about the customers and are the in-betweens for the organization's aggressive and unfaltering decisions.

I want to give zero star but 1 is the smallest

Terrible! I worked in Boston office and the cultural is toxic. Working hour is much longer than the industry. People sometime need to work overtime that is due to senior management bad schedule. Wouldn’t get any appreciate and no overtime paid bonus. Salary is lower than the industry average but highly demand on the work. 5 days on site work. No flexibility. Stay as far as possible!

Pay would be fair- if they didn’t work you to death for it. I work 55-75 hours every single week to earn that.

They hate you. Your bosses hate you and will work you like a dog. You will have to use your days of PTO just to stay above water to meet your weekly goals. And you will STILL have to work on those days off to meet the demands. Metrics are used to measure work productivity. System is extremely flawed. Metrics seem to be based on the smallest, fastest completion of an assignment and apply that standard to EVERYTHING which is unrealistic and inaccurate. Assignments are deliberately given low points, requiring you to do double the amount of work a normal job would require to meet your weekly minimum goals. If this were occasional, it would be tolerable but it is the way of life at CoStar to overwork their employees. You could work 80 hours a week, driving hundreds of miles to assignments, fixing and dropping off the company car at the shop, (with no credit for your time spent) and your assignments could cause you to work well over 50 hours , most likely into 60 hours and weekends. No overtime pay. You will be under constant surveillance in your car and on your phone. Management will read your messages and emails, and watch you in your car as you drive. There’s a camera watching your every move. You are unemployee but they will treat you like a contractor. You could drive 1.5 hours to an assignment- let’s say they cancel the job. You then drive 1.5 hours back home to try to find something else to do- you get no credit for the 3-4 hours lost trying to do your job and at no fault of your own it didn’t pan out- they want you to “pivot” and spend another 10 hours trying to “find work” and turn something in. It’s hell. There isn’t room enough here to go into all the insane things they do. Just pass - the pay is good because the turnover rate and their reputation is so bad, it HAS to be high to recruit people.

Cutting edge technology. Benefits. Salary *

You’ll hear the word “expectations” constantly. You won’t meet them. Not because you’re slacking, not because you lack talent, but because the game was rigged with a heavy thumb on the scale long before you even stepped onto it. Salaried? Sure, in name only. They'll treat you exactly like an hourly worker—except without the overtime premium. Expect to log off officially, then keep working anyway to chase those ridiculous quotas and "expectations." The extra hours aren't optional; they're the price of not getting written up or let go. Welcome to the modern hustle tax.

Good base pay, smart employees, fine benefits

Toxic. Constant fighting over deals, generally incompetent management, poor company ethics. High base salaries and uncapped commission still cannot make this workplace remotely attractive.

1. Pay is decent, with the “possibility” of a monthly bonus if you happen to line up with whatever arbitrary metrics management decides that week. 2. The role gets you out in the field instead of chained to a desk. 3. Access to professional-grade gear most photographers could never afford on their own. 4. Constant interaction with new people in public spaces, at events, or on client shoots. 5. The occasional chance to work in genuinely beautiful locations. 6. Flying a drone commercially is one of the few aspects that actually feels fun.

Where to even begin… 1. Leadership without backbone. Management appeared more interested in pleasing executives than actually leading and guiding staff, which left employees without any real direction or clarity. 2. Chaotic operations. Assignments were often sent out late Friday nights, with the assumption that staff would work weekends. Pushing back on giving up any personal time usually led to being labeled as “inefficient" and "high-maintenance." Mind you, employees talk to each other, and not 1 photographer has said that they work less than 50-60 hrs a week. 3. Unsustainable workloads. Employees were regularly tasked with scouting, photographing, filming, editing, curating, uploading, and captioning 50+ parks and schools per week at the beginning of 2024. This metric was described as the “minimum safe metric.” Tasks and assignments eventually changed, but every new assignment had less value attached to it, adding more work and effort on the photographer's side to reach any metrics. Unfortunately, any employees ended up using PTO days just to catch up on editing. 4. Swarm phases. At a moment’s notice, photographers were required to travel to remote markets for 4–5 days straight, cramming in two weeks’ worth of assignments during that stretch. Travel was often encouraged over weekends to capture “authentic life” in public spaces, with zero consideration for personal time. Once back, employees were still expected to edit, upload, caption, and curate tens of thousands of images and videos in just five days. Travel was never listed or mentioned in the initial job description or interviews, and despite lots of push by photographers, they slyly made it a mandatory occurrence regardless of whether you couldn't travel due to personal differences and decisions. 5. Field work with little support. Staff were expected to complete assignments in extreme weather, deal with reshoots caused by shifting priorities, last-minute scrambles, and make sure they find work and organize it in a way that can help them reach their metrics, all while being efficient in the field. Photographers have had to handle everything alone when confronted with security issues, police stops, harassment, or hostile environments. It always felt like “this is your problem, not Costars, but here's the company's security management phone number if you need it." 6. Misleading job expectations. Roles were advertised as creative and fulfilling, but quickly turned into high-volume, low-quality production work that bore no resemblance to the original job description or responsibilities. 7. No expense coverage. Despite being on the road daily, field employees received no stipends for food, coffee or basic travel expenses outside of what the costar car provided. 8. Training out of touch. The focus was on software and creative “standards” rather than the reality of hitting impossible quotas under constant field issues and ever-changing assignment deliverables. 9. Moving targets. Priorities shifted daily, making planning nearly impossible and leaving employees scrambling to keep up with inconsistent demands. 10. Company-wide routine layoffs. After the homes.com launch, job cuts became a regular occurrence. Many employees realized they had been brought on simply to push the company past that milestone and were made to feel disposable by design. And the culture at the top has been made clear by Senior VP and Global Operations, Lisa Ruggles, who mentioned the employees' struggles during a company-wide meeting and responded: “Suck it up, buttercup, this is the job, what did you expect?” If you’re considering this company, be aware: the reality is extremely long hours, unstable and unexpected priority shifts, and a revolving door of completely burned-out employees.

It is a job that does pay money. About all I can say

Management does not care what reason you have to be out of office whether it’s a sick child, sick yourself or have a legitimate emergency. They threaten you over a one time event even when you are a model employee, go above & beyond and always put in long hours including working weekend to make quota’s. Their website even says 40hr work weeks and no weekends worked. They fail at their own work/life balance policy. Employee cohesiveness with a hostile work environment is the worst I have seen in my career.

Nice people and great health insurance.

A lot of turn over