Continuing its acquisition strategy, CoStar Group (Nasdaq:CSGP) this week finalized its acquisition of Resolve Technology, Inc., a leading provider of business intelligence and portfolio management software serving the institutional real estate investment industry.

Founded in 1990 by CEO Eric Forman, Resolve is based in Needham, Mass. Its clients include many of the world's leading real estate advisory and investment management firms, REITs, pension funds, and life insurance companies. Resolve's Request and Portfolio Maximizer software solutions enable investment managers to integrate data spread over numerous disconnected systems and countless Excel spreadsheets in one centralized information solution for the management of their real estate investments.

Resolve's investment analysis tools automatically consolidate historical, budget, and pro-forma financial and property information. They also tie together information related to assets, debt, and partnerships so clients can quickly understand the impact on performance and returns. The software facilitates the analysis of historical and forecasted performance of investments and enables what-if scenarios in order to optimize the performance of real estate portfolios.

The acquisition of Resolve follows CoStar's acquisition in July of Property and Portfolio Research, Inc. (PPR), a leading, independent provider of global real estate analysis, market forecasts and credit risk analytics to the commercial real estate industry. According to CoStar Group President and CEO Andrew Florance, the strategic acquisition of Resolve Technology is expected to further strengthen the appeal of CoStar's, PPR's and Resolve's offerings to a broad range of investors, financial institutions, and advisory firms engaged in direct real estate investments.

"CoStar and PPR's tools can become much more valuable when presented in context with the client's own asset information," Florance stated. "Resolve's sales efforts can benefit from CoStar's strong balance sheet -- and from CoStar's scale in marketing and sales. In addition, we believe Resolve can also become much more valuable when it uniquely integrates client information with CoStar's leading independent third party market information and forecasts."

As an example, Florance said that Resolve's tools have always made it easy for a client to quickly identify a property in their portfolio with a higher-risk concentration of lease expirations within a given year. "What it could not tell you was whether or not those lease-rollovers were likely to result in lower or higher net operating incomes for the property," Florance added. "Once the CoStar and PPR data is integrated with Resolve's products, a client will be able to understand immediately whether or not current market rents are higher or lower than the expiring rents, and whether or not similar properties are leasing quickly or not at all. We believe this enhanced capability will be invaluable for institutional investors with larger, complex portfolios in different property types spread over many markets."

"The ability to support rapid buy-sell-hold decisions based on accurate data and thorough analysis is a paramount concern for institutional investors and lenders alike," he continued. "Using Resolve's technology, portfolio managers can quickly evaluate different acquisition, disposition and financing strategies, and accurately measure and track complex risk parameters much more effectively."

In addition, Florance said the acquisition is in keeping with CoStar's announced strategy of capitalizing on the current environment to leverage its strong financial position and acquire companies that can support strong strategic long-term growth.

"For more than 20 years, CoStar has focused on expanding our research and market coverage to offer the most comprehensive source of commercial real estate information available online," added Florance. "Having largely completed our comprehensive domestic market coverage, we are increasingly focused on helping our subscribers do more with the enormous amount of information available to them. We believe that providing additional, value-added options for accessing and analyzing commercial real estate information will enhance CoStar's value for existing clients, and appeal to a large number of firms in the investment, banking and financial services sectors, ultimately expanding the overall market for our services."

Resolve Technology CEO Eric Forman said he was very excited about the potential to expand the firm's business intelligence and analytics platform under CoStar. "Our vision, which is shared with CoStar, is to provide automated processes and technologies that empower the real estate investment industry to make timely, information-driven investment decisions," said Forman. "Given CoStar's unmatched resources for aggregating and making available a wealth of property, tenant and sales information, and its extensive client relationships, I expect the combination of our firms will speed the widespread adoption of this more efficient and cost-effective technology in the marketplace."

CoStar said the acquisition will have no effect on its third quarter 2009 results, schedule to be released on Wednesday, October 21, 2009, and the Company reaffirmed its guidance for the third quarter. Also, the acquisition is not expected to significantly affect CoStar Group's 2009 revenue and earnings. The company will provide a more detailed discussion of the acquisition on its Third Quarter 2009 Conference Call scheduled for Thursday, October 22, 2009.

Please Please click here to see additional disclosures related to forward-looking statements associated with this transaction in CoStar's official announcement.