How Manston Investments cut weeks of research to hours, and found deals beyond their existing agent networks.
How a commercial property investor cut weeks of research to hours — and found deals beyond their existing agent networks.
Before we adopted CoStar there was quite a lot of data out there, but it's unstructured ... it can be a complete nightmare to cleanse and make comparable. So, the ability to have clean, comparable data across asset classes, across multiple time frames is clearly a huge time saver.
Five things CoStar changed for Manston Investments
Clean, Comparable Data - Brought In-House
CoStar gives Manston a single, structured source of market and asset-level data, eliminating hours spent reconciling multiple sources. Year-end KPIs, internal revaluations, market analysis - tasks that used to mean weeks of calls and consolidation now take a couple of hours on CoStar.
More Strategic Conversations with Agents
CoStar hasn’t replaced Manston’s agent relationships, it has made them more productive. By researching markets and assets in advance, Tom arrives at every call with data in hand, enabling sharper questions, faster triangulation, and quicker decisions.
Broader Deal Sourcing Beyond Existing Networks
Manston’s agent relationships are strongest in the Midlands and London, with introductions naturally shaped by their existing networks. CoStar broadens the team’s visibility, helping them spot nearby opportunities and source assets from a wider range of agents nationwide. Vicki uses its filters and radius search to identify newly listed properties more quickly, helping Manston stay ahead of agent introductions and uncover opportunities that might not otherwise cross its desk.
More Confident Pricing and Underwriting
CoStar supports Manston’s underwriting with detailed, asset-level financial modelling, helping the team assess and model value before entering negotiations. The platform acts as an independent sense-check, giving Tom confidence that Manston is pricing acquisitions competitively without overpaying. It also strengthens risk awareness, with market data and news informing their view of market health, inflection points, and sector pressures.
Exploring New Sectors and Geographies
As Manston looks to diversify through joint ventures and new asset types, CoStar helps the team explore unfamiliar markets with confidence. Alerts surface new opportunities early, allowing them to carry out light due diligence and build familiarity ahead of acquisition. For Vicki, cross-sector search across education, healthcare, industrial and retail helps uncover opportunities beyond existing agent briefs, keeping the business proactive as its strategy evolves.
Manston Investments is a family-owned commercial property investor with a £30m UK-wide portfolio across industrial, office, retail, and leisure assets, with a strong focus on the Midlands. CoStar helps the team make faster, more confident investment decisions with clean, comparable market data, enabling them to validate and contextualise agent advice, uncover wider opportunities, and complete research in hours rather than weeks, while supporting ongoing analysis, pricing and valuation decisions, and a broader view of the market as strategy evolves.
Tom Boardman-Weston,
Managing Director
Tom has been Managing Director of Manston Investments for six years, having joined the business as a NED in 2017. Tom is responsible for designing Manston's investment strategy, maintaining stakeholder & external relationships, portfolio decisions, and the firm’s long-term growth agenda.
Victoria (Vicki) Hall,
Commercial Property Administrator
Vicki joined Manston Investments in April 2024, from a national law firm, where she worked within a large hospitality property team. She now supports the day-to-day running of the property department, including acquisition searches, comparables, disposals, and wider property administration.
In their own words
It allows us to be more active participants in those conversations rather than passive receivers of information. Without any context, it's difficult to judge how accurate any individual data point is, but with CoStar as a second source of data, we can triangulate.
The best thing to do is see what's available on CoStar. We work with a number of agents, but that doesn't show the whole market. CoStar helps us discover opportunities from a wider range of agents, giving us a more rounded view of the market.
CoStar supports us in engaging in some quite granular financial modelling to understand what the asset is worth to us. It acts as a good sense check that we are pricing things competitively, and not overpricing things.
What’s Next
By combining CoStar’s structured market intelligence with Manston’s established agent relationships, the team can move faster from opportunity to decision while remaining disciplined on underwriting and risk. As the business continues to optimise its portfolio, deploy capital, and expand into new sectors, CoStar will play an increasingly central role in shaping and executing strategy.
CoStar is going to be really valuable in helping to inform the inception of that strategy, and in terms of executing it, particularly where we might be looking at areas where we don't have the networks that we do have in our core markets.
Tom Boardman-Weston,
Managing Director,
Manston Investments
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