Real estate analytics group CoStar has paid $450 million to acquire STR, formerly Smith Travel Research.
The deal is expected to close by the end of 2019.
STR was created in 1985 by Randy and Carolyn Smith as a benchmarking and analytics service for hotels.
It has since grown to include consulting services, market intelligence, training, forecasting and competitive analysis.
CoStar says it will use the STR acquisition in the same way that it did with its purchase of Apartments.com in 2014, to integrate and extend the tools to its investor and service provider customers.
STR currently gets data from around 65,000 hotels in 180 countries around the world, which then feeds into its core STARreport service.
Some 1.2 million reports are distributed every month, it claims.
Read Original Article
