Here’s a summary of this review in case you don’t feel like reading: If you are bored easily, don’t like doing the same few tasks over and over again, have an issue with micromanagement, and want to get some sort of satisfaction out of your work, do not take this job.
I worked here for a year and half and like 90% of my colleagues, I stayed much longer than I planned, because of the money. This is a long review but I could have easily written a novel about why you should avoid working here. Everything you do is based on metrics. If you don’t hit those metrics, you will receive emails from your manager and possibly director asking why you aren’t doing your job (sometimes it’ll include a graph of your lack of progress throughout the day), and you’ll then need to write out a “plan of action” that includes how you plan to improve. I was less supervised as a high school student than I was at this job.
This job would honestly be bearable if you didn’t have managers and directors constantly breathing down your neck and making you focus so much on metrics. The stress from the metrics makes you put all your energy into hitting numbers (which are often fake) instead of focusing on serving the client/working on actual commercial real estate data/research. You will find yourself spending hours trying to hit your goal of 14 interviews because 90% of brokers would much rather communicate via email and don’t have time to sit on the phone answering questions (shocking that a data company hasn’t figure that out considering it’s 2019).
One of the company’s biggest flaws is how it treats people who deserve to move up and get promoted. They’ll tell you during the interview process that there are many different avenues you can go down after being a research associate for a year or two, but that’s just not the case for majority of people. I’ve watched numerous people perform consistently well each month, win awards such as “top producer” or “top interviewer,” and take on extra team responsibilities still get passed up repeatedly for promotions over people who either barely met their metrics or are known for cheating the system. One of the popular reasons people are told they didn’t get promoted was because they were “too valuable to lose as a research associate.” In reality, they want certain people to be managers- those who will never question how things are done and those who don’t have a problem micromanaging.
You’ll notice there’s a large number of good Glassdoor reviews that people wrote around the same time (written a few months ago)…That’s because the CEO held multiple meetings with different departments to highly encourage people to go onto Glassdoor and leave reviews about how great it is to work at CoStar. Usually, if it’s a decent place to work, you don’t have to ask people at your company to write inflated reviews.
In short, the money is great; but if you’re looking for a job that makes you feel valued, requires you to use your brain and critical thinking skills, or gives you any sense of independence, do not take this job.
