Xceligent bankruptcy – It’s a sad day in the commercial real estate data technology world, as CoStar’s biggest (and pretty much only) competitor, Xceligent, has filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy and decided to close its doors effectively immediately.
If you try to visit www.xceligent.com, you’ll be presented with a dead page that looks like this:
When CoStar acquired LoopNet in 2012, it was required that CoStar sell some assets to Xceligent in order for CoStar to have a worthy competitor in the marketplace and not become a monopoly. However, this was not enough. The commercial real estate data business is brutal and extremely capital expensive. Just look at CoStar’s public financial filings and you’ll notice just how many resources go into researching, collecting data in order to provide the service. Xceligent and Digsy AI were working on a partnership and during the many of the conversations we had, we talked about how hard they work and the many financial-and-human resources that go into providing the service. CoStar sued Xceligent claiming that Xceligent was illegally getting data from their CoStar data suite. When the judge found evidence of fault with Xceligent, it forced Xceligent to pay up to $20,000 per incident. That’s a crazy fine considering how many listings and buildings there are — so naturally, it’s no surprise to see Xceligent go. After this, Xceligent booted Doug Curry as CEO, and replaced him with Frank Anton.