The Virtual Tour Is Becoming the Property Database

01 · The transaction

Two different kinds of property information came together.

In April 2024, CoStar announced an agreement to acquire Matterport in a cash-and-stock transaction reflecting an estimated $1.6 billion enterprise value. The acquisition closed in February 2025.

CoStar brought listings, market information, transaction history, and enormous distribution. Matterport brought a platform designed to turn physical space into a measurable digital twin. One knows the market around the building. The other can increasingly describe the building itself.

02 · Beyond the tour

An image helps a person see. A record helps software reason.

Matterport’s Property Intelligence tools can derive room dimensions and labels, layouts, property reports, and other outputs from a captured space. Its commercial uses already extend into construction documentation, remote collaboration, facilities, capital planning, and due diligence.

The important distinction is between a visual experience and a structured record. A tour lets someone walk through a property online. A machine-readable record gives software information about dimensions, configuration, visible conditions, captured assets, and changes over time.

• Marketing: show the property remotely.
• Diligence: measure and document the space.
• Operations: maintain a visual record of assets and conditions.
• Planning: connect layouts to construction, capital, and occupancy decisions.

03 · The larger opportunity

Connect the spatial record to the market record.

Combine a digital twin with rents, listings, transactions, tenant information, and operating history, and the property copy becomes an analytical layer across the asset’s lifecycle. Software could compare the building’s configuration with competing inventory, estimate fit for a user, identify missing information, or help prioritize capital work.

That complete experience is a strategic direction—not a claim that every capability is currently delivered in one product. But the combination gives CoStar the ingredients to pursue it.

04 · The control question

The route to the market may be as valuable as the record itself.

In 2026, Zillow removed Matterport tours from its platform. Matterport publicly described that as Zillow’s unilateral decision and said customers remain free to publish their tours elsewhere. Whatever the commercial dispute, it exposes a strategic issue: a property record is only useful if owners can keep it current and move it where decisions are being made.

Owners should ask who controls the record, who can update it, which systems can access it, and whether it remains portable when marketplaces or vendors change.

05 · What could break the thesis

A digital twin is not automatically the truth.

A scan becomes stale when the building changes. Measurements must be used at the appropriate level of reliance. Building systems do not integrate themselves. Data rights, privacy, security, and portability remain real constraints.

The opportunity is not a perfect digital replica created once. It is a trusted property record that can be refreshed, connected, and used without trapping the owner inside one distribution channel.