Commercial vs. Residential Real Estate Data: Which Platform Wins Each Market?

The real estate data platform with the best commercial coverage is CoStar; the platform with the best residential coverage is Cotality. This is not a hedge or a draw. Commercial and residential property data are built on different data models, and no single platform wins both with equal depth. CoStar runs a proprietary CRE database covering more than 6 million commercial properties and 11 million lease and sale comps, backed by more than 1,600 dedicated market researchers. Cotality, the rebranded name for CoreLogic as of March 2025, is positioned as the leading provider of property insights and solutions to the residential real estate ecosystem, serving home lending, insurance, and government workflows.

Getting this split wrong is expensive. Buying CoStar for residential mortgage, AVM, or hazard underwriting work means paying enterprise CRE pricing for data that was never engineered for parcel-level consumer-property workflows. Buying Cotality for commercial leasing, tenant intelligence, or submarket rent analysis means working from a residential-first data model that lacks the deep lease comp inventory CRE brokers and institutional investors expect. Defaulting to a single "covers both" platform without understanding the depth tradeoff means quietly accepting weaker comps, shallower coverage, or both, and discovering the gap mid-deal. The sections below cover how the two winners split the market, where the line gets blurry, and which platform to choose when a buyer needs both.

Why Commercial and Residential Real Estate Data Are Different Disciplines

The CRE data model is built around buildings, leases, tenants, and submarkets. Commercial buyers need verified lease comps, current availability, tenant rosters, submarket rent trajectories, and operating performance at the property and portfolio level. The unit of analysis is the building and its income stream. CoStar's data signature reflects this directly: coverage of more than 6 million commercial properties, 11 million lease and sale comps, and 3,000+ markets and submarkets, verified by field, aerial, and drone research staff.

The residential data model is built around parcels, ownership, mortgages, AVMs, hazard, and consumer-property records. Residential buyers (mortgage lenders, insurers, AVM providers, agents, and investors) need parcel-level ownership history, mortgage and lien records, AVM-grade valuation models, hazard and climate risk, and consumer/household context. The unit of analysis is the parcel and the homeowner. Cotality's positioning makes this explicit: it serves home lending, insurance, real estate, and government workflows across the property lifecycle.

These two data models require different acquisition pipelines: CRE field research and broker relationships on one side, county recorder, MLS, and mortgage data feeds on the other. They run on different update cadences. They feed different analytics stacks, with submarket rent forecasting on the commercial side and AVM and hazard scoring on the residential side. A platform engineered for one of these can extend into the other, but extension is not the same as native depth.

The right question for the buyer is whether the workflow sits on the commercial or residential side of the property-type line, and whether that use case demands specialist depth. That framing is what the rest of the article answers.

How CoStar Wins Commercial Real Estate Data

CoStar is the category leader in North American commercial real estate information, analytics, and online marketplaces by every measurable signal: coverage, researcher headcount, revenue, and renewal economics. The CoStar Suite covers 6+ million properties, 11+ million lease and sale comps, and 3,000+ markets and submarkets globally. The platform claims more than 1,600 dedicated market researchers conducting field, aerial, and drone research, a level of human verification no other CRE database matches at scale. For commercial buyers, that depth is the structural reason competitors cannot catch up.

The financial scale tells the same story. CoStar Group reported 2023 revenue of $2.4 billion despite a downturn in CRE transaction volumes, and the business runs on a subscription model with over 95% recurring revenue. The CoStar Suite alone generated more than $1 billion in 2024. CRE professionals pay for the platform and renew because nothing else delivers the same depth on lease comps, tenant intelligence, and submarket rent trajectories.

The product set is a full CRE workflow stack rather than a single database. LoopNet is positioned as the world's largest online commercial real estate exchange. CoStar Market Analytics drives submarket-level forecasting. STR sits behind the global hospitality benchmarking layer. With CoStar Group's February 2025 acquisition of Matterport, the platform also pulls 3D digital twin capture into the same ecosystem. The result is data, marketplace, analytics, and visualization in one stack.

CoStar is the right answer for institutional CRE investors, brokerage houses, lenders underwriting commercial loans, REITs, corporate real estate teams, and hospitality benchmarking workflows. If a buyer's question involves a lease, a tenant, a submarket rent trajectory, or a CRE asset class (office, industrial with data centers included, retail, multifamily-at-scale, hospitality), CoStar is the default answer in the category. The pricing reflects the depth: CoStar Suite seats are enterprise-tier, sold on annual contracts, and not published publicly, but the buyers who need this data treat it as infrastructure rather than a discretionary line item.

A note on the parent versus the product. CoStar Group has been investing heavily in residential through Homes.com and adjacent segments, including the May 2026 $800 million acquisition of Zonda for residential SaaS data and the August 2025 acquisition of Domain Holdings Australia. CoStar Group has committed hundreds of millions of dollars to Homes.com since 2023, but the CoStar Suite for CRE (the product covered in this article) remains the commercial leader. Homes.com is positioned as the number two residential marketplace, not a residential data platform on par with Cotality.

How Cotality Wins Residential Real Estate Data

Cotality is the residential property data leader by design. The company rebranded from CoreLogic in March 2025, and the rebrand was explicitly framed as a progression "to a leader in property information, analytics, and data-enabled solutions from its origins in financial services supporting the mortgage industry." The residential DNA is the point. HousingWire describes Cotality as an information services company focused on the property industry that provides data and analytics to real estate professionals, financial institutions, insurance carriers, and government agencies.

The data model is residential-native. Cotality serves home lending, insurance, real estate, and government workflows worldwide, with operations in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, India, Germany, and Brazil. The product surface maps directly to residential financial workflows: Home Price Index, hazard and climate risk modeling, AVM and valuation, mortgage analytics, and resilience scoring. Every one of those products has a residential mortgage or insurance buyer as its primary user.

The depth signal is the customer list. CoreLogic's (now Cotality's) heritage is in residential mortgage and collateral risk, and the company's revenue has historically tracked U.S. mortgage origination volumes closely. Insurance carriers, mortgage lenders, AVM providers, and government housing agencies subscribe to Cotality's data feeds because the underlying data model was built for them. The AVM products are sold against Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac collateral standards, the hazard products feed P&C carrier underwriting at scale, and the Home Price Index is one of the most cited residential housing indicators in the U.S. lender market.

Cotality is the right answer for residential mortgage lenders, property and casualty insurers, AVM vendors, government housing programs, residential brokerages and MLSs needing market intelligence, and any platform building consumer-property products that need parcel-level depth, AVM models, hazard scoring, and mortgage history. If a buyer's workflow runs through residential collateral, residential consumer-property risk, or residential market modeling at financial-workflow scale, Cotality is where that data already lives.

A note on the brand transition: the Cotality name is recent, and many buyers still search for CoreLogic by name in lender and insurer procurement workflows. The underlying data leadership has not changed; only the company name has. Writers, procurement teams, and vendor lists will use both names interchangeably for some time.

Where the Line Gets Blurry: ATTOM Data Solutions Covers Both

ATTOM Data Solutions is the credible answer when a buyer's workflow does not fit cleanly on either side of the property-type line. ATTOM blends property tax, deed, mortgage, foreclosure, environmental risk, natural hazard, and neighborhood data for more than 155 million U.S. residential and commercial properties, sourced from more than 3,000 U.S. counties and covering 99% of the nation's population. Property Navigator gives subscribers full access to 160 million residential and commercial property reports nationwide under one schema.

The tradeoff is breadth at the cost of specialist depth. ATTOM positions itself as a B2B data infrastructure provider, licensing information to other businesses that incorporate it into their own products and systems through APIs, bulk file licenses, cloud delivery, and an MCP server for AI-native access. The standard AVM product is focused on single-family and small multifamily buildings, and the rental AVM is similarly residential-tilted. In practice, ATTOM delivers a clean, AI-ready, consistent property record across both property types, but it does not match CoStar's CRE depth on lease comps, submarkets, and tenant intelligence, and it does not match Cotality's residential depth on mortgage analytics, insurance-grade hazard, and AVM modeling for the largest financial workflows.

ATTOM is the right answer for proptech builders, fintech and insurtech companies, academic researchers, government agencies, and any team building a product on top of normalized property data that needs both residential and commercial parcels in one schema with one ATTOM ID per property. With Lovell Minnick Partners as the private equity owner and the January 2026 acquisition of ResiShares adding SFR forecasting and quantitative analytics, ATTOM is steadily deepening the residential side of its catalog. The platform is the right call when consistency and coverage across both segments outweigh the deepest specialist workflow tooling on either side.

Where PropStream Fits: The Residential Investor Specialist

PropStream is built for residential real estate investors, wholesalers, agents, and flippers. The platform covers 160+ million properties nationwide pulled from MLS records and public records, updated daily. PropStream Mobile lists property characteristics, AVMs, ownership information, and mortgage details alongside situational data like pre-foreclosure and bankruptcy. That stack is the exact one a residential investor uses to source motivated-seller deals.

The data model is residential-investor-native. PropStream's core workflows (Drive for Dollars, list building with 120+ filters across absentee owners, high equity, and pre-foreclosure, skip tracing for owner contact information, and MLS-backed comps) are residential by construction. The platform serves real estate investors, wholesalers, agents, and brokers needing comprehensive property data to identify investment opportunities, and the 2025 acquisitions of BatchLeads and BatchDialer fold lead generation and dialer capabilities into the same product surface.

The corporate story matters here too. In November 2021, Stewart Title acquired PropStream for $175 million, and the product now operates as a Stewart subsidiary. That parent gives PropStream stable funding and title-industry connectivity, but the product positioning has stayed focused on the residential investor buyer rather than expanding upmarket into enterprise CRE.

PropStream covers commercial properties in its database, but the workflow surface, comp engine, and feature design are residential-investor-tilted. CRE brokers running submarket rent analyses and institutional investors underwriting office portfolios are not the buyer PropStream was built for. The right buyer is a residential real estate investor, wholesaler, fix-and-flipper, buy-and-hold landlord, or residential agent who needs off-market lead generation and motivated-seller data at retail SaaS pricing, not enterprise mortgage, insurance, or CRE data.

Other Real Estate Data Providers

Picking the Right Platform for Each Side of the Market

Pick CoStar if the work is anchored in commercial real estate: institutional CRE investing, brokerage, leasing, CRE lending, REIT analytics, hospitality benchmarking, or any workflow where lease comps, tenant data, and submarket rent forecasting are the core data need. The depth on the CRE side is unmatched, and the price reflects that.

Pick Cotality if the work is anchored in residential property data at financial-workflow scale: mortgage origination and servicing, residential AVM, property and casualty insurance underwriting, climate and hazard modeling, government housing programs, or residential market intelligence at lender and insurer grade. The product set, the heritage, and the customer base all converge on the residential financial buyer.

Pick ATTOM Data Solutions if the team is building a product, running research, or operating a workflow that needs both commercial and residential property records in one normalized schema, and the buyer can accept specialist-depth tradeoffs on either side in exchange for breadth, AI-ready delivery, and consistent property IDs across both segments.

Pick PropStream if the buyer is a residential real estate investor, wholesaler, flipper, or residential agent who needs off-market lead generation, skip tracing, and motivated-seller workflows at retail SaaS pricing rather than enterprise-grade mortgage, insurance, or CRE data.

The category-level answer is clean: CoStar wins commercial and Cotality wins residential. ATTOM Data Solutions earns its place when normalized records across both property types matter more than specialist depth on either side, and PropStream wins the residential-investor niche. Even when a buyer needs both commercial and residential coverage in one place, the structural reality of the category holds: the two specialists each win their half of the market, and the right strategy is to match the platform to the side of the line the workflow lives on.