Dysfunctional, dishonest and distasteful - Factory-line content farmer CoStar Group Employee Review

Nutshell: Toxic workplace, mandate to RTO 5 days a week, preference to hire people without kids due to lack of family-friendly policies. You need to stay home with your sick kid? Can't work from home, must take PTO. If that place wasn't bad enough, they just took away 52 work-from-home Fridays and offered us FIVE WHOPPING floating days a year in return. CoStar functions much like our current administration: constant chaos and frequent mass firings. I was recruited by Homes.com to help launch what sounded like a cool new project. Except there was never an overarching plan, leadership or resources for how this was supposed to happen. In fact, we spent the first three months working on something we weren't hired to do because the higher ups couldn't be bothered with our project. Our team quickly learned that we were not a priority for the company, yet we had the same unrealistic quotas as everyone else. The kicker is that our content wasn't discoverable (another non-priority for the company), so the quotas made no sense. Homes.com also wanted to function like a newsroom, except it relied more on auditors than editors for evaluating content, which focused more on grading us like children than truly improving our work. Our "grades" were intentionally low-balled as an excuse to not give us bonuses or promotions. At one point, the CEO thought we should abandon our project and switch to writing for the blog - another joke that warrants a separate post. After more than a year of working our butts off, we were informed at our mass layoff that Homes will be relying more on AI going forward, which leads me to believe we were hired under false pretenses with the sole purpose of the company using our writing to train AI. The bottom line is that CoStar has no idea what they're doing. They recruited people on a nationwide LI call to relocate to Richmond just 2 months before firing most of the content team. Their sole business model: "Your listing, your lead," is not in fact true, and the emperor wears no clothes. They think their weak-a$$ commercials, "Homes.com is the best," makes it true just because they say so. But Zillow still far outranks them. The only way their reign of terror can be stopped is if people stop agreeing to work there, otherwise you will be burned at the end. Oh, and you'll have to sign an illegal non-compete clause not to work for another competitor for a year, otherwise they will go after you in their petty, petty way.