WASHINGTON, DC—Effective this past weekend, CoStar Group's database has been integrated with that of Its listing service, LoopNet. Although LoopNet has been under CoStar ownership since 2012, they've maintained two “separate and distinct databases” since then, CoStar's Rob Cain tells GlobeSt.com.

In part, that was due to the fact that “CoStar and LoopNet actually speak to very distinct audiences,” says Cain, VP of product management with CoStar. “At its heart, LoopNet is a marketing platform that is primarily intended to reach an audience of end users including smaller investors, and real estate professionals will market their listings to that audience through LoopNet.” By contrast, CoStar's subscriber base is comprised “almost entirely of commercial real estate professionals: brokers, appraisers, larger owner/investors, lenders, etc., who want higher-quality verified research data.”

With effectively two separate platforms going at once, “There was a fair amount of redundancy in terms of how customers were communicating to us about those properties,” Cain says. “As the years went on following the merger, we also recognized that we were missing some tremendous opportunities to bring higher quality and more timely data to our information customers, people subscribing to CoStar.