CoStar Group has agreed to buy Vexcel Group for about $730 million in cash. CoStar is best known for commercial real estate data and the Homes.com and Apartments.com listing sites. Vexcel flies one of the largest survey-grade aerial imaging programs in the world.
For open-source analysts, this is a change in who owns a major non-satellite imagery source.
What CoStar is getting
Vexcel captures more than 60 million aerial images a year across over 45 countries and 320 major metro areas. In the US its coverage reaches 99.6% of the population. The company had more than $140 million in revenue over the past twelve months, growing over 30%, with an adjusted EBITDA margin around 20%.
Aerial imagery from aircraft isn’t the same as satellite imagery. It’s sharper, it’s taken at an angle as well as straight down, and it’s flown on a schedule over the places that matter commercially, which means cities. You can read a building’s roof, count its floors, see its parking and spot changes between flights. Satellites see more of the planet. Aircraft see the built environment in far more detail.
CoStar says it will run Vexcel’s imagery through its own AI to extract tens of billions of new data fields on hundreds of millions of properties. That’s the point of the deal: turning pictures into structured records about every building.
What changes for imagery users
Vexcel keeps its brand and leadership, and the deal is expected to close in the first quarter of 2027. In the short term, customers shouldn’t see much difference.
The longer question is priorities. Vexcel sells to insurers, governments, mapping companies and analysts. CoStar is a property data company with competitors who also buy imagery. Under new ownership, the archive could get more attention on property attributes and less on everything else, or licensing terms could tighten for anyone CoStar considers a rival.
Last month Vexcel opened plain-language search across its archive to AI agents, which we covered in Vexcel Opens Plain-Language Search of 15.1 Million km² of Aerial Imagery to AI Agents. That kind of open access is what analysts should watch. If it survives the acquisition, the archive becomes more useful. If it quietly narrows to property use cases, the OSINT community loses one of its better sources of high-resolution urban imagery.