Visual Lease and CoStar Real Estate Manager are no longer competing products. CoStar Group announced a definitive agreement to acquire Visual Lease on October 22, 2024 and confirmed the deal had closed on November 1, 2024. Both are now CoStar products, so the real question is not which vendor wins a bake-off. It is which of the two platforms a new buyer should be sold, and what happens to your renewal if you are already on one of them. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
This comparison was written for buyers who are actively shortlisting and found two products that turn out to have one owner. Every claim about the acquisition below is taken from CoStar Group's own investor relations announcement, and product facts were checked on each vendor's site in September 2026. Last updated September 2026.
Did CoStar acquire Visual Lease?
Yes. CoStar Group (NASDAQ: CSGP) completed its acquisition of Visual Lease on November 1, 2024, having announced the agreement on October 22, 2024. CoStar stated the acquisition would enhance its Real Estate Manager business line. Visual Lease, founded in 1996, was described in the announcement as used by over 1,500 organizations. Deal terms were not disclosed.
The wording CoStar used is worth reading closely, because it tells you more about the roadmap than any sales call will. The announcement called it a "merger of two equal firms" and said that "implementation of Visual Lease's technology will be seamless for all CoStar Real Estate Manager users." It also said the deal "will also provide Visual Lease's mid-market customers with a new opportunity to grow into an enterprise solution."
Read that last sentence as a buyer rather than as a press release. It describes an upgrade path from Visual Lease into CoStar Real Estate Manager, which is a reasonable thing for a company to build and also a reasonable thing to ask hard questions about at renewal.
Visual Lease vs CoStar Real Estate Manager: what actually differs
Before the acquisition these two sat in adjacent segments, and that shape has not disappeared. The distinction that still holds is portfolio size and who inside the organization owns the system.
| Visual Lease | CoStar Real Estate Manager | |
|---|---|---|
| Owner | CoStar Group, since November 1, 2024 | CoStar Group |
| Founded | 1996, per CoStar's announcement | CoStar Group product line, listed on NASDAQ as CSGP |
| Historic segment | Mid-market, named as the group CoStar wants to grow into enterprise | Enterprise, described as covering every phase of the lease lifecycle |
| Standards | ASC 842, IFRS 16, GASB 87 and GASB 96 | Lease accounting compliance across the same frameworks |
| Noted strengths | GASB experience and ESG analytics, both called out by CoStar | Transaction management and CoStar market data alongside administration |
| Published pricing | None. Request Pricing form only | None. Demo request only |
| Lease abstraction | AI lease abstraction marketed, powered by CoStar | Offered as part of implementation and services |
CoStar specifically credited two things Visual Lease brought in: "the platform's GASB experience strengthens CoStar Group's utility for government customers, while its ESG analytics product makes CoStar Group even stronger for identifying sustainability solutions across their portfolio." If you are a US public entity with a GASB 87 obligation, that is a signal the GASB capability is being kept rather than retired.
Which one should you buy?
Since both come from the same company, the honest answer is that you should stop comparing them against each other and start comparing the combined offer against everything else. A bake-off between two products with one P&L behind them is not a negotiation, and it will not produce the price tension buyers usually assume a shortlist creates.
Three practical rules:
- Put a genuine third vendor on the list. FinQuery for standards breadth, Occupier if you are a tenant and want a product built only for tenants, or Crunchafi if an accounting firm is doing the work. Without one of those, you have a single-source procurement wearing a shortlist costume.
- Ask which product is being actively developed. Not which is supported. Supported means the lights are on. Ask where the engineering headcount went this year and what shipped in each product in the last two quarters.
- Get the migration path in writing. If the sales conversation includes any version of growing into the enterprise solution, ask what that costs, what triggers it, and whether your current contract price survives the move.
Our full Visual Lease alternatives and pricing comparison covers the head-to-heads buyers actually search for, including Occupier and Black Owl Systems, and the best lease abstraction software roundup sorts the wider category into the three groups worth choosing between.
What the acquisition means if you are already a Visual Lease customer
Nothing dramatic in the short term, and something worth preparing for in the medium term. Acquired platforms rarely disappear, but they do stop being the place new features land first, and pricing tends to converge on the acquirer's model over a few renewal cycles.
Four questions to put in writing before your next renewal:
- Is the Visual Lease product line committed to a published roadmap through the term I am signing?
- If I am migrated to CoStar Real Estate Manager, who pays for the migration and does my rate change?
- What is the full export I can take out, in what format, and does it include documents as well as lease records?
- Do any integrations I depend on change ownership or endpoints as the platforms converge?
That last one catches people out. Integration endpoints do quietly move during platform consolidation, and a nightly sync that stops running is the kind of failure nobody notices until a month-end close is already late. If a lease feed drives your accounting, it is worth putting a simple uptime and endpoint monitor on it so a silent failure surfaces the same day rather than at reporting time.
Does the acquisition change lease abstraction?
Not really, and this is the part of the decision that gets missed in platform bake-offs. Visual Lease and CoStar Real Estate Manager are both systems of record. They hold, calculate and report on lease data. Neither of them removes the step where somebody has to read a stack of signed PDFs and their amendment chains and turn them into structured fields in the first place.
That step is priced separately in almost every implementation quote in this category, and it is usually the largest single line nobody asked about. On a hundred lease back catalog it is routinely a bigger number than year one of the software. Our lease abstraction cost guide works the math on all three ways to get it done, and the lease abstraction software pricing page records which vendors publish a rate card at all.
The sequence that saves money is unglamorous: abstract the portfolio into structured, source-linked data you own and can export, then load verified terms into whichever platform you choose. Do it in that order and the platform decision gets cheaper, because you are no longer buying migration services to fix data quality at the same time. It also means the abstract survives a vendor change, which, given the subject of this article, is not a hypothetical concern. Our CoStar lease abstraction page shows the field set a CoStar Real Estate Manager record expects.
Who owns the other lease software vendors?
Visual Lease is not an isolated case. This category has consolidated steadily, and several of the product names still circulating in buying guides now belong to somebody else or have been folded into a larger platform. Ownership matters at purchase because it tells you whose roadmap you are actually buying into. Every row below was checked in September 2026.
| Product | Now owned by | How you can tell |
|---|---|---|
| Visual Lease | CoStar Group | Acquisition completed November 1, 2024; joins the CoStar Real Estate Manager line |
| LEVERTON | MRI Software | leverton.ai redirects to MRI Contract Intelligence |
| Kira Systems | Litera | Acquisition announced August 2021; kirasystems.com redirects to Litera's Review capability |
| LeaseQuery | Renamed FinQuery | Company rebrand, same product line |
| AMTdirect | MRI Software | Brand folded into MRI ProLease |
| LeaseCrunch | Renamed Crunchafi | Company rebrand, same product line |
| Lextract | No longer resolving | Domain stopped resolving in late August 2026 and was still down in September |
The Lextract row is the one worth pausing on. It published a genuine per-lease rate, which made it useful in comparisons, and then the site simply stopped answering. No announcement, no redirect. That is the scenario your data export policy exists for, and the reason we keep saying you should hold an exported copy of your own lease data rather than relying on a login continuing to work. The MRI Contract Intelligence page covers what happened to LEVERTON in more detail.
Is CoStar Real Estate Manager the same as Visual Lease now?
No, not as of September 2026. They remain separately marketed products under one owner, with their own sites, their own sales motions and their own feature sets. CoStar described seamless implementation of Visual Lease technology for Real Estate Manager users, which implies capability sharing rather than an immediate merge into a single product.
What that means practically: you can still be sold either one, the two will increasingly share components, and over time the differences narrow. Treat any statement about long-term product independence as a commercial promise to get in the contract, not a technical fact.
How much does Visual Lease cost after the acquisition?
Visual Lease still does not publish pricing, and neither does CoStar Real Estate Manager. Both route to a form. Nothing about the acquisition changed that, and directory sites that quote confident figures for either product are estimating rather than reporting. We have seen ranges for Visual Lease that differ by more than twenty times across supposedly authoritative directories, which is a good working definition of a price that does not exist publicly.
What you can do is control what the quote contains. Ask for subscription, implementation, data migration and abstraction of the existing portfolio as four separate numbers. The fourth is the one that is usually bundled invisibly, and it is the one you can source elsewhere at a published rate. If ASC 842 compliance is the deadline driving the purchase, our ASC 842 lease data extraction page lists the fields the measurement actually needs, and critical date extraction covers the option and notice dates that have to survive into whatever calendar you end up using.
The short version
CoStar owns both. Compare the combined offer against a genuinely independent third vendor rather than against itself, get the migration path and the export rights in writing, and price the abstraction of your existing leases as its own line rather than accepting it inside an implementation number. The platform you pick will change hands again at some point. The structured lease data you export does not have to change with it.