Osborne Clarke advises CoStar on acquisition of Fairmas Benchmarking

Osborne Clarke has advised CoStar Group, a leading provider of online real estate marketplaces, information, and analytics in the commercial and residential property markets, on the acquisition of products and assets known under the name Fairmas Benchmarking, a leading German benchmarking product for the hospitality industry, from Fairmas GmbH.

Fairmas Benchmarking was launched in 2004 and is part of the financial software product division of Fairmas GmbH. The Berlin-based software company is now selling its hotel benchmarking to long-time US cooperation partner STR, the hospitality information and benchmarking business of CoStar Group. Over the past 18 years, the two partners have jointly collected daily hotel market data from more than 2,200 hotels in Germany and served the hotel industry with market figures. Together, STR Germany and Fairmas Benchmarking cover more than 2,200 German hotels with over 320,000 rooms.

STR has been part of the CoStar Group since 2019. Founder and Chief Executive Officer Andrew Florance explains: “STR has been in Europe since 2008 and is committed to providing the best products, data and services to clients throughout the region. We are looking forward to continuing the strong customer relationships developed by Fairmas, while offering all of our German hotel clients significant incremental value through planned new products and data sets. We believe that the entire hospitality industry in Germany will benefit as we combine hotel benchmarking products with our CoStar information platform and expand our forward booking and profitability data sets."

The Osborne Clarke team advising CoStar, led by Dr Björn Hürten, comprised Charlotte Mager (both Corporate / M&A), Konstantin Ewald, Benjamin Schaum (both IT), Dr Jens Schefzig, Timo Bosman (both Data Protection), Ghazale Mandegarian-Fricke, Jan Marco Aatz (both Antitrust) and Florian Merkle (Tax).