Both are CoStar Group products. CoStar bought Visual Lease for $272.5 million in cash and closed on November 1, 2024, and as of 2026 the two are still sold as separate platforms. CoStar Real Estate Manager is the enterprise system, Visual Lease serves the mid-market. Neither publishes a price and neither lets you test extraction on your own lease. Upload one here and see the abstract free.
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Compiled from each product's own public pages, CoStar Group's acquisition announcements, and the CoStar Real Estate Manager blog, as of August 2026. The two rows most buyers cannot find anywhere else are the standards row, where the products genuinely differ, and the pricing row, where neither CoStar product publishes anything at all.
| Software | Who it is built for | AI lease abstraction | Accounting standards published | Try it free yourself | Published pricing |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| LeaseAbstractors This tool | Any team that needs lease PDFs turned into structured data | Yes, purpose-built, every field links to its source page | None. Exports clean data into whichever system does your accounting | Yes, upload a lease with no signup or demo | Free tier plus usage plans |
| Visual Lease | Mid-market portfolios running lease administration and accounting together | Yes, on CoStar's Lease LLM, with results validated against CoStar property data | ASC 842, IFRS 16, GASB 87, GASB 96 | No, demo and sales quote | None. Quote only |
| CoStar Real Estate Manager | Enterprise portfolios, thousands of leases, multi-entity and multi-currency | Yes, backed by CoStar's in-house abstraction team and its lease data | ASC 842, IFRS 16, FRS 102, ASC 840, local and statutory GAAP | No, demo and sales quote | None. Quote only |
Note the standards row carefully if you are a public-sector reporter: Visual Lease lists GASB 87 and GASB 96 on its own site, while CoStar Real Estate Manager's lease accounting page lists ASC 842, IFRS 16, FRS 102, ASC 840 and local GAAP without naming GASB. That is the clearest published difference between the two. Neither product publishes a rate card, neither offers a free trial, and the dollar figures that circulate for both in software directories and roundups are estimates with no stated methodology, so we do not repeat them. Confirm current pricing and standards coverage with CoStar directly before you buy.
These are now sibling products inside the same company, which makes the usual feature-grid comparison less useful than it looks. What still separates them is segment, implementation effort, and what each one publishes.
CoStar Group acquired Visual Lease in a deal that closed November 1, 2024 for $272.5 million in cash. Visual Lease still ships under its own brand and its own site. CoStar has published no consolidation timeline and frames the two as complementary rather than merging.
CoStar's own post on the acquisition puts it plainly: CoStar Real Estate Manager has a strong footprint in the enterprise market, serving for example six of the top 10 US banks, while Visual Lease has dominance in the mid-market. That is a CoStar claim, not an audited figure, but it is the clearest statement of intended fit either side has made.
The same CoStar post describes Visual Lease as having lighter configurations and more self-implementation options. If you have a small lease administration team and no appetite for a long implementation, that difference matters more than any feature checkbox.
Visual Lease now runs AI lease scanning and abstraction powered by CoStar's Lease LLM, calling it the industry's most accurate AI lease abstraction engine. Its own page says every document goes through more than 40 intensive validations and that results are checked against CoStar market data. Treat the accuracy claim as vendor-reported: no percentage is published and no independent benchmark exists.
Visual Lease publishes GASB 87 and GASB 96 coverage. The CoStar Real Estate Manager lease accounting page does not name GASB at all. If you are a city, county, university, or any other governmental reporter, ask that question first, because it narrows the choice before anything else does.
Both products are demo-gated with a custom quote. You cannot upload your own messiest lease and see what comes back before you commit. That is the single practical reason teams run their abstraction somewhere self-serve first and load the finished data into whichever platform they pick.
Whichever CoStar product you land on, both expect abstracted lease data to arrive already structured. This is how to produce it without a services engagement.
Add the base lease, every amendment, and any side letter or exhibit. Scanned documents are fine, and there is no minimum and no signup.
You get base rent and the rent schedule, escalations, term dates, renewal and termination options with their notice windows, operating expense and CAM terms, and the security deposit, all as structured fields.
Every field links back to the page and clause it came from, so a reviewer confirms the numbers in minutes instead of rereading the lease.
Download as Excel, CSV or JSON and map it into Visual Lease, CoStar Real Estate Manager, or whatever system of record you settle on.
Last updated August 2026. Who owns what, how the two products differ now that they share a parent, what each one does on AI lease abstraction, and how to choose.
Yes. Visual Lease is owned by CoStar Group. CoStar announced the acquisition on October 22, 2024 and the deal closed on November 1, 2024 for $272.5 million in cash. They are not, however, the same product. Visual Lease still runs under its own brand on its own site, and CoStar Real Estate Manager continues to be sold separately. So the honest framing for a buyer in 2026 is one vendor, two platforms, aimed at two different sizes of customer.
The main difference is who each one was built for. CoStar Real Estate Manager is the enterprise platform, built for organizations running thousands of leases across multiple entities and currencies with heavy ERP integration. Visual Lease is the mid-market platform, and CoStar itself describes it as having lighter configurations and more self-implementation options. The second real difference is published standards coverage: Visual Lease lists GASB 87 and GASB 96 alongside ASC 842 and IFRS 16, while the CoStar Real Estate Manager lease accounting page lists ASC 842, IFRS 16, FRS 102, ASC 840 and local GAAP without naming GASB.
Everything else you will read comparing them, the interface, the reporting, the support quality, comes from review-site scores that move around and that were largely collected before the two companies combined. Segment fit and standards coverage are the two things you can actually verify from primary sources today.
CoStar Group acquired Visual Lease for $272.5 million in cash, announced October 22, 2024 and closed November 1, 2024. Visual Lease had been an independent lease accounting and lease administration company before that. The acquisition gave CoStar a mid-market lease accounting product to sit under its existing enterprise platform, and gave Visual Lease access to CoStar's property dataset, which is what its AI abstraction now validates against. We wrote up the deal and what it means for existing customers in more depth on what the CoStar acquisition of Visual Lease means.
Yes. Visual Lease launched AI-powered lease scanning and abstraction running on CoStar's Lease LLM, and its own page claims every document goes through more than 40 intensive validations with results checked against CoStar market data. Visual Lease also states that it runs these models under an enterprise agreement with Amazon Bedrock rather than hosting its own. The capability is real and the market-data validation, which can flag a rent figure or a square footage that looks wrong against comparable properties, is something no other lease platform can easily copy. What is not published is any accuracy percentage, any independent benchmark, or any way to test it on your own document before you sign.
Yes, CoStar Real Estate Manager offers lease abstraction as part of its platform and CoStar has long run an in-house abstraction team of trained abstractors and attorneys, which is the same expertise the Lease LLM was built on. In practice it is delivered as part of an enterprise engagement rather than as a self-serve upload. We cover how that works, and what the import actually expects, in does CoStar Real Estate Manager do lease abstraction and in the guide to importing lease data into CoStar Real Estate Manager.
There has been no announcement that Visual Lease is being discontinued. As of August 2026 it is actively marketed under its own brand, with new AI abstraction functionality shipped since the acquisition. CoStar's own post-acquisition writing describes the two products as complementary and gives no consolidation roadmap or timeline. That is not the same as a guarantee, and any buyer signing a multi-year contract with either product is entitled to ask CoStar directly what the long-term plan is for both platforms. But the public record right now shows continued investment, not a wind-down.
Neither publishes pricing. Both are sold as annual subscriptions quoted after a demo, and both scale with portfolio size, modules, and implementation scope. You will find dollar figures for both in software directories and in roundup articles, and we deliberately do not repeat them, because none of those sources states a methodology and several of them contradict each other. The only reliable number is the one on a quote with your own lease count on it. If you want a sense of what the wider category charges and how the pricing models differ, our breakdown of ASC 842 lease accounting software cost lists every vendor that actually publishes a rate.
If you run a large, multi-entity portfolio with ERP integration requirements and a project team to implement it, CoStar Real Estate Manager is the one built for that. If you are mid-market, want a shorter implementation, and especially if you report under GASB 87 or GASB 96, Visual Lease is the closer fit and its published standards list backs that up. If your actual problem is not the system of record but the pile of lease PDFs that has to become structured data before any system is useful, that is a different job, and one you can do today without a demo. Upload a lease to our lease abstraction software, check the fields against the source pages, and export clean data into whichever platform you choose. Teams comparing more broadly usually also look at the Visual Lease alternatives and the CoStar Real Estate Manager alternatives, and our best lease abstraction software roundup covers the rest of the field.
Yes. CoStar Group owns Visual Lease, having closed the acquisition on November 1, 2024. They are not the same product: Visual Lease and CoStar Real Estate Manager are still sold as two separate platforms aimed at different segments.
CoStar Group acquired Visual Lease for $272.5 million in cash. The deal was announced October 22, 2024 and closed November 1, 2024.
CoStar Real Estate Manager is the enterprise platform for large multi-entity portfolios. Visual Lease is the mid-market platform with lighter configurations and more self-implementation options, and it is the one that publishes GASB 87 and GASB 96 coverage.
Yes. Visual Lease runs AI lease scanning and abstraction on CoStar's Lease LLM, with results validated against CoStar market data and more than 40 validations per document. No accuracy percentage is published and there is no self-serve way to test it.
Yes. Visual Lease lists ASC 842, IFRS 16, GASB 87 and GASB 96 on its own site. The CoStar Real Estate Manager lease accounting page names ASC 842, IFRS 16, FRS 102, ASC 840 and local GAAP but does not name GASB, so confirm this directly if you are a governmental reporter.
No announcement of a wind-down has been made. Visual Lease is actively marketed under its own brand and has shipped new AI abstraction functionality since the acquisition. CoStar describes the two products as complementary and has published no consolidation timeline.
No. Both are demo-gated with custom quotes and neither offers a free trial or published pricing. If testing extraction on your own leases before buying matters, a self-serve abstraction tool lets you do that first and export the data into either platform.
A self-serve alternative to the Visual Lease platform.
Learn moreFor teams deciding whether to run CoStar at all.
Learn moreVisual Lease against the biggest lease accounting rival.
Learn moreHow CoStar handles lease data and what its import expects.
Learn moreThe full field, ranked and compared.
Learn moreThe field set both platforms expect on import.
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