Andy Florance, the outspoken founder and chief executive of Domain’s new USD37.54 billion ($57 billion) owner CoStar Group, couldn’t be more different from the typical Australian corporate leader.
For one thing, he’s not afraid of, and in fact seems to relish, directly needling his competitors. “He’s got a good sense of humour, better than you would actually think,” Florance said of News Corp’s global CEO Robert Thomson. “And he hates me.”
The self-described hyper-competitive US property chief has been on a media blitz over the past week since CoStar closed its $3 billion acquisition of Domain from Nine Entertainment. The acquisition sets up a fascinating new phase in the real estate listings market, long dominated by News Corp's REA Group.
It also means Florance is facing a kind of media scrutiny that even he isn’t used to. Despite the size of the company he built, the multi-millionaire has enjoyed a relatively low profile in the US, at least in Wall Street terms. (Save for one story, which “will not be named”, a Business Insider profile which he says he successfully sued over.)
