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Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Scout24 Q1 2026 Results Conference Call. I am Mathilde, the Chorus Call operator. [Operator Instructions] And the conference is being recorded. [Operator Instructions] At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to Filip Lindvall, Vice President, Group Strategy and Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Scout24's Earnings Call for the First Quarter of 2026. My name is Filip Lindvall, and I'm Vice President, Group Strategy and Investor Relations at Scout24. With me on the call today are Ralf Weitz, our Chief Executive Officer; and Martin Mildner, our Chief Financial Officer.

Ralf will start the presentation with key business highlights, and Martin will provide a detailed overview of our financial results. As always, we will conclude the call with a Q&A session. You can find today's presentation on our website, under Financial Reports and Presentations. This session will be recorded and a replay will be available shortly after the event.

Please take note of the disclaimer on Page 2. Ralf, now over to you.

Thank you, Filip, and welcome, everyone. Let's turn to Page 4. Q1 marks a good start to the year for Scout24. We delivered double-digit organic revenue growth, mid-teens growth ordinary operating EBITDA and 20% adjusted EPS growth. This performance was driven by continued strength in our Professional business and the solid contribution from Private.

In Professional, B2B subscriptions continue to drive strong revenue growth, supported by positive customer development and very high retention. Agents value our comprehensive and continuously evolving product suite as well as our role as a trusted partner. In Private, PPA is developing well as our platform gains further used amongst private sellers and landlords. At the same time, our B2C subscriber base continued to expand despite the rollout of the new tiering model. Our ecosystem is becoming increasingly interconnected. All customer groups are growing. We see an increased share of logged in users and customers are buying more products across the platform.

The pace of product innovation remains high, in Q1, we launched their tenant network and waiting list as well as scout the Street and further enhance our AI-powered search. These innovations further strengthen the ecosystem and enhance the user experience. As ultimately reinforce a Scout24 position as a leading real estate platform in Germany. AI continues to play a central role of Scout24. Wherever we deploy AI, we see higher engagement, increased usage and improved monetization. We are also leveraging AI internally to drive efficiency. We will share more details on our product and AI road map at our Capital Markets Day in 2 weeks.

We completed the Spain acquisition at the end of February and consolidated first revenues in March. As communicated yesterday, we are also upsizing our share buyback volume in 2026, a step that reflects the confidence we have in the business and future performance. Martin will explain on this further in his part.

Overall, Q1 shows that Scout24 is continuing to deliver double-digit organic growth, accelerating innovation and expanding margins. Based on this strong start, we are confirming our full year 2026 guidance.

Let's review our customer development for the first quarter. We reached 24,400 professional customers in Germany, an increase of 3.7% year-on-year. This growth is broad-based across sectors. We are adding customers across residential, commercial and developer segments. Professionals choose Scout24 because we bring together agent software, data, valuation and marketing in a well structured membership logic. There's a possibility for customers to purchase ecosystem products using our digital currency in more points. Our relationships with professionals continue to deepen, and Scout24 is increasingly being seen as a trusted partner that delivers value year after year.

Our B2C subscription business reached an average of around 508,000 customers are 2.5% year-on-year. Momentum improved towards the end of the quarter, with March increasing to around 516,000. We are making good progress with the rollout of our new tiering and pricing model. Our recently launched Tenant network product, which is a core product of the additional product features offered in the other tiers is scaling quickly. We now have close to 20,000 listings after just a few months. This additional inventory is already contributing 50 to 100 B2C subscription sign-ups per day to our higher-value pro membership. This goes on top of our existing funnel.

Now let's turn to Page 6 for an update on the dynamics of the German real estate market. The market remains fundamentally stable and healthy. This is reflected in our Scout24 Transaction Momentum index. This stands at 92 in Q1. Although this is slightly lower than last quarter, it still indicates a stable overall environment. On the supply side, listings are increasing. Inventory reached around 640,000 in March, up around 15% year-on-year. This development is driven by the strength of our platform and brand as well as long as standing times in the sale and rent market.

On the demand side, requests for rental contracts remain at a healthy level, although they are below previous peaks mainly due to affordability constraints and reduced mobility. Buyer interest has also moderated from earlier highs due to recent macroeconomic uncertainty, interest rate movements and geopolitical developments. Despite these trends, the underlying fundamentals of the sales market remain intact.

Turning to Page 7. You can see how AI is already delivering tangible growth and monetization across our platform. At our 2024 Capital Markets Day, we established AI as a core part of our road map. Since then, we have rolled it out across our products, and we now see clear impact. On the consumer side, take HeyImmo. In just a few months, it reached around 650,000 monthly users with close to 1 million conversations taking place in April alone. This shows that effectively integrating AI can drive engagement and loyalty on our platform. At the same time, traffic from external LLM remains very low at around 0.3% to 0.4%. This suggests that users do not perceive any added value in using external LLMs for real estate searches.

On the agent side, Propstack shows how this translates into monetization. Features include automated listing, expose video and floor plan creation, saving time and increasing productivity. Agents can manage more clients and hence are willing to pay more. Customers using these AI features generate around EUR 340 in monthly ARPU compared to EUR 220 without, more than 50% higher. A win for agents and for Scout24. The use of AI strengthened our platform, accelerates revenue growth and increases ARPU. And this is just the beginning.

In our upcoming CMD, we will demonstrate further integrations across our B2B memberships. Now I will hand over to Martin, who will talk you through our financial performance as he joins us for his first earnings call to Scout24.

Thank you, Ralf, and good afternoon, everyone. It's a pleasure to be on my first earnings call at Scout24. Having spent my first 2 months with the team, what really stands out is the quality of the business model we described earlier combining innovation, strong growth dynamic structural operating leverage and much more than robust cash generation, which is clearly reflected in our Q1 performance.

On Page 9, you can see our strong performance in the first quarter of 2026 compared to the first quarter of 2025. First of all, and as Ralf already stated at the beginning, we delivered another quarter of double-digit revenue growth, combined with further operating leverage. This reflects both good execution and a disciplined cost base while we continue to invest in technology, AI and acquisitions. Our revenues were up by 13.9% to EUR 179.6 million, with particularly strong momentum in the Professional segment. Secondly, our ordinary operating EBITDA increased by 15.1% to EUR 107.9 million leading to an ordinary operating EBITDA margin of 60.1%. This represents an improvement on the margin achieved in the first quarter of 2025.

AI is increasingly supporting our products, helping us to monetize more effectively and to run the business more efficiently. Thirdly, this also translated into healthy earnings growth. Our adjusted EPS increased by 20.1% to EUR 0.95. And finally, operating cash flow remained strong, up 10% to EUR 64.2 million. Excluding cash outflows related to share-based compensation, the increase would have been even stronger.

So if you are turning to Page 10, you can see our development in the professional segment. Before I will come to the respective numbers, I'd like to mention that we have updated our reporting structure in the Professional segment as a result of the integration of our Spain business. Spain's revenues are now included in subscription revenues, and the regional breakdown has been adjusted. Germany as our main and most important market is now shown separately, while the subscription business of Austria and Spain are combined under rest of Europe. Additionally, as a small cleanup, third-party advertising revenues from Spain and Austria have been reclassified under other revenue, where German advertising revenues were already reported.

So having said this, on Page 10, you will see that our Professional business continued to perform strongly in Q1 2026, reaching EUR 133.6 million in revenues, corresponding to a growth rate of 15.8% with subscriptions as a key growth driver. The German subscription business delivered industry-leading mid-teens revenue growth driven by strong ARPU expansion and customer growth. Migration to our new membership continues. Subscription revenue, rest of Europe totaled EUR 9.6 million for the first quarter, including the isolated revenues for Spain for the month of March. Transaction enablement developed positively as well, supported by CRM as well as data and valuation services. Consumer leads remain subdued while seller leads develop positively.

The combination of strong subscription momentum, continued customer expansion and disciplined execution drove further margin expansion compared to the first quarter 2025. The ordinary operating EBITDA margin of the Professional segment increased by 0.8 percentage points to 60.5%.

Now let's have a look on Page 11, where you can see the development of our Private segment. Revenues were up 8.8% and continued to benefit from solid demand across both subscription and pay per ad product. We ended the quarter with an average customer base of 507,600, up 2.5% year-on-year, while ARPU increased 2.7%, supported by upselling and product mix effects. We are progressing with the rollout of our new product tiering model. There's a transition phase as customers adapt to the new structure, and we are already seeing encouraging early indicators, including strong demand for higher-value memberships. Pay per add in Private remained strong, growing by 13.5%. This was driven by high market activity, strong brand and product positioning and rising marketing needs from landlords, which increased demand for our PPA offering as a rental market slowed.

The ordinary operating EBITDA margin of the Private segment remained stable at 58.9% as we continue to invest in brand and marketing for the new B2C offering.

Coming to Page 12, where we highlighted our main cost positions. As you can see, efficiency remains at the core of how we run Scout24 with automation and AI is driving our workflows. This is reflected in our Q1 cost development with organic cost growth in the mid-single-digit range. Even on a reported basis, operating costs increased by around 12%, remaining below revenue growth.

So let me provide you with some color on the various lines. Personnel costs declined organically by around 5%, driven by our AI initiatives and workflow automation. Organic FTEs continue to trend down even with a growing business. Marketing expenses increased mid-teens on an organic basis as we supported targeted campaigns, including the rollout of our new B2C subscriptions. IT costs increased driven by Spain as well as tech and AI investments, while organic cost growth remained disciplined. Purchasing and other operating costs rose in line with higher demand and an increased use of external services. This combination of efficiency on the one hand and targeted investment on the other hand, continues to drive our operating leverage resulting in an improvement of our ordinary operating EBITDA margin to 60.1% and therefore, 0.6 percentage points better than in the first quarter of 2025.

Turning to Page 13, where we show the items which are below ordinary operating EBITDA. Nonoperating effects were positive overall. I will comment on these positions on the next page. Depreciation and amortization increased moderately, reflecting the continued amortization of acquisition-related assets. The financial result improved significantly compared to the same period last year primarily driven by foreign exchange gains. This translated into a very strong net income of EUR 68.5 million and basic EPS of EUR 0.97. Adjusted net income and adjusted EPS also developed very positively with adjusted EPS increasing by 20.1% to EUR 0.95. This is highlighting the strength and quality of our earnings.

Finally, and due to our share buyback programs, the lower weighted average share count further supported EPS growth. So let's turn to Page 14, where you can see the bridge from reported net income to adjusted net income. I'd like to focus your attention only on the nonoperating costs. In fact, that our nonoperating items improved significantly and made a positive contribution to the net income in this quarter. This positive contribution was mainly driven by the reversal of the provisions for the share-based compensation due to a lower share price. As a consequence, the reversal led to a noncash related reduction of the provisions and to a higher net income. Furthermore, compared to the first quarter of 2025, reduced reorganization costs influenced the improvement of lower nonoperating costs, which were partly offset by some higher M&A-related expenses in connection with the closing and post-closing activities of [ Photockasa ].

As a result, adjusted net income was broadly in line with reported net income at EUR 67.1 million on an adjusted basis compared to EUR 68.5 million on a reported basis.

If you turn to Page 15, you will find another bridge this time from our adjusted net income to our free cash flow. Our free cash flow in Q1 2026 increased by 11% year-on-year to EUR 56.3 million. Please note that our cash flow was mainly impacted by working capital changes related to cash out in the first quarter of 2026, which have become due in connection with our long-term incentive programs for previous financial years. But even considering these cash outs, our free cash flow conversion remained strong at 84% of adjusted net income and 52% of ordinary operating EBITDA, highlighting our strong cash generation.

The next page is on our financial leverage and our capital allocation. In Q1, we continued our disciplined capital allocation. We are balancing shareholder return to its targeted investments. Our free cash flow was mainly deployed on the one hand into share buybacks and strategic acquisitions, especially in Spain, on the other hand. Both supporting our long-term growth strategy.

As a result, cash outs in the first quarter of 2026 for share buybacks and the payout of the purchase price for the business in Spain, led to an increase of our net debt. And concurrently, our financial leverage rose to 0.76x. Building on the announcement from yesterday evening, I am pleased to confirm that we are increasing the buyback volume for 2026 to a total of up to EUR 350 million. This represents a material increase from the previous expected EUR 200 million based on the natural allocation of the EUR 500 million until mid-2028. Based on the upside plan for 2026, this means about EUR 250 million for the second half. We took this decision together with the Supervisory Board, as we feel highly confident in delivering our full year 2026 guidance and continuing to execute beyond that, both on the revenue and cost efficiency side, which we will detail during our Capital Markets Day in 2 weeks, combined with the historically low valuation of Scout24, we view this as a great opportunity to increase the buyback and create value for long-term shareholders.

So moving on to our guidance.

This is where we will share our view on the guidance provided so far for the entire 2026 financial year. For the 2026 financial year, we continue and confirming again to expect group revenue growth in the range of 16% to 18%, with 6 to 7 percentage points coming from Spain. In Q1, Spain contributed for 1 month only with a full contribution from Q2 onwards.

In terms of profitability, we continue to expect the group ordinary operating EBITDA margin to be up to 61% or up to 64% on an organic basis reflecting the continued operating leverage in our core German business. A few phasing comments for 2026. As outlined in our full year call, we expected a strong start in our B2B membership business, which were confirmed in Q1 and should continue for the remainder of the year. In B2C, we expect growth to build throughout the year as customers adapt to the new tiering and pricing and the new product features are increasingly recognized.

Therefore, I'd like to close my part of this earnings call, we are confident in our 2026 guidance.

Before we move to the Q&A session, I would like to hand back to Ralf, again, who will summarize the key takeaways from this call for you.

Let me close with a few key takeaways. We started the year with strong momentum. We delivered growth, continued margin expansion and launched product innovations at pace. Our B2B business remains the core driver. At the same time, AI is clearly translating into results. We see higher engagement, stronger usage and improving monetization. In private, we are taking the next step with our new tiering model. It is still early, but the first signals are encouraging. Overall, this quarter shows that we can combine growth, innovation and profitability. This is supported by a stronger platform and disciplined execution. With that, we confirm our outlook for the year. We look forward to sharing more at our Capital Markets Day.

With that, let's open the line. Please limit to 2 questions per speaker. Operator, over to you.

[Operator Instructions] The first question comes from the line of Andrew Ross from Barclays.

My first question is about the Private subscription revenue, which was around 5% growth in Q4 -- Q1. I know you wouldn't only give kind of monthly trends, but obviously, there's quarters been some noise going on with launch of new tiers. So could you give us a bit more color in terms of how that trended in January and February? And then what you've seen coming out of Q1 and then to April to kind of give us the comfort of when that starting to get back to better revenue growth in that line. That is the first question.

My second question is maybe just something for CMD, but can you give us an update in terms of how Spain is trading? What we've seen today is 1 month of revenue, but it would be helpful to get any color as to more broadly what's happened in that business in Q1.

Yes. Happy to take your questions Andrew. And this is Ralf. Let me start with the Private subscription business. I think I mentioned in the last call already that we did some testing in the last couple of months, and that led also to the fact that the subscription growth the subscription -- in particular, was slowing down a bit. And this is all what we planned. So what I can share is that we finished the pricing test, so it's as expected. So we are on track then what we planned. That means also that the number of subscribers are going up again. So we will see in April, higher number already where we will be above 530,000 subscribers already.

So with the tiering, we can continue the subscriber stock growth, we think maybe not on the level we saw in the past, but also -- as you know, we did it because we have to differentiate the different packages because the product is too much commodity now here, but we are really positive on the tiering we made and we're looking forward here and that we can deliver what we promised for this year. And if we can continue the growth even subscriber stock. So that was number one.

Number two was regarding Spain. I think, yes, I mean we're not guiding Spain separately. I mean, it's in this bucket. What I can share is that it is also as expected. So we are quite happy making progress. As you know, we just got the keys here. It takes some time, although to do restructuring or integration, but we are on track here and we see first progress, which is quite promising. So also positive here on this side.

The next question comes from the line of Will Packer from BNP Paribas.

Firstly, thanks for the detail around your own conversational search and the LLM traffic, and we look pretty reassuring your in-house conversational search is strongly outperforming. That said, as we look forward, it feels like the next focus on AI will be around agentic search. Could you give us the color on how you're prepping the business for the use of agent agents by consumers. And any initial perspective around the speed at which you think that will be adopted and where Scout needs to build resilience.

Secondly, web traffic was down in the quarter, and you talked to kind of macro weakness as the driver. Could you give us a bit of color on your confidence that it's macro related? Does this happen before? Typically, in the past, you could have just said the other payers a week, we would have moved on. But I suppose in the context of changing consumer habits probably a little more scrutiny today than in the past. And so any extra color there could be helpful.

Yes. Let me start with the agentic topic. I mean the CMD is upcoming. So I think giving you a detailed answer to this, I mean -- and I know you will be there anyway. So what I can say is, I mean, we are making progress in this AI development, in particular, if it comes to search. I mean, as you know, we started with our conversation in search -- called HeyImmo, which is actually level 1, if it comes to agentic experiences. So Code for instance, is Level 3, which is also not agentic 100%. But then the next level, Level 4 will be much more agentic. We are not there yet. Even the LLMs are not there yet. So -- but we are moving with the trend. So we are testing already some first agentic features and the -- and you can see it already in the traffic and also in the engagement we have in HeyImmo, a number of prompts for instance, number of revisiting users, for instance, that the engagement is always higher if we are offering those features to the consumers. They are more engaged with our products. So this is really positive.

But we also see that we have additional opportunities to monetize. We did some test here and there. It's also quite promising, so now imagine that the identic features are now also kicking in. And of course, that will have some impact as it comes to monetization and pricing strategy. But all what we did so far, what I can say is it's more an opportunity than the threat and therefore, we are believe positive. We will share more details, and we will also share some prototypes and test we made, we will share on the Capital Markets Day. So that was question number one.

Question number two, the traffic. I think good question. I think this I think here, it's also I think important to understand what's impacting traffic at the moment. I mean we have the macroeconomic facts. I mean, we have a more -- could immediately see the rent -- was starting this was having an impact on the traffic side. There's much more uncertainty in the market. and also the situation here in Germany, in particular, comes to economy and so on, there are a lot of layoffs and so on. This is creating more uncertainty, and this is what we see already.

So we had this in the past. They were different macroeconomic events where we saw traffic impact. So this is no -- actually no surprise for us. What's good for our business. First of all, the business is not dependent on traffic volatility actually. I mean, because we are not paid along the traffic we deliver. It's what we see in the core business, it becomes the search engagement. This is more or less stable. So the engaged users are still using the search product more intensively. The traffic we are losing, it's more left and right of the search. So a bit like -- how to say, the business [Foreign Language]. And this is now -- so therefore, we see it not negative, to be honest. And the other thing I would like to mention, in particular, if AI is now becoming more and more relevant for classifieds that the -- I mean the importance of traffic will be -- will go a bit down here because, I mean, the old [indiscernible the question is how the new flywheel will look like we a belief here, I will share my belief on the Capital Markets Day and also some evidence on this.

We now have a question from the line of Joseph Barnet-Lamb from UBS.

Excellent. So firstly, on Private subscription there's a reference to increasing demand for the higher value packages. Can you give any early indication of the sell-through rates of the higher-value packages, pro and unlimited. What are you hoping for here? What would success look like?

And then secondly, marketing expenses increased by, I think, 27% year-on-year in 1Q. I'd imagine that was impacted by marketing for the new consumer subscription packages. Can you give some thoughts on both marketing going forward, but also what that means for private margins through the year? Should 1Q be a proxy going forward?

I mean -- yes, I can share some early indicators we have. So how does success look like for private subscription business? Obviously, success we will be able to grow the subscribers stock further. And also, of course, we want to deliver at least double-digit revenue growth, and we are quite confident that we are able to do it. I mean the March numbers where we -- that was actually the first full month where we had the tiering in place and we hit all the targets we had here internally. So we are, therefore, quite confident. So success is having more subscribers ideally and also more revenue. I mean the tiering gives us the opportunity to also introduce more and more Argentic services to the seekers. And I think that's important. I mean there's the Plus product, which is at the moment a bit like where people can -- seekers can push themselves up the up the waiting list more or less or up the queue, this might change a bit more into Agentic services. So -- and as more the users are used to those Agentic services and as more they expect those things, we will see more conversions in the higher packages for our Plus subscription products. So therefore, we are adding Agentic services more and more in the higher tiers.

We believe there is a willingness to pay as it is for Agentic services, what I meant before with the Level 1 and Level 2 services we see in the market. So -- and yes, and the first indicators here for the higher tiers are also quite positive, I have to say. So we are on plan. It's also maybe fair to mention that nobody else has this product. So it will still take some time to balance out a bit what is the right value for each package and what do we need additional in terms of product features. So we are working on it. So yes, but as I said, on track. So if it comes to marketing, I can share a bit. I mean -- so we are not steering -- first of all, we are not guiding the private margins. But if it comes to marketing spend, I think that was the question, right, how much marketing -- the marketing spend increase. We have to see that we are integrated our Spanish business here. That was the main driver for the marketing spend. But it's also true that we did a bit more marketing -- performance marketing on the private side, but this is really -- it's more a strategic thing we did here. So we believe that the margin for the private business, even if we are not guiding it separately, will not be much different than it is today or was in the past.

The next question comes from the line of Doyinsola Sanyaolu from Citi

I've just got one question. The disclosure changed in the Professional segment, just to give us Germany, but can we get any additional color on how ARPU and customer numbers developed for the business in Austria, just to be helpful to kind of get a steer on how rest of Europe will progress.

Okay, I can take it. Thanks for the question. I mean, yes, we changed the disclosure, but it's -- I mean, if it comes to the Austrian business, it's moving in line with the performance of the business here in Germany. So even on the customer side, we are growing in a number of customers we are growing double-digit revenue. So this is all as planned. And I think for Spain, I made my comments earlier, I think it's as we expected. I mean yes, I mean we don't want to disclose anything too much to our competition as well. Please understand that.

But the performance of the business in Spain and keep in mind that the business is really, really small compared to all the other activities, in particular in the core business we have. So we are on track. But I mean, it's not the #1 business in terms of revenue and so on. So we made -- we made a strategic acquisition, and this is -- and it's paying off already. I will also share some details here on the Capital Markets Day.

We now have a question from the line of Annick Maas from Bernstein.

The first one is, you've mentioned some organic personnel cuts due to AI efficiencies. Can you comment on what types of roles have been impacted here? And how much more opportunity to see to cut further roads due to AI?

And the second one is on the listing numbers. So you disclosed it, it was up 14.5%. I was wondering how many of these listings were from the newly introduced the soon available category? And if that 14.5% is the like-for-like number or not?

Okay. I will start with the first question. Sorry, the second one, I didn't get it fully. But on the AI side, I mean, of course, I mean, we are using AI for enhancing the product experience for our customers, and we are using it also to become more efficient internally. So I mean, we introduced company-wide AI, I think, early last year. We started that everyone got an agent and so on. And now we are moving deeper into it where we automate more and more of our internal processes. And we are using also more automization, in particular, as it comes to coding, so tech and product and design as well.

Just to give an example here, I mean, a normal, let's say, engineer can do a couple of thousand lines of code. I mean, I know this is not fair because it's not just coding. But in gigantic, let's say, kind of a gigantic service or copilot service, an engineer can do more than 40,000 lines of code in a month. So that gives you a bit of a feeling of an idea of what's possible. So we're using AI really, really heavily internally. And that's actually the reason why we can use the [ build-in ] capacity we have differently and why we can also use from the cost perspective, where we can use the attrition rate we have. I mean every tech business has an attrition and our ambition is that we are not replacing people who are leaving. It's more like we want to use technology better. And yes, that's working good and it's paying off already. So the second question I need to ask again, maybe you can repeat.

Yes. So yes, so you introduced in March, I think, this new capability, which allows you to show houses that are coming soon online. And so I was wondering, of the listings that you have on there, how many of the growth that you've seen, how many are these new coming soon properties, I guess?

I don't have the exact numbers here. So what we -- I mean, this coming soon listings, so we have early -- so there is an earlier version of it live for a couple of months already. So -- and it was roughly 6%, 7% of the listings, the new listings. But I mean, this is -- we call it also tenant-to-tenant listing. So there are different categories of those coming soon listings. So I don't have the exact number. So we have -- I mean, if they're happy to share. But what we see, and that was actually the hypothesis is that we call it gray market or this hidden market that this is still -- this is really a relevant market because those listings coming soon listings are highly attractive for the seekers. So and this is actually also driving the Plus subscription, particularly in the higher tiers. So I mean, in order to create extra value for the higher tiers and the Plus subscriptions, it's important that we get access to this gray market. And actually, what we see is that this is really working well. I mean, just to give you a bit of -- I mean, we have a couple of thousand new consumers for our waiting list product. So waiting list is actually the other side for those coming soon listings. So we can match in live mode actually the demand and supply side and the product, and that's really, really attractive, not just for the seekers also for the landlords because they produce the coming soon listings, but they see immediately the demand for their property and maybe they don't need to put the listing even live on the platform or visible on the platform, they can pick and choose their future tenant from the waiting list. So this is actually what we are creating at the moment is actually a gray market where we do a kind of offline matching, even if it's digital and online, but it's not visible. So -- and that's actually working well. Again, here on CMD, there will be a new feature we're going to launch soon. So share and we will give also more insights here.

Next question comes from the line of Nizla Naizer from Deutsche Bank.

I have two questions as well. The first is on the professional ARPU growth in Q1. Ralf, could you maybe dive into the drivers of how that 10% came about because it's quite a nice number. And based on that, is that the sort of run rate you expect for the rest of the year in the Professional segment?

And my second question connected to that is you spoke about the health of the consumer in Germany. Could you maybe give us some color on the health of the agent base because you have been adding agents over the last few quarters? And would you expect to continue to add agents or some sort of leading the market with the current economic climate? Any color you can give us on the health of the agent base would be great.

Yes. Let me start with the ARPU growth. So the ARPU growth is also a bit impacted by the resegmentation we made, which is now the Austrian business is in a different bucket here. But even despite this, I mean, we are happy with the ARPU growth, and this is not just driven by price increases. It's in particular driven by more use of the product. So agents instead of just using the memberships for listing property, they use more and more products out of the ecosystem. So as you know, we have this interconnected ecosystem and the plan is that we increase the number of multiproduct use. And this number is going up, and we have our one system product as well. So that's really, really -- we are really happy here, in particular, the AI features in Propstack we have are highly attractive. So customers are starting now to use Propstack and the listing product we have, and they are actively asking for this. And -- and if it comes to customer numbers on Propstack we are really, really happy. So even without growing on total number of customers, we can grow in the number of customers who are using not just one product. This is important to understand.

So this is a different growth lever, and we are unlocking this potential at the moment, in particular, with AI because we can use AI also to connect the different products much better in our ecosystem, and that's working really well. If it comes to customer growth potential overall, I would say, I mean, we're working with the hypothesis that they are still fish in the sea. So every morning, somebody is getting up and wants to be an agent. And -- so -- and as long as we believe that it should be possible to grow customer numbers. Is it 6% as we did last year? I don't think so. So you see in the first quarter, 3-point something. But we are really, really good on this pipeline management we do. So -- so you need a lot of customer insights to understand better who's joining the market, who's leaving, who's splitting up because many, many new businesses are starting from a, let's say, from a franchise group business perspective. So agents, they start to work for franchisees for franchise companies and then they want to have their own business and they're splitting up with them. So it is quite important to have this customer insight. And we are here, I would say, ahead of the market a bit, and therefore, we should be able to grow customer numbers further, particularly this year.

[Operator Instructions] We now have a question from the line of Giles Thorne from Jefferies.

The first question was on market share trends. It's quite rare that we get disclosure out of -- on their property on their property vertical, but we recently had some metrics around performance in 2025 and particularly the eye-catching number was 40% revenue growth. And I appreciate comparing it like-for-like, would Scout is not completely sensible, but it is suggestive of market share gain. So are you donating to them? Or is this mostly coming from Immo? Or any color that you think is useful here.

And then the second question is back on Spain. And just to push you, Ralf or maybe Martin, a bit harder on potential for cost cuts ideally, you'd give us a number for the amount that you could remove in time, perhaps we have to wait for the CMD for that. But maybe any color instead on how inefficiently the operations were run or the organizational structure that could illuminate how much you think you could impact the cost base there? That would be very useful.

Yes. I mean yes, I mean, what should I say about the link post from Simon. I mean he was posting 40%. So I mean, I know -- what I know is that they're doing a lot of price increases at the moment. So I mean, they convince customers who paid EUR 3,000 with the competition more maybe in this case, they convince them to join EUR 150. Now they're bringing those customers up from EUR 150 to EUR 300. Okay, nice. I mean this is actually how they run the business. And of course, you should be able then to grow double digits. So yes, but is it impacting us?

No, it's not, as you see. We are still able to grow on customer numbers, and we are executing on our pricing strategy and value strategy. So therefore, it's hard, I would say, to compare like-for-like. I mean you have a quite mature business we have and also from the value perspective. And then you have a follower business, Kleinanzeigen.

They are catching up with low-cost pricing and eating up the market share of the #2. So the impact is actually, we don't see it at the moment. And at least to the customers I talk to, they really appreciate the value we deliver. And -- and it's not that they say, look, I can replace you or they deliver better service here. So this is how I see it. I don't -- also -- I don't have access to the full numbers of Kleinanzeigen. I just rely on what Simon is texting. So yes, this is what I can say to that. About Spain, again, I don't -- to be honest, I don't like to -- because, I mean, I think we disclosed a bit here. I mean, we acquired the business.

This business is a classified business. So it contains marketing, it contains personnel costs, it contains also revenue. And the revenue is divided by membership revenue or what they call as membership. It's not really a membership, and it's also containing advertising revenues. So as we acquired the business, we are not so much interested in the third-party media revenue. So -- and that's also the reason we would like to rebalance a bit the way how they run the business.

So less advertisement on the website, more user experience and better user experience, in particular, for the seekers, but also for the real estate agents because we would like to replace the third-party media revenue with agent media revenue. So as we have it here in Germany. If you take the percentage of third-party media we're doing here in Germany and what we are doing in Spain is completely different. So we would like to repair the structure how we would like to run a classified in Spain, means we would like to introduce memberships here. We would like to reduce the third-party media revenues. So this will also take time. So please don't expect that we will be able to double the revenue soon here. And what the business also contains is marketing and also personnel costs, tech costs and so on. And of course, you can expect that there will be efficiency synergies as we are integrating the platform deeper into our, let's say, tech ecosystem at Scout.

And as we delivered on Sprengnetter and all the other M&As we did, right? So this will also take a bit of time, but we are quite confident that we will deliver the margin expectations we also disclosed where we said, look, I mean, it should be possible as a #2 to run a business which is delivering 40% margin. So -- and this is still our target here. And by the way, it's easy to achieve that. I just need to cut off marketing because the marketing spend they do, and you can see it in our numbers a bit because we consolidated the business.

So the marketing increase is mainly coming from Spain. So if you just take the marketing spend in percentage, what we're spending here in Germany, and the traffic is not so much dependent on marketing spend, to be honest, in Spain. So then you would easily achieve 40% margin there. So it's a more theoretical thing. That's what I would like to express. We would like to strengthen the business. And we said, look, we have time for that. We are not guiding separately Spain. We are guiding the margin of Scout. We have many opportunities within our own, let's say, Scout universe to optimize the margin and to deliver what we promise. We don't need necessarily to optimize the margin only on Spain separately in order to achieve that. That's maybe the message.

Ladies and gentlemen, that was the last question. I would now like to turn the conference back over to Philip Lindvall for any closing remarks.

This concludes today's call. Thank you for joining and your interest in Scout24.

Ladies and gentlemen, the conference is now over. Thank you for choosing Chorus Call, and thank you for participating in the conference. You may now disconnect your lines. Goodbye.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Scout24 Preliminary Full Year 2025 Results Conference Call. I'm Moritz, the Chorus Call operator. [Operator Instructions] The conference is being recorded. [Operator Instructions] The conference must not be recorded for publication or broadcast.

At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to Filip Lindvall, Vice President, Group Strategy and Investor Relations.

Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Scout24's earnings call for the preliminary Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2025 results. My name is Filip Lindvall, and I'm Vice President, Group Strategy and Investor Relations at Scout24. With me on the call today are Ralf Weitz, our Chief Executive Officer; and Dirk Schmelzer, our Chief Financial Officer. Ralf will start the presentation with key business highlights, and Dirk will provide a detailed overview of our financial results. As always, we will conclude the call with a Q&A session. You can find today's presentation on our website under Financial Reports and Presentations. This session will be recorded, and a replay will be made available as quickly as possible after the event. Please take note of the disclaimer on Page 2.

Ralf, now over to you.

Thank you, Filip, and welcome, everyone. Let's turn to Page 4. 2025 was another great year for Scout24. We delivered strong financial results while continuing to execute our interconnectivity strategy. Revenue grew by 15%. Ordinary operating EBITDA increased by 17%. Adjusted EPS rose by 20%. Growth was driven by our B2B and B2C subscription businesses. Our ecosystem expanded across all key metrics. We gained more customers and more content. We introduced better and more innovative products. User engagement increased, cross-selling continued to grow.

In 2025, we further strengthened our leadership in search. AI is now integrated across the entire customer journey from semantic and elastic capabilities to agentic experiences through HeyImmo and our ImmoScout24 app in ChatGPT. Internally, we continue to embrace technology. We simplified processes and embedded AI into our workflows. Combined with healthy revenue growth, this drove higher profitability. Our margin increased to 62.5%. Looking ahead to 2026, we expect revenue growth of 16% to 18% and an ordinary operating EBITDA margin of up to 61%. Scout24 is more relevant, stronger and better positioned than ever to power the German real estate ecosystem. Technology and AI will continue to enhance our platform and strengthen our competitive position.

Let's turn to Page 5 and look at customer development. Starting with our Professional segment. We closed the year with 26,400 professional customers. This represents growth of 5.1% in Q4 and 5.7% for the full year, clearly industry-leading rates. We continue to gain market share across segments. Our responsible pricing approach is working. Churn is at a minimum, and we see virtually no net churn. Our success in B2B is driven by a strong and integrated product portfolio, including our market-leading agent software, Propstack. We are deeply embedded in agent workflows through software, data valuation and marketing tools. Our Bronze, Silver and Gold membership tiers serve both smaller and larger agencies. In 2025, we spent more time than ever with our B2B customers. This strengthens relationships and positions Scout24 increasingly as a business enabler. 2026 has started well. We are adding customers and continue to see healthy revenue growth across the base, including nonresidential.

Turning to the Private segment. We ended the year with 503,600 subscribers, representing 14% growth for the full year. Growth moderated in Q4 due to normal year-end seasonality, softer rental demand and following the rollout of our new group-wide ERP system. We are currently updating the private subscriptions offering, including product tiers, features and pricing.

Looking at Page 6. Let me walk you through the German real estate market dynamics. Our Scout transaction momentum index stands at 97. The residential transaction market has stabilized. Based on preliminary data, 2025 recorded around 600,000 transactions, up 14% compared to 2024. This environment supports our residential B2B membership business. We are also seeing improving trends in commercial as we enter 2026.

Our listings index reached 146 in January. Inventory continues to grow following the normal seasonal dip in December. The approachable content grew to 17 million objects. This reflects improving activity and strong trust in the ImmoScout platform. On the demand side, rental contact requests moderated slightly from very high levels as rents increased. Buyer side, contact requests remained stable at elevated levels, indicating healthy demand to buy. Let me now provide a strategic update. Over the past year, we have continued to execute our strategy with discipline while embracing technology to stay ahead. In the current market environment, it is important to understand what differentiates Scout24 and why our competitive position continues to strengthen.

Let me highlight 5 points. First, we have accelerated execution of our interconnectivity strategy. Second, we have expanded our AI native search and extended audience reach across the entire user journey. Third, we have built a market-leading software platform for German real estate agents. Fourth, we are driving structural margin expansion through technology and AI. And fifth, we are outperforming our CMD 2024 targets and raising ambition again at CMD 2026. Let me walk you through each of these. Turning to Page 8. Let me be very clear. Scout24 is not only a listing platform. We have built the digital ecosystem for German real estate transactions. Over the past years, we have invested more than EUR 400 million and executed our interconnectivity strategy with discipline to achieve this.

At the core sits our proprietary back end. We operate the leading agent software, subscription products across the buy and rent journey and Germany's leading residential and commercial real estate database. More than 10% of residential units are registered in our property hub. We also provide valuation and banking software used by financial institutions. These systems are deeply embedded in daily workflows. They are exclusive to Scout24. They are not accessible to AI models or [ web callers ]. On top of this infrastructure, we connect all stakeholders. We reached 20 million users per month and serve 26,000 professional customers.

Around 25% of annual real estate transactions in Germany now involve a Scout24 B2C subscription product. As the ecosystem grows, our data becomes stronger. As our data becomes stronger, our products improve. This is digital infrastructure powering German real estate. Scout24 is embedded in how the market operates. At our Capital Markets Day in early 2024, we outlined our vision for AI-driven natural language search. Today, that vision is fully live across semantic, elastic and agentic search. First, AI-powered filter search. User describe what they want in natural language and receive relevant results instantly, including image-based search. Second, HeyImmo, our specialized real estate LLM. It is built on 28 years of proprietary behavioral and transaction data, combined with exclusive residential and commercial inventory across our ecosystem.

This enables contextual accuracy that generic LLMs cannot replicate. We are seeing strong user growth and engagement. Third, we integrate with external LLMs as audience extension. Through our ChatGPT app integration, ImmoScout connects users directly back to our platform for engagement and transaction execution. Referral traffic from LLMs remains insignificant at 0.4% in December and below last year's peak levels. General AI models will need trusted platforms with proprietary data to deliver a strong real estate experience. That is where Scout24 plays a central role. Our back end for agents is Propstack, our fully cloud-based software platform. This is where agents run their business.

They manage contacts, listings, marketing and their pipeline. It also serves as a marketplace for Scout24 products and partner integrations, many powered by AI. AI is embedded directly into these workflows. More than 30,000 AI actions have already been executed. Voice to listing reduces listing creation time by over 80%. These are real productivity gains. We estimate our market share in Germany at around 30%, and it is growing. We are on track to become market leader. Propstack significantly increases our relevance by covering a large part of the agent value chain, and we are taking the next step. Our ambition is clear to transform Propstack into Agentic AI, software that not only documents workflows but actively drives them, software that helps agents prioritize leads, draft communication, prepare listings and move transactions forward.

We will share more at our Capital Markets Day in 2026. At our Capital Markets Day in 2024, we committed to building a scalable technology platform and deploying AI internally to improve efficiency. Today, we operate a very cost-effective tech platform and one integrated builder organization serving all 3 customer groups. We build our product solutions centrally and deploy them across consumers, professionals and homeowners. This allows us to grow without increasing complexity or capacity. The impact is visible in our cost structure. Personnel, our largest cost bucket, has remained broadly stable in an organic level over the past 3 years despite continued revenue growth. At the same time, we continue to invest in technology and AI to enable that leverage. Even as we invest further, IT costs grow at a disciplined mid-single-digit rate and represents only around 9% of our total cost base.

The structural leverage is reflected in our margins. Ordinary operating EBITDA increased from 59.7% in 2023 to 62.5% in 2025, and we continue to see further margin expansion over the next years. Technology and AI are structurally increasing our profitability.

Turning to Page 12. Our CMG 2026 will define the next chapter of Scout24. We have evolved beyond classifieds into the digital back end of German real estate. AI is strengthening our platform and our proprietary data advantage. As our products become more personalized and more automated, our ecosystem becomes more valuable and our competitive moats deepen. We will present the next evolution of our ecosystem, the acceleration B2C expansion and further scaling of our B2B leadership. We will also introduce updated midterm targets for 2027 to 2029, including higher margin ambition.

Let me close with a few key takeaways on Page 13. In 2025, we delivered what we set out to deliver. That is Scout24. We set clear targets and we execute while continuing to invest in technology and AI. Our ecosystem is increasingly central to the German real estate market. We are deeply embedded across stakeholders, workflows and data, and that position continues to strengthen. We have shown that disciplined investment and margin expansion are not mutually exclusive. Innovation and profitability reinforce each other. AI is already making our products more personalized and automated.

It increases the value of our data and strengthens our competitive moats. With this foundation, we expect to deliver again in 2026. At our next CMD, we will outline the next chapter, including further margin ambition. Before handing over to Dirk, I would like to thank him personally. Working with you over the past 6 years has been a pleasure. You have powered our financial profile, expanded margins, improved cash generation and built a strong finance organization. Dirk, thank you for your leadership, your partnership and your commitment. On a personal note and on behalf of the entire Scout24 leadership team. We wish you all the very best in your next chapter.

With that, I hand over to you.

Thank you, Ralf, and good afternoon, everyone. 2025 was an excellent financial year for Scout24. Revenue grew 15% to EUR 649.6 million. Ordinary operating EBITDA increased 16.5% and adjusted EPS rose 19.6%. We delivered strong operating leverage. The margin expanded by 100 basis points to 62.5%, while continuing to invest in product, AI and the integration of acquisitions. Cash generation remains a core strength of our model. Operating cash flow reached EUR 284.8 million, up 11%.

Turning to Page 16 and the Professional segment. Revenue grew 14.8% in 2025 to EUR 470.5 million, driven by subscription growth of 15.4%. Average customers increased 5.7% to 26,027. We completed over 5,000 migrations, bringing adoption of the new membership model to around 60% of the base.

Growth was particularly strong in the bronze tier, creating further up-migration opportunities ahead. Subscription momentum and new customer wins have continued into January and February 2026. ARPU increased 9.5% for the full year and accelerated further in Q4. Transaction enablement revenue grew 17.5%, supported by CRM expansion and M&A contributions. Overall lead demand remains muted. However, homeowner lead products showed solid momentum, growing 9% in 2025.

Ordinary operating EBITDA rose 14.5% to EUR 292.9 million. The professional ordinary operating EBITDA margin remained strong at 62.3% for full year 2025. In Q4, the margin increased to 63.4%. Acquisition-related dilution was fully offset through operational improvements, keeping margins at a structurally high level.

Turning to the Private segment on Page 17. The segment delivered strong performance in 2025. Revenue increased 14.5% to EUR 179 million, driven by subscription growth of 18.8% and strong PPA performance. The average customer base expanded 14% year-on-year to approximately 507,000. Q4 included a temporary adjustment related to our system migration.

ARPU increased 4.2% for the full year. As expected, growth moderated in Q4 as we lapped the [ Schafer ] monetization benefit. PPA delivered a strong performance, growing 10.9% for the full year and accelerating further in Q4. Growth was supported by improving market activity, product simplification, increasing brand strength and targeted marketing initiatives. Ordinary operating EBITDA increased 22.3% to EUR 112.8 million. Margin expanded by 4 percentage points to 63%, demonstrating the scalability of the subscription model and strong operating leverage.

Turning to Page 18. Operating expenses increased 9.6% in 2025, largely driven by the consolidation of recent acquisitions. Organically, cost growth remained disciplined. Personnel costs increased on a reported basis due to M&A, but remained broadly stable organically despite continued revenue growth and investment in technology and AI.

To build on Ralf's remarks, we continue to invest in AI and technology while keeping IT costs under control. IT expenses increased 14% for the full year and only 4% in Q4 despite the significant product launches you have seen across search and other areas. Marketing expenses were organically flat with efficiency gains offsetting selective brand investments. Purchasing costs grew most strongly, driven by higher valuation volumes and increased service components within B2C memberships. Overall, we maintained cost discipline while investing strategically. As a result, ordinary operating EBITDA increased 16.5% to EUR 405.7 million and the margin expanded by 100 basis points to 62.5%, demonstrating continued operating leverage.

Turning to Page 19, where we show the items below ordinary operating EBITDA. Nonoperating effects increased in 2025, driven by M&A-related expenses and higher share-based compensation linked to share price development. I will comment on these positions on the next page. D&A increased moderately, mainly reflecting acquisition-related PPA amortization. The financial result improved compared to last year, supported by lower subsequent measurement effects on M&A purchase price liabilities and reduced interest expenses.

This was partially offset by negative foreign exchange effects due to the depreciation of the U.S. dollar. On taxes, the year benefited from EUR 46 million onetime deferred tax gain following the reduction of the German corporate tax rate from 2028 onwards. This led to a temporary reduction of the effective tax rate to 14.5% in 2025. Net income increased to EUR 240 million and basic EPS rose to EUR 3.33. Adjusted net income and adjusted EPS also grew strongly with adjusted EPS up 19.6% to EUR 3.47. Finally, the weighted average share count declined by 1.4% due to our share buyback program, further supporting EPS growth.

Now let's turn to Page 20 and walk through the bridge from reported to adjusted net income. Nonoperating effects, excluding share-based compensation, increased during the year, primarily driven by M&A-related items, including earn-out revaluations related to Sprengnetter and Neubau kompass as well as transaction costs associated with the Spain acquisition. Share-based compensation increased year-on-year, mainly driven by higher share price levels during most of 2025 as well as strong performance factors. We expect share-based compensation to decline in 2026, which I will address in more detail on the guidance slide. The tax bar reflects the reversal of the one-off time deferred tax revaluation benefit recorded in 2025. Importantly, the majority of these nonoperating effects are noncash in nature.

Speaking of cash, now turning to Page 21 and cash flow. Free cash flow for the full year 2025 amounted to EUR 253.1 million, representing growth of 13% year-on-year. This reflects our strong operating performance, solid cash conversion and the fact that a significant portion of nonoperating costs are noncash items. Free cash flow conversion remains strong, corresponding to 101% of adjusted net income and 62% of ordinary operating EBITDA.

Turning to Page 22 to leverage and capital allocation. At year-end 2025, net debt stood at EUR 144.5 million, resulting in a leverage ratio of 0.36x, supported by strong cash generation and disciplined capital management. In 2025, we returned significant capital to shareholders. We allocated EUR 124.3 million to share buybacks over the full year and paid a dividend of EUR 95.4 million. Looking into 2026 and as of Monday, we have already executed EUR 47 million of the initial EUR 100 million share buyback program, demonstrating our continued commitment to disciplined capital return.

Moving to the guidance on Page 23. For the 2026 financial year, we expect group revenue growth in the range of 16% to 18%. 6 to 7 percentage points of that growth are expected to come from Spain. This reflects approximately 10 months of contribution as we expect to close the transaction tomorrow.

In terms of profitability, we expect the group ordinary operating EBITDA margin to be up to 61%. Excluding Spain, the organic ordinary operating EBITDA margin is expected to be up to 64%, reflecting continued operating leverage in our core German business. A few phasing comments to 2026. Our B2B membership business has started the year strongly, supported by sustained demand and continued new customer acquisition. Churn entering 2026 is lower compared to the prior year, providing a solid foundation. In B2C, we are testing new product tiering and pricing initiatives. This may impact growth rates in the first quarter. As a result, organic growth in Q1 might be a bit softer with acceleration expected from the second quarter onwards. Overall, we expect growth to build as the year progresses, consistent with our full year guidance.

Regarding share-based compensation, we expect cost for 2026 to be in the range of EUR 15 million to EUR 20 million. If the share price remains at current levels, the lower end of the range is more likely. On the implied ordinary operating EBITDA contribution from Spain, this includes one-off transition-related costs such as TSA arrangements, which are recorded as operating expenses and therefore, impact ordinary operating EBITDA. These effects are expected to unwind from 2027 onwards. Overall, we are confident in our 2026 guidance and the momentum across the business. In particular, the up to 64% organic ordinary operating EBITDA margin exceeds the 2026 target communicated at CMD 2024. We will provide an updated increased midterm margin ambition at our Capital Markets Day in May.

Turning to Page 24. Our Capital Markets Day will take place on May 12, 2026. As Ralf mentioned earlier, the company will present its updated strategic framework and midterm financial ambition in more detail. It will provide a comprehensive view on the next stage of Scout24's development. And before we conclude, I would like to say a few personal words. After more than 6 years as CFO of Scout24, this will be my final earnings call. It has been a privilege to help shape the financial and strategic development of this company during a period of strong growth and transformation.

Together, we accelerated growth, strengthened profitability, improved capital allocation discipline, expanded our ecosystem and positioned Scout24 as a scalable, resilient business. I would like to thank Ralf, Gesa and the entire leadership team for the close and constructive partnership over the years. Our collaboration has been built on trust, strategic clarity and disciplined execution. It has been fun working with you. Also, I would like to thank my directors and the entire Scout24 team for their dedication and execution. And of course, our shareholders for their trust and support. Scout24 is in excellent shape strategically and financially. And I'm confident the company will continue its successful trajectory. Thank you.

With that, let's open for questions. Please limit to 2 questions per speaker. Operator, over to you.

[Operator Instructions] And the first question comes from Ed Young from Morgan Stanley.

My first question, could you perhaps give a bit more color on the private customer growth development in Q4? You mentioned a system migration impact, also seasonality and end user demand. I wonder if you could help quantify what that might be or the relative impact of those 3 different parts and how we should think about the time line for new products and tiering there? And then second of all, on buyback and capital returns. I just wonder if there was any updated thoughts from you given the divergence between the share price performance, the sort of overall sentiment in the sector compared to your continued confidence in the business.

Ed, thanks very much. It's Dirk. So let me start off with the second question you raised with regard to capital allocation. As you are probably aware, we announced a EUR 500 million buyback program in December last year. We started that with the first tranche of EUR 100 million early January this year. And we're now down the road, I think, of EUR 50 million roundabout that we already bought back.

And of course, you can imagine that we, as executives of this company are convinced that the intrinsic value of the company is higher than what we see at the moment, given the recent backdrops at the capital markets. So we are still discussing and continue to discuss additional share buyback programs. with the Board and within the Management Board, and we will update you as soon as we have new information. Then on the private growth with regards to third and fourth quarter, some of you know that we changed our ERP system last year and the biggest chunk of change here was the order to cash module, and we changed that in the transition from the third to the fourth quarter.

And in that transition, there were a few customers which we kept in the systems in the third quarter and only deleted out of the system, so to say, in their data in the fourth quarter, and that came to a slight change and a slight delay. And if you look at the numbers around that, I think you should deduct around 2 percentage points in Q3 and put another 2 percentage points in Q4 on growth. That will bring you roughly there where we are. Apart from that, I think we're quite optimistic when it comes to the 2026 growth in private subscribers, but Ralf will elaborate a bit more on the initiatives we're putting forward there. So for the second part of the first question, I hand over to Ralf.

Yes. So I think we also reported a bit to you last year that there is a kind of saturation if it comes to the private plus subscription product. Saturation means not that we are not able to grow in subscriptions because subscription numbers are driven by lifetime in particular. And this is actually what we're working on. So -- and the other thing we're working on is actually the tiering, the product tiering. I mean this product now is the market standard here in Germany if it comes to real estate search rent. So the question is, how can I differentiate as a seeker.

And so we will come up with new product tiers, and we are testing those actively and we started last year, and we continue to do this in Q1. What I can say is we see a positive impact here to all the KPIs. And so we are quite optimistic that we can let's say, launch another rocket for our Plus subscription business. And -- but yes, that's what we -- I mean, so far, we haven't had a tiering here, as you know. And we follow actually the path what we did over the last years in the professional business.

So it's actually a well-known, let's say, playbook to us. And so yes, that's how you should read it. So there's no significant -- there's no decline in the subscription base, as Dirk said, right, we changed the ERP system. I mean, the customers -- the subscribers has been there. So we had a payment delay process. We changed with the ERP system. That was actually the reason why we saw the numbers declining in Q4.

Then the next question comes from Will Packer from BNP Paribas.

Dirk, a big congrats on [indiscernible] CFO. Two from me, please. Firstly, you've entered into a wide-ranging partnership with OpenAI across HeyImmo Enterprise and of course, the ChatGPT app. Whilst I wouldn't imagine you share specific commercial details, could you share some details around the app? So in particular, around data sharing. For example, to what extent do they get insight into your inventory and consumer behavior? Or is that in a scout walled garden? And then secondly, in terms of the guidance for Spain for '26, the margin looks a fair bit lighter than consensus expectations. I imagine the deal timing is a factor, but could you help us through the factors that are weighing on margin in 2026 and how that will impact 2027?

Yes, I can start, Dirk, maybe you can jump in then. To your first question regarding the ChatGPT cooperation here, first of all, you don't pay for this app, right? I mean it's -- we build the app. This is actually an [ API wrapper ], we call it. So you give access to a -- via API to our listing, let's say, database. So we are not giving access to proprietary data we have in the system. So this is guarded behind lock-in walls and everything. So -- and if you want to contact somebody from -- on the listing and so on, so you have to do it in our ecosystem. So AI wrapper means it's actually you funnel the traffic from ChatGPT into our system directly.

So it's not that they're taking over customer data. soever, it's just they are able to search -- to execute a search on our listing database, which is publicly available anyway more or less. And then if you want to do more, so you execute everything on our website then. So -- and you can experience that, right? So you start the search and then you get the results immediately if you click on the results, and you land immediately on our website and you also continue then there the search.

So actually, what we see so far is that the traction is okay-ish, but it's not really -- there is no exponential growth also as people might expect, I don't know. So we see traction in our HeyImmo product. That's a couple of hundred thousands now using it. So there is some exponential growth in our own product because the experience here is much better. And this is -- and HeyImmo is also getting limited access to proprietary data if people are locked in, for instance. And yes, so -- the partnership is good. So we took actually the first-mover advantage here as we did with the Apple ecosystem a while ago, and we are quite happy here. So second question was.

It was about the Spanish development -- maybe Yes, I'll start with that, and then Ralf will certainly add something to that. So with regards to guidance, I mean, we're getting the keys for the business tomorrow. So give us some time to take a look under the -- into the motor of the business. As of today, we're talking about 10 months instead of 12 months that we're getting the business. We've been guiding something around EUR 60 million of revenues. If I read it correctly, last year ended on plan. January started okay-ish in Spain. But most importantly, I think what you need to take into account is our constant message that we are deploying the German playbook when we are entering into Spain with Fotocasa.

And that also means that we will take some changes on the user interface and the user experience on the platform, which we did in Germany a few years ago as well, and that had the effect that advertising revenues were going down. Today, advertising revenues in Spain are around 10% of revenue. And you can imagine us driving that down very fast to a level that we see in Germany, which is below 2%. And that has an impact this year already of around EUR 5 million to EUR 6 million, and that's what you see reflected in our guidance with regards to Spain. I hope that clarifies.

Yes. What you also have to see, I mean, we're doing a carve-out of a carve-out, right? So there might be parallel costs for doing this because you have the TSAs we have to pay and in parallel, we have to build the systems. We need in order to take over. This is -- this will be relevant for this year, not for next year. So hopefully, we can finish most of the TSAs end of this year. That's actually the plan. But as Dirk mentioned, right, we just get the keys -- we will get the keys tomorrow also. So we lost 2 months this year, let's see. So -- but it's on plan. And for us, everything is in our expectation, let's say. And now we look more into it and driving actively the business from beginning.

And in terms of the 2027 margin outlook for Spain, that's something that comes at the CMD. Is that the right -- once you've had some more time with the business? And because some of those costs will unwind, right?

If you have something to tell you on May, we can rely on, I would do it. But give us a bit time here. I mean this is -- so we said in the midterm perspective, the business should be able to deliver 40% margin. That's what we said, and we still believe that. But as I said also, we have to stabilize the business here. So for us, it's more important that we deliver on the key metrics and key metrics are the customer numbers here, it's the listing numbers, it's traffic gap to [indiscernible] in particular, and also leveraging the synergies we have, as I said, right, there's also benefit for German customers.

So -- that's what we want to deliver. And then hopefully, revenue and margin flies in as we expect. So that's -- so executing the playbook, I think what Luis mentioned is correct. And that is actually also a challenge for us. It's not that easy to take over a business 300 people in such a situation. So we stay optimistic here because everything is as we expected so far. And yes, then we give you an update if we can, maybe in May.

And the next question comes from Joseph Barnet-Lamb from UBS.

Joe from UBS. Firstly, I'd like to add my congratulations on your tenure, Dirk, and all the best for the future. A couple of private questions, if I may. So firstly, should we read into the launch of the new tiering that you're pivoting to a more ARPU-driven growth strategy due to volume-based growth running out? Or is this about elongating subscription duration by giving a variance of products to consumers? And can you sustain teens growth in private post the product launches? And then the second question is on private margin. It increased significantly in 4Q. Was this at all related to the slower revenue growth in the quarter? Or maybe asking the question differently, is there any reason why margin within private wouldn't be sustainable for FY '26 or even expand further?

I'll start with the second question and hand over to Ralf for the first part of the question. No, there's no reason why the margin in private should change. As you've probably seen, we came from a margin of 30%, 40% in the early innings of the product, and we now reached professional margins here. So I think that's a good sign, and that is something that will continue. And Joe, it's a good sign that our analysts understand the business so well that they answer their questions themselves. But nonetheless, I would hand over to Ralf to answer the remainder.

Yes. I think it's a really good question, to be honest. I mean you have 2 key metrics you can optimize. Revenue growth is created by number of customers and the prospective subscribers and the ARPU growth, the pricing power you might have. So on the pricing power side, we've been quite conservative in the past because we grow heavily on the customer side. And so this is something we're going to change with our tiering here. So there hopefully will be -- there will be hopefully more pricing power in the future on this because we just had 4.5% ARPU growth last year, blended, and we had 14% subscriber growth last year.

The year before in 2024, it was over [ 25% ]. So I think what we can also do on the subscriber side, on the number of customer side, and that's what we iterated sometimes is that if you extend the lifetime today, we have lifetime close to 6, if you double the lifetime, then you would double the number of subscribers, number of customers who are paying at the same moment. And this is also where we have some initiatives on. But it's a bit tricky, right? You need to add also new product features to those product tiers as well to make the difference here, but also to extend at the same time the lifetime. So this is actually what we're working on. and we are testing it.

And maybe why is it so difficult? I mean, nobody really has this product. So there is no playbook we can copy also where there's not much experience on this, right? So -- and we are the market maker here. And therefore, we have to learn and that takes time a bit. And we started last year in Q3, end of Q3 with the testing, and we continued this in Q4, and we will continue this in Q1. But we are making progress. That's actually the message I would like to send. So we have an interest that we create sustainable growth here. And at the same time, we can deliver the margin.

So the margin, you might remember, we optimized the margin because we changed a bit the products here. So from products we used from third-party vendors into products we developed on our own. capabilities, and that led also to this margin expansion. And this is also now part in the new product here that we have to come up with own products, new own products also to maintain the margin profile we delivered already. So you can see it's not easy to run such a business, but we are, as I said, positive and the first signs we see now will hopefully accelerate the subscriber growth, but also the ARPU growth in Q2.

And the next question comes from Marcus Diebel from JPMorgan.

Yes, I would also echo that, Dirk, and partly good luck in your new endeavors. First question is again on private, just to be really clear. So sort of like the comment on sort of like the some bad debts in there. So that effect will basically stop in Q4. So we won't really see much of this in Q1 and Q2 going forward. I think that's the case, but I just wanted to be really clear on this. And secondly, also for Dirk, I guess, on personnel costs. I mean, clearly, quite an impressive performance, 4% only increase. Could you talk a little bit more about the moving parts here? Where is the efficiency really coming from? And how should we think about personnel costs going forward in the next quarters? I mean is it volume? Is it number of headcount? Is it salary? If you can just explain a bit more where the efficiency is coming from?

Thanks, Marcus. First of all, to your first question, I can confirm that the migration to the platform has been finished in Q4. Also all customer numbers and everything related to nonpaying customers and bad debt. So there will be no effects leaping into the first quarter 2026. On the efficiency side, I think it's quite an interesting discussion here. When I would like to remind you to the discussions we had in 2024 when there were a lot of companies standing up and saying, "Oh, from AI, we will achieve 25% savings, 30% savings on headcount cost in the next years because our efficiency will increase in engineering, our efficiency will increase in programming, product development and everything else.

And as you are aware, we took a slightly different approach here. We said at a certain point in time, that was Q3 2024, where we said, okay, we're sticking to the full-time equivalents we have in the company, and that is around 1,000, and we are not growing here, but we're growing revenues, and we're growing profitability. Hence, what we did was we gave every one of our employees a second employee. And in 2025, that second employee was called Claude when we had the arrangement with Anthropic. And this year, it's called ChatGPT because we've changed the arrangement from Anthropic to OpenAI.

And now AI is structurally embedded across the organization. We have a huge amount of users. We have 1,200 AI-driven projects company-wide. And a lot of sort of what's going on in AI is really helping us to maintain that amount of 1,000 full-time equivalents. And that is the approach we have been taking. That is the approach we have been communicating with you, and that is the approach we will continue in '26 and '27. So you shouldn't expect our personnel cost to increase beyond any merit increases over the years to come.

And the next question comes from Craig Abbott from Kepler Cheuvreux.

And also, Dirk from my side, all the best going forward. Yes, 2 follow-up questions, please. Just turning over, first of all, to the traffic sourcing mix again. Could you just confirm that your direct traffic share has been stable, still around 80%, I think, and that the cost of the inorganic traffic is also stable? And then secondly, also as you continue to roll out your AI product suite, can you also confirm that you do not expect a material increase in your product development costs?

Yes, I can confirm all 3. [indiscernible] That was a short answer.

No, no, please elaborate a bit.

Yes. I think -- I mean, the -- on the traffic side, there is -- what we see is that there is no change here. And if it comes to organic traffic, I mean, we are, as you know, quite strong on the brand awareness. This hasn't changed. So we don't expect that there will be a change in the organic traffic. So direct traffic it's still over 80% and dominated by the app traffic in particular here, which is the main organic traffic source. On the paid side, I mean, there is no paid traffic channel in LLMs at the moment. So we do, of course, some marketing here and there to integrate ourselves better to become more visible in LLM sources.

That's what we do, and that costs a bit of money. But -- so if there -- and we expect if this is -- if they are models, they will replace other traffic sources like Google Search in particular. And so we don't expect additional paid marketing costs for our model. And the last question is whether we expect more AI costs if we are going to roll out our AI suites to the market. That's, of course, I mean, if you -- if we have more, let's say, LLM calculations in the system that will drive a bit cost.

But as I iterated in one of the other meetings is that we had before that actually, the way how we use LLMs is a bit different. So we have most of the data in our own databases, it's called [indiscernible] databases. So we have different access even if people execute an LLM search. So we have the cost side here under control and token prices, by the way, dropped by 30% in Q4 last year. So because of the competition we have in LLM, there are also arguments why the costs were not going up dramatically here even if the usage would go up exponential. So therefore, we are quite confident that we can manage the cost side what we told the market, right?

Yes. And Craig, maybe a short advertising break on my end, for Andrew Ross' report from Barclays on LLM traffic on classifieds because this report mirrors exactly what we are seeing on our platform at the moment. So the LLM traffic is roughly stable to slightly decreasing and constantly remaining below 1% on our platform. And we believe that this will sort of not go into an exponential growth by the end of this year or next year. Yes, that's the external traffic, Ralf, corrected me here. Yes, that's the external traffic. And the HeyImmo traffic that we're seeing is a positive for us, to be honest, right? It's a great customer experience. And I elaborated on the cost for HeyImmo versus OpenAI/CatGPT, and that will cost us below EUR 1 million this year for a great customer experience. And that's good.

Then the next question comes from Nizla Naizer from Deutsche Bank.

And all the best to you, Dirk, from my end as well. Just a couple of questions for me. On the Professional segment ARPU growth, when you think of 2026, sort of how is that phasing over the course of the year given the strong ARPU growth you reported in 2025? Some color there would be great. And then the second question is on Propstack. So it was really good to see that you've got such a good penetration among the agent base with Propstack. Where do you think that can sort of expand to? And could you remind us again, how is it monetized? Is it a monthly subscription? And how profitable is Propstack? And how much of revenue does it contribute at the moment? And what's your sort of objective for that segment going forward, given that's fundamentally different to the rest of the classifieds business that you do?

Yes. I'll start, maybe you take over. The -- if it comes to Propstack, yes, we are quite happy on Propstack here. I mean, we are on the way to become a clear market leader if it comes to agent software systems in Germany. Why is it important? Because for the agents, they interact, engage, they engage much more intensive with the [ CM solutions ] than they do with listing marketplaces because they also -- they save the customer data, for instance, in agent software solutions like Propstack. They prepare the listings there and so on.

This is often the starting point of the agent. So with the agent software product, we mirror the business of an agent in a software in a digital format. And so we have a clear strategy here. We would like to become market leader this year in terms of customer numbers, in terms of listing imports. So we can measure how many listings on the portal are imported via our own agent software, and we're making progress here, which is really, really great.

So the way how we monetize it is, of course, the agents, depending a bit on the size of the agent business, they have to pay a monthly subscription fee here. It's a classical SaaS model. We are also combining it depending on the packages with the membership products here and there. Actually, what the product does is we are creating much more loyalty because if customers are not just using the listing portal membership, they are also using our technology, our system for running their business day-to-day. Of course, we're creating a kind of loyalty and pricing power, and this is actually a big advantage.

So what we achieved in 2025 is that the number of customers who are using more than just one product in our ecosystem increased. And this is actually something we would like to continue. And for this, we have Propstack, our agent software system, but also other products, valuation products, for instance, we have on the energy certificate side, we have products. So we are building and creating this suite for -- product suite for the agents more and more. And it's well accepted, I have to say. So -- and of course, agents, they see also benefits because, I mean, everything is integrated, is connected. And if you sum up the product and the, let's say, the prices you would need to pay stand-alone for each product, there is an advantage if you bundle it, right? So -- and therefore, we are able to bring over more and more customers also from competitors into those products, and that's quite positive. So the other questions, Dirk.

Nizla, it was around ARPU development over 2026 and where do we see it. What I can say is that we, at the moment, envisage a similar development that we saw in 2025. We were very positively surprised by our customer numbers in January, February. I was a bit more conservative when I guided you on that in the Q3 call. But I have to say January, February start was good. We saw a very low churn. We're seeing good migration efforts from our sales teams, and we're seeing a healthy development on ARPU. So all in all, I think that business should develop nicely over the course of the year and expect an ARPU growth in the high single digits.

Then the next question comes from Giles Thorne from Jefferies.

My first question was on your partnership with OpenAI. And specifically, it would be useful to know what the cost profile or the commercial agreement would have looked like for the powering of the HeyImmo products and then the -- as [ SDK ] integration if you hadn't done a migration from Anthropic to ChatGPT. Did you get a good price because of that migration? And then secondly, we're clearly in a very volatile and febrile environment for investor sentiment towards sector and Scout24. There's no consensus on what happens here next. Perhaps the one area of consensus is that you want to be a well-invested platform with a progressive mindset. So given all that, does the current environment and the risks and opportunities around AI Ralf change your attitude towards the ideas of regional scale?

So yes, I can -- a lot of questions. So I'm not sure whether I really understood everything, but let me start with the ChatGPT agreement we had. I mean, as you know, we -- so we cooperate internally with Claude, Anthropic's in particular, and then -- and also with other LLMs. And then for our HeyImmo product, we decided to go with ChatGPT, OpenAI here. And so what we then learned, I mean, of course, we checked a bit on the usage of the product, and we agreed on token prices at the beginning of the year. And what we learned over the year is that there is high competition between the different LLM systems. And we see also that some of the LLMs they are specializing. For instance, OpenAI is really specialized more on the consumer experience side.

So it's for us the right partner for HeyImmo at the moment, I would say, using the technology, we are fencing the data. That's actually the deal here. And so as we checked in on prices, even for our internal, let's say, AI system we are using for the organization, we learned really that we can lower the prices by 30% if we are shifting to, let's say, OpenAI here. And then Anthropic, and that is maybe something you would like to know then is that Anthropic also reacted and they locked prices also even higher. So you can see that there is high competition. Everyone wants to have us as a B customers.

And that's actually what we see that those LLMs, they learned over the last year, it's really hard to monetize the consumer. So sometimes it's better you just monetize the B side of the business. So as Google did, as always did, right? And so they are really hunting for B customers. And that's what we see. And therefore, we see also competitive prices here. And on the deal we have, if it comes to our app [ SDK ] product, I mean, we've been one of the first companies to launch in an app here, an own app. So we interacted quite early after Zillow launched the product here in the U.S. We interacted with the team here in Germany to learn a bit more about how the app SDK really works.

As I said before, it's an API wrapper. So there is no really commercial agreement. I mean, we also have no really commercial agreement with Apple here other than if there is a payment, Apple gets a share if we are using their payment methods, what we don't do. And so there is no extra cost for this app SDK. So that might change, who knows. But at the moment, I think what we see from those LLMs, they have high interest, really high interest to cooperate with companies like ours because they need to create a really unique user experience.

And for this, they need data because if you're searching for real estate and they cannot really give access to this data and for this, they need us and they need us as a partner so that we give them better access than maybe they would have if they just need to pause the data. So -- and that's actually also in their interest that they cooperate with reliable -- that they do collaboration with reliable partners. So therefore, it's more like a partnership than a dependency. And that's, I would say, good and positive here. So the other question, maybe remind me.

Guys, I think we're through, right?

No. The second question, I was using too many words. And let me put it simply, does the current very accelerated innovation cycle change your attitude towards the benefits of regional scale?

So if I translate this, Giles, your thesis is that if you are able to accelerate the amount of innovation and product development, there should be more international scale, right? Is that your hypothesis?

No, it's the other way around. It's the other way around. If you're a bigger business, then your capacity to invest is bigger, all else being equal.

Okay. Got it. I think I'm starting with the answer to that question. I think we're well there with 3% of our revenues annually invested into product development and tech. And that is around EUR 20 million, will accelerate a bit maybe to EUR 21 million, EUR 22 million. But we never had any year where we had the feeling we didn't have enough capacity to invest. I -- the last time I recall that we had that discussion was when we migrated to the cloud, but that's 4, 5 years ago. And there, we still had 7% CapEx to revenue ratio. At the moment, I don't see any need to accelerate our spending on product development and NII. And then the answer to your question is, no, we don't see scale from being bigger.

I fully agree. I think -- I mean, what we said earlier is that, of course, we also gain efficiency if it comes to internal processes, right? I mean, for instance, we shortened the process of developing a product. So we -- in the past, we had 6 months. Now we brought it down to 3 months. and we would like to bring it down to 3 hours. So from an idea to an MVP. So -- and this is freeing up capacity. So we never shipped so many new features probably than we did in the last quarter. And that's actually a positive sign. So we can reshuffle capacity internally to cope with the additional need of shipping innovation to the market.

And that's actually also what others now starting to do, right? You can see that Rightmove at [indiscernible] and so on, they reshuffle capacity. They're using AI technology to become more efficient internally and to ship faster. I think -- I mean, the filter search is around or has been around for 25 years, a bit change here and there, but not much. So now you see semantic search popping up everywhere. So within 1 quarter. So I think it shows you a bit what's possible even with the same amount of capacity and cost budget. So it's actually quite positive here. So therefore, I'm with Dirk. And yes, and on regional side, I think no extra need.

Ladies and gentlemen, this was the last question. I would now like to turn I would now like to turn the conference back over to Filip Lindvall for any closing remarks.

Okay. So this concludes today's call. Thank you for joining and your interest in Scout24.

Ladies and gentlemen, the conference is now over. Thank you for joining, and have a pleasant day. Goodbye.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Scout24 9 Months Q3 2025 Results Conference Call. I am Shari, the Chorus Call operator. [Operator Instructions] The conference is being recorded. [Operator Instructions] The conference must not be recorded for publication or broadcast.

At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to Mr. Filip Lindvall, Vice President, Group Strategy and Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Scout24 Third Quarter and 9 Months 2025 Earnings Call. My name is Filip Lindvall, and I'm Vice President, Group Strategy and Investor Relations at Scout24.

With me on the call today are Ralf Weitz, our Chief Executive Officer; and Dirk Schmelzer, our Chief Financial Officer.

Ralph will start the presentation with key business highlights, and Dirk will provide a detailed overview of our financial results. As always, we will conclude the call with a Q&A session. You can find today's presentation on our website under Financial Reports and Presentations. This session will be recorded, and a replay will be made available as quickly as possible after the event. Please take note of the disclaimer on Page 2.

Ralf, now over to you.

Thank you, Filip, and welcome to everyone joining us today. Let's turn to Page 4, where I will walk you through the key highlights for the third quarter and first 9 months of 2025. Building on the already strong first half results, we continued to deliver a strong financial performance in the third quarter. Revenue increased by 15%, bringing our 9-month growth to 15.3%.

Importantly, we continue to deliver consistent strong double-digit organic growth. Our product and tech strategy is working. We are winning customers with AI-powered tools, better data and improved platform features. Consequently, this drives higher revenue per customer. Our ecosystem keeps growing, more agents, more private customers, more content and engagement. As customers use more of our products, our margins naturally expand. We are also running the company more efficiently with AI. This allowed us to expand our ordinary operating EBITDA margin over the 9 months, even by investing in innovation and integrating acquisitions with lower margins.

Our core businesses both continue to perform strongly. B2B memberships delivered industry-leading revenue and customer growth with revenue up 16.7%, driven by our comprehensive product offerings. Private subscriptions maintained high teens momentum at 17.8%. On innovation, we are leading with product and technology.

Last quarter, I said we would launch HeyImmo, our AI chatbot. It's now live, giving users intelligent property search assistance. We are not stopping there. We are bringing AI to more parts of our platform. This makes agents more productive and helps property seekers find their homes faster. On M&A, we announced Photocasa and Habitacle in Spain, an investment at an attractive price. Spain is one of Europe's most dynamic real estate markets with strong German buyer interest. We will apply our playbook, improving their B2B business, enhancing platform and user experience, implementing AI and adding Spanish listings to our German platform.

Over time, this acquisition will strengthen our German B2B membership products even further. giving our agents access to the Spanish market. Our M&A strategy has not changed. Our focus remains Germany. However, this acquisition was a great opportunity, and we took it. Our priority for the foreseeable future is executing this playbook on Spain, while Germany remains our core with substantial runway.

Finally, on our 2025 guidance, we are narrowing guidance based on strong 9-month results and clear Q4 visibility. We now expect the upper end for EBITDA margin and the mid- to upper end for revenue growth. This will be our fifth straight year of double-digit growth. It shows Scout24's quality as a compounder executing our strategy consistently. Let's turn to Page 5 for an update on our customer base development. Starting with our Professional segment. We now serve more than 26,100 customers, representing 5.7% year-over-year growth. In Austria, our customer base returned to growth in Q3, a clear sign that the market is stabilizing and our product continues resonating with customers there. This customer growth is a result of market share gains and our comprehensive product portfolio. We offer CRM, marketing, valuation and data tools that cover the full agent workflow.

Our responsible pricing approach creates trust and predictability, minimizing churn. Turning to our Private segment. We have surpassed 526,000 subscribers, up 14.5% year-over-year. This includes impressive net adds of 24,000 in Q3, representing 4.9% quarter-on-quarter growth, consistent with 2024's strong quarterly performance. 2024 growth benefited from our March 2023 shift from 2-month to 3-month minimum subscriptions. This drove lifetime extensions and revenue growth throughout 2024. We have now let that benefit, so our current mid-teens growth reflects the underlying strength of our Plus product.

On the homeowner side, we now have 2.4 million homeowner registrations, up over 60% year-over-year and 3.5 million objects under management, up 51% year-over-year. Looking at Page 6. I would like to share the German real estate market dynamics in the third quarter. The German residential real estate market remains healthy. Transactions are taking place and agents are making good business. Our Scout24 transaction Momentum Index reached 92 in Q3, confirming this positive momentum.

Moving to content. Our listings index surpassed 149 in Q3. We now have over 600,000 high-quality listings on the ImmoScout24 platform. Sellers and landlords choose us because of our brand trust, reach and ability to connect them with the best buyers and renters. Demand indicators remain strong. Contact requests for rental properties stand at 175, maintaining elevated levels throughout the year. On the buy side, the index reached 130, showing resilient buyer interest.

Let me conclude with some key takeaways on Page 7. Our results show consistent execution. We are proving that we can innovate, grow double digits, integrate M&A and expand margins at the same time. This is powered by our product strategy. Customers choose us for best-in-class products, workflow tools for agents and valuable services for property seekers. This drives strong revenue and customer growth across both segments. We are implementing AI like Hemo powered by our unique data. We have unmatched property data through Sprengnetter and Bolvinggesa plus unique user profiles and over 2 million registered homeowners. AI enables us to deliver next-level experiences competitors can't match. It's our advantage, not a threat. German market fundamentals remain strong, and Scout24 is extremely well positioned to capture this opportunity, giving us confidence in long-term B2B and B2C growth in 2026 and beyond.

On B2B, Germany's agent market is highly fragmented, giving us a huge customer base to distribute our workflow products to. Agent work is complex with limited data access. So our products help digitizing and simplifying their business. Agents earn strong commissions, but current online take rates offer significant upside potential for us. We position ourselves as partners through transparent responsible pricing.

On B2C, Germany has over 3 million annual rental transactions, a massive market. Scout24 offers products for the entire journey, renting, buying and living. These fundamentals give us clear visibility for sustained growth as we expand. As I said earlier, our focus remains Germany. However, our Spain acquisition represents a great opportunity where we can bring our B2B and B2C knowledge to improve their operations and expand our footprint. This also strengthens our German B2B membership products by giving agents access to the Spanish market. Based on our strong 9-month results and clear visibility into Q4, we are narrowing our full year guidance. We now expect to achieve the upper end of our EBITDA margin guidance and the mid- to upper end of the revenue growth range, our fifth consecutive year of double-digit growth.

We are also confident about carrying this momentum from our core business into 2026, where we expect double-digit organic revenue growth again.

Now I hand over to Dirk.

Thank you, Ralph, and welcome, everyone. Let's move to the financial section of our presentation on Page 9. Q3 was another strong quarter mid-teens revenue and ordinary operating EBITDA growth, double-digit organic growth and 20% adjusted EPS growth.

Cash flow continues to grow impressively in line with EBITDA. Revenue grew 15% in both Q3 and 9 months. Our core subscription business maintained momentum while acquisitions contributed meaningfully. On profitability, 9-month ordinary operating EBITDA margin reached 61.9%, 60 basis points of expansion despite integrating lower-margin acquisitions. Adjusted EPS for the 9-month period also grew 20%. Turning to Page 10, our Professional segment, which delivered another outstanding quarter. Revenue grew 15.1% in Q3 to EUR 119 million, maintaining our exceptional momentum with 15.2% growth for the 9 months.

Our subscription business keeps delivering strong results. At 16.7% growth in Q3, this is a truly remarkable achievement. On an organic basis, we are still delivering robust 13.3% growth, demonstrating the fundamental strength of our membership model. What makes this performance even more impressive is our customer growth, up 5.7% to an average of 26,100 in Q3, with organic growth of 5% in Germany, excluding Nebo Compass. We are capturing share and expanding our customer base at a pace rarely seen in established markets.

Notably, Austria has also returned to customer growth in Q3. We are now seeing ARPU acceleration as well, up 10.4% in Q3 compared to 8.3% in Q2. This acceleration is primarily driven by strong adoption of new products at Nebo Compass. So we have both customer growth and accelerating revenue per customer, a powerful combination. Transaction enablement revenue reflects a mixed performance across business lines. The CRM business delivered the strongest growth and demand for data and valuation services remained robust. While homeowner leads showed stable development, demand for mortgage, ESG and relocation leads remained soft.

Ordinary operating EBITDA for 9 months increased 14.1% to EUR 216.5 million. The segment margin came in at 61.8%, down 60 basis points year-over-year, primarily due to the dilutive impact from integrating recent acquisitions with lower initial margin profiles.

Turning to the Private segment on Page 11. We delivered another impressive performance in Q3. Private segment revenue grew 14.7% to EUR 46.7 million in Q3 with 9-month revenues reaching EUR 133.8 million, up 15.5%. Our Plus subscription products remained the growth engine, delivering robust 17.8% growth in the quarter. We reached 527,000 subscribers on average during Q3, adding 24,000 net subscribers versus Q2, representing strong quarter-on-quarter growth of 4.9%.

ARPU increased 2.9% to EUR 17.6 in Q3. The lower growth compared to the first 2 quarters reflects the year-on-year increased base effect due to last year's introduction of the dual vendor strategy for credit checks. Our PPA business showed acceleration, growing 15.1% in Q3 to EUR 15 million, a clear step-up from Q2. This acceleration reflects 3 factors: improving market dynamics in the sales market, our product simplification efforts and the continued strength of our brand. Ordinary operating EBITDA increased 23.3% for the 9 months to EUR 83.1 million, with margins expanding 400 basis points to 62.1%. This outperformance was driven by the strongly growing subscription business, higher PPA bookings and the scalability and operational excellence of our business model.

Turning to Page 12. Let's take a closer look at the main ordinary operating items for Q3 and the 9-month period. Due to the completion of projects, own work capitalized decreased 20.3% in Q3, representing approximately 2.7% of revenue. Operating expenses grew 11.8% in Q3 and 11.1% for 9 months, substantially below our 15% revenue growth, creating strong operating leverage. On an organic basis, this discipline is even more impressive. Expenses rose only mid-single digits. Personnel costs remained stable on an organic basis. The 10.2% increase for the third quarter period reflects the consolidation of new companies into our scope. Looking at marketing expenses, you will see a slight increase in Q3. What's important to note is that on an organic basis, our marketing costs actually declined. This reflects the continued efficiency gains we are achieving in our leads business through our interconnectivity strategy. We have been able to reinvest a portion of these savings back into brand marketing, which positions us well for sustained growth going forward.

IT costs rose 15.8% in Q3, driven by cloud infrastructure expansion, AI capabilities and new ERP system implementation alongside acquisition integrations. These investments are already improving operational efficiency through infrastructure standardization while ensuring scalability. Purchasing costs increased 20.2% in the quarter, reflecting higher demand for third-party valuation services due to the growth at Sprengnetter and Bola. Ordinary operating EBITDA grew strongly in Q3, with margins remaining resilient year-over-year. For the 9 months, ordinary operating EBITDA increased significantly, delivering 60 basis points of margin expansion to 61.9% despite integrating acquisitions with lower initial margin profiles.

On an organic basis, margins reached 64% in Q3 and 63.2% for the 9 months, demonstrating our underlying operational strength and the scalability of our business model. This strong performance demonstrates our ability to balance multiple priorities, investing in product innovation, integrating acquisitions and using AI to simplify operations. As our ecosystem grows with more customers and interconnections, we gain natural operating leverage.

Turning to Page 13, where we show the items below ordinary operating EBITDA. Nonoperating effects were higher year-to-date but moderated significantly in Q3 compared to Q2. The 9-month increase reflects M&A costs from a Sprengnetter, earn-out revaluation and advisory fees related to the Spain acquisition. Share-based compensation normalized after an elevated Q2. D&A increased slightly in Q3, driven by acquisition-related purchase price amortization. The financial result improved in both periods, primarily driven by the lower expenses from M&A purchase price liability revaluations and reduced interest expenses. This was partially offset by foreign exchange impacts as the dollar weakened against the euro. On taxes, Q3 benefited from a EUR 43 million onetime gain.

On July 11, the German Federal Council passed legislation gradually reducing corporate tax rates starting in 2028. This required us to revalue our deferred tax positions at the future lower rates, creating a onetime benefit that significantly boosted Q3 net income. This gain will have a cash impact on the operative businesses 2028 going forward. For the full year 2025, we now expect an income tax rate of approximately 15%. Excluding this onetime benefit around 30% Net income for Q3 more than doubled to EUR 101.5 million, reflecting both the strong operational performance and this onetime tax gain. Basic EPS reached EUR 1.41 in Q3 and EUR 2.64 for the 9-month period, up 55.9%.

Adjusted net income and adjusted EPS, which exclude all one-offs like this tax benefit, showed strong underlying performance. Adjusted EPS grew 19.3% in Q3 to EUR 0.90 and 20.3% for the 9 months to EUR 2.55.

Let's turn to Page 14 for the bridge from reported net income to adjusted net income for Q3 2025. Nonoperating effects, excluding share buyback totaled EUR 5.8 million. This was driven by an increased earn-out valuation for Sprengnetter and M&A-related advisory fees. Share-based compensation returned to normal levels in Q3 after the exceptionally high Q2. The large tax deduction in the bridge represents the reversal of the onetime tax gain. Importantly, the majority of nonoperating effects in Q3 will have no cash impact in 2025.

Turning now to Page 15 and cash flow. Free cash flow for the 9 months reached EUR 202.4 million, up 17% year-on-year, outpacing both revenue and ordinary operating EBITDA growth. This was driven by strong operating performance and positive working capital effects from noncash nonoperating costs. Our conversion ratios remain excellent. Free cash flow representing 110% of adjusted net income and 68% of ordinary operating EBITDA, demonstrating strong cash conversion.

Turning to Page 16 to leverage and capital allocation. Our leverage ratio decreased to 0.38x at the end of Q3 2025, driven by strong cash generation and in line with the typical seasonality of Q3. In the third quarter, we allocated EUR 36.6 million to share repurchases, bringing total buybacks for the 9-month period to EUR 74.9 million. We increased our buyback volumes in Q3, taking advantage of the share price decline during the quarter to repurchase more stock at what we view as very attractive valuations. Importantly, the Fotocasa and Habitaclia acquisition does not change our capital allocation policy. We will continue our share buyback program and progressive dividend policy. For M&A, our near-term focus is executing the Spain playbook. We remain open to German bolt-on opportunities when they arise, but international expansion is not on the agenda for the foreseeable future. We continue executing on all organic growth investments within our current operating expense base.

Moving to the guidance on Page 17. Based on our strong 9-month performance and continued momentum, we are narrowing our full year guidance as follows: revenue growth, mid- to upper end of our 14% to 15% range. Ordinary operating EBITDA margin, upper end of our guidance. As a reminder, we guided for up to 70 basis points of margin expansion. With this guidance, we are on track to deliver our fifth consecutive year of double-digit revenue growth and third consecutive year of margin expansion.

Let me highlight what is embedded in our Q4 outlook. In Professional Memberships, we will start lapping strong prior year customer growth that accelerated in Q4 2024. In private subscriptions, we expect the typical Q4 seasonality with lower Sika activity towards year-end. In addition, we will continue to lap the dual vendor credit check ARPU benefit. We expect growth in transaction enablement to remain at current levels. Given these factors, we expect Q4 revenue growth to be lower than previous quarters this year. And here are some early thoughts for 2026. We have high level of confidence in maintaining the strong growth dynamics of our core business going into 2026.

We expect 2026 to be another year of double-digit organic growth for Scout24. In terms of ordinary operating EBITDA margin, we expect at least 63% for our existing business, excluding Photocasa and Habitacliia. Photocasa and Habitacliia will dilute group reported ordinary operating EBITDA margin by low single digits in 2026. By 2027, we anticipate these Spanish assets becoming accretive to Scout's ordinary operating EBITDA growth with group margin expansion resuming as we apply our proven playbook. And finally, on taxes, the German corporate tax rate will gradually decline from 30% today to around 25% by 2032, roughly 1 percentage point annually starting in 2028. This represents a meaningful structural tailwind to our cash generation that is worth incorporating into your long-term valuations. We are delivering strong results and have narrowed our full year guidance towards the upper end of our ranges. This positions us for our fifth consecutive year of double-digit growth with momentum continuing into 2026. We will provide our next update during the Q4 and full year 2025 earnings call on February 26, 2026.

With that, let's open for questions. Please limit to 2 questions per speaker. Operator, over to you.

[Operator Instructions] The first question comes from the line of Will Packer, BNP Exane.

So as I'm sure you're aware, Gen AI has become a more prominent investor concern, dragging on some classified share prices, including arguably Scout. There are various concerns such as weekly network effects, Gen AI search or disruption via Identity AI. So there's kind of 2 specific things I want to ask regarding.

Firstly, can you sufficiently invest in your tech stack and consumer offering in the context of these fast-moving developments within the envelope of the margin expansion you have outlined in your CMD, for example, sufficiently invest in prompt-based search or new Gen AI expertise with 100 basis points of margin expansion for 2026? And then secondly, Zillow has integrated their offering into ChatGPT. The U.S. is pretty unique with MLSs, high competitive intensity. But what do you think about that? Would you consider something similar? And then in the hypothetical that Immowelt put their inventory on Google or OpenAI agentic search, would that impact your calculation?

Bill, this speaking. I'm happy to take your questions. I will start and then Auk will add on the numbers something. So on Gen AI, I think we are, in general, well prepared. So we started, as you know, quite early to invest into AI, but also to implement AI deeply into the company. So it's not just offering -- not just adding AI to our product suite, it's also adding AI to the organization. Why is it important? Because we need to shift internally costs from, let's say, from personal -- from the personal side into the tech side because tech costs are increasing because of AI, and we need to afford that. And we want to avoid that this will have an impact on our margin plans.

That's number one. Do we see it as a threat? Actually, at the moment, what we see is that, that's for us more an opportunity than a threat. I mean, we launched a couple of products on the Seeker side, a couple of products on the B side as well, and we see that the engagement is going up. And we also see that with more visibility we are gaining into AI models that we are also getting more traffic also from those channels. And therefore, it's more important to stay up to date here as a company as a classified business so that you follow the development, for instance, whether the app SDK from OpenAI will land in Europe. I mean there's still a question mark on it. We expect that this will come over to Europe as well. Zillow cannot cover this. So -- and we also believe it makes sense to partner up with those companies as well. And then, of course, OpenAI can decide whether they want to choose Immowvate or the market leader. I think market leaders in general, number one, they have good position to engage with those tech giants from the U.S. So therefore, we are in deep contact with them, and I'm more positive now than I was 3 months before with that.

So -- and we see really good traction on our own AI products. We recently launched HeyImmo, which is an AI chatbot. We built that together with OpenAI. And we see a high usage rate already. So what we also see is that the people are using it for search mainly, but they are also using it secondly then for data consumption. And that's helping us actually to connect our ecosystem better because, as you know, before, we had Spgnetter All what we have as a company now is integrated in our Hemo product, and we continue to do this. And so therefore, from the user experience side, I think we're making progress, and we are really, really positive.

Yes. And let me take the first part of your question, Will. I think it was around do we have enough money to invest into AI to cope with the challenges we are seeing there. And as Ralf outlined, I mean, for us, it's rather an opportunity than a challenge. And you can imagine that when guiding 2026, we've been discussing this a lot. And we've been discussing this rather in the context of our financial means and basically a reallocation of the financial means we have in our P&L. And if you look at our P&L for 2025, we have around EUR 20 million in CapEx spend that we spent on own work capitalized.

We have another 300 engineers in our organization, and we have a bucket of EUR 45 million of marketing spend. So if I sort of take that all together, for us, investing into AI is rather a question of reallocating certain amounts in our spend than spending on top of that or in addition to that. So to give you an example, if we do AI-based search, we will certainly cut back our investment needs in SEA. And similar examples with regards to implementing HeyImmo, of course, we do that with the help of ChatGPT, but we also do that with the help of our own engineers. And as we outlined in our previous call, we also invested a lot into our employees and people to cope with AI, and we see very good developments there. So to sum it up, on the cost side, I think we have the necessary means in our P&L to cope with AI and see this rather as an opportunity than a challenge.

The next question comes from the line of Ed Young, Morgan Stanley.

My first is to help frame that AI opportunity as you see it, I wonder if you could help us with an indication of your direct or app mix to help us understand the context a bit better. And then the second is on the Spanish acquisitions. I think on our math, that involves a ramp-up in the admittedly very low starting point on margins in that business to get to the 3 percentage points of dilution. Can you sort of just outline what the main drivers of that are, how you balance investment versus efficiencies in that business and perhaps give us some indication of where you think margins in that business can get to on, say, a 3-year view?

Okay. Thanks, Ed. I will start before I hand over with regards to AI to Ralf. I think when you look at our traffic stats, you see that with regards to the brand awareness we're having, most of our traffic is really direct. We have around 4.5 million app downloads. We have 4.2 million active app users, and that's growing 6% year-on-year. And also, if you see the monthly website users of 15 million, around about 80% of that traffic is really organic and o generated rather than performance related with regards to traffic that we need to buy.

If you look at the overall traffic metric that's coming from AI at the moment, you can imagine with other classifieds, that's rather that's rather a limited amount of overall traffic. I think it's in the 1.5% to 2% area or something. And then I would also comment a little bit on Spain with regards to the margin and on the strategic aspects of AI and Spain, Ralph will take over then. With regards to the margin, I mean, what we have seen and why we have executed on Spain, as we outlined earlier on, was we saw it as a fantastic opportunity to buy an asset at a reasonable valuation. And reasonable valuation means for us, on the other side, that this is an asset where we think we can improve the value in a decent amount of time. Improving the value means applying our German playbook and improving the value means also improving the margin in that business. And we believe that we can stop margin dilution in 2027.

You just heard me saying that. and we will increase the margin of that business to, I would think, the lower end of a good classified margin, which should be in the area of somewhere between 50% and 60%. And Ralf, maybe you want to say something with regards to AI traffic and usage and what you already outlined with regards to Will's question.

So what we see in our own AI products is the usage rate is going up. At the moment, on HeyImmo, we are more than doubling every month the usage of the product, which is great. We have a month, just to give you a number, more than 100,000 already, and this product is live for less than a month.

So we are really, really happy. The usage rate in the other AI products, for instance, the features we implemented in Poxec, as I said, I mean, they are doubling every month. This is great. So we are seeing that our customers there adopting the products we are bringing in the market. And that's also what's important for market leaders that we are shaping at the end, the way how people consume products. And that will help us to maintain our market leadership position.

And back on what Dirk mentioned regarding Spain, I think we are at the forefront when it comes to AI. I mean probably you have seen this on the conference in Madrid. I mean, there were a couple of comparison between industry leaders and what they are doing regarding AI. And I mean, unformed they mentioned us as one of the leaders here, and that should give us an advantage also in Spain, we believe, because we know what's working and what's not working. So -- and we would like to bring it over without losing the focus on our German business. And that's really the good thing with AI technology is easily to integrate those, let's say, models into different back-end systems, for instance, [indiscernible]. And in the past, it was always a discussion about, oh, you need to have one back end and maybe -- and then you can serve different countries. We never believed in this approach, to be honest. What we can imagine is that on the interface, user interface side, there will be a kind of consolidation because the AI tech companies they are shaping at the moment the way how we will search in the future. And this is where we have to adapt to. And that's actually what Zillow showed in their keynote -- what Zillow showed in the cooperation with OpenAI that you need to be visible in those models. And so it makes no sense to, let's say, defend, let's say, your product against OpenAI.

It makes no sense. It is a bit like the discussion we had at Apple launched the App Store, where we also had internal the discussion about whether we should launch an own app in the App Store of Apple, and we decided actively to do it to partner up with Apple and iOS at that time. So -- and I think that's also what we would like to do with AI models. And important is that we have proprietary data. And that's -- if you use HeyImmo -- for instance, with our data and you compare the output with what you are getting if you are just using ChatGPT, there is a difference. And that's what the people have to learn. If they -- as deeper they go into their own real estate search, it's more it makes sense to engage with a specialist website. And that's for what we stand for. We stand for the -- being the expert in this field, and that's what we would like to defend.

And yes. So what's defining our position here is actually the unique data, as I said, the exclusive content we have that everything is deep integrated into our system, and we have the brand on top. And that's what Om and the other models at the moment cannot provide is the trusted brand element, and that's a big, big benefit.

The next question comes from Craig Abbott, Kepler Cheuvreux.

Obviously, my questions are also going to be around AI, and you've obviously provided us a lot there already. I guess the follow-ups on my side will be on the one hand, obviously, you can't run any potential deal you might be working on. But I mean, is it fair to assume that you are proactively trying to negotiate to be integrated on these models? That would be the one thing. And the second thing is just getting back to the cost factor. On the one hand, you said you're happy with the traffic origination trends so far, but yet there is still a very small share.

And then you also mentioned that you'll be over time, reallocating costs, for instance, away from SEO search to further development of your AI tools. But isn't there a potential that you might be running double costs for some time as you can't afford, obviously, that will fall off in your SEO-generated traffic whilst you're seeing traffic flows start to shift toward the Gen AI models? Those are my questions.

Maybe I start off once again. Craig, thanks for your questions. So I start with the latter one. Will there be a substitution of SEO and AI-generated traffic? I certainly believe so, but I don't see us running into double cost here.

As Ralf said earlier on, we have quite a cutting-edge organization here that is able to see where the developments are going, which AI engines are creating, which amount of traffic, how that traffic converts and how we integrate that into our traffic mix. So I'm not really worried about that part of the equation. I'm also not worried about the part of the equation when it comes to us being the go-to portal in Germany with regards to real estate because we're currently putting AI on top of it, right? So we will not only be the go-to place for real estate search and data search, we'll also be the go-to portal when it comes to AI-based real estate search. If you look at the functionalities that Ralph just outlined with regards to HeyImmo, yes, there is quite low usage at the moment. We're seeing around 120,000 conversations, but they are growing at around 300% month-on-month. We see out of that numbers, we see 60% really property searches. The rest is valuations and investment topics around real estate. So we are moving beyond Chat to agentic capabilities. We see consumers, users saving their searches. We see object creation via AI. So there's a lot of opportunities in AI. And hence, I believe that we will also be able to substitute parts of our cost that I just outlined in the answer I gave to Will with existing costs that we have on the P&L at the moment. And I don't see a margin dilution there. I don't see a reason for margin dilution there.

I mean at the end, and that we are doing this since since last year already, we said, look, I mean, we cannot increase the costs on the marketing side, we cannot increase the cost on the personnel side further. So we need to change the structure of the business.

Therefore, we implemented AI into the company. And AI will drive, let's say, efficiency in different dimensions, not just for our customers, also for us as a company. If it comes for, let's say, SEO content production is something we automated completely. So we don't need the resources there anymore for producing the content. We acquire data with the data, we can also generate exclusive content, nobody else can. So there is a big advantage sitting in, let's say, in the assets of Scout, we just need to connect this with AI technology. That's what we are doing at the moment. So I'm with Dirk.

Let's say, we would be able to connect the different products better via AI. We would be able to generate more organic traffic also because as more of the customer groups are connected in our 3-sided marketplace, there's more engagement we are creating and there's more traffic we will generate. So -- and therefore, we feel -- actually, we feel well prepared. Nobody knows what will happen. I mean I cannot promise you, but what we see at the moment is that we are able to adjust our business model really in a way that there is no margin impact. That's good for us.

Next question is from Nizla Naizer, Deutsche Bank.

My 2 questions move away from AI a bit, and it's more on the near-term guidance as well. So you've kept the guidance at the upper half of the growth range for the full year. This does imply, according to my math, maybe growth of around 13% in Q4, correct me if I'm wrong. Just wanted to understand, does it still include M&A contributions of around 5 to 6 percentage points? Because clearly, these new acquisitions that you've done this year seem to have been doing maybe better than expected in terms of revenue contribution.

So some color there would be great. And linked to that as well, could you maybe remind us what the margins of these businesses were when you acquired them versus how they're trending now? For us, I think it would be interesting to see when you talk about the Spanish acquisitions, your track record of improving margins would be an interesting data point to sort of understand. So any color there would be great.

Thanks, Nizla. This is Dirk. First of all, your math is correct. It should be around 13% growth in Q4. Don't forget that in Q4 2024, we already had 1 month of Nebo Compass included, which is, I think, a EUR 1 million revenue figure that we put in, in that month.

So when it comes to Q4, we have a very strong comparable with regards to last year. So there, we saw 11% organic growth, and it was the strongest quarter in 2024. Q3, as you maybe recall my remarks on the half year call, I was a bit more toned down with regards to Q3 growth, but it came out stronger than we thought. So we saw a quarter-on-quarter growth of 3% and the effects we are expecting for the fourth quarter is we're having around 4% customer growth lapping into the fourth quarter.

Transaction enablement will continue to grow at the current pace and private, we will see similar trends. Here, you have to see that usually in December, we're seeing a slight slowdown with regards to private searches for rent. And all in all, I think that translates into the figure you just outlined, 12.5%, 13% growth for the fourth quarter, maybe a bit a notch on top of it. And all in all, I think that is what has been guiding us. And when it came to your question with regards to margin, in the past, I mentioned that when we acquired Sprengnetter, they came in with a 10% margin. Now if you look at the business stand-alone, which is difficult after we integrated everything. But today, Sprengnetter is running at 30-plus percent margin. We see other businesses like Bolingesa, like Neva Compass and all the others, they are now running beyond 20% margins, and we believe we can continue to make those businesses much more efficient by growing them through integration on the one hand, but also by applying top-notch technology to those businesses. And I hope that answered your questions.

The next question comes from Joseph Barnet-Lamb...

Whilst I started with 6 AI-related questions, you'll be happy to know they've all been answered. So just one big picture one left for me. I was wondering if you could update us on how you're strategically viewing the Tenant Plus opportunity. You've previously spoken about how you were focused on trying to evolve the product offering to elongate listing duration sort of beyond the transactionary period. How has subscription duration increased? And how do you weigh up that opportunity versus pushing underlying pricing as well?

I'm happy to take this. This is Ralf. Yes, I mean, I think we discussed it in one of the last calls already, there is a big opportunity because the market is still bigger than what we have at the moment in terms of subscriber numbers. So in theory, there is a huge potential. So the question is how to unlock this potential. And you need to consider different factors here.

One is that there is a significant part of the overall market and the we call it gray market. So these are transactions never coming to online portals. So -- and we are working on products where we give access to -- where we give consumers or seekers access to this kind of gray market. And we will launch or we are going to launch a couple of products here. And hopefully, this will help us also to extend the lifetime of our existing Tenemplus products. And what you said is also correct that we are adding to Tenant+ also elements as the people staying in the system.

So we call it Living Plus. So at the end, that should lead to a longer lifetime. We're seeing that actually clearly because the number of Living Plus subscribers is constantly growing, which is good. And so therefore, this will also have an impact on revenue growth, and that's what we see as a factor for continuing the growth story of Tenant+. So -- but we need to do our homework, as I said, in particular, on the gray market topic, we are on it, and we see there the biggest potential for Tenant+ and also for the lifetime of the product.

That was the last question.

Thanks a lot, everyone, for your questions, and thanks a lot for listening in. And to those of you that were interested in AI, keep your eyes open. There will be some new and innovative products coming to our portal in the fourth quarter this year, and we are pretty thrilled about it. With that, I would leave it up to you. Have a nice afternoon, and speak soon. Bye-bye.

Ladies and gentlemen, the conference is now over. Thank you for choosing Chorus Call, and thank you for participating in the conference. You may now disconnect your lines. Goodbye.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Scout24 H1 Q2 2025 Results Conference Call. I'm Vicki, the Chorus Call operator. [Operator Instructions] The conference is being recorded. [Operator Instructions] The conference must not be recorded for publication or broadcast.

At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to Filip Lindvall, Vice President, Group Strategy and Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Scout24 Second Quarter and First Half 2025 Earnings Call. My name is Filip Lindvall, and I'm Vice President, Group Strategy and Investor Relations at Scout24. With me on the call today are Ralf Weitz, our Chief Executive Officer; and Dirk Schmelzer, our Chief Financial Officer. Ralf will start the presentation with key business highlights, and Dirk will provide a detailed overview of our financial results. As always, we will conclude the call with a Q&A session.

You can find today's presentation on our website under Financial Reports & Presentations. This session will be recorded and a replay will be made available as quickly as possible after the event. Please take note of the disclaimer on Page 2.

Ralf, now over to you.

Thank you, Filip, and welcome, everyone. Let's move to Page 4 of our presentation and review the key highlights of the second quarter and first half. We are very pleased with our second quarter performance, which was strong across the board and continues to build on our excellent first quarter results.

Second quarter revenue grew 15.1% with organic growth remaining strong at 11.1%. For the first half, we delivered total revenue growth of 15.5%. Revenue growth was driven by our 2 great core businesses, which continue to deliver impressive customer growth. Our B2B business is now approaching 26,000 customers. And our B2C segment surpassed the significant milestone of 500,000 subscribers in the second quarter.

PPA Private was a bright spot in the quarter with 10.9% growth, driven by increased listing volumes and marketing activities. Transaction enablement showed more modest expansion in the second quarter due to lower transaction volumes. We continue to generate operating leverage as we drive interconnectivity and simplify our organization.

Ordinary operating EBITDA grew 16.9%, marking another strong quarter. For the first half, we delivered 1 percentage point of margin expansion year-on-year, which is impressive as we are integrating several acquisitions with lower margin profiles.

Adjusted EPS continued to grow impressively by 23.6% in Q2. The strength of our platform is becoming increasingly evident. The number of B2B customers using multiple products in our ecosystem grew 15% quarter-on-quarter, a healthy sign that our interconnectivity strategy is working. Listings increased by 12.8%, and homeowner registrations grew by 57.7% in Q2.

We are seeing deeper engagement across all market participants. This creates compounding value as more agents, property owners and home seekers connect through our ecosystem. We are creating value for all our stakeholders by integrating AI solutions across our entire enterprise from consumer products and professional tools to internal operations.

As I highlighted in the first quarter earnings call, innovation remains central to how we serve customers. I will provide details on this and the innovation update later.

Based on the strong business performance during the first half of the year and the outlook of the remainder of the year, we upgraded our guidance for 2025, as you might have seen from Tuesday's ad hoc release. Our upgraded guidance reflects a strong business momentum we are seeing in our core operations. We now expect revenue growth of 14% to 15% and ordinary operating EBITDA margin expansion of up to 70 basis points.

Let's move to Page 5 for an update on our customer base. In the first half of 2025, both our Professional and Private segments reached record customer numbers. Starting with Professional. The Professional segment accelerated from already fantastic Q1 levels while continuing to gain market share. We are approaching 26,000 customers with growth accelerating again to 6.1% in Q2, building on the already strong 5.9% growth in Q1.

This was driven by continued robust performance in Germany, including neubau kompass. The Austrian real estate market has started to recover, and our customer base grew every month in the second quarter. Our customer growth in Germany stands out both domestically and globally within the classified sector.

It is worth taking a moment to acknowledge where these customers are coming from. Firstly, we are gaining market share among smaller customers through our Bronze membership, an accessible entry-level product. Secondly, we are benefiting from new business transformations. And thirdly, we are seeing our large customers expand their franchises. Our strong product offering and responsible approach to pricing are the reasons why we are winning in the market.

Turning to the Private segment. We sustained healthy expansion after last year's exceptional growth. We crossed the 0.5 million subscriber milestone in the second quarter, reaching 502,000 subscribers, a 15.3% year-on-year increase. So we achieved our Capital Markets Day target of 500,000 subscribers significantly ahead of schedule. While growth has moderated from last year's exceptional levels, this represents healthy expansion on an increasingly large base and follows normal seasonal patterns.

Regarding our consumer portfolio, we have rebranded Tenant+ and Buyer+, into Search+. Living+ remains unchanged. All consumer products continue to deliver strong growth and value to our users. Search+ for buy is experiencing impressive year-on-year growth of 38%. Living+ has doubled its customer base compared to last year, showing how we can bring innovative new products to the vendor market and create new addressable markets.

Looking at Page 6, I would like to share the German real estate market dynamics in the second quarter. The German residential real estate market continues to be healthy with strong underlying fundamentals. As mentioned in our Q1 earnings call, the sales market experienced a temporary slowdown in April and May following the German government's investment program announcement, which resulted in higher mortgage rates. This decline is reflected in our Scout24 transaction momentum index, which showed a slight downturn in Q2. Since then, mortgage rates have stabilized after recent volatility, supporting buyer confidence in market activity.

Demand for real estate purchases remained strong, with sellers willing to engage as prices remain high. The rental market continues to see robust interest while contact requests stayed on high levels. The listings index continue to climb in Q2 with more new listings hitting the market and faster turnover times, demonstrating robust selling interest and market activity.

The German government's Bau-Turbo initiative and broader investment program and positive signals for the medium to long term. And these measures will stimulate housing market activity and increased demand for our platform services.

Moving to Page 7. I would like to share with you how AI is transforming every part of our business. As we promised at our Capital Markets Day 2024. And as I emphasized in my first earnings call as CEO in May, we are committed to being the technology and product leader in our market. To achieve this, we continue to invest heavily in product innovation for our customers. We are now in a phase where we are integrating AI across all of our products.

Let me give you a few examples. Moving to Propstack AI, one of our professional tools. This is transforming how our professional customers create property listings. Here is how powerful this is. Agents simply select a few photos and within seconds, Propstack AI automatically creates a professional property video, integrating compelling voice narratives and highlighting key selling points. This represents an enormous efficiency and cost advantage. Tasks that traditionally required expensive video production and hours of editing, now happen instantly. Agents save significant time and money while ensuring consistent high-quality listings across our platform. And the market response has been great so far.

Propstack is growing over 40% year-on-year in customers and contributing 60% more listings to our platform compared to last year, while revenue is surging over 50%. In July, almost 2/3 of our upsell revenue came from Propstack. We have been winning customers from competitors. Every single month for over a year now. Why? Because we have built the most intuitive and powerful and innovative HCM software in the market. We are now taking Propstack to the next level with AI, representing our commitment to innovation and our focus on delivering tools that truly transform how agents work.

Now turning to the consumer side. Our HeyImmo feature represents the next evolution in property search. Users can prospectively search in a conversational manner. For example, simply asking for a 3-bathroom apartment in Munich under EUR 2,500 with good transport links or the best investment opportunities in Berlin. We are developing an AI search assistant that enhances the consumer search experience.

HeyImmo provides conversation and search capabilities while leveraging our proprietary and exclusive data assets. This unique data integration creates a differentiated offering that positions the platform to deliver a superior real estate search experience compared to existing AI assistants in the market.

While traditional search will likely remain the primary access point for several years, we are launching the next level search now. This gives consumer choice and ensures we have the best product available during the transition period as consumers search expectations evolve with AI. Currently, conversational search is in beta. We will be rolling out fully on all devices in H2. We have also partnered with Anthropic to integrate Claude AI because we want to embrace AI productivity benefits internally throughout the organization.

Every employee now has their own AI assistant to work with. This provides our teams the sophisticated support for everything from data analysis to content creation. We expect that over time, both employees and processes becoming more efficient, enhancing our internal operations and productivity. We are moving full steam ahead on these AI initiatives. It is still early days, and we remain humble about the journey, but our goal is to provide choice for our customers and deliver the real benefits of AI and automation.

Let me conclude with some key takeaways on Page 8. Firstly, we delivered a strong financial performance that enabled us to upgrade our full year guidance. Revenue grew 15% with margin expansion, even while integrating acquisitions, proving we can execute growth and efficiency at the same time.

Secondly, we are winning in the market with record customer metrics. We now approach 26,000 professional customers and have crossed 500,000 private subscribers. Our product-led strategy and responsible pricing is clearly resonating. We are taking share from competitors and expanding our reach into new customer segments.

Thirdly, our AI transformation is accelerating. Propstack AI is already live. HeyImmo will be launched in H2 this year, and we have deployed Claude across the organization. We are not just experimenting with AI, we are implementing it at scale to drive real business results.

And lastly, our platform is generating powerful network effects. Multiproduct adoption increased, while listing volumes are expanding, and our interconnected ecosystem is creating compounding value. These results confirm that our strategy is working, and we are well positioned for continued success.

Now I will hand over to Dirk.

Thank you, Ralf, and welcome, everyone. Let's move to the financial section of our presentation. On Page 10, you will find our Q2 and first half financial highlights. Building on strong Q1 momentum, Q2 delivered another solid quarter, resulting in an impressive first half that reflects continued strength across our business. Group revenue in the second quarter reached EUR 160.6 million, up 15.1% year-on-year with organic growth contributing a healthy 11.1%.

This performance reflects strength across our core business. Subscription services maintained momentum, while recent acquisitions are already contributing meaningfully. For the first half, revenue totaled EUR 318.2 million, representing 15.5% growth with organic growth accelerating to 11.6%.

Turning to profitability. Second quarter ordinary operating EBITDA increased 16.9% to EUR 101.7 million, marking the first time our quarterly ordinary operating EBITDA has reached 9 digits with margins expanding 90 basis points to 63.3%. For the first half, ordinary operating EBITDA reached EUR 195.4 million, up 17.3%, resulting in a margin of 61.4%. This margin expansion is particularly strong as we are integrating acquisitions that carry lower profitability profiles.

Reported EPS increased by 15% to EUR 0.54, while adjusted EPS showed even stronger growth of 23.6%, reaching EUR 0.87. Operating cash flow came in at EUR 133.5 million, 11% higher year-on-year.

Turning to Page 11 for a closer look at our Professional segment. Revenue in our Professional segment grew by 14.5% in Q2, reaching EUR 115.7 million. For the first half, we delivered strong growth of 15.3%, driven by robust performance across both subscriptions and transaction enablement.

Our Subscription business grew 14.8% to EUR 84.2 million, with double-digit organic growth of 11.7%. We are clearly winning in the market, capturing share from competitors, benefiting from healthy business formation and expanding in the rural parts of Germany with accessible products like the Bronze addition.

Professional customers expanded 6.1% to nearly 26,000, with organic growth at 5.6% in Germany, excluding neubau kompass. ARPU grew 8.3% to EUR 1,082 driven by strong performance with our residential agents, offset by more moderate growth among our commercial customers. Transaction enablement grew 18.4% to EUR 26.4 million, driven by acquisitions and 4% organic growth. The lower organic growth reflects reduced transaction volumes and reduced capital allocation into our leads business as part of our interactivity strategy.

Demand for data and valuation and agent CRM products remains strong. Ordinary operating EBITDA grew by 14.3% to EUR 73.1 million with a margin of 63.1%. Ordinary operating EBITDA increased by 14.3% to EUR 73.1 million, achieving a 63.1% margin. The 0.5 percentage point year-on-year margin compression in half year 1 reflects the dilutive effect of recent acquisitions.

Turning to the Private segment on Page 12. Let's review the results for the second quarter of 2025. Private segment growth picked up momentum in Q2, accelerating to 16.8% revenue growth and EUR 44.9 million. The stronger second quarter lifted first half revenues to EUR 87.2 million, up 15.9% year-on-year.

Performance was driven by our Plus subscription products, which delivered strong growth of 22.2% in the quarter, while PPA revenues also surprised on the upside with 10.9% growth. We reached 502,000 subscribers in Q2, up 15.3% year-on-year. This strength spans our entire portfolio. Search+ Buy surged 38% driven by high purchase demand. Living+ doubled its customer base, creating new rental markets. And Search+ Rent maintained consistent growth. ARPU increased 6% to EUR 17.7 driven by improved unit economics from our multi-vendor credit check strategy.

Our PPA business grew 10.9% in Q2, driven by strength in both sales and rental listings. Improving market conditions and rate stabilization boosted sales, while rental PPA remained robust. Our targeted marketing campaigns are resonating with sellers and landlords. Ordinary operating EBITDA surged 23.9% to EUR 28.6 million in Q2 with margins expanding 370 basis points to 63.7%. For the first half, ordinary operating EBITDA reached EUR 53.5 million with margins at 61.4%, up 500 basis points year-on-year.

Turning to Page 13. Let's take a closer look at the main ordinary operating items in Q2. Own work capitalized decreased 9.4% to EUR 4.9 million, reflecting the completion of various development and integration projects. As a percentage of revenue, this represents approximately 3.1%.

Operating expenses increased 10.2% year-on-year, growing below our revenue growth rates. This reflects the positive impact of our interconnectivity strategy, efficient acquisition integration and our continued efforts to simplify the organization. On an organic basis, operating expenses were up just 3.6%.

Personnel costs rose by 7.8% to EUR 28 million, primarily driven by M&A integration and regular salary adjustments. On an organic basis, personnel costs remained nearly flat. Marketing expenses increased marginally by 3.9% to EUR 10.4 million as our interconnectivity strategy continues to enhance performance marketing efficiency.

IT cost increased 19.4% to EUR 5.6 million, primarily driven by higher AWS costs from migrating acquisitions to our cloud infrastructure and increased data lake volumes. Additional factors include ongoing AI investments and the integration of recent acquisitions.

Selling costs increased 33.5% to EUR 11.2 million, driven by stronger demand for data and valuation services. This increased activity led to higher third-party costs at Sprengnetter and bulwiengesa. Ordinary operating EBITDA grew strongly by 16.9% in Q2 with margins expanding 90 basis points to 63.3%.

For the first half, we achieved impressive results with 17.3% ordinary operating EBITDA growth and 100 basis points of margin improvement. On an organic basis, margins would have reached 64.4% in Q2 and 62.8% for the first half, demonstrating our underlying operational strength. This strong performance demonstrates our ability to balance multiple priorities, investing into product and innovation, organizational simplification, integration of acquisitions and investing in our people.

Turning to Page 14, where we show the items below ordinary operating EBITDA. Non-operating effects increased 78.8% in Q2 due to our strong share price and Sprengnetter business performance. I will comment on these positions on the next page. For the first half, reported EBITDA increased 15% to EUR 159.8 million. Along with the decrease in own work capitalized, D&A decreased 12.8% year-on-year in Q2, primarily driven by the completion of IT projects and platform developments. For the first half, D&A totaled EUR 24.2 million, a flattish development of 2.8%. The mix has shifted with PPA amortization from recent acquisitions increasing to EUR 4.8 million in half year 1, while other scheduled depreciation remained stable.

The financial result improved year-on-year to negative EUR 6.1 million in Q2, a 28.5% improvement driven by lower one-off impacts compared to last year. We also incurred EUR 1.4 million in foreign exchange losses. I will walk through more of the specifics on the following slide.

Income taxes increased to EUR 16.6 million in Q2, up 14% with an effective tax rate of approximately 30%. Despite all one-offs in Q2, we still managed to grow basic EPS by 15%, leading to strong growth in half year 1 2025 of 22.3% to EUR 1.23. Net income for the first half increased 20.5% to EUR 89 million, a solid bottom line expansion despite Q2's temporary impacts.

Adjusted EPS, which excludes all one-offs, was strong in both quarters, up 23.6% in Q2, leading to half year 1 2025 growth of 20.8% to EUR 1.65. The fact that we delivered over 20% growth in both reported and adjusted metrics for half year 1 2025 truly demonstrates our underlying business momentum and margin expansion capabilities.

Let's turn to Page 15 for the bridge from reported net income to adjusted net income for Q2 2025. Non-operating effects increased by 78.8% year-on-year in Q2 of 2025 due to the following successful business outcomes. Share-based compensation increased significantly due to our share price overperformance, up around 40% year-to-date compared to our mid-teens share price growth assumptions, leading to higher provisions. Non-operating effects, excluding share-based compensation came in at EUR 9.8 million. Thereof, M&A-related costs totaled EUR 8.2 million in Q2 driven by EUR 8 million increased provision for Sprengnetter earn-out due to the strong EBITDA performance in 2024.

The adjustment of the financial result included EUR 4.9 million from purchase price liability remeasurements, including EUR 1.4 million for the remaining 25% Sprengnetter stake and EUR 3.5 million for neubau kompass and EXPLOREAL earn-outs. These impacts were partially offset by favorable fair value adjustments on our venture capital investments of EUR 700,000. We do, however, not see a material cash impact from these non-operating costs in 2025.

Turning to Page 16 and cash flow. Free cash flow for the first half reached EUR 118.1 million, up 15% year-on-year. The improvement was driven by our strong operating performance as well as positive working capital impact from the non-cash nature of the non-operating costs. Our conversion ratios remain excellent. Free cash flow representing 99% of adjusted net income and 60% of ordinary operating EBITDA, demonstrating strong cash generation.

Turning to Page 17 to leverage and capital allocation. Our leverage ratio increased to 0.53x at the end of Q2 2025, up from 0.42x in Q1 due to higher credit facility utilization and share buyback program commitments. This temporary increase reflects the typical seasonality of Q2 when we pay our annual dividend.

In the second quarter, we allocated EUR 14.8 million to share repurchases, bringing total buybacks for the first half of the year to EUR 38.3 million. Total shareholder returns in Q2 amounted to EUR 110.2 million, primarily driven by a dividend distribution of EUR 95.4 million, following the 10% increase in the annual dividend to EUR 1.32 per share.

Moving to the guidance on Page 18. Based on our strong first half performance, we upgraded our full year guidance to 14% to 15% revenue growth, including approximately 3 percentage points of inorganic contribution and expansion of our ordinary operating EBITDA margin of up to 70 basis points. We are well on track to deliver our fifth consecutive year of double-digit growth and third consecutive year of margin expansion.

Let me provide some context around our guidance upgrade and outlook for the remainder of the year. The upgrade reflects our strong execution in the first half and confidence in the underlying business momentum in our core membership and private subscription business. Based on the second quarter revenue run rate for transaction enablement, we believe our upgraded revenue guidance range represents a good outcome for the full year and leaves us enough flexibility to balance between profitability and growth.

In terms of quarterly cadence, I would like to remind you that the third quarter will likely show lower revenue growth and then accelerate again in the fourth quarter. We expect a similar trend for ordinary operating EBITDA growth and margin. Overall, we feel very good about the momentum in the business, which is reflected in our upgraded guidance.

We will provide the next update during our Q3 9 months 2025 earnings call on October 30, 2025. And with that, let's open the line for questions. We would appreciate if you could limit your questions to two per speaker.

[Operator Instructions] The first question from Craig Abbott, Kepler Cheuvreux.

I have two questions for now, please. One is just some early thoughts on the run rate heading into 2026 and in particular, thinking about the components of that continued growth. I'm thinking about things like the new AI tools, of course, continued trade-ups in the -- amongst your membership packages, scaling up at neubau and bulwiengesa. If you could just maybe give us some early thoughts at this stage on how we should think about that going into '26 when you're going to be obviously going up against quite a high competitive base? And then I'll ask my second question.

Craig, it's me, Dirk. Maybe I'll start before I hand over to Ralf. Of course, you can see us preparing our growth levers for 2026 already. And as you rightly pointed out, it will be a mixture between continued growth in the professional membership, which is driven by ARPU increases based on our new acquisitions as well as our product rollouts that we're having. And secondly, of course, also by continued growth in our private segment with regards to subscriber growth. You might have seen that we are seeing a nice tick up in the buy product as well, not only in the rental product. We are scaling beyond 500,000 as we speak, and we also believe that there is room to grow in the next year on private as well as professional.

And you've also seen the nice tick up that we're having on our PPA business in Private. And that will be added by additional growth in the transaction enablement business because we think that the transactions in the German real estate market will start picking up again in 2026. As you might have read this morning, the numbers in the German real estate market look quite good for the second half as well as for 2026 coming in. We're seeing a slight uptick in prices for houses. We're seeing a similar, but only half of that, roughly 1% quarter-on-quarter price uptick for apartments. So all in all, we believe that the transaction environment overall for next year will light up. So you can see us in Q1 with a good mix between professional growth, private growth and transaction enablement growth.

Yes. Actually, not much to add, Dirk. Ralf speaking here. So what I can add maybe it's helpful that there's still room to grow in the new membership additions, right? Just 12,500 customers are migrated so far. So there's still a lot of potential. And as you know, we are not foreseeing customers into the new memberships. We are only doing them in if they see the value and also we do the price enforcement for the new memberships, and that's guaranteeing an uplift in terms of revenue if new customers -- if the customers are migrated in the new membership additions. That's all.

Okay. Sorry, Ralf, I didn't quite get the number you said that had migrated, sorry?

12,500 customers have migrated, the new membership.

Okay. And my second question, and I'll get back. Dirk, you mentioned the private PPA number having picked up quite strongly in Q2. I mean, obviously, it's high-margin products. So -- and you talked about some targeted marketing measures having impacted that. A, could you maybe elaborate on that? And secondly, are you seeing this trend in growth in PPA continue in Q3?

No, we didn't have specifically a large number of targeted campaigns around that. What you can see is what I mentioned when we come to tends for 2026 is that the transaction market is slightly picking up again, and that's also reflected in our private PPA numbers. On the professional side, you don't see those numbers picking up in the same order, simply because of the fact that we are trying to get more and more customers into our starting addition, the Bronze addition, and that is reflected in the more than 5% customer growth organically in the second quarter that you are seeing.

So overall, I think the PPA business is also a testament to our product offering, which is right in time for a market uptick in the second quarter as well as in 2026.

Next question from Ed Young, Morgan Stanley.

My first one is just if you could give a bit more color on the sort of temporary impact you spoke about around transactional enablement in Q2 and how we should think about that in H2, a broader commentary on the broader macro? And then the second question was around Propstack. It's very interesting, you speaking about that. Can you give a bit more color around the upsell in terms of which packages it incorporated into? I think in Austria, it's in all of them, but I might be mistaken. But how do you think about the dynamics around upsell for that product? That would be interesting to hear.

Maybe we start with the Propstack question. Yes, I can -- I mean, what we see in Propstack is that the customers really appreciate the new features we built in, in particular, the AI features are well received by the customers. And with the package we are offering to the market, I think we are winning, at the moment, market share. Why is it important for us because as you can see that with customers using Propstack, we can increase our listing share against the competition. So we have an interest that more and more of our customers using Propstack. So therefore, we are upselling actively Propstack to our membership customers. And I think, in the highest edition or in the highest edition, there's also a Propstack product included, but not the full-fledged product. So that gives us actually also upsell potential. But as I said, the strategic interest is that our customers using Propstack, our CRM solutions, and they benefit from additional features and also from better placements they get because the product, of course, Propstack is better integrated than we could do with other external CRM systems.

Dirk, the first question?

Ed, your first question was with regards to transaction enablement. I think I answered the part of that when Craig was asking the same question, but let me repeat it here again. I think what we have seen in the first half was a modest growth amidst macro headwinds that we were seeing. Mortgage and relocation -- and our media business was a bit weaker, but that was fully substituted by the homeowner leads business, and that was doing quite okay.

And what we are seeing and what is a testament to our strategy, I think, is that we are seeing a very strong demand for data valuation and CRM services. And for the remainder of the year, I would expect similar trends. We are also expecting the leads business to pick up a bit again versus the first half, and we are seeing quite healthy incoming interest into our data valuation business and as Ralf outlined, on the CRM side. So overall, moderate picture for transaction enablement for the first half. But the early signs we're seeing in the second quarter, I think we're going into a very good second half of the year with transaction enablement.

The next question is from Andrew Ross, Barclays.

I've got two on numbers. First one is on the share-based comp, which obviously was higher in Q2, I think, largely because of the share price going up a lot. Can you just give us a guidance as to what you expect for share-based comps the rest of 2025 and also for 2026, I guess, on an assumption of kind of more normal share price appreciation? That's the first question.

Then the second one is just to follow up on your comment, Dirk, on outlook where you said you'd expect Q3 to be a bit slow and then to reaccelerate in Q4. And I was just kind of checking the transcript on the Q1 call, and I think you spoke about tougher comps in Q2 and then in Q4 back then. And just kind of looking at it, the comp actually looks a bit easier in Q3. So just help us understand why growth is going to slow in Q3 before it reaccelerates.

Andrew, thanks. Let me start with share-based compensation. To give you a bit of more color around that. So the programs we have out there are split into basically 2 line items. One is the Executive Board and the second part is the leadership team. They both amount to an annual value of around about 9%, so slightly below 10% of our overall personnel costs. Over the past 4 years, the performance period of all programs has basically been ramping up. So when you look at our balance sheet, what you see is a reflection of liabilities on the company towards employees of around EUR 54 million, EUR 55 million. And that is due to the fact that on the one hand, we have performed quite well versus our performance targets. And the second piece is, as Filip outlined already, that we have seen a pickup in the share price. So around about 30%, 40% since beginning of the year. And those effects had to be reflected in share-based compensation.

So to do the math, if you think about roughly a EUR 40 million liability on our balance sheet, and the share price increases by 30% based on constant performance metrics, you will need to increase that liability by EUR 12 million per quarter. So that's the way the metrics work. If you look into the next year, you will see more of a normalization because next year payout periods are starting. So we are taking liabilities away with cash from the balance sheet. And we are only adding additional liabilities to the new consecutive programs coming through. And we think about those programs in the area, which I outlined in the beginning, so EUR 8 million to EUR 9 million year-on-year. And that was also the basis which I gave you at the beginning or end of last year when it came to 2025, not having in mind that the share price, which showed such a positive reaction.

So I hope that helps a bit, Andrew, to give you a flavor and an idea on where this metric will develop in the next years. But it will, of course, be a tailwind for us that we start converting liabilities into cash.

Second part of your question was around comps in Q3. You're absolutely right. When we were talking in the Q1 about Q2 and Q3, we actually haven't expected a very positive development in Q2 that was -- especially with regards to the new customer acquisitions on the professional side as well as on the private side. And that was also the reason why we increased guidance, as you've seen. And against that guidance, I would think that the Q3 revenue growth will be slightly lower than in the first half. And what you have traditionally seen in our business is an acceleration in the fourth quarter.

So transaction enablement, we see a slightly softer organic growth before it picks up in Q4, as I said. First numbers we are seeing at the end of Q2 are quite encouraging. Then we are starting to let ARPU benefit from our multi-vendor credit check strategy in private and we expect transaction enablement to grow in Q4, as I just said, a bit quicker. So for EBITDA, we see basically the same trend, tough comp with the 63% we saw last year. But overall, I would reiterate that the fourth quarter is usually a strong one for us on profitability as well as on growth. So we expect the same for the Q4 2025, and that's why we felt quite optimistic with regards to our target for the second half with the phasing I just outlined between Q3 and Q4.

If I could just follow up on the stock-based comp point. That was helpful color. I guess, to kind of summarize it, when we kind of think about the overall P&L charge that we should be putting into our numbers for the second half of '25 into '26, what would be a kind of sensible assumption? Are you kind of saying we're going back to mid-teens run rate annualized from here? Or have I misunderstood that?

I think in the future, what you will see is rather a range from us than anything else. I outlined that we will always be around 10% of our overall personnel costs. And what you're currently seeing is around, I think, Filip, EUR 30 million that we have for provision for share-based comp for this year versus the EUR 15 million. I wouldn't think that we will materially go beyond EUR 30 million for the full year 2025.

The next question from Will Packer, BNP Paribas Exane.

Firstly, very good customer add numbers again. Could you help us think through the drivers of that, gaining share of small agents, new formation, market share gains versus peers? And should we think these positive trends could extend into 2026 and remain a growth driver? And then secondly, in the last 12 to 18 months, there's obviously been a fair bit of change around your competitive environment in terms of ownership. At the coalface, are you seeing any evolution in pricing strategies, marketing strategies and any potential new competition in areas like Tenant+?

I'm happy to take the first question regarding customer numbers. I think what we see is that the structure of the market or the nature of the market is quite robust. What it means is that there are this dynamic in the market. So they are -- there are new starters. There are also consolidations in the market. The franchise companies, they are also growing in terms of customer numbers. And we are benefiting from that. So market actually is quite healthy, and we believe we can -- we will also see that in 2026. So there's no reason why there should be a change, let's say, in the nature of the market.

So why we are benefiting is also because we have quite an attractive product if it comes to smaller customers, in particular. So we can actually offer a new starters a really good package, not just a listing product. Also, they get more. They get kind of CRM systems from us, better CRM systems from us. They get support if it comes to energy certificates, for instance. So for new starters, in particular, it makes sense to start with us if you are new to the market.

We also offer some trainings to new starters. So we are building a kind of loyalty to new starters and that helps us also to upgrading those customers later on from a Bronze addition into a higher membership tier. So therefore, we are starting quite early on the customer journey, and we are successful. That's also a bit different to competitors where you have a hurdle of price often and you need to hit this hurdle first before you can get a member or a real customer of the platform business. So that's different to how we approach the market. And I think we are quite successful here. So therefore, we think this will remain a driver for next year for sure.

So second question, Dirk?

I think the second question, well, thanks for that, was around the competitive environment. To be honest, we haven't seen so much difference in our competitive strategy over the past 12 months. And we continue to see very healthy metrics on our side. So when I look at, for example, listing development, we've been adding 13% listings to more than 560,000 listings on the platform as we speak. In Q2 and overall, in the first half, listings were added by 11%. We see an uptick in objects. We see an uptick in homeowners that are registering objects on our platform. We have more than 3 million objects on the platform as we speak.

So why do I mention those numbers because they give you a good indication on the relevance of our platform in the market and how is that taken. Object uptick, customer uptick is obviously driven by the fact that a lot of our B2B customers take objects away from the market, from the competition to our platform. And a lot of the private customers are taking their objects on our platform because they see us as a clear market leader.

So in total, I would think, yes, we're still heading for tough competition in the German market as always. But the strategy that we are following and that interconnected strategy really helps us to gain value to customers, and that's been showing in the nonfinancial KPIs, I just outlined to you.

Very helpful. Just one minor follow-up. In terms of the underlying number of estate agent branches in Germany. Does your 6% benefit from underlying growth in that number? Or is it more just accessing some of these smaller agents, et cetera? What do you think the market growth in agency branches is?

I'll start. We were just discussing it, sorry, Will. I'll start off with that. I think -- and Ralf will answer the question in more detail. But I think what we have seen here is growth in the Bronze addition, which points you to the agents that are coming on to the platform, which are rather small agents. We don't see a huge uptick in the overall amount of agents. But on the other side, I think, Ralf, we're also seeing more agent conglomerate coming onto the platform with additional districts.

Yes. I mean I think that what I outlined before, I think the dynamic is quite good in the market. So the question is how many agents do you need for such a dynamic. And as you know, there are no barriers in Germany to become an agent. So it's actually quite attractive at the moment to become an agent because there is some liquidity in the market as it comes to objects. And so therefore, what we see is that our customers are growing. So the franchise groups are growing in terms of agents, and it's also more attractive to enter the market. So we see new starters. And we see that for agents who are just with the competition, it makes no sense because the dominance of Scout is we increased our dominance, so they have to move to us as well.

So what we saw in the past that some of the agents in Germany, they had a one-portal strategy either with us or with the competition, they also move over to us. So -- and that's all supporting the customer number growth you can see. And we think that will continue. I mean you see it also in the car classified business at the moment in Germany. So the #1 is eating market share from #2 and also partially from #3. So I think we believe that's also true then for next year.

The next question from Nizla Naizer, Deutsche Bank.

I have two questions as well. The first one is on the guidance for 2025. You've now said that you're guiding for a 70 basis point margin improvement for the full year. But given margins already expanded by around 100 bps in H1, just curious to understand if there's some conservatism baked into H2, or is there some incremental investments you've specifically got in mind. Some color there would be great on the thinking.

And second, on leverage being sort of 0.5x, how you're thinking about future M&A as a use of cash as well maybe beyond Germany because there's been a lot of consolidation and activity in other markets as well. So just curious to see how you think of that opportunity for maybe more aggressive inorganic growth.

Nizla, thanks for the questions, to the point as always. So on your first question with regards to margin guidance, of course, we want to leave a little bit headroom and flexibility for the remainder of the year. And if you followed our half year 1 guidance -- or sorry, our half year 1 results, you can see that we still have to add more than 80 basis points to come to the target margin until the end of the year. We feel comfortable around that, I have to say, but we also want to keep up flexibility and we want to keep our powder dry in order to support growth for the remainder of the year. That was the first part.

And the second part is around M&A. I mean, we haven't materially changed and we won't materially change our capital allocation strategy. You know that we are paying and we continue to pay dividends. We are doing share buybacks and the remainder we are using for M&A, all along the strategy, which we laid out at the Capital Markets Day, which is around interconnectivity. So nothing to add to that and no changes around that.

The next question from is Giles Thorne, Jefferies.

The first question is back on competition. We've seen Kleinanzeigen bring in a big new external hire to lead the property vertical back in April. He's been quite vocal on where he sees the opportunity, specifically in giving the market a consumer-centric platform rather than the professional-centric platforms like ImmoScout and Immowelt. And given Kleinanzeigen is very big in C2C, that makes a lot of sense, but it would be useful to hear your thoughts on the direction Kleinanzeigen is moving in and how you might respond if you need to respond at all?

And then the second question was on the private business, and it'd be useful to hear what plans you have to drive up the cross-sell rate from Search+ Rent as it is now known to Living+. If I'm not getting it wrong, that cross-sell rate currently is very, very low.

Yes. Maybe should I start with the first question? Okay. So I think you referred to the interview from the Kleinanzeigen CEO, right? I mean, so far, we haven't seen any activity in terms of that they founded or that they started an own vertical for real estate. It might come, who knows. I mean, it could be. What we are seeing at the moment is that the traction they get is not high, and they are mainly winning shares or market share from the #2. That's what I mentioned before that Immowelt is a bit in the middle here. So what I can say if it comes to consumers, I mean, Kleinanzeigen, of course, is quite effective for consumers, but we are also attractive. Why? Because we try to position ourselves as the trusted platform out there, and there's a lot of fraud in the market. So if you want to sell your property seriously, then I think we are the best place to go to. And that's what we are also communicating to the market. And you can see it in the private listing numbers that this is -- the strategy is working.

If it comes to rent listings, there's still a way to go, but we are also investing heavily into our homeowner strategy and homeowners are also landlords, as you know, and this is quite unique listing content for us. And by the way, it's quite hard to monetize on the listing side, at least rent listing. So I mean, those listings are for free in Kleinanzeigen. So the economical impact will be low here. But of course, this content is quite attractive. So therefore, we are investing so heavily into our homeowner strategy.

So as it comes to cross-selling, I mean, as you know, our strategy is to expand the lifetime of Plus subscriber, right, because that's also the value driver for us. So ideally, the consumers, they start with a Plus subscription if it comes to Search and then they convert into our Living+. So we are experimenting still with Living+. You are right. I mean, the conversion could be higher, but we see progress in the product here. And so -- and if you take the stand-alone growth numbers of Living+ and if you compare it with the growth numbers we had in Search+ as we started 10 years ago, I think we can be quite happy, right? And the good thing here is that the Living+ subscribers, they are coming out of the product, right? So we have a clear funnel where we start on the Search+ products, and then we are going -- we are migrating those customers on to Living+. I would see it as a big opportunity and potential rather than that we are not successful here.

And maybe complementing on what Ralf just said with a few numbers, Giles. What you need to keep in mind that the Search+ customer base is roughly 6% of our overall rental search base, right? So there isn't much to cross-sell at the moment. Plus, if you look at the average customer lifetime on the Rental+ product, you can fish per month out of a pool of, say, 60,000, 70,000 customers. So that's all going to be more integrated, and there will be more cross-sell in the future. But at the moment, I would think that our full focus is on those customers that have a real search need for buying a real estate. And with 30,000 customers, we're really, really happy.

That was the last question. I would like to turn the conference back over to Mr. Lindvall for any closing remarks. Thank you.

Thank you, everyone. This concludes today's call. Thank you for joining and your interest in Scout24.

Ladies and gentlemen, the conference is now over. Thank you for choosing Chorus Call, and thank you for participating in the conference. You may now disconnect your lines. Goodbye.