REA Group Limited

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the REA Group Limited Third Quarter Fiscal Financial Results Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during this session, you will need to press star 11 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising you your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 11 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Alice Bennett. Please go ahead.

Good morning and welcome everyone. My name is Alice Bennett, Head of Investor Relations, and I'd like to thank you for joining us to discuss REA Group's results for the third quarter ended 31st March 2025. Before we commence, I'd like to acknowledge the traditional owners of country throughout Australia and recognise the continuing connections to lands, waters and communities. We pay our respects to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures and to elders past, present and emerging. This morning you'll firstly hear from our CEO, Owen Wilson, who will provide a brief business update. Then Janelle Hopkins, REA's CFO, will talk to the financial highlights for the quarter. Following this, we'll be happy to take your questions. Just as a reminder, our quarterly numbers are top line results only, so we're restricted in the amount of detail we provide. With that, I will pass to Owen to get us started.

Thanks, Alice. I'd like to welcome everyone this morning and also acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which we are meeting and pay my respects to their elders past and present. REA Group has delivered a strong third quarter result, underpinned by double-digit yield growth. Looking at our results from co-operations for the quarter, revenue was $374 million, an increase of 12%, and EBITDA, excluding associates, was $199 million, also an increase of 12%. Strength in underlying fundamentals coupled with the first interest rate cut in four years supported the health of the market and buyer demand in the quarter. National listings remained in line with the prior year's strong comparables with steady national house price growth supporting vendor confidence. In these positive conditions consumers visited our platforms in record numbers and our customers continued to prioritise our market leading products and services. REA's growth is driven by our clear strategy and our third quarter achievements demonstrate excellent progress towards our strategic goals. To deliver on our purpose of changing the way the world experiences property, we remain focused on engaging the largest consumer audience with our personalised property experiences, delivering superior value to our customers with leading products and services, and leveraging unparalleled data insights as we expand our core business and build next generation marketplaces. Australians can find more listings and more buyers on realestate.com.au than anywhere else. This quarter, more people visited our platform than ever before, including a record 12.6 million visitors in March. We further extended our exclusive audience in the quarter with a monthly average of 6.4 million Australians using our platform and not using our nearest competitor. This means access to this large number of potential buyers, sellers and renters is exclusive to REA customers. Our personalized experiences ensure property obsessed Australians continue to return to our platform with an increased average of 133 million visits each month. And our app first strategy delivered 5.5 times more app visits than our nearest competitor. Our consumer strategy is centered on personalizing our membership experience. Deep personalisation not only unlocks an enhanced consumer experience, it also amplifies the value delivered to customers. Members are proven to be much more likely to perform a high-value action, and our active membership base continues to expand, increasing 6% on the prior year. Realestate.com.au is more than just an advertising platform, and our goal is to support consumers throughout the full property journey. The aspiration of our AI driven next generation listings initiative is to set a new global property experience benchmark. It's aimed at helping consumers understand more about a property and encouraging them to take action sooner. Supporting this, we recently integrated before you buy building test and strata reports. And while it's early days, we're currently seeing more than 400 reports downloaded on average each week and this is continuing to grow. We also integrated NBN availability on all listings at the end of February, providing the most up-to-date information about a product's connectivity. Recent enhancements to the property listing experience have significantly boosted higher value consumer interactions. As we expected, buyer email inquiries declined slightly, but these have been replaced by inspection interactions which are up 12%. These are a much more meaningful buyer action. Our property owner experience helped drive a 50% year-on-year increase in seller leads delivered to our customers during the quarter. The release of an enhanced owner experience in December, which enables owners to more easily update their property's attributes, continues to engage owners with an average of 10,000 properties updated each month since launch. Turning to our customers. Record Premier Plus penetration supported the strong yield growth in our core residential business and our top-tier commercial product, Elite Plus, also achieved record penetration. The uptake of our high-performance listing solution, Lux, continues to gain momentum and deliver significant value to customers and their vendors. Lux generates 71% more high-value consumer actions than a Premier Plus listing. These include saving or sharing a property, booking an inspection, or adding an option or an inspection to plan. During the quarter, we launched our developer high-performance listing solution, Amplify. Amplify is designed to engage high-intent buyers on the homepage and is set to deliver significant value to developers with more project profile views and more buyer leads. As part of our commitment to delivering greater choice and flexibility to customers, we introduced more options into our FY26 contract rollout. We know the highest performing campaigns combine a multi-channel strategy and these new options achieve this in the most cost-effective way. PRO is the most comprehensive subscription in the market with advanced solutions across agency services and agency marketplace. It is designed to support and accelerate business growth for our customers. Customers are seeing significant value in exclusive benefits such as access to our PropTrac powered CMA tool. Pleasingly, some key national agencies have recently signed new enterprise-wide pro partnerships. With the powerful combination of the most comprehensive property comparison data and unparalleled demand data, we believe we have the best CMA in the market. Our latest customer sentiment scores are at record levels, and pleasingly, the gap over domain is at an all-time high. Turning to financial services. With improved market conditions in recent quarters, we're now seeing the increase in submission volumes flow through to an increase in settlements. Investment in the mortgage choice brand and systems, coupled with product innovation, continues to deliver value for our brokers and support productivity. Leads generated from the enhanced realestate.com.au experience were up 45% year on year. Mortgage choice freedom continues to drive white label penetration. Freedom reached an exciting milestone in the quarter with brokers settling more than $2 billion in Freedom loans since the product first launched just under two years ago. Moving to REA India. Our Indian business delivered strong revenue growth in the quarter driven mainly by the Housing Edge platform. Housing.com's performance reflects a competitive environment and a slightly softer market. We remain focused on investment in our app experience and driving our app audience. This is delivering strong results with Housing.com continuing to lead the share of app downloads with 59% of all downloads and app sessions continue to grow rapidly. We know apps are the future of the Indian property experience and we're confident in our App Prime strategy. As we enhance the app experience with new features and technology, we are also prioritising listing quality and information accuracy. Verified listings on the housing.com platform grew steadily in the quarter. This is a strategically important trend and while our focus on verified listings may impact volumes in the short term, We know consumers' value trust and high-quality listings are an essential component of that trust. Before I hand over to Janelle, I'd like to share a few comments on the market as we look ahead. The Australian property market remains healthy with the support of positive fundamentals. As we know, listings are notoriously hard to predict. As we close out FY25, we expect listing growth will moderate against the very strong comparables of last year. This would still represent a healthy market. There are significant global factors currently playing out. And while this may cause some uncertainty, increased expectation of the number and timing of further interest rate cuts is likely to support activity and encourage people to transact in a market underpinned by strong demand. The recent clear result in the federal election is also likely to support confidence. REA is well positioned for a strong finish to the year. Our next-gen listing experience will continue to evolve with some exciting releases set to drive deeper engagement and connection with our consumers and value for our customers. Over to you, Janelle.