REA Group Limited

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the REA Group Limited Full Year Results 2025 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 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, Head of Investor Relations. 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 REA Group's 2025 full year results presentation. Before we commence, I'd like to acknowledge the traditional owners of countries throughout Australia and recognise their continuing connection to lands, waters and communities. We pay our respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures and to Elders past and present. So today you'll hear from REA's CEO, Owen Wilson, and Janelle Hopkins, REA's CFO. Owen will talk to our overarching financial performance and strategic highlights for the full year. He'll then hand over to Janelle to talk to our financial results in more depth. And following this, we'll be happy to take your questions. With that, I will pass it 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're meeting and pay my respects to their elders past and present. This will be my last full year presentation and I'm delighted to share these results today. REA Group has delivered an excellent FY25 result underpinned by double digit yield growth, deepening consumer engagement and the superior value delivered to our customers. Turning to the results from cooperations for the year. Revenue was $1.67 billion, an increase of 15%. EBITDA, excluding associates, was $969 million, an increase of 18%. And NPAT was $564 million, an increase of 23%. The board has determined to pay a final dividend of $1.38 per share, fully franked, together with the interim dividend, This represents a total dividend of $2.48 per share, an increase of 31%. Before we move into our operational highlights, I'd like to touch on the market conditions we operated in this year. Demonstrating the health of the market and vendor confidence, listings remained broadly in line with the very strong prior year. New national buyer listings remained above the seven-year average, while quarterly growth rates reflected significantly varied comparables. I expect the chart on the left to reverse in FY26 as we face strong comparatives in the first quarter and softer comparatives in the fourth. The chart on the right highlights the return to more normalised listing conditions in the last two years. The fluctuating listing volumes reflect the impact of the Royal Commission, the global pandemic and successive interest rate hikes The more normalised market conditions of FY25 supported vendor confidence with buyer listings up 1% on the prior year and just 1% below FY18. The first interest rate cuts in four years accelerated buyer demand to reach peak levels in the second half. In May, we recorded the highest level of inquiry in over three years and inspection interactions also continued to increase. As interest rates fell, price momentum strengthened and extended across the country. National house prices finished FY25 at a new peak, around 5% higher than a year ago. In these positive conditions, we remain focused on the execution of our strategy and we achieved some outstanding highlights. More people turn to our leading platform than ever before with a new Ipsos record of 12.7 million people visiting realestate.com.au in April. Our personalised owner experiences help drive a 55% increase in seller leads and 4.5 million Australian properties are now tracked by their owner on our site. Customers continue to turn to our premium products to differentiate their listings with Premier Plus in Residential, and Elite Plus in commercial, both achieving record depth penetration. In India, we recently announced the divestment of PropTiger, enabling greater focus on the core housing.com business. We also announced our exciting investment in Athena Home Loans, and we established our Cyber City Innovation Hub in India and centralised our support teams in the Philippines. We have a consistent strategy with three simple goals, providing personalized property experiences to engage the largest consumer audience, delivering leading products and services to drive superior value to our customers, and leveraging unparalleled data insights as we expand our core business and build next generation marketplaces. Supporting our growth strategy, we've continued to acquire new capabilities, taking minority stakes in immersive, a 3D visualization platform, and JITI, an AI-powered search platform based in the UK. REA has been investing in AI and machine learning models for over a decade, and our investment has significantly increased in recent years. AI is an enabler that is enhancing the execution of our strategy and accelerating delivery. There are clear opportunities to innovate the way we extract and use data, enhance our products and experiences and to improve operational efficiencies. This slide highlights just a few of the current use cases, some of which I'll refer to over the coming slides. Australians are property obsessed and on realestate.com.au they can find more homes for sale than anywhere else. Australia's number one address in property was recognised as the sixth most valuable Australian brand in the 2025 Kantar Brands ranking. Realestate.com.au delivered record FY25 audiences and we increased our lead over the nearest competitor with 12 million people visiting the platform on average each month. Over half of these visitors use our site only. This means there are more than 6.4 million potential property seekers that can't be reached on a nearest competitor's platform. The size and deep engagement of our audience underpins the value we deliver to our customers. This has consistently strengthened over time, and in the last eight years, our unique monthly audience has more than doubled. Highlighting this strong consumer engagement, our visits lead over the nearest competitor has also significantly increased. Our consumer strategy is centered on converting our large-scale audience to members, and we are pleased to increase our active membership base by 12%. Our personalized property owner experiences nurture deep engagement and are key to driving quality seller leads. Owner experiences help generate around half of all seller leads. Inspections are a pivotal moment in the property journey, and inspection interactions are a key measure of demand. In FY25, we uplifted the inspection experience for both consumers and customers, resulting in a 253% increase in REA inspection registrations in the second half. In September, we launched our AI-driven next generation listings initiative with the aspiration to set a new benchmark in property experiences globally. Since then, we've delivered some of the most impactful enhancements to the listing experience in many years, and there's still more to come. The initial release focused on improved agent branding and image enhancements, and since launch, we've seen a 112% increase in consumers viewing all the images within a listing. Sharing the property journey with others is often a key part of the experience, and our NextGen initiative has supported a 21% year-on-year increase in consumers sharing buy listings. This is a multi-year program of work which will ultimately shift the listing experience from fixed to dynamic and highly personalised. The benefits are already emerging, but the end state of this initiative will drive even deeper consumer engagement. Our research platform, property.com.au, is the number three Australian property website, with 2.1 million people visiting on average each month. In FY25, we launched multiple new experiences and features, including the first media partnerships on the platform, our first step towards monetisation. Turning to customers, record Premier Plus penetration supported excellent yield growth in our core residential business. Powered by NextGen, Premier Plus is the most comprehensive and highest performing listing product, delivering 20% more inquiries than a Premier listing and selling 12 days faster on average. As part of our commitment to delivering greater choice and flexibility, we introduced new options for Audience Maximizer in our FY26 contract rollout. Starting at just $99, an audience maximizer add-on complements our core product offering and customers have recognized this value with penetration more than doubling in the latest round of contracting. Our highest performance listing solution, Lux, is proving to have broad market appeal and uptake continues to build traction. Demonstrating the significant value offered to customers and their vendors, Lux generates twice the number of views compared to a Premier Plus listing. The value we provide to a vendor is undeniable and the cost of this is a fraction of the total cost of selling a property which typically runs at about 2-3% depending on where you are in the country. This slide highlights the rapid growth in national property prices over the last five years alongside the average cost of advertising on REA relative to the property price. While average national property prices have grown by 8% CAGR since FY20, REA's average take rate has remained relatively steady and over the last two years it is broadly in line with FY20. Our range of subscriptions support customers to grow their business and are designed with choice and flexibility at the core. They range from the cost-effective basic offering through to pro. Pro offers the most advanced solution for customers to elevate their brand, to prospect and generate leads, and to simplify their working day. We recently launched a new short form social media style video called Agent Reels, which is exclusive to Pro customers. Located within an agent's profile, Reels provides customers with an impactful way of introducing themselves to potential sellers. RealCommercial.com.au is Australia's number one place for commercial property. 1.9 million Australians visited the platform on average each month, which is a record three times more people than the nearest competitor. Our top tier commercial product, Elite Plus, achieved record penetration. Supporting customers with more choice, we launched Elite Plus Unlimited in March, which offers unlimited days on site. This aligns to the longer transaction timelines we typically see in commercial campaigns. Turning to financial services. Improved market conditions throughout the year and strong brand activation supported an increase in submission volumes which has flowed through to a pleasing increase in settlements. Continued investment in core broking platforms and product innovation delivered ongoing broker value and supported productivity, which increased 5% across the year. The finance experience on realestate.com.au was enhanced this year with more prominent placement and new features. This uplift supported a 46% increase in realestate.com.au generated broker leads. Turning to our Indian business, the Indian market is the world's fourth largest economy and is backed by strong fundamentals. The housing market is strong and digitisation continues to accelerate. We have streamlined the business, we have a talented team in place to deliver on our app first strategy and our new CEO Praveen Sharma commenced last month. Praveen brings 25 years of experience in technology, digital and advertising including several years at Paytm and Google. On the right you can see the depth of our business in India. Housing.com is well established in the eight tier one cities as well as 20 of the 30 larger Tier 2 cities. Our Indian business delivered strong revenue for the year, primarily driven by the Housing Edge platform. Last month we entered into a binding agreement with NSE listed business Aurum PropTech to divest the PropTiger business in exchange for a 5.5% equity interest in Aurum. This move streamlines our Indian operation and will enable an increased focus in our core Housing.com business. We are firmly committed to our at-first strategy as we know this is the future of the Indian property experience. This focus continues to deliver strong results with Housing.com holding the lead in app downloads with a 56% share. We also remain focused on listing quality and information accuracy. Verified listings are a key component of maintaining and nurturing consumer trust and driving audience. New verified listings on housing.com increased 58% year-on-year. Sustainability is embedded within REA's strategic agenda and we were pleased to make progress toward our goals in FY25. The group's efforts were recognised with an increased MSCI ESG rating of AAA And from a social perspective, we were very pleased with our record high employee engagement score of 89%. The Australian property market remains healthy and we are continuing to invest and innovate. There are clear drivers of our continued growth in FY26 and beyond. Our next-gen listing initiative will continue to drive increasing consumer engagement and value for customers. We've completed another successful round of re-contracting for FY26, supporting record adoption and growth in the penetration of our products. Our financial services business has strong momentum, fueled by investment, integration, and a positive market. The recovery in the developer market is well underway to meet the shortfall in housing construction in recent years. As the market leader in this space, we are well placed to benefit from this recovery. We're excited by the opportunity in our streamlined Indian business where our app first strategy is extending the reach and quality of our audience. And as a business with technology at its core, we're deeply engaged in accelerating our products and experiences with AI. We're doing this while ensuring we have the right structures and talent in place to support speed and enhance delivery. I'd like to share a few comments on the market as we look ahead. Strong underlying fundamentals and expectations of further interest rate cuts this calendar year should continue to support buyer demand and steady national house price growth. These conditions offer a great time to sell and we expect vendors will feel confident in bringing their properties to market. Listings are notoriously hard to predict and we are facing very strong comparables in the first quarter. The softer comparables in the second half, however, should see national listing volumes for the full year broadly in line with the prior year, which would represent a healthy market. In this environment, REA Group is strongly positioned. Our next-gen listings initiative continues to roll out, enhancing the experience of consumers and their engagement with our platform. The value of our premium products will continue to underpin our future growth. As mentioned in our ISX announcement, we're in the very final stages of the appointment of our next CEO, and an announcement is expected soon. As you can understand, I cannot provide any further details today. REA's future is incredibly bright, and it's been an absolute pleasure to lead this business. When I sign off for the last time, I know I'll be leading the group in the hands of a talented and committed executive leadership team and dedicated employees. Over to you, Janelle.