REA Group Limited

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the REA group limited half-year 2026 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 at that time, please 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. Ma'am, 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 our EA Group's 2026 Half-Year Results presentation. Before we commence, I'd like to acknowledge the traditional owners of country throughout Australia and recognize the continuing connection to lands, waters, and communities. We pay our respects to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures and to elders past and present. So today you'll hear from REA's CEO, Cam McIntyre, and Janelle Hopkins, REA's CFO. Cam will talk to our overarching financial performance and strategic highlights for the half. He will then hand over to Janelle to talk to our financial results in more depth. And then following this, we'll of course be happy to take some questions. With that, I will pass to Cam to get us started.

Thank you very much, Alice. And good morning, everyone. Look, as I usually do, as I'm stepping through the slide deck, I'll just mention each slide as I get to it, just so you can keep up. So, look, I mean, to begin with, RAS delivered a good first half result underpinned by double-digit residential yield growth. It was a half that saw new AI-led experiences for consumers, product enhancements for customers, record audiences and growth in our market leadership position. Overall, the Australian property market landscape remained healthy with strong demand across the country and improvements in Sydney and Melbourne listings in Q2. So let's start with slide four and just looking at our financial results. So for the half, and we saw revenue up 5% on PCP to $916 million. EBITDA excluding associates up 6% on PCP to $569 million. and net profit after tax up 9% to $341 million. Boards also determined to pay a fully franked interim dividend of $1.24 per share, which is a 13% increase on PCP. And in addition, we've also announced today an on-market share buyback of up to $200 million, and that reflects REA's strong balance sheet, the confidence we have in our future outlook, and the balanced approach we have to capital management, enabling us to return... surplus capital to shareholders while continuing to retain flexibility to invest in growth opportunities as they arise. So before I move into our operational highlights, I'd just like to touch on mark conditions. So looking at slide six and listing volumes in Sydney and Melbourne kept pace with very strong prior year comps while volume in our smaller capital cities softened. Nationally, we are seeing a two-speed market result in a decline in new buy listings, which were down 6% for the half. As you can see in the chart on the left-hand side, listing volumes in the December quarter strengthened against the softer comps with Melbourne and Sydney leading the charge here. And the predominantly steady interest rates environment, that helps support the buoyant levels of demand that we saw with buyer inquiries surging today. to four-year highs across the nation. So let's jump into slide eight and looking at our numerous H1 highlights and it was a transformative half. Our technology, we rapidly extended our AI capability. We delivered excellent new experiences and products which we'll talk through a little bit more as we step through the presentation. Supporting our visualization strategy, we acquired a 61% stake in Canadian-based iGUIDE in October last year. In India, we strategically refocused the business on housing.com. Our personalized and immersive experiences were key to the record audience levels that we saw and deep consumer engagement with 38% year-on-year growth in seller leads for the half. We achieved a record Premier Plus penetration in residential and record Elite Plus penetration in commercial, which was fantastic. On to slide nine, and just taking a closer look at record audience levels and high-quality engagement. As you can see here, more people than ever visited our flagship site, realestate.com.au. record average of 12.7 million people visited the platform each month, and we achieved a record 146.1 million average monthly visits. But the real value is in the very large audience that lies with our deep engagement of our consumers. And looking back over the past two years, our audiences continue to consistently extend each half, and more importantly, key engagement metrics have also strengthened as well. like our active member base, the number of properties tracked by owners and sellers, and buyer inquiry volumes as well. The strength of our brand, the quality of our experiences, and access to unique data and content ensures Australians continually return to and spend more time on realestate.com.au than any other property site in the country. Looking at slide 10, and I'm sure most of you have seen this one before, but REA's purpose is to change the way the world experiences property, and our strategy centers on engaging the largest consumer audience, delivering superior value to our customers, and leveraging unique data and insights as we expand our core business and build next-generation marketplaces. Moving on to slide 11, and you've heard us say this before as well, that REA has been investing and innovating with AI for some time. It's a clear strategic focus and a significant opportunity. It's embedded in our existing strategy as an enabler that's enhancing the execution and supporting our delivery of product. Our unparalleled audience and proprietary data provide strong foundations and unique leverage for harnessing AI as we continue to change the way people buy, sell and rent property. AI has been applied across all of our operations. We've delivered several key AI-led initiatives and partnerships in the last half, which I'll talk to you a little bit more about in a moment. So let's turn to slide 12 and just talk a little bit about consumer experience. And during the half, after a successful 12-month trial, we're progressively rolling out natural language search, which is now available to half our website visitors. This new way of search, it really offers consumers a choice between traditional search with filters, map, or natural language search. In terms of the next evolution of AI search, A conversational search trial is running on realestate.com.au and that's now live for 10% of our web audience. And for those of you that are interested in having a look at that, you can contact Alison and she can give you some directions on how to get onto that one. But this really is an intelligent search experience that's going to encourage consumers to take action, such as saving or sharing a listing online. And it also may encourage consumers to think outside their set filters. So, I mean, for example, you know, if you're looking for a property for sale in Kew with a tennis court, let's say, and there aren't any, well, you know, search results using this sort of search engine may result in you looking at large properties with big enough backyards to install one of your own and estimate the cost for an upgrade, for instance. So, Level of intent data available through conversational search will increase exponentially, and this is going to be incredibly valuable to customers. In the middle of that slide there, you can see supporting our visualization strategy to engage consumers in a new way, and we launched a great new video hub in November. And on the right-hand side of the slide there, you'll see we launched our new AR-led conversational assistant. which is a great tool designed to support owners to better understand their real estimate valuation. Now, let's also now look at slide 13 and just talking a little bit about our customers. And we saw record Premier Plus penetration support yield growth in our core residential business. During the half, we introduced the serious buyer metric exclusive to Premier Plus listings. And this metric's powered by PropTrack, And what it does is it analyzes hundreds of behavioral signals to identify consumers showing true purchase intent. And that predictive score empowers agents with data to optimize campaign strategy and enhance their vendor conversations that they have. Our audience extension offering, audience maximizer, that was invigorated in 2025 and new features, price points and additional value helped drive record penetration in the half with that product. And on the right-hand side of the slide there, you'll see we've added additional value to our high-performance listing solution, Lux, which is proving to have market appeal, which is great, and we're seeing its penetration continue to build as well. On to slide 14, and the value in our pro subscriptions is in both enhanced brand exposure and access to exclusive products and tools that help generate new business. Agency groups have recognised the value that we have in pro with a number of customer groups signing enterprise-wide pro agreements now. And in addition, Australia's largest agency group, Ray White, was the first customer to access our new market intelligence data suite in December. And that offering is enabling agencies to better benchmark with insight into market share and conversation trends or conversion trends, I should say. Underpinning value for our customers is access to Ignite, and the self-service platform we have here is designed to bring deep insights, tools, and leads together into the one place. Monthly active Ignite use increased 14% on PCP, and in the first example of generative AI in Ignite, during the half, we introduced AI Smart Summary for Leads, and what that does is it provides quick seller lead insights to help customers have more informed conversations with property owners. On to slide 15, and realcommercial.com.au delivered record audiences with 2.9 million Australians visiting the platform on average each month, which was up 90% on the prior year, and our top tier product, which is Elite Plus, achieved record penetration, and there's been strong uptake of Elite Plus Unlimited, which offers unlimited days on site. The value in Ignite continued to increase for commercial customers. We saw a 59% PCP growth in monthly active users. In November, we also acquired Navalytics, and that offers a unique view of demographics with real-time lifestyles and mobility data. Both Navalytics and Aerialytics are really good opportunities for our commercial business. Turning to slide 16 and just talking about our financial services and improved market conditions, product innovation and brand investment delivered good revenue growth. Submission volumes continue to increase and they flow through to pleasing increases in settlement numbers. Enhancements for finance experience supported a 26% increase PCP growth in realestate.com.au generated broker leads in a good demonstration of the quality of these leads. The submissions from REO leads were also up 32% on PCP. We also continued to invest in our core broking platform and in AI training and tools and they delivered ongoing value and supported productivity improvement for our brokers. and this includes access to Google Gemini, which is supporting brokers to efficiently automate their processes. From a consumer perspective, in partnership with Athena Home Loans, Mortgage Choice launched a new bridging finance solution called Freedom Move in the half, and that solution is designed to simplify the complex and costly process of buying and selling. On to slide 17, and look, AI is clearly embedded within with an REA strategy, as you're seeing through this presentation. And our team, along with our key partnerships and investments, are really, really significant enablers in continuing to integrate AI across the business. The business is evolving to an AI-primed company, or an AI-primed company in terms of thinking and adoption. We're focused on empowering our people with the right tools and skills to harness the technology and boost capability. Productivity and drive to efficiencies are also incredibly important and this focus is delivering really strong results. Across the business, around 90% of our Australian employees have completed foundational AI training and 85% of our team regularly uses AI, our internal AI assistant. We're seeing very strong AI adoption in our global tech team as well and 90% of our global tech team are leveraging AI daily. A number of recent investments provide us also with deeper AI and data capability. This includes our UK-based AI property portal JITI and the Canadian-based iGUIDE business that I just mentioned. We're also really pleased to be partnering with global leaders in AI and have them help power some of our new AI-led products and experiences. Looking at slide 18 and demonstrating our accelerated innovation. This slide really highlights recently delivered AI products, experiences and tech capability along with training support and tools for our customers and brokers. AI-led search and immersive experiences on our platforms are engaging consumers in completely new ways and these experiences not only offer property seekers more choice, flexibility and personalisation, they also unlock rich consumer and market insights underpinning customer value as well. And what's to come is really exciting. AI is going to continue to evolve and we'll be very thoughtful in how we deliver that capability over time too. In the coming months, consumers can expect to see deeper personalisation with enhancements to conversational search and exclusive content and video. Our customers can expect to see powerful AI integration into our self-service Ignite platform and and data and technology that underpin our products and experiences will strengthen and the foundation REA has to leverage in AI. So turning to our international businesses and as we flagged previously, Housing.com's REA India's strategic priority and is now solely focused there on moving forward. Our app burst strategy continues to deliver positive results with housing.com continuing to lead app downloads in India. Focused improvements on the platform have also placed more relevant properties in front of the right consumers, which supported a 20% year-on-year growth in leads delivered to customers in the second quarter. We've also evolved our depth model as well with the introduction of a new top-tier subscription product called Ultra, which provides customers with superior listing branding. Looking at slide 21, we announced the acquisition of our controlling stake in Canadian-based Planeta, which is the maker of iGUIDE in October. iGUIDE, what that does, it uses AI to identify property features and produces immersive 3D virtual tours, precise floor plans, and reliable property measurement data. It's the market leader in Canada with around 25% of all listings sold in the country in 2025 featuring an iGUIDE. Canadian revenue grew 23% in half one with strong growth in each of its four key markets which are residential, insurance, construction and commercial. And the success of the business in Canada points to the opportunity that we have here in Australia where video and interactive content will become standard in property advertising. In the Australian market, the early signs are really strong with the first sales to customers in recent weeks, and we've been receiving really great positive feedback. In the US, REA has a 20% stake in Move, operator of Realtor.com. Realtor introduced a number of innovative products and experiences in the half, including a fly-around which provides consumers with a new way to explore neighbourhoods from above. which is very cool. REA and MOVE are also collaborating on AI strategy, amongst other things, to facilitate faster delivery and reusability of AI capability across both the Australian and United States markets. Before I hand over to Janelle, I'd just like to share a quick few comments on the market as we look ahead. And I guess ongoing strength in employment levels and population growth, they really continue to drive strong demand nationally and they really contribute to the health that we have in the Australian property market. While we saw an increase in interest rates this week, the prospect of rising rates was already widely flagged and the underlying fundamentals of the market remain very strong. Supply has improved in Melbourne and Sydney with limited stock in smaller capital cities resulting in some vendors delaying their listings. Anecdotally, Across the country, our customers are telling us that they're seeing very good numbers coming through open for inspections, which aligns with that view of a buoyant level of demand that we're seeing. Into the second half, we will continue to drive innovation, and it's an exciting time with AI presenting new opportunities and our teams embracing this capability, coupled that with the ongoing health in the property market, and we're well positioned to to drive further growth for the remainder of FY26. And just before I hand over to Janelle for more detail on our results, it is her final result with the business and I'd just like to acknowledge her service and achievements as CFO and thank her for her outstanding contribution to REA over those years. So thank you Janelle and over to you.