REA Group Limited

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the REA Group Limited Third Quarter 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, please press star 1-1 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 1-1 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, ma'am.

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, end of 31st of March, 2026. Before we commence, I'd like to acknowledge the traditional owners of countries throughout Australia. and recognise the continuing connection to lands, waters and communities. We pay our respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures and to Elders past, present and emerging. This morning you'll firstly hear from our CEO, Cam McIntyre, who will provide a brief business update. Then Andrew Cramer, REA CFO, will talk to the financial highlights for the quarter. And following this, we'll be happy to take your questions. And just as a reminder before we get started, our quarterly numbers are top-line results only, so we'll be restricted in the amount of details we can provide. With that, I will pass it to Karen to get us started.

Thanks, Alice, and welcome, everyone. REA has delivered an excellent third quarter result underpinned by double-digit revenue growth across our Australian business and strong double-digit yield growth in our core residential business. Looking at our results from core operations, for the quarter, excluding M&A, which, as a reminder, it strips out the impact of sale of PropTiger, the shutdown of Housing Edge and the acquisition of iGUIDE. Revenue was $398 million, an increase of 11%, and EBITDA, excluding Associates, was $220 million, an increase of 16%. Strong underlying fundamentals continue to support the property market and supply kept pace with buyer demand. While global events and interest rate increases impacted broader economic sentiment, listing activity in Sydney and Melbourne was strong and nationally listings were slightly up on the prior year. In this balanced market, more Australians visited our platform than ever before and our customers continued to turn to our market-leading products and services to ensure best results for their vendors. In relation to our audience, We reached a new quarterly record in Q3 of 12.9 million visitors on average each month. Just under half these visitors used our platform exclusively. This means access to a large number of potential buyers, sellers and renters is exclusive to REA customers. Our immersive experiences ensure Australians continually return to our platform and we achieved a new quarterly record of 150 million average monthly visits. The value of our audience extends beyond scale, though, and it ties into the deep engagement of our consumers. In Q3, properties tracked by their owners reached a milestone of 5 million, an increase of 16% on prior year. Seller leads increased 28% year-on-year, and we delivered an average of 2.6 million buyer inquiries to our customers each month. Our consumer strategy is centred on delivering a personalised and immersive membership experience. Members are much more likely to perform a high-value action, which amplifies the value delivered to our customers. Our active membership base continues to grow, increasing 19% on the prior year. In the quarter, we launched our new evolution of AI property search, Our new conversational search experience is now live to 50% of our web audience and 10% of our iOS app members. This intelligent search experience encourages consumers to take high-value actions, such as sharing a listing or submitting an inquiry. Conversational search is going to continue evolving as we expand the number of topics covered, and that in turn will support a more detailed, curated, AI-powered companion experience for our consumers. It's also going to uncover valuable intent data for our customers. Property buyers are increasingly seeking more immersive and informative search experiences and we officially launched iGUIDE in Australia in March here. iGUIDE 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, and we're pleased with the early uptake in Australia. We're working closely with the industry on this, and several large photography networks have signed up already. There are now more than 100 iGUIDE specialty cameras in market, which is ahead of our own expectations, and we're seeing the strong momentum continue. Supporting our visualisation strategy is the social media-style feed in our Video Discovery Hub on the app home screen, is deeply engaging our consumers. The new hub achieved a 22% growth in average monthly video viewers in Q3. In relation to our customers and some highlights here, we saw record Premier Plus penetration, which underpinned double-digit yield growth in our residential business. We also achieved record audience maximiser penetration. We continue to roll out the next generation of AI-powered tools and services for our customers as well as offering education, support and training. As part of our broader Advantage AI program, we're also pleased to announce a customer hack day initiative that will take place in September. These hack days are core to our innovative culture that we have as a business and for the first time, customers will submit ideas and work alongside our tech team with the aim of turning customer and industry-focused ideas into prototypes and working solutions in a matter of days. During the quarter, we also launched a new AI-powered vendor campaign summary in our self-serve platform, Ignite, generating key campaign insights into our vendor-ready narrative within Ignite's vendor report. This is supporting agents in the clear communication of their campaign performance while reducing the manual reporting effort that's required. We recently also started a pilot rollout in a new chat capability in Ignite called Campaign Assist, and this is exclusive to Premier Plus feature, and it combines consumer intent and automated evaluation model data. to provide customers with strategic recommendations to boost the performance of a listing. In recent weeks, we launched the AI-powered PropTrack Buyer Impact Model, which provides our customers with clear evidence of a direct link between a property sale and an realestate.com.au campaign. The new probability-based model assessed more than 1.3 million Australian properties sold over a 22-month period and analysed more than 10 billion consumer data points. The data highlights that realestate.com.au attracts and engages the buyer for 9 in 10 homes listed on the platform that go on to sell. The combination of data scale, depth of audience, engagement and the new AI capability underpin the model, and it was independently reviewed and validated by Deloitte. Delivering on our commitment to more choice, flexibility and value for our customers, we've introduced new packaged options and a suite of features as part of the FY27 contract rollout. From July, the Video Discovery Hub will be increasingly valuable for customers of Premier Plus property walkthrough videos set to feature on the prominent carousel. Highlighting the value in video, we know that serious buyers are almost nine times more likely to watch video content than other users, and listings with vertical video generating more views and more inquiries. Our commercial and new home businesses achieved double-digit revenue growth with record penetration of Elite Plus for our commercial customers and a pleasing improvement in the new homes market. Looking at financial services and momentum continues here. Business saw exceptional growth in submission volumes, a strong increase in settlements and an increase in the loan book. showing the strength in the market and the value in our investment in mortgage choice, innovation and brand average submissions per day in February were the highest mortgage choice has ever seen. As we've flagged previously, Housing.com is REA India's strategic priority. The app-first strategy continues to support Housing.com's leadership in app downloads in India, with more than 50% of downloads sitting online. with our platform. As I wrap up, I'd like to share a few comments on market conditions as we look ahead. After an extended period where demand exceeded supply, the Australian property markets become more balanced and we're moving into a period of more normalised levels of buyer demand. The rebalance in the market likely reflects some uncertainty around global events, expected further interest rate rises and potential government tax policy changes. The momentum behind price growth is anticipated to moderate and we may see the time to sell lengthens a little as vendors readjust price expectations to meet buyers. As a business, we're incredibly well positioned in this more balanced market with agents and their vendors seeking to reach the largest and most engaged audience of property seekers and to differentiate their listings. We're focused on continuing to drive innovation, and our teams are embracing the capability and exciting opportunities presented by AI. Coupled with healthy underlying fundamentals supporting the market and strengthening our market position, we're well-placed to deliver further growth for the remainder of FY26. And with that, I'd like to welcome you, Andrew, and hand over to you. Thank you, Cam.