5/12/2021

speaker
Ursula Teret
Head of Investor Relations, Scout24

Welcome everyone to Scout24's Q1 2021 results call. My name is Ursula Teret and I am Head of Investor Relations at Scout24. I have Tobias Hartmann, our CEO, and Dirk Schmelzer, our CFO, with me on this call. Tobias will kick off the presentation with a summary of our Q1 performance and how we are executing on our strategic agenda. Dirk will then cover the Q1 2021 financials in detail and will provide an update on our 2021 outlook. We will then have time for your questions. As usual, you can find today's presentation slides on our website under Financial Reports and Presentations. There you can also find our Q1 2021 statement, which contains a detailed discussion of the Q1 results and the corresponding financial table. If you are using the web link we provided beforehand, you can see the presentation slides live. This session will be recorded and a replay will be made available as quickly as possible after the event. Please be aware of the disclaimer on page 2, and let us now turn to page 3, where I hand it over to Tobi.

speaker
Tobias Hartmann
CEO, Scout24

Thank you, Ursula, and welcome, everyone. Let me start on page 3 on a very positive note. We saw strong momentum in the first quarter of this year, and we delivered a higher-than-expected revenue growth of 5.2%. which also led us to increase our revenue outlook for the full year 2021. Dirk will talk about that later. This revenue growth was fueled by the double-digit growth of our residential real estate partner business. An increasing customer base is successfully using our realtor lead engine product to source and win new sale mandates, leading to more real estate transactions. and through our newly acquired Immo4Cow24 channel, we have enabled around 390 sale transactions in Q1, where we received part of the agent commission. One year ago, this commission share business did not yet exist at Cow24. On the rental side, we improved our services for home seekers to help them with successful rent transactions. Accordingly, our plus product revenue increased by 28% year on year. While acknowledging our success, let's not forget the challenges we faced at the beginning of the year. The most salient were the newly enacted Bestellerprinzip, COVID-19 with ongoing lockdown measures across Germany, and the lack of supply of real estate for sale and rent. Our positive revenue development in Q1 clearly demonstrates that we managed to turn these challenges into growth catalysts in our market asking for greater digitization and convenience. Let me give you an example. While we saw a somewhat reduced agents listing activity on the back of Bestellerprinzip and COVID-19, we continue to invest into our membership additions. Through these, we are offering an even more efficient and complete product set for our partners and ultimately help them drive transactions. To this effect, we also accelerated our lead engine product. These initiatives paid into our strategic agenda and our goal to build a comprehensive network marketplace where we offer digital products along the value chains of real estate sale and rent transactions. The development of our key performance metrics on page 4 shows that this transactional focus is translating into growth. The reduced EBITDA margin is a function of the changes in the revenue mix and the investments we are making into growth products. Dirk will explain this in greater detail. A key driver of our revenue growth was the increasing realtor lead engine revenue. This is derived from homeowner's contacts we refer to agents. The price for those leads depends on the quality. On the top of the funnel, we counted around 27,400 homeowners referred to agents via different acquisition products, which is 55% more than in the prior year quarter. As the migration of our residential agent customers to the new memberships is still ongoing, our pool grew at only 1.1%. However, We are confident that this will accelerate in the second half of the year. I already mentioned the customer growth of 4.4% and the effect COVID-19, the lack of supply, and the Bestellerprinzip have on listings, which were down 4.1%. Traffic on ImmoScout measured in sessions was up 1.8% to 107.7 million per month. Due to a change in the provider, we did not include the number of unique users for Q1 2021. In summary, we delivered growth across all relevant KPIs, and this against a strong Q1 2020. Especially the revenue growth of 5.2% is a strong performance, and this will further accelerate as our growth investments translate into accelerated revenue growth. Our investments and the execution of our network marketplace agenda not only translated into attractive growth. On page five, you can see the impact also in our revenue mix shift. From one-off listing revenues to recurring agent and consumer subscription revenues and leads. This upgrade in revenue mix proves that we are moving closer to the real estate transaction. Through our enhanced membership additions, The largest and orange portion of the graph, we are strengthening our partnership with the agents. We want to be perceived as a business and transaction enabler rather than a cost center by them. The acceleration of the lead engine product also pays into exactly that. The revenues are included in the amber portion of the graph, which represented 14% of Immoscout 24 revenues in Q1 2021, up from 10% the year prior. The consumer subscription revenues depicted in teal are composed of strong growth products such as tenant plus, buyer plus, and landlord plus. They grew by 28% year-on-year to make up 14% of the total ImmoScout revenue in Q1. Please be reminded that the growth of the plus product as well as the growth of the lead product is being pushed by a respective marketing invest. With this revenue shift, we are gaining both in quality and continuity. we are increasing the recurring portion of our revenues, orange plus teal, which increased from 67% in Q1 2019, over 69% in Q1 2020, to 71% in Q1 2021. At the same time, the one-off listing PPA revenues decreased from 20% in Q1 2019 to 18% in Q1 2020 to 13% in Q1 2021. This development has been accelerated by the free-to-list initiative, which we started at the end of March last year. We have been using this slide for some time now, so it nicely shows you that we are developing from a pure classifieds play into a comprehensive ecosystem. And this transition will be further accelerated by the acquisition of Vermeeted DA, which we announced yesterday. With Vermieter DE, we will apply a similar playbook on the rent side as with Immo4Kauf24 on the sales side. With Immo4Kauf24, we took the realtor lead engine product to the next level. The impressive 95% revenue growth in Q1 from 3.8 million euros to 7.5 million euros was largely driven by Immo4Kauf24, contributing 2.5 million euros towards that increase. Similarly, Vermeeted.de will take the Landlord Plus product to the next level. With the listing services of Landlord Plus, the right tenants can be found. With Vermeeted.de, landlords will be able to comprehensively manage the entire lifecycle of the tenancy. Let me give you some facts on Vermeeted.de. The company was founded in 2016 by Yannis Fischer, who will remain in the company as Managing Director. Vermieter.de is a, if not the, market-leading digital platform for private landlords in Germany with a few hundred thousand registered rental objects. The platform offers its customers a comprehensive SaaS toolkit to manage all property-related processes, such as tenant relationship management, preparation of utility bills, assembling tax declaration data, or obtaining information on the market value of the properties under management. With the integration of omitted.de, we will substantially extend our product offering within our rental journey. And this comes with a great advantage. We are accelerating our product development efforts in this space by approximately three years. Already by the end of this year, our private landlord customers will benefit from first synergies of both platforms. This acquisition is an important milestone on our way to build a comprehensive market network because the rental market is key in Germany. 3.2 million rental transactions are handled per year compared to 626,000 sale transactions. With this, I'm handing it over to Dirk, who will dive deeper into our Q1 financials, which do include IMO for Kauf24, but, of course, not yet for me today.

speaker
Dirk Schmelzer
CFO, Scout24

Thank you, Toby, and a warm welcome also from my side. Toby already talked about our key financials at group level. Slide 7 presents the segment view with a very positive outcome for our largest segment, residential real estate. Here, revenue increased by 8.5% to 68.8 million euros. This growth was mainly driven by the revenue from our professional customers, which grew at a double-digit rate by 11.3%. Main reason was the strong pickup of the Realtor Lead Engine product, which led to revenue increase of 95%, including ImmoVerkauf24. Revenue from consumers increased by 2.5%. This means that the loss of revenue due to free-to-list was overcompensated for the first time by the growth of our plus product subscription revenue. The latter grew by 28% year-on-year. The ordinary operating EBITDA margin of the residential real estate segment came in at 61.7%, which is 3.3 percentage points below the previous year. On the one hand, this reflects the foregone private listing revenues and, on the other hand, the changed revenue mix due to the higher growth products, including ImmoVacauf24. The business real estate segment revenue declined by 3.8% to 17.2 million euros due to the pandemic related decline in revenue with business real estate agents. The business real estate margin fell by 1.7 percentage points year on year to 71.9%. The media and other segment revenue decreased by 1.8% to 7.6 million euros We are now increasingly offering advertising space as an internal agency to our core customers. FlowFact recorded declining revenues due to the ongoing shift in the payment model, while the growing business of ImmoScout24 Austria had an opposite effect. The ordinary operating EBITDA margin of the media and other segments fell by 6.3 percentage points to 33.6%. All segments combined, we achieved a revenue growth of 5.1% to 93.7 million euros, and this against a strong prior year quarter, which was largely unaffected by the pandemic. However, the change in revenue mix combined with a stable absolute ordinary operating EBITDA resulted in a lower margin, 61.3%. Let us now take a closer look at the customer and APO development on page 8. We have strengthened the relationship with our professional customers during the pandemic, and we put a lot of effort in the improvement of the product suite. Once the agents have fully migrated to the new membership and the pandemic is fading, we will increase our focus on APU growth again. The number of residential real estate partners grew by 4.8% year-on-year to 17,474 partners at the end of Q1 2021. The APU rose slightly by 1.1% compared to the strong prior year quarter. As Toby mentioned before, our focus in the first half of the year is more on a successful migration than on pricing. At the end of March, the migration rate was at 66%, six percentage points up from the 60% at the end of February. The number of business real estate partners also increased. by 2% to 2,804 as of March 31st, 2021. The business partner APU for the first quarter was at 1,758 Euro, down 2.9% year on year. This decrease is mainly due to the decline in revenue with business real estate agents, while revenue with developers and new home builders increased slightly. Turning to page nine, let us go through the main ordinary operating items affecting our margin development. Own work capitalized increased to 5.6 million euros in the first quarter with a stable capitalization ratio of 6%. This ratio reflects our continued product enhancement activities. Examples of product investments we made in the quarter include further developments of the home seller hub, the plus products, the memberships, and the location analysis. The total ordinary operating cost increased by 12.5% year-on-year to 44.3 million euros. This increase is mainly related to the change in revenue mix towards more transactional products. It includes the additional cost of Immofacauf24, which was not yet part of the Scout24 group in the year before. While Immofacauf24 contributed 2.5 million euros to our revenue in Q1, this contribution was not yet profitable. For example, the 16.6% increase in personal cost is mainly due to the integration of Immo4Calf24 employees. More full-time equivalents at ImmoScout24 and post-CalfOut disk synergies are adding to that. The growth in other operating costs by 24% can be broken down as follows. Additional online marketing costs. These are primarily acquisition costs for our high-growth lead products. Increasing selling costs for the growing plus products also had an effect. external personal costs due to the additional call center activities, as well as investments in flow facts. Finally, dis-synergies contributing to the rising other operating expenses. As the operating effects increased more strongly in percentage terms than revenue and own were capitalized, our ordinary operating EVDA remained stable year-on-year at 55 million, and the margin decreased by 3.1 percentage points to 58.7%. On page 10, you see the items below the ordinary operating EBTA line. Non-operating cost increased by 9.9%, mainly due to the higher share-based compensation. As a result, the reported EBTA declined slightly by 0.6% to 52.3 million euros in Q1 2021. With a year-on-year improvement in the financial result, but rising tax expenses, profit after tax from continuing operations fell by 8.2% to 24.4 million euros in the first quarter of 2021. Based on a volume-weighted average number of shares of 97.8 million, this results in a stable EPS for the continuing operations of 25 euro cents. By the way, the declining number of shares reflects the share buybacks effected over the last year. It does not yet reflect the capital decrease following the recent tender transaction, which brings me to the next page. With page 11, let me update you on where we stand with our capital return roadmap. The key pillar of our capital return roadmap was the up to 1 billion buyback tender transaction, which we successfully completed in April with an acceptance rate of 82%, translating into 794 million euro of cash returned to shareholders and a corresponding decrease of our share capital. Right after settlement of the tender transaction, we started with the up to 200 million ordinary share buyback via the stock market. As of end of last week, we already bought back over 83 million euros with that program. Our AGM will take place on 8th of July, where we will propose a dividend for 2020 in the amount of 68.5 million euro. The amount per share depends on the total amount of shares without treasury shares at that time. As of the end of last week, we had 85.2 million shares outstanding excluding treasury shares. In relation to the proposed dividend amount, this number of shares would result in a pro forma dividend per share of €0.80. Post the ongoing share buyback program and the 2020 dividend, we had around €500 million undistributed AutoScout24 stale proceeds left. Against this background, we will seek shareholder approval at the upcoming AGM for an additional authorization to buy back shares in the amount up to 10% of the existing share capital. Now let's turn to page 12 and our updated outlook. Based on the growth momentum we have seen in Q1, we are increasing our group revenue outlook for the year from a mid-single-digit percentage growth rate to a mid-to-high-single-digit percentage growth rate. For our residential real estate segment, we are upgrading the 2021 revenue outlook to low double-digit growth. Taking into account the corona impact, we see the business real estate segment with a low single-digit growth rate for the full year. Our outlook for media and other is unchanged. Here we expect a declining to flat revenue development. On the back of the current growth opportunities and the respective investment into our product suite, we are a bit more conservative regarding the ordinary operating EBITDA margin for the group. Hence, our revised full-year margin outlook of up to 60% versus prior outlook of around 60%. Please be aware that this updated outlook excludes the effect from the permitted DE acquisition. With this, I hand it back over to the operator and your questions.

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