8/12/2021

speaker
Ursula Caret
Head of Investor Relations and Treasury, Scout24

Welcome everyone to Scout24's Q2 and half-year 2021 earnings call. My name is Ursula Caret and I am Head of Investor Relations and Treasury 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 the H1 2021 key events. Dirk will then cover our Q2 and H1 financial performance in detail. We will then have time for your questions. As usual, you can find today's presentation on our website under financial reports and presentations. There you can also find our half year 2021 report. If you are using the web link we provided beforehand, you can follow the presentation live. This session will be recorded and the 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
Chief Executive Officer, Scout24

Thank you, Ursula, and welcome everyone. Let me start on page 3 with a short recap. From classifieds to ecosystem, that is the goal we set ourselves after the sale of the car classifieds business. How do we define ecosystem for real estate? It is where all participants of a real estate transaction come together, operate and interact. And there are multiple interaction and multiple transaction events. Therefore, we also speak of a market network. Although it had a temporary dampening effect on our revenues, the introduction of free-to-list acted like a catalyst to our ecosystem strategy. And as we were in the middle of a pandemic, we used the time to pursue our strategy more forcefully. I will show you later that the traditional classified revenues, i.e. the share of one-off listings, is now lower than the revenue share generated by each subscription and leads. This is the proof that the ecosystem strategy is working with an increasing momentum in the first half of this year, especially Q2. What are the most notable initiatives which spurred this development? On the agent side, we pushed the real Elite Engine product further, both with the ImmoScout24 and the Immo4Cow24 offerings. We continued to migrate our residential real estate customers into our new membership editions. Here, we intentionally decelerated the process to focus more directly on pricing discussions. In Q2, we felt an increasing demand and willingness to pay on the agent side, so took a very agile approach on price increases. You will see on the next slides how this helped our ARPU development. On top of that, the sales force managed to again win new customers and increase our core customer base. Initiatives on the homeowner side comprised a dedicated campaign to market our valuation tool, which ultimately led to increased homeowner registrations for the homeowner hub. And with the acquisition of Vermita DE, we are building out our offering for private landlords. For consumers, or better said, seekers, we comprehensively reworked our price atlas. You should take a look at it on ImmoScout24 under Search and Real Estate Prices. The Atlas comprises object data from 43 million properties. Here you can see sale and rent prices for archived and active listings, including information on price developments. Against the background of the tense market situation, we were able to accelerate Tenant Plus and Buyer Plus subscriptions and we launched a dedicated multi-channel marketing campaign in Lower Saxony to increase awareness of seekers in that region. Page 4 shows you how the increasing momentum translates into numbers. Our revenue growth of almost 10% was mainly driven by residential real estate, while the business segment is still suffering from the pandemic. Within the residential segment, the realtor lead engine was the strongest growth driver. This is fully in line with our intended strategy. We want to help agents drive their business by providing them with unique and valuable leads for winning new mandates. One third of the real elite engine revenues came from ImmoVerkauf24, which we acquired in July 2020. The reduced EBITDA margin is mainly a result of investments linked to our ecosystem strategy, including acquisitions. Without the acquisitions, the organic, ordinary operating EBITDA would have been higher at 60.1%. Another important contributor to our revenue growth was the residential partner ARPU. While in Q1 it only increased by 1.1%, the Q2 increase was 9.0%. Of course, part of this comes from Lab's corona discounts, another part from the growing reel-to-lead engine revenues. But the larger portion, approximately 5-6% increase, is driven by pricing. The growing agent base also had a positive revenue effect. Compared to last year, it increased by 3.4%. On the residential side alone, we managed to win approximately 650 new partners over the last 12 months. Homeowners, the second group in our triangle, grew by an impressive 88% year-on-year. So, we now have 640,000 homeowners registered at Immoscout24. All of these are potential sellers or landlords entering into a transaction, with or without an agent, at some point in time. The number of subscribed consumers also grew very strongly. by 62%. At the end of June, we counted 198,000 tenant plus and buyer plus subscribers. By the way, in July, we passed the 200,000 subscriber mark. I hope all these growth rates on this slide demonstrate the strength of our company strategy and the ability to execute against it. And I can assure you, there is more to come. At the CMD in December, I would like to share more insights with you where and how we are planning to navigate the company over the next couple of years. While our financials are very strong, we must be aware of the current market conditions. We have devoted a separate page, slide five, to the topic. The German real estate market is a seller's market. While there is strong demand, both on the buy and rent side, There is a meaningful supply gap, and the housing initiative of the German government has not yet led to a noticeable relief. Therefore, rent and sale prices continue to rise. On top of that comes a shortage of building materials, which was spurred by the COVID-19 crisis. Consequently, we continue to see listings decrease. This is a result of the supply gap and shorter standing times. There might even be a minor besteller-principe effect since five more federal states introduced the 50-50 commission split in January 2021. Our competition is affected the same way. Therefore, we were able to maintain our listings advantage at 1.9 times. As a consequence of the high demand, we are seeing usage and hence relevance significantly increasing. Mobile traffic went up by 20%, overcompensating the decrease in desktop usage on a year-on-year basis. Next to improved mobile usage, we believe this trend is due to the changed cookie content, which leads to a reduced measurability of traffic. By the way, we have changed the provider for the tracking of user traffic, hence the new split between desktop and app. For the year-on-year developments, we used like-for-like data. Monthly sessions on InvoScout24 were only slightly down by 3% to 107.2 million and therefore almost back at previous year's level. So taking into account the cookie content, the number of sessions on desktop and app together actually implies a significant increase in demand, especially since the lockdown too in November. So let us now look at the bright side of the equation. Bright because we have exactly the right products for this contracted market situation. And our customers are willing to pay for these products because we help them to cope with the market as it is. Proof points for this are the increased APU, the increased customer base, some agents having committed themselves to list more inventory on ImmoScout24, Agent satisfaction scores are at highest levels, especially amongst Acquisition Edition customers. By the way, with the migration continuing, we had 2,040 agents or 15% in the Acquisition Edition at the end of June. This represents an increase of 130% since December 2020. Acquiring new mandates is the biggest pain point for agents in the current seller's market. Our acquisition edition and also our realtor lead engine are exactly addressing that pain point. Let me give you some more facts on the realtor lead engine. Revenues from that product came in at 15.7 million euros in H1 2021. This represents an increase by 162% year on year. ImmoScout24 referred approximately 53,400 homeowner contacts to agents from January till June this year. And ImmoScout24 sold 840 commission share leads to agents in the first half of the year. Let me give you one more proof point for our high customer and consumer satisfaction. The demand for tenant plus and buyer plus product is increasing. These products help seekers to find their dream property despite the contracted market situation. Revenues from these products reach 25.1 million euros in H1 2021, an increase of 30% year on year. Let us turn to slide seven to have a closer look at this specific revenue portion. The consumer subscriptions are depicted in teal on this slide. Their revenues exceeded the one-off listing or paper ad revenues for the first time. The same holds true for the leads revenues, the yellow portion of the graph. The consequence, as intended, we are becoming less and less dependent on our traditional classifieds business. From classifieds to ecosystem, that is our stated strategy. Listings are a commodity nowadays. The monetization is shifting towards other revenues, which are linked to a sale or rent real estate transaction. And these revenue streams have a greater recurring character. Through our enhanced membership additions, the largest and orange portion of the graph, we continue to value the partnership with our agent customers. We want to be perceived as a business and transaction enabler. The acquisition of Immo4Kauf24 pays 100% just into that. And I can share with you that the integration of the acquisition is completed. Immo4Kauf24 has been part of the Scout24 family for a year now. With the sale of roughly 840 commission share leads, they generated €5.2 million of revenue in H1 2021 at an increasing rate. These leads led to 840 completed real estate transactions in Germany corresponding to a property transaction value of more than half a billion euro on a full year basis. To put that into perspective and give you an idea of the growth potential, the total market value of residential sale transactions was estimated at 215 billion euros for the year 2020. For Vermietet DE, we are following a similar, i.e., fast integration playbook as for Immo4Cow24. Step one of the platform integration has already started. The plan is that after the private landlord has found a tenant through Immo4Cow24, the customer relationship is shifted to Vermietet DE, where the rental contract is automatically populated with the necessary data, ready to be signed. Vermita DE then offers the landlord a comprehensive cloud-based toolkit to manage all tenancy-related processes such as tenant relationship management, preparation of utility bills, assembling tax declaration data, or obtaining information on the market value of the units under management. At this point in time, the sole focus of Vermita DE is still on customer acquisition. There is no material revenue generation yet. With the integration of Vermieter.de, we will substantially extend our product offering in a rental market that is key in Germany. The acquisition allows us to accelerate our product development efforts in this space by approximately three years. With this, I'm handing it over to Dirk, who will dive deeper into our H1 financials.

speaker
Dirk Schmelzer
Chief Financial Officer, Scout24

Thank you, Tobi, and a warm welcome also from my side. Tobi already dipped into our key financials at group level. Slide 9 now presents the segment view with a strong performance of our largest segment, residential real estate. Here, revenue increased by 13.6% to 140 million euros in half year one and 19% to 71.2 million euros in Q2. This growth was mainly driven by the revenue from our professional customers, which grew by 15.3%. As Tobi already mentioned, we saw a very strong performance of the Realtor Lead Engine product, which showed a revenue increase of 162% to 15.7 million euros, including the 5.2 million from ImmoVerkauf24. At the same time, the APO increased by 5.1%, from 709 to 745 in half year one 2021. Revenue from consumers also performed very well, increasing by 9.9% for the first half year and 18% for the second quarter. Our plus product subscription revenue was up by 30.5% to 25.1 million euros and thus clearly overcompensated foregone revenues due to free to list. Moreover, consumer subscriptions exceeded total listing PPA revenues for the first time, underlining the transition of our revenue mix from listings to transactions. While we are accelerating our ecosystem strategy through selected bolt-on acquisitions such as ImmoVerkauf24 or Vermietet.de, we are also growing the core. As you can see, our organic revenue growth in half year one was 9.7% to 135.2 million euros. The ordinary operating EBITDA margin of the residential real estate segment came in at 60.1%, which is 3.4 percentage points below the previous year. On the one hand, this has to do with higher operating costs, for example, resulting from the acquisitions. On the other hand, the margin development reflects the change revenue mix associated with our market network strategy, with the recent acquisitions strongly contributing to this strategy. Organically, the ordinary operating EBITDA margin would have been at 62.9%. The business real estate segment revenue is still affected by the consequences of the pandemic, but was doing quite well in the second quarter, where segment revenues increased by 2.4% to 17 million euros. This is due to stronger growth in revenues with project developers and new home builders, while revenue with business real estate agents showed signs of stabilization. First half year 2021 revenues were still down 0.8% to 34.3 million euros with a slightly improved ordinary operating EBITDA margin of 72.3%. The media and other segment revenue increased by 1.1% to 15.2 million euros in the first half year and by 4.2% to 7.6 million in the second quarter 2021. This is mainly attributable to our fast-growing business at ImmoScout24 Austria, while the third-party media business and FlowFact are still showing decreasing revenues. The ordinary operating EBITDA margin of the media and other segment fell by 4.2 percentage points to 36.2% in the first half year 2021. All segments combined, we achieved a revenue growth of 9.6% to 189.5 million euros, and an even stronger plus of 14.4% to 95.8 million euros in the second quarter of 2021. The latter being against a pandemic affected prior year quarter. Organically, our half year one revenue growth was 7% to Euro 184.7 million. The change in revenue mix combined with a lower increase in absolute ordinary operating EBITDA resulted in a margin of 60.4% in half year one 2021. Again, organically, this would have been significantly higher at 62.4%. We already mentioned the continued customer growth and the APU increase. Slide 10 gives you the customary quarterly and half-yearly overview by segment. Looking at the residential real estate partner APU increase by 9% in Q2, you need to take into account the following effects. Part of the increase comes from corona discounts running out. The increase is spurred by the growing realty lead engine revenues. The growing agent base, however, creates downward pressure on the APU as it mostly applies to smaller agents. Therefore, approximately 5% to 6% of the increase is purely driven by pricing. Looking at the membership alone, the like-for-like APU increase is even higher. Turning to page 11, let us go through the main ordinary operating items affecting our margin development. The respective cost-based effects reflect mainly the ongoing implementation of our market network strategy. OwnWear Capitalized increased to €12.3 million in the first half year with a growing capitalization ratio of 6.5%. 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 Membership Editions and the Price Atlas Tobi mentioned before. The total ordinary operating cost increased by 17.1% year-on-year to 91.8 million euros, outpacing revenue. This increase is mainly related to the change in revenue mix. It includes the additional cost of ImmoVerkauf24, which was not yet part of the Scout24 group the year before, and Vermieter.de. For example, the 16% increase in personal cost is mainly due to the integration of ImmoVerkauf24 employees. Additional costs were incurred due to an increase in personnel at ImmoScout24 and disk synergies after the carve-out of AutoScout24. You will also note the strong increase in marketing costs both in Q2 and over the first half year. In Q2, we increased our investments in marketing through targeted regional and national multi-channel campaigns. These were placed via TV, radio, billboard advertising, and online and served to increase the awareness for ImmoScout24 on a regional level, revive the vibrancy of the marketplace, and to generate new homeowner contacts. The costs also include additional marketing activities of ImmoVerkauf24 and Famike.de. The growth in other operating costs by 16.4% can be broken down as follows. additional online marketing costs, which are primarily acquisition costs for the realtor lead engine, increasing selling costs for the growing plus products, rising external personal costs to accelerate product developments, and investments in flow effect. At the same time, reduced travel expenses have an opposite effect. As the operating effects grew more strongly in percentage terms than revenue and own were capitalized, our ordinary operating EBITDA increased at a lower rate of 4.5% year-on-year to 110.2 million euros. And the margin decreased by 2.9 percentage points to 58.1%. Again, organically, the margin would have been 2 percentage points higher. Looking at profitability on page 12, you see the items below the ordinary operating EBTA and the highly accretive development in earnings per share. Non-operating costs decreased by 1.2% mainly due to lower reorganization costs, while share-based compensation increased year on year. As a result, the reported EBTA was up 5.1% to 101.3 million euros in half year one 2021. Depreciation and amortization were driven by higher depreciation of rights of use from leases resulting from the move to the new Berlin office, as well as depreciation of own work capitalized resulting from our increased focus on product innovation since 2020. We saw a year-on-year improvement in the financial result, reflecting the investments of the proceeds from the AutoScout transaction in special security funds, but we also saw rising tax expenses. Profit after tax from continuing operations was up 2% to 46.8 million in the first half of 2021. Based on a sharply reduced volume-weighted average number of shares of 92.9 million, This results in a 13.6% higher EPS for the continuing operations. The declining number of shares reflects our share buybacks, including the April 2021 tender offer affected over the last year as part of our capital return roadmap, which brings me to the next page. With page 13, let me update you on where we stand with our capital return roadmap. The key pillar of our capital return roadmap was the 794 million euro buyback tender transaction with a corresponding capital decrease which we successfully completed in April. Right after settlement of the tender transaction, we started another ordinary share buyback tranche which was completed on June 30th at a total volume of 2.92 million shares or 200 million euros. At the AGM on 8th of July, we proposed a dividend for 2020 in the amount of 68.5 million euros corresponding to an amount of 82 euro cents per share however this is not yet reflected in our net cash position as of balance sheet date 30th of june 2021 thus excluding treasury shares we ended up with a total of 83.5 million shares and a net cash position of 414 million euros as of June 30th, 2021. Post the most recent share buyback program and the 2021 dividend, we have returned the majority of the AutoScout proceeds to our shareholders as part of a massive capital return program. At the AGM in July, we received shareholder approval for potential additional share buybacks in the amount of up to 10% of the existing share capital. Now let us turn to page 14 and our outlook. Based on the ongoing successful implementation of our ecosystem strategy and the growth dynamics we have seen in the first half year 2021, we confirm our group revenue outlook for the year of a mid to high single digit percentage growth rate. This translates into low double digit revenue growth for our residential real estate segment, a low single-digit revenue growth rate for our business real estate segment, which is still impacted by the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, and a declining to flat revenue development for our media and other segment. Assuming an improved margin, especially in the fourth quarter, and excluding the cost effects of Formit.de, we also confirm our earnings forecast. This assumes a group ordinary operating EBITDA margin of up to 60%. The acquisition of Formica DE fits perfectly into our market network strategy and gives us a significant head start in product development for the tenant market, which is so important in Germany and Austria. However, in the short term, the revenue contribution will still be low and necessary growth investments will be initially taken and have a negative impact on the EBITDA margin. From next year onwards, however, we expect a positive effect on group revenue and in the medium term also on the group margin. But to be clear, the respective margin effects are not yet reflected in the above outlooks. Before we open the call for your questions, let me sum it up very quickly on page 15. I think we made it very clear what we understand under ecosystem strategy and how we are shifting from a traditional classifieds business towards a more sustainable network marketplace model. This comes with a stronger revenue diversification and an expanding addressable market. With Immofacauf24 and Vermietet.de, we have shown that targeted add-on acquisitions accelerate our strategic agenda. For example, the Immofacauf24 offering enhances our Realtor Lead Engine product, accelerates the respective revenue growth, and opens new markets for us. And this is only one example for our market-leading product suite. The Membership Editions and Consumer Plus products are adding to that. At our Capital Markets Day, which we are planning for December, we want to make it even clearer how we are creating long-term shareholder value with our strategic agenda. In the first half of this year, we created shareholder value through massive capital returns, also leading to 14% EPS growth. And now we are happy to take your questions. Operator, over to you.

Disclaimer

This conference call transcript was computer generated and almost certianly contains errors. This transcript is provided for information purposes only.EarningsCall, LLC makes no representation about the accuracy of the aforementioned transcript, and you are cautioned not to place undue reliance on the information provided by the transcript.

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