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Scout24 Se
11/11/2021
Welcome everyone to Scout24's Q3 2021 earnings call. My name is Ursula Keret and I am Head of Investor Relations and Treasury at Scout24. As speakers, we have Tobias Hartmann, our CEO on this call, who will kick off the presentation. Dirk Schmelzer, our CFO, will then present our Q3 and nine-month financials. 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 quarterly statement with Q3 and 9-month 2021 financials. If you are using the web link we provided beforehand, you can follow the presentation 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.
Thank you, Ursula, and welcome, everyone. Let me start on page 3. I think we made it very clear over the last quarters what we understand as ecosystem strategy. It is how we are moving away from a traditional classified business towards a network marketplace model. and how this leads to a more diversified revenue model. As a proof point, let's take a look at our very pleasing Q3 results. While the core residential agent ARPU did grow through price increases, it is a bit dampened by new customers, but also boosted by our strongly growing realtor lead engine product. On top of that comes the strong demand for mandates from Immo4Kauf24, which led to a respective revenue increase of 41% in Q3. On the consumer side of the business, we saw our plus product revenue grow by 23%. So, our traditional core agent business is complemented by acquisition products for agents, And our consumer listing business is complemented by subscription products, which now significantly overcompensate the free-to-list effects. Additionally, we are capitalizing on the fact that both customer groups, professional and private, are becoming more and more digital savvy. The business real estate business is still suffering from the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. But despite of that, and in context of our continued free-to-list push, we were able to achieve an overall revenue growth in Q3 of around 9%. And since Immoverkauf24 has been acquired on July 1st, 2020, organic and reported growth is nearly the same for the quarter. At our CMD in three weeks, we will share more context and plans how we are tackling growth in the future while at the same time creating long-term shareholder value. Talking about shareholder value, in Q3, our EPS increased significantly following the recent share buybacks. It came out at 29 euro cents, 27% up year on year. I leave it to Dirk to talk about our next share buyback program in the amount of up to 200 million euros. As just explained, thanks to the right product offering in place, we delivered strong revenue growth. And This despite the ongoing challenging market conditions in Germany. Those of you who have followed the German election campaign have noted that the housing shortage is a major political topic over here. We are addressing this issue amongst others with mandate acquisition products and solutions for agents and tailored search products for consumers. These are all products which go beyond the traditional offering of a classified player. This is the main reason why, despite decreasing listing numbers, which you can see on page four, we are delivering increasing revenues. At the same time, we are seeing an increased usage of our platform by home seekers. This is a proof of our significantly increased relevance. In the first nine months of the year, the app traffic went up by 23% year on year, compensating for the decrease in desktop usage. Next to improved mobile usage, we believe this desktop trend is driven by the changed cookie content, which leads to reduced measurability of traffic. Monthly sessions on ImmoScout24 were only slightly down by 3% to 104 million, and therefore almost back to 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. This increased engagement is certainly due to the strong demand for property, which is ultimately met by the help of our search products. Those search products are included in the consumer subscriptions portion depicted in teal on the graph on slide 5. Revenues from this product group are now exceeding the one-off listing or paid per ad revenues. The same holds true for the leads revenues, the yellow portion of the graph. As I mentioned before, we are becoming less and less dependent on our traditional classified business. from classifieds to ecosystem. That is our stated strategy. And both the leads and consumer subscription products bring us closer to either sale or rent transactions. Through our membership additions, the largest and orange portion of the graph, we offer our agent customers the right tools to efficiently market their inventory. And it also helps them win new mandates. This very solid core business while growing at a slower pace, is the foundation for our strongly growing transactional business. Page 6 now shows how this translates into 9-month 2021 key performance indicators. Our group revenue grew by 9.4% to €287 million in a year-on-year comparison. The main growth driver was our residential real estate segment with a revenue increase of 12.8%. Considering the operating cost developments linked to the change revenue mix I showed you before, the ordinary operating EBITDA increased by 4.5% to 165 million euros. Due to the strong demand for the realtor lead engine product and continued price adjustments, the ARPU of the residential real estate partners increased by 5.9% to 751 euros. The business real estate ARPU also increased still at a low pace due to the pandemic by 0.5% to 1,748 euros. Once again, we were able to also grow our customer base by 2.5% to 20,511 customers. The biggest pain point for this customer base remains to win new mandates in a market with a lack of supply. The currency for these mandates is our growing registered homeowner base. At the end of September, we started approximately 670,000 homeowners, an increase of 34% year on year. The number of consumer plus product subscribers grew even stronger by over 80% to almost 237,000. With the resulting revenues, we were able to significantly overcompensate the declining pay-per-add business, leading to a good overall growth of consumer revenues. This is fully in line with our intended business strategy, and we are pleased to see our company deliver very tangible results as part of our execution. With that, I will hand it over to Dirk to provide more color on the financials. Dirk, over to you.
Thank you, Tobi. Welcome everybody also from my side. Now let's move to slide seven, which shows you the segment view. As Tobi already mentioned, the residential real estate revenue increased by 12.8% to 212.4 million euros in a nine month comparison. This growth was mainly driven by our revenue with agents, which grew by 14%, strongly supported by delivering sales mandates to our agents. The Realtor Lead Engine and ImmoVerkauf24 together increased revenue by 111% to 23.9 million euros in a nine-month view. Comparing quarter on quarter, the respective growth rate was 54% due to the consolidation of ImmoVerkauf24 in Q3 last year. Revenue with consumers increased by 10.2% in a nine-month comparison, despite free-to-list. This is due to a high demand for our plus products reflected in the strong increase in consumer subscriptions, as Toby just told you. The ordinary operating EBITDA margin of the residential real estate segment came in at 59.5% for the first nine months of 2021, which is 3.9 percentage points below previous year. On the one hand, this is due to higher operating costs, mainly for homeowner marketing initiatives. 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 was at 61.8% for the residential real estate segment. The business real estate segment revenue is still affected by the pandemic. resulting in a stable revenue development with €51.4 million for the nine-month period 2021. Nevertheless, the revenue with developers and new homebuilders increased by 4.3% and thus compensated for the decline in the revenue with commercial real estate agents. The latter was primarily due to a decreasing pay-per-add business with commercial agents. The ordinary operating EBITDA margin of the business real estate segment came in at 72.7%. The media and other segment revenue increased by 2% to 23 million in the nine-month period. This was mainly driven by the strong ImmoScout24 Austria business, while at the same time the media business declined. FlowFact also recorded a declining revenue due to the ongoing conversion of the payment model to software as a service. Since August 2021, the newly acquired PropStack also contributed to the media and other revenue development with its cloud-based CRM product for smaller agents. The ordinary operating EBTA margin of the media and other segment fell by 5.3 percentage points to 34.5%. We already mentioned the continued customer growth and the ARPU increase. Page 8 gives you the customary quarterly and year-to-date overview by segment. The residential ARPU increase by 7.4% in Q3 can be explained by the growing real-to-lead engine revenues and price increases. On the other hand, the growing agent base creates downward pressure as it mostly applies to smaller agents. The business real estate segment is still influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic with a slight recovery in Q3 reflected by the ARPU growth of 1.7%. Turning to page 9, let us go through the main ordinary operating items affecting our margin development. Own work capitalized increased by 21% to 19.5 million euros in the first nine months. This translates into a capitalization ratio of 7.4%, which is above our target ratio of 6%. This is mainly to do with capitalized project developments from Vermieter DE, which come on top of our accelerated product innovation efforts. Examples of such product investments include further development of the Home Seller Hub and the Plus products, which pay into our ecosystem strategy. However, I am expecting that by the end of 2022, the capitalization ratio should be down to our 6% target again. Personal cost increased by 14.5%, mainly due to the integration of Formitab DE and PropStack employees. As a recurring topic from the last quarters, the higher marketing expenses mainly reflect our ambition to generate valuable homeowner contacts, which are at the heart of our leads business. With these leads, our agent customers can digitally accelerate their mandate acquisition efforts, eventually leading to more transactions. Our marketing expenses increased by 28% to 27.8 million euros in a nine-month comparison. This includes expenses for TV and online advertising, search engine optimization, search engine advertising, and performance marketing. IT expenses remain stable in a nine-month comparison at 12.7 million euros. The increase in Q3 was due to a higher number of software licenses coming with more employees. The year-on-year growth in other operating costs by 21.4% to 38.5 million is mainly due to increasing purchase cost in connection with the sale of more leads and plus products, higher external labor costs due to additional call center activities, and additional investments into Flowfect. Taking all those operating effects into account brings us to an ordinary operating EBITDA of 164.7 million euros for the first nine-month period and 54.5 million for Q3 2021. This reflects a year-on-year increase of 4.5% and 4.4% respectively. The nine-month margin came in at 57.4%, while Q3 was lower at 55.9%. Again, organically, the margin would have been at 59.1% for the nine-month period and at 57.1% for Q3. Let's turn to page 10, where you see the items below the ordinary operating EBTA with a highly accretive development in earnings per share. Non-operating costs decreased significantly by 70.6% in Q3, mainly driven by the development of share-based compensation. Due to the declining share price, long-term incentive program provisions were released in Q3 2021. This was partly offset by higher M&A costs. For the nine-month period, the non-operating effects decreased by 34%. As a result, the reported EBITDA was up 18.2% in Q3 2021 and increased by 9.2% in the first nine-month period. Depreciation and amortization increased due to higher depreciation rates resulting from the move to the new Berlin office, as well as depreciation of own work capitalized. The strong decline in the financial result in Q3 is resulting from a lower amount of cash invested in the special securities fund due to further share buybacks. In addition, the actual performance of the fund was slightly lower than in previous periods. The recent share buybacks are also the reason for the strong increase in earnings per share. Based on a reduced average number of shares of 83.5 million for Q3 2021, this results in a 27% higher EPS of 29 euro cents. The nine-month EPS amounted to 79 euro cents, up 18% year on year. Let's take a closer look at the development of our share capital on page 11. What you see here is the development of outstanding shares and treasury shares in connection with our capital return roadmap. The number of outstanding shares, depicted in black in the graph, forms the relevant base for calculating the EPS. The volume of up to 10% of our total share capital, which we can hold in Treasury shares, is reflected by the orange portion of the graph. In December last year, after the public tender transaction in April this year, and one week ago, at the beginning of November, we cancelled Treasury shares. Consequently, our total share capital now stands at 83.6 million shares, of which 83.5 million are outstanding free-flowed shares and less than 100,000 are left as treasury shares. As announced on the 3rd of November, the next share buyback program in the amount of up to 200 million euro is just around the corner. It is planned to start within the next days and should be completed at the latest at the end of June 2022. and therefore before the next AGM. Let me finish our presentation with page 12 and our outlook for 2021. With increasing confidence in the business development for the rest of the year, we decided to refine our full year outlook. So mid to high single revenue growth now becomes around 9% revenue growth. And our previous outlook for the ordinary operating EBITDA margin of up to 60% is refined to a range of 57 to 58%. This range now also fully reflects the recent acquisitions of Vermeer.de and PropStack. I told you in our last earnings call that Vermeer.de would cost us one margin point this year. So without Vermeer.de, we would have been able to share here a margin outlook in the range of 58 to 59%. Just like imofacauf24, Vermeer.de perfectly fits into our ecosystem strategy. Both businesses bring us closer to the real estate transaction. With ImmoVerkauf24, we participate in sales transactions by realizing a share of the agent commission. With Vermieter DE, we participate in rental transactions when private landlords create and sign digital rental contracts over the platform and manage ongoing tenant relationships. In the first nine months of this year, ImmoVerkauf24 completed approximately 1,230 property transactions with our partner agents. Formited.de had 144,000 registered landlords on the platform at the end of September. By the way, the integration is running as planned. Users can now log on to Formited.de with their EmuScout24 account and seamlessly transfer property data. With this, let me open the floor for your questions.
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