2/28/2023

speaker
Philipp Lindwall
Director Group Strategy and Investor Relations, Scout24

good afternoon everyone and welcome to scout24's fourth quarter and full year 2022 earnings call my name is philipp lindwall and i am director group strategy and investor relations at scout24 with me on the call today is tobias hartmann our ceo and dirk schmelzer our cfo toby will kick off the presentation and Dirk will dive deeper into our fourth quarter and 2022 full-year financial performance. As always, we will conclude the call with a Q&A session. We would kindly ask you to limit your questions to a maximum of two. You can find today's presentation on our website under financial reports and presentations. Our annual report and non-financial statement will be published on our website on 23rd March. If you're using the web link we provided beforehand, you can follow today's presentation live. This session will be recorded and a replay will be made available as quickly as possible after the event. Please take note of the disclaimer on page two. Tobi, now over to you.

speaker
Tobias Hartmann
CEO, Scout24

Thank you, Philipp, and welcome everyone. Let's get right into it and move to page three of our presentation. I wanted to start off with recapping year 2022, how markets drastically changed and how we at Scout24 navigated these changes successfully so far. Starting with macro. We all know that 2022 was an unprecedented year in terms of rising inflation and interest rates. as well as significant geopolitical uncertainty. But even in this tough environment, we managed to outperform expectations coming into the year, leading to a guidance upgrade and closing out the year at the top end of the upgraded guidance. As part of the dramatic macro changes, the real estate market also changed significantly from a seller to buyer market. As part of this change, IS24 became much more relevant for agents and rent seekers. The proof is in the pudding. Despite the more challenging market for agents, we added 668 new agents during the year. Growth even accelerated in Q4 2022. And we are continuing to grow the number of agents in January 2023. The other major shift was the massively increased interest to rent. This benefits Scout24 because of our product Tenant+. With our private subscription products, we crossed the mark of 300,000 subscribers during the summer, a remarkable achievement, and ended the year about 320,000 subscribers. Talking about our CMD targets, despite increased macro headwinds, we continue to deliver against these targets. In summary, we are very pleased with how the company is performing and the continued positive operational and financial trajectory. We are grateful for the hard work being put in by our teams to deliver the strong performance, and we believe we are best positioned to continue our growth track record going forward. We are entering 2023 with confidence based on our resilient and diversified business model and high demand for our core product suite. In addition, we see the current market environment as an opportunity to further accelerate innovation and continuously review how we can operate in the most efficient way. Now let's move to page four and key messages for the past year. Starting off with the full year results for 2022, we are very pleased to have delivered revenue and ordinary operating EBITDA growth of 15% and 13% respectively. Revenue growth came in at the top end of our upgraded guidance and OOEBITDA even outperformed our top end guidance range of 12%. These strong results were delivered in a year with significant macro uncertainty. The Ukraine war, a dramatically changed real estate market, as well as a softening demand for seller and mortgage leads in the second half of 2022. But these results are not a coincidence. They are the outcome of rigorously executing our strategy over the past years. Our revenue model is diversified, thereby enabling us to consistently generate double digit top line growth throughout the different stages of the real estate cycle. We grew customers throughout 2022 and see continued strong demand for IS24 core products, specifically professional membership subscriptions, PPA and consumer subscriptions. The increased demand for IS24 core products reflects the changed real estate market and the immense value IS24 offers market participants. These positive developments offset the cyclically softer demand for seller and mortgage leads. I will talk about this later. In Q4 2022, we continued our path to generate sustained operating leverage exactly as we've said we would do since the second quarter 2022. We expect this trend to continue in 2023. Dirk will talk more about this in his part. We are committed to delivering best-in-class returns to our shareholders and as such I'm very pleased to announce that our adjusted EPS has increased substantially by 26% to 1.91 Euro. Finally, While we are still very early into 2023, the year has started off as anticipated and we are on track to deliver 2023 guidance with 12% revenue growth and 13% ordinary operating EBTA growth. Dirk will elaborate more on the full year 2023 guidance in his part. Now, let me move to page five to walk you through our 2022 full year results. On group level, revenue totaled €447.5 million, a 15.0% year-on-year increase. Ordinary operating EBITDA of the group came out at €251.1 million, representing a margin of 56.1% and a growth over 2021 of 12.7%. Both numbers exceeded our initial expectations for 2022. In our professional segment, subscription revenue increased by 10% to €260.1 million. This is the result of strong core membership growth, strong PPA growth, a dynamic seller growth and also strong growth of our Mortgage Leads business in the first half of 2022. The number of professional customers grew more than 3% year-on-year, We are particularly pleased about this development given the changed real estate market. ARPU increased by 6.8% to 1,025 euros. In our private segment, including the landlord platform Fomita.de, subscription revenue increased by 52.4% to 60.1 million euros. This was fueled in particular by significant new customer wins for the Tenant Plus product, growing our number of private customers in Q4 by 49.1% to on average almost 304,000. Private ARPU increased by 2.2% to 16.5 euros. The blended estimated customer lifetime value increased sequentially from Q2 by 2.7% to 115 euros. Given the scarcity of rental objects in Germany and the value add this product offers, it continues to drive new customer wins. We are very proud of what our teams continue to deliver in this business. Now, let me move to page six for a quick summary of our Q4 2022 results. On group level, we delivered revenue growth of 13.1% and OO EBITDA growth of 14.4%. OOEBDA margin was 57.7%, up 0.6 percentage points versus Q4 2021. We are delivering on the communicated strategy around operating leverage. Expect us to continue this path in fiscal year 2023. In the professional segment, we saw continued strong momentum in membership revenues, which was offset by a challenging quarter for OTP and mortgage. In total, revenues grew 9.2%. We continued to grow our customer base by over 4%, highlighting the strong demand and relevance of the IS24 platform in the new real estate market environment. ARPU growth of 4.7% was driven by strong membership revenue, again, partially offset by a weak OTP quarter. I will comment more on the Q4 2022 OTP developments in just a minute. Private revenue growth remained strong at 28.1%, driven by continued growth of 10 and plus. At the end of 2022, we recorded almost 320,000 subscribers on average across the full year. ARPU slightly increased to 16.8 euros. Now turning to page seven. Let us review where we stand on targets and momentum for the five value drivers on the basis of full year 2022 performance and Q4. The key takeaway for you is that we have performed well above our stated targets on membership revenue. Private subscriptions also generated growth in excess of our target on a full year 2022 basis and in line with our target in Q4. The strong momentum of these revenue lines reflects the strong demand for IS24 core products, both B2B and B2C, in this market that has now become a buyer's market. As you know, these revenue streams are recurring and come at high gross margins. Seller leads and mortgage revenues grew well in H1 2022, but growth started to slow down in Q3 and was turning negative in Q4. Let's go through the value drivers in detail and what we are seeing in the market. Professional membership revenue increased by an impressive 12.1% in Q4 year on year and 9.2% for the full year. Growth accelerated every quarter this year as our membership products are in high demand. They generate superior returns on investment for real estate agents. As commented before, we grew the number of customers in Q4 2022 by over 4%. The strength and resilience of our platform makes us optimistic about 2023. Seller leads revenue declined by 7.8% in Q4 2022, affected by the market environment. Specifically, agents are currently less willing to spend money on leads for new mandates as they already have follow-up pipelines that take longer to convert into a sale. Scout24 is a growth company. As such, we are focusing on market share gains and efficiency, levers and times of demand, shifts and industry-wide disruptions. To that end, the 7.8% decline still represents relative market outperformance when we compare it to the decline of transaction numbers and other relevant data points such as decline in new mortgage lending. For the full year 2022, seller leads grew 17.3%, a strong performance in the changed market environment. We started into 2023 with a healthy mandate pipeline. That's good on the one side, as there are a lot of mandates committed, but as we communicated in the Q3 earnings call, it is now taking longer to generate transactions, and this impacts our mandate split revenues negatively. However, the seller leads and the mandate business is in its early innings and bear in mind, it only represents roughly 9% of our total revenues. Our mortgage business-related revenue declined by 14.2% in Q4 2022, affected by the challenging market environment for new mortgage lending. Mortgage brokers are reluctant to invest in leads at this time of heightened uncertainty and decreased underwriting appetite from banks. When we compare our Q4 decline to what other market participants have reported, we again see relative outperformance and higher resilience thanks to our lead monetization business model. For the full year 2022, we grew our mortgage business by 7.9%. Mortgage revenues contributed 4% to total group revenues in 2022. Our unique private subscription business continues to grow strongly as the product and value proposition resonates well with consumers and landlords. Revenues grew 28.1% in Q4 2022 and for the full year 52.4%, mainly driven by continued strong growth in tenant plus, which grew number of subscribers by 26.9% in Q4 2022 and by 49.1% for the full year. We are proud of what our teams are achieving. We are in the fortunate position to have innovated Tenant Plus product years ago, which has created another growth lever for Scout24, while at the same time diversifying revenue streams. We continue to innovate around potential product extensions and are excited about future revenue opportunities. Our landlord solution around formited.de is continuing to gain relevance. We grew the number of registered units on the platform by 108%, crossing the 1 million unit mark, ending the year 2022 at 1,052,000 units. To summarize, we feel good about where we stand in terms of executing on our moving to the next level strategy. Our membership and private subscriptions businesses are performing strongly and the high relevance of our platforms and these products for market participants is reflected in the growth rates and the continued momentum we are seeing. Now, turning to slide 8. Given the changing real estate market since last earnings call in November, we wanted to share our recent view on the German real estate market and what the new market environment means for Scout24. Starting off with the German market fundamentals. Based on the fact of significant undersupply of new homes over the past years, we don't see the market suffering a significant price decline. In addition, remember that agent commission level of 4 to 6.5% remains high and makes Germany a very attractive place to work as an agent. So what about agents' financial health? Based on the fact that we are still adding agents to the IS24 platform and real estate prices remain high, we see agents have enough buffer to navigate the current market without going out of business. We think a likely scenario may involve real estate prices gradually adjusting downwards over the upcoming quarters, which will lead to a number of transactions starting to normalize sometime late 2023 or beginning of 2024. We also believe that the role of a real estate agent is more relevant than ever before as part of the future real estate market in Germany. Agents will need to help moderate the potential gap between the homeowner's price expectations and the buyer's price willingness. This will take some time, but will increase the need for well-trained and professional real estate brokers. What makes us confident is the fact that we provide a great lead quality to real estate agents. We pair this lead quality with the best marketing power toolkit for agents and we offer that at reasonable prices as our share of wallet of agents' total income is not that high. A good product with high relevance at a fair price underscores the fact that a temporary period with fewer transactions will not lead to accelerated agent churn. So what about our OTP and mortgage business in this market? Agents are holding back on buying seller leads. This is because they have a full pipeline of mandates that takes longer to convert. This behavior is rational and while of course we would rather sell more leads, the most important thing for us is that our real estate partners remain in business and if that means buying fewer leads for a few quarters, This is a trade-off we are very happy to make. In fact, we would encourage. The same development holds true for our mortgage business. If we now compare the previous real estate market with the current market, it is very clear that Scout24 has an increasingly important role to play to support all stakeholders to operate successfully in this new environment. For agents, This means providing them with the market power and reach of the IS24 platform, as well as best in class products to help them operate efficiently. Agents need high quality buyer leads, which is exactly what they get from IS24. For potential buyers, we have to help them navigate a market with much more choice and provide transparency around pricing in a market where bid and ask spreads are still sizable. And for landlords, they need efficient digital processes to find the right tenant in a market with high number of applications. The changed real estate market is a clear net positive for Scout24 as we are seeing increased relevance with all of our stakeholders. This is reflected in increased demand for our core products. In addition, there is demand from stakeholders to further digitize processes around sale and rent transactions. These are the reasons why we are optimistic going into this new market cycle. Scout24 is best positioned to take market share across its core products, emphasizing our market leadership and unique platform offering. And with that, I would like to hand it over to Dirk, who will take you through the financial part of the presentation.

speaker
Dirk Schmelzer
CFO, Scout24

Thank you, Tobi, and welcome everyone. On slide nine, you can see the year-on-year revenue growth in our three segments and the respective ordinary operating EBITDA margins for the full year 2022. The 10.8% revenue growth in the professional segment is based, as Tobi already mentioned, on a strong core membership business and a softened but still dynamic seller leads business. As the professional PPA business has gained momentum in the current market environment, These revenues add to the segment growth. Consequently, the ordinary operating EBITDA margin of the professional segment came in relatively strong, at 60.5%, despite this year's additional growth investments. The private segment showed a revenue growth of 28.5%, strongly backed by private subscription revenue, which grew by 52.4%, including for metered.de. In private, we also experience continued strong growth in our PPA business, creating additional tailwinds. The ordinary operating EBITDA margin of the private segment has significantly increased to 51.6% in 2022. This is mainly to do with a lower penetration of credit checks as part of a longer subscription term. whilst also accelerating the PPA business with longer standing times for listings as well as price adjustments on the subscriptions. The media and other segment revenue increased by 9.7% in 2022. This includes the ImmoScout24 Austria business, which grew strongly. In our CRM business, we observed a planned shift from FlowFact to PropStack reflecting our sales approach to focus on standardized and integrated product and feature sets. The ordinary operating EBITDA margin of the media and other segment grew by 0.6 percentage points to 34.9%. Let's turn to page 10 to dive a bit deeper into the professional segment. As already mentioned, with a strong core business and seller leads growth, subscription revenue increased by 10% in 2022. We managed to increase our number of customers again in Q4 by 4.3%. Professional APU increased 6.8% year on year from €959 to €1025, reflecting dynamic pricing and the mix effect of new customers. In these times, our highly diversified revenue composition comes at a great advantage, with a stronger core business in the context of the current market developments. The seller leads growth was still at 17.3%. This, in addition to the revival of paper at demand, added momentum to the professional segments EBITDA growth. Hence, Despite additional growth investments, the ordinary operating EBITDA came in at 176.2 million euros, a 4.4% increase compared to last year. This results in a margin of 60.5%. On page 11, let's take a closer look at the private segment. I already elaborated on the year-on-year increase of the private subscription revenue by 52.4%. and the significant new customer additions in 2022 of 49.1%. Revenue growth and net new customer wins continue to be fueled by the hot rental market. Speaking of important milestones, the private PPA business exceeded again the 10 million euros revenue mark in Q4, increasing by 37.9% year on year. If we look at the full year, we generated growth of 23.6% in the private PPA business. As a consequence of the successful development of the TenantPlus product, we reduced the business with third party credit checks, leading to a decrease of 8.9% of the other revenue line. The described mixed shifts, amongst others, had a positive effect on the ordinary operating EBITDA margin of the private segment. In absolute terms, the ordinary operating EBITDA grew strongly by 45.4% to 62.7 million euros in 2022. This is mainly due to a more efficient plus product business, the revival of the high margin PPA business and lower expenses for credit checks. The ordinary operating EBITDA margin came in at 51.6%, which is six percentage points higher than in 2021. Turning to page 12, let us go through the main ordinary operating items. Own work capitalized increased by 8% to 28.7 million euros in 2022. The increase was mainly related to development and integration projects at Famita.de, Flowfact and Immoscout24. This translates into a capitalization ratio of 6.4%, which is slightly lower than last year. In Q4, it was down to 6% from 6.8% in Q4 2021. Expect this trend to continue. Personal cost increased by 11.7%. That is below revenue growth, mainly due to the integration of Formited.de employees and regular increase in wages. As a percentage of revenue, we were able to reduce personal cost from 21.2% in full year 2021 to 20.6% in full year 2022. This trend will accelerate in 2023. Marketing costs remain stable as we continued to invest into Vermietit.de, online marketing, brand campaigns, and our seller and mortgage leads businesses. Beyond that, we launched a new TV campaign in the third quarter of 2022. One important takeaway for you is that in the light of the changing German real estate market, we will be very focused on return on invested marketing spend, which may result in mix and channel shifts going into 2023 and beyond. The year-on-year growth in IT costs of 18.4% to €21.4 million results from the integration of Vermieter.de and increased AWS costs which have been impacted by the Euro-US dollar exchange rate and also of the increased number of visitors. Good for the business, but it comes with a bigger check to AWS. Selling costs increased under proportionately to growth in Plus product revenues, mainly due to a lower amount of credit checks sold with the Plus subscriptions. Putting all together, we get to a 12.7% higher ordinary operating EBITDA of 251.1 million euros in 2022. The resulting margin is 56.1%. Now let's turn to slide 13. Looking back to our Q3 2022 results, we talked about closing in on generating operating leverage. We have delivered on that statement already in Q4 2022. where we delivered EBITDA growth in excess of revenue growth and hence expanded our margin. This is as planned and outlined at the CMD and a testament to our ability to combine strategic long-term investments while increasing the efficiency of our operations. As we have talked about before, we are coming out of an investment phase and operating leverage also means that you can expect CAPEX to go down further over the next couple of years. In addition, we are focused on achieving further cost efficiencies in our operations, and we are working through our administrative and G&A expenses. Putting this together, we have the right platform in place to generate meaningful further operating leverage and margin improvement at increased scale in 2023 and beyond. Now let's turn to page 14, where you see the items below the ordinary operating EBITDA. Non-operating costs decreased €1.5 million in 2022. Expenses for M&A activities and reorganization had a cost-increasing effect. A decrease in share-based compensation had a cost-reducing effect. Therefore, the reported EBITDA increased at a higher rate than the ordinary operating EBITDA, coming out at €230.6 million in 2022, 14.8% higher than in 2021. Depreciation and amortization decreased by 33% to 42.3 million euros due to the termination of the purchase price allocation amortization of the ImmoScout customer base. The financial result is not impacted anymore by the performance of the managed liquidity. For Q4 2022, the financial results turned positive to 6.5 million euros. With these developments, the reported net income increased by 36.4% to 123.5 million euros in 2022. Due to the share buybacks, the basic EPS increased by 54.3%, testament to our highly accretive capital allocation strategy. The adjusted EPS increased at 25.7%. Turning to page 15 and full year 2023 guidance. Based on data points we are seeing in the first two months of the current financial year, we confirm our full year 2023 guidance. Given the general market uncertainty, I wanted to provide you with some additional puts and takes how we are seeing the remainder of the year. Despite the macroeconomic headwinds and uncertainty in the real estate market, we expect to navigate successfully towards our growth objectives. To give you some further context on our assumptions for the current financial year. First, we see continued demand for membership revenues and healthy developments in our agent base. Secondly, we believe that PPA remains a growth driver. Thirdly, the private segment will continue to profit from the current market environment. And lastly, we see a continued challenging environment for mortgage and seller leads. To be specific, into our guidance, we have baked in a certain amount of softness in our lease and transactional businesses. And as Toby mentioned in his part, we are using the current market environment to assess how to best run those businesses going forward. If we get to a situation where it makes sense to reduce investments for improved profitability, that is a choice we prefer. Consequently, we feel very comfortable with our EBITDA outlook. To wrap up, we are very pleased with how the company is performing and the continued positive operational and financial trajectory. We are best positioned to continue our strong growth track record going forward. We will provide with the next update in our first quarter 2023 call on May 4th. With that, let's open the line for questions. We would appreciate if you could limit your questions to two per speaker. Operator, over to you.

Disclaimer

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