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Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Scout24 third quarter and nine months 2024 earnings call. My name is Philipp Lindvall, and I'm vice president group strategy and investor relations at Scout24. With me on the call today are Tobias Hartmann, our chief executive officer, and Dirk Schmelzer, our chief financial officer. Tobi will start the presentation with an overview of our quarterly performance and Dirk will dive deeper into our nine months and third quarter 2024 results. Let me just remind you that we have now completed the first full year since the consolidation of Sprengneta on July 1st, 2023. This means there is no longer any inorganic revenue contribution from Sprengneta. I also want to remind you that starting with our third quarter results today, we are now reporting in line with our new segment structure, which we announced during the last earnings call. As always, we will conclude the call with a Q&A session. You can find today's presentation on our website under Financial Reports and Presentations. 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 2. Toby, now over to you.

Thank you, Philipp, and welcome everyone. Let's turn to page 3 of our presentation and review the key highlights. Revenue growth was 8.5% in the third quarter of 2024, contributing to an overall increase of 11.4% for the first nine months of the year. Growth was driven by continued strong performance in our core agent membership business and a very strong momentum in our private subscription segment. Our membership business grew revenue by 9.0% during the quarter, driven by a combination of customer growth and product upgrades. We continue to win new professional customers, achieving 2.5% growth in our membership business during Q3. This marks an acceleration compared to the second quarter. The number of customers amounted to 24,728 during the quarter. By the end of September, we have grown the base even further, now approaching 25,000 customers. Our interconnected product portfolio and the strength of the InmanScout24 platform continue to provide unmatched value to agents in this increasingly complex real estate market. Our private subscription business also remained a key growth driver in the third quarter with 27.6% growth. We continued to add subscribers at an impressive rate, growing 24.7% in the quarter and reaching an average of 460,000. Growth was based on continued strength across the product portfolio. At the end of September, our customer base has surpassed 470,000. a new all-time high. We are very pleased that our newly formed business unit transaction enablement grew 2.9%. This was driven by strong performance of our data and valuation business, CRM software, as well as ESG products. Demand for seller leads stabilized while demand for mortgage leads remains soft. Our operating leverage accelerated in the quarter with 16.1% growth and 4.1 percentage points margin expansion. These improvements are due to continued focus on efficiency gains and the successful execution of our interconnectivity strategy, which is improving product usage. Adjusted EPS rose by 16.0% to 75 euro cents during the reporting period. Turning to financial guidance for 2024. Based on the strong business performance in the first nine months of 2024, we are very pleased to narrow the current guidance to the upper end, both for revenue growth and OOEBDA margin. Based on this guidance update, we are well on track to deliver our fourth consecutive year of double-digit revenue growth. This is a track record we want to continue building on as we move into 2025. Before we continue with the quarterly numbers, let me provide you with a quick update on the German real estate market. The real estate market for residential sale transactions is in recovery mode. Interest to acquire properties is increasing. Nationwide contact requests on Immoscout24 increased by 9% in September compared to August. In Germany's major metropolitan areas, they rose by 28% year-on-year. However, transactional volumes remain lower than historical levels as buyer affordability is still down compared to the low interest rate environment. As inflation is starting to come down and the ECB has started to lower interest rates, there's reason to be optimistic that the residential sale market will continue to gradually recover as we move into 2025. For our customers active in the commercial, developer, or new home building space, the market remains more challenging. There are also reasons to believe that those markets will benefit from lower inflation and interest rates, but... It is too early to call out the recovery here. Overall, the current market environment is favorable for Scout24. The decline of the gray market, higher complexity of selling real estate, and increased importance of buyer leads are trends that will continue to persist as we enter 2025. With our unmatched product portfolio to tackle this new market environment and complexity, we are confident to continue our growth path. Let's turn to page 4 for a brief summary of our key third quarter metrics. Revenue for the quarter reached 144.0 million euros, reflecting a 8.5% growth year-on-year. Ordinary operating EBITDA came in strong at 90.7 million euros, an increase of 16.1% year-on-year, representing a margin of 62.9%. In the professional segment, subscription revenues rose by 9.0% to 74.5 million euros due to continued strong growth with residential agents. In the private segment, subscription revenue continued to perform exceptionally well with a 27.6% increase, building on the already strong performance from the second quarter. Subscriber growth reached 24.7%. Turning to page 5, let me now elaborate on our 9-month results. Group revenue reached 419.6 million euros, reflecting an 11.4% increase. The ordinary operating EBITDA of the group came in at 257.1 million euros, up 14.5%, representing a margin of 61.3%. With these results as a basis entering the fourth quarter, we are well on track to achieve the upper end of our guidance. In the professional segment, subscription revenues showed healthy growth of 9.5%, reaching 219.7 million euros. This was driven by the strong performance of our core membership products throughout all three quarters of the year. In the private segment, subscription revenues grew by an impressive 24.8% year-on-year, totaling €65.8 million. As I commented before, this growth is driven by broad-based strengths across the product portfolio. Let me wrap up by putting our strong results into a broader context of our strategic framework. We are well on track to deliver a strong 2024, which marks the first year on the back of the capital markets day we had in February, where we outlined our updated strategy and financial targets. With our narrowed guidance towards the upper end, we are off to a great start executing on our strategy and targets. Our strong financial results are an outcome of our interconnectivity strategy starting to bear fruit. Let me highlight just a couple of examples to make the point. At the Capital Markets Day, we said we were confident that our agent membership products will continue to see high demand based on our new level of interconnected products we provide in the new memberships. Agents now consume much more of the ImmoScout24 product universe than just the listing insertion. Examples include valuation products, energy certificates, modernization calculator, and many more. The growth rates we achieved in our membership business so far in 2024 illustrate the point that we have permanently raised the bar for this business. And we are very excited about our plans and momentum entering 2025. We also said at the CMD that we had great know-how turning new products into subscriptions. Living Plus is a good example of this. We now have more than 19,000 subscribers and we are closing in on 1 million euros annual revenue run rate for this great new product. For Seekers, we said that we wanted to increase information and transparency around property data. To that end, we have added a fair price label for our listings. This is essentially pulling valuation data from Sprangnet API and comparing it to the price asked from the agent. For Seekers, we have also integrated AI filters on listings, and we are one of the first classifieds in the world to do so. Interconnectivity also generates internal cost efficiencies as we become more productive. As you can tell, we are very excited how we are executing and how the strategy is coming together. While we clearly still have much to do, we are confident to close out the financial year 2024 on a high note, and we look towards the upcoming year with a high level of confidence. And with that, I'll hand it over to Dirk.

Thank you, Tobi, and welcome, everyone. Let's turn to page six, where you can see the year-on-year revenue growth and ordinary operating EBITDA margins for our professional and private segment over the first nine months, which both grew double digits in revenues. The professional segment achieved an 11.1% revenue increase. The ordinary operating EBITDA margin decreased by 0.1 percentage points to 62.5%. This is still a good achievement considering that last year's numbers did not yet include Sprengnetter until July. We saw a strong demand for Plus subscriptions in the private segment. resulting in a 12.4% revenue increase. The ordinary operating EBITDA margin for the private segment increased by 6.2 percentage points to 58.1% as we continue to scale the business and make high return marketing investments. Let's turn to page 7 for a closer look at the professional segment. In the third quarter, revenue in the professional segment grew by 6.5%, reaching 103.4 million euros. This growth was primarily driven by the strong performance in our core membership products, for which revenue increased by 9% in the quarter and 9.5% for the nine months. We are very pleased that we continue to expand our agent customer base, achieving a year-on-year growth of 2.5% in Q3. APU in the professional segment grew by 6.4% from €943 to €1004. slightly slower than revenue from subscriptions. This development was driven by new customers generally coming in at a lower ARPU and a more challenging market situation for our commercial customers. The transaction enablement revenue line reached an inflection point and grew by 2.9% in the third quarter of 2024, supported by the gradual recovery of the real estate market. ordinary operating EBITDA in the professional segment improved significantly by 11.3% in the third quarter of 2024. As a result, the ordinary operating EBITDA margin expanded by 2.7 percentage points, reaching 63.6%. This positive development is due to successful execution of our interconnectivity strategy, leading to an increased gross margin and increased internal productivity. On page 8, let's take a closer look at the private segment. In the third quarter, the private segment grew by 13.8%, reaching 40.7 million euros. Growth was fueled by the continued strength of our Plus subscription portfolio, particularly driven by Tenant Plus, as well as positive developments in Buyer Plus and a still small but steadily growing contribution from our newly launched Living Plus products. The average number of private customers rose by 24.7% during Q3, reaching 470,507 in September. Subscription revenues for the first nine months of 2024 increased by 24.8%, reaching 65.8 million euros. Ordinary operating EBITDA in the private segment grew significantly by 31.1% in the third quarter and 25.9% for the nine months, supported by the scalability of our subscription business. As a result, the private segment's ordinary operating EBITDA margin expanded materially to 61.3% in the third quarter, an increase of 8.1 percentage points. Let's turn to page 9 to review the main ordinary operating items. Operating effects for the third quarter decreased by 1.8% compared to last year. Over the nine-month period, expenses rose only moderately by 5.5%. These positive developments reflect the progress we see around interconnectivity, which generates scale benefits and productivity. One example of this are our marketing costs, which continue to decline as more and more product sales are triggered from within our ecosystem user base, drawing from our strong brand and traffic. The rise in operating effects on a nine-month basis stemmed mainly from higher personal costs and increased other operating expenses, which were mainly driven by more external labor and professional services. Ordinary operating EBITDA grew by 16.1% in the third quarter, which marks a meaningful acceleration compared to the second quarter. This led to a 4.1% point expansion in the ordinary operating EBITDA margin for Q3 and a 1.7% point improvements over the 9-month period. These strong margin improvements are driven by continued revenue growth from our higher margin products as well as a positive trend in cost management. Overall, we are pleased with our current cost structure and our ability to effectively manage costs moving forward. You can expect us to remain focused on driving business growth while continuing to enhance profitability in the coming quarters. Let's turn to page 10, where you see the items below ordinary operating EBITDA. Non-operating effects increased by moderate 6.2% in the third quarter, returning to more normalized levels after the strong increase in the first half of 2024 due to the higher accruals for share-based compensation. On the nine-month basis, non-operating effects remain 41.4% higher year-on-year. Reported EBITDA improved by 16.8% to 85.3 million euros in the third quarter, slightly ahead of ordinary operating EBITDA. Moving now to items below reported EBITDA. DNA came in at 11.5 million euros in the quarter, increasing by 24.2% due to increased amortization of internal completed projects, as well as DNA related to PPA from the Sprangnetter acquisition. DNA in the third quarter was lower compared to the second quarter, in line with comments we shared during the last earnings call. We expect DNA to stabilize at current levels for the fourth quarter as well. The third quarter reported net income grew 8.4%. Growth was negatively impacted by strong financial results in the third quarter last year, which was fueled by positive one-offs. Earnings per share for the quarter amounted to 69 eurocent, representing growth of 9.9% year-on-year. Adjusted net income for the quarter was up significantly at 14.4% and adjusted EPS grew by 16%, slightly less than ordinary operating EBITDA due to higher D&A expenses and the effects from the financial result. Turning now to page 11 to walk you through a bridge from reported net income to adjusted net income. This is an additional piece of disclosure we have added for this quarter. The purpose is to provide a clear overview of the adjustment items between reported and adjusted net income. We believe that this is important as our active M&A strategy and also the recent strong share price since 2023 has created differences between the two baselines. Let me call out a couple of points. Non-operating effects excluding share-based compensation were driven by increased provisions for milestone payments related to the Sprengnetter acquisition, as well as a revaluation of the remaining 25% stake. This increased provisioning impacted both M&A costs and the financial result. At this point in time, we do not expect to increase provision levels further. On the topic of share-based compensation, we discussed during the last earnings call that it will be higher this year than historically. The reasons are strong share price and business performance. For the nine-month period, we currently stand at 20.4 million euros. For the full year 2024, we do expect to remain within the 20 to 25 million euros range. Please note that the majority of positions I just discussed will not have a cash impact in the ongoing financial year. Turning to page 12 on the topic of cash flow. We believe that one of the core advantages of our business model is the strong cash generation. As we move from executing our product vision and growth targets to improve our profitability, we now add the third element focusing on our strong cash generation. This additional slide allows you to track our free cash flow generation on a quarterly basis. The strong and growing cash flow generation of the Scout24 financial model is an important part of our equity story, which we want to highlight. To simplify reconciliation, we are starting the bridge from reported net income and progressively building up to the free cash flow figure. Free cash flow for the nine months was very strong at 172.9 million euros, representing growth of 24% year-on-year. The strong year-on-year growth was driven by a combination of revenue growth, increased profitability and positive working capital changes due to the high amount of non-cash non-operating effects I mentioned on the slide before. Free cash flow conversion as percentage of adjusted net income and ordinary operating EBITDA for the nine-month period was at 111% and 67% respectively. Turning now to page 13, we focus on our leverage development and capital allocation strategy. At the end of the third quarter, our leverage stood at 0.4 times. which was slightly decreased since its peak earlier this year following the dividend payment. Leverage was reduced as our ordinary operating EBITDA continues to grow and we repaid some debt. We expect leverage to remain in the range of 0.4 times to 0.6 times in the upcoming quarter. We continue to deploy capital for our shareholders. In the third quarter, we bought back shares for a total of 21.8 million euros which is a meaningful increase compared to the second quarter. Let me wrap up with some key takeaways. Just eight months after our capital market stay, we are on track to deliver with guidance at the top of the range, implying double-digit revenue growth and a margin at the upper end of the range we shared in February. These results are not a coincidence. They are a combination of our unique strategy with our strong teams delivering high-quality operational execution. Revenue growth in our core business lines is getting stronger as a result of interconnectivity, and we expect to see these developments going into 2025. Our transaction enablement revenue line offers upside as the transactional markets recover. Executing on interconnectivity will also continue to generate cost savings, as organizational efficiency improves and marketing costs are reduced. Plus, more products draw on the power from within the ecosystem. On the M&A side, we have shown over the years that we have the ability to acquire strategic companies, integrate them well and continue to generate margin expansion on group level. Expect us to continue on this path. Moving to the guidance on page 14. As a reminder, our guidance for 2024 assumes 9-11% revenue growth and an ordinary operating EBITDA margin of about 61%. Based on the strong business performance in the first nine months of 2024 and our constructive outlook for the fourth quarter, we have decided to narrow the current guidance range to the upper end, both for revenue growth and ordinary operating EBITDA margin. In terms of outlook for the fourth quarter, we expect trends to remain broadly similar to what we have seen in the third quarter. In summary, with the momentum we are experiencing in our core business, a slow but steady recovery of the real estate market, as well as increased organizational efficiency, we feel very confident to close out the fiscal year 2024 on a high note. While it is too early to talk about 2025, we feel good about the momentum we are currently seeing in the business and expect to carry this into next year as well. We will provide the next update during our preliminary Q4 full-year 2024 earnings call on February 27, 2025. And 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.

First question comes from William Pecker from BNPP Exxon. Please go ahead.

Hi there. Many thanks for taking my questions. Two from me, please, kind of related. So firstly, you gave some helpful data about demand side indicators, which are supportive. we can see the leading indicators on mortgage approvals are supportive. When do you think we start to see a substantive improvement in transaction levels? And when do we start seeing normalization back to historical levels? And then the second part of the question is, could you help us think through for your key business lines, how that will impact your business when we do see that recovery? I suppose the context is there's a lot of optimism for the property classified segment. on how this transactional recovery will flow through to the businesses. And, you know, clearly some segments will do better, but you think considering in 2023, your performance was very resilient on counter cyclical dynamics in areas like PPA, it could have more of a mixed impact on your business. So could you just help us think through for your core estate agency subscriptions for the PPA business, for your private subscriptions, how that cyclical impending cyclical rebound flows through? Thanks very much.

Hi Will, thanks for the question. This is Dirk. Trying to fully answer your questions around, first of all, the German market. As you have seen, we've seen a slight growth on the transaction enablement, here about 3%, and that is an indicator that transactions in Germany are continuing to grow versus 2023, where we've seen a very depressed year. We also see that based on that development, the amount of leads that we are generating through our platform, buyer leads, have increased by 9% on the average in certain areas by up to 28%. So the market is pretty lively and we expect that to continue over the next quarters to come. When we will return to basically the amount of transactions and the transaction levels we've seen in 2022, 2021, we believe that's going to be more in the outer years of our overall long-time guidance. So we're looking at 27, 28. But apart from that, I think compared to the market and how the business has been performing in 2021, 2022, the return of the transactions will help us to continue our growth momentum going forward. So when we see further movements in mortgage rates going down, it is quite obvious that, first of all, our mortgage business will have an advantage around that. We will also see an advantage in our seller leads business. This time, as opposed to 21-22, we're going to see our seller business continuing for much profiting and continuing to get much, much more organic seller leads than bought seller leads, as we've seen in the past. So profitability and volume will increase in both revenue lines, seller and mortgage. On the transaction enablement side, the remainder of the transaction enablement side, valuations certainly will go up. So we're going to profit with that from our strengnetter business. In the core membership business, we believe that the grey market is something from the past and it will not return simply for the fact that prices are rather moving sideward whereas transactions are picking up and not upwards. So our buyer lead business which is reflected by our core membership business will also profit from more transactions in the German market because they also mean that the help of our more than 25,000 agents on the platform is insured. Now, going through the other revenue lines, like in the private segment, our Tenant Plus product, we believe that this is now a standard in the German market. As of today, we have around 470,000 subscribers, and we believe that we can get much more of the around 4 million rental transactions in Germany from our subscriber base. And we don't believe that there will be a market situation where the rental market will will be in a situation where we have lesser demand from tenants in the market. And I think overall, your last question was around PPA. I think we've said everything about the professional PPA in the past calls that you've followed. We believe this is a more stable revenue line, and the same will be the case on the private PPA revenue line. So we're going to see slight uptakes, maybe single-digit growth, but we're profiting more and more from migrating those demands into our subscription memberships. I hope that was an answer to your question.

Yeah, thanks very much. It sounds like the disappearance of the gray market is a bit of a structural factor that will assist you as we go into the next phase of the cyclical recovery as well. That's very helpful.

Yes, and you can see that also. I mean, the transaction market is coming back and we are improving our listings. I think that's quite a good data point to underpin that.

And next question comes from Dorian Sola San Yulu from Citi. Please go ahead.

Thank you for today's presentation. I had two questions. In the private segment, we saw strong development in customer numbers and ARPU. Do you think this new level of customer numbers is sustainable in the near term, such that the 500,000 target for 2026 could be conservative? And then maybe along the same vein, Could you talk us through some of the developments in the uptake of Living Plus, Buyer Plus, et cetera? Are they the main drivers of customer number growth? And maybe like what's really driving the increased interest? Is it all macro or is there more of a push around some of these products? And then just as a tiny add on to that, maybe why are some customers less interested in the third party credit checks? Thank you.

Hi, thank you. This is Toby. Thank you for your question. Let me start providing some color. With regards to our private segment, you pointed out correctly, we're very happy with the development, and we do think that in the past, there were always questions about, first, can we get to the number that we had laid out in the past, around the 500,000 subscribers by 2026? Clearly, we have a line of sight that we can get there. We don't think this is a conservative objective, we rather think this just proves that we're able to really innovate around an initial idea and then scale that idea. That also leads to output development, customer number, and then driving engagement. What we are doing is you're creating more and more services and wrapping more products around the customer base. So what you will see in the future is not necessarily such high growth in the customer numbers, itself but rather seeing that we're taking the relationship, we're picking it up and we're extending the lifetime given the fact that we're moving into different phases such as living plus where all of a sudden we've passed the stage of just finding a new home and then moving in and being a partner at their side. So that's coming back to the interconnectivity strategy we are pursuing because let's not forget We initially started solving for one pain point, but now we are a partner to our customers who have found a home, who are moving into a home, who then have completely new challenges for the home, such as the energy bill, such as the utility check, such as legal advice, because they might be pushed out of the apartment because the owner wants to move in and things like that. So you should expect more around the product itself and innovation. rather than us coming up and saying, hey, by the way, we're going to have 750,000 subscribers. That's not so much our goal. Our goal is more like providing more value for the existing customer base. Hopefully, this is helpful, Carlo.

And the next question comes from Joel Barnett from UBS. Please go ahead.

Excellent. Thank you very much for taking my question. So two from me. Firstly, EBITDA margin in private improved by I think it was eight percentage points year on year. Could you give us a little bit more color on the key drivers behind that? I appreciate the degree of seasonality. Do you think that the achieved margins above 60% are sustainable? And how should we think about that into next year? And then secondly, you mentioned a narrowing of the guidance range to the upper end. I think your ordinary operating EBITDA margin guide is circa 61%, not a range. So just how should we interpret that? Should we think of that as greater than 61% now, or would you steer us in some other way? Thank you.

Hey, Joe. Thanks for both questions. First of all, on the private margin, I think that is something which will continue and is pretty stable to upward development. And that has simply to do with the fact that we are now using a dual vendor strategy on our credit checks. On the outlooks, you're right. It was a bit of a language issue. But you can expect us certainly not to deliver below 61%, rather on top of it. And I think that gives you enough color on the question.

Okay, thank you.

We now have a question from Craig Abbott from Kepler Schiff Group. Please go ahead.

Yes, good afternoon, everyone. Congratulations on the good results. Yeah, I wanted to follow up on the earlier question regarding the different subscription product categories within private all performing very well. I think you were very clear that the big driver going forward is going to be more the value add and customers simply consuming more product that you're offering. So my two follow-ups there, if you will, just two-part follow-up there is, I mean, should we kind of assume, I know you're not guiding on this, but can we kind of assume nevertheless similar overall growth rates there? And that subscriber revenue line, even if the actual growth in the number of subscribers maybe starts slowing down to the higher base effect, which I think you were kind of alluding to. And the second part of that is if you could give us an update on just kind of like the average duration across your portfolio. And then I have my second question after that. Thank you.

Craig, I start off with your question around the development on privacy. I mean, our strategy here, I believe, is quite clear. First of all, we were in a, so to say, land grab mode. We were trying to make the product a standard product in the German rental market. And I think we have a tick in the box here. That's done. What we have been doing in the meantime, as referring to Joe's question before, was to improve our quality of the product. And we're now following a two-vendor strategy here. which will improve the margin slightly the next phase is going to be putting some additional product features into it and with that trying to have a longer lifetime of our customer base so we're coming from five to six months now about six months six to seven months is what we've seen and then we're going to see slight improvements on the overall APU in private And if you put all that together, we're very optimistic to grow at levels that you've seen this year, slightly below that. But we're very optimistic that the overall business will continue to be developing or developing very, very healthy. Second part of your question, you go ahead, Craig.

Oh, yes. No, my second question. Thank you very much for that. That was a lot of very useful color there. My second question is more big picture overall for the group. Just wondered if you could give us an update on any new developments you may or may not have seen on the competitive front in the last quarter. Thank you.

Hi, Craig. It's Toby. We've not seen any major new developments aside from what's publicly known and that you're all aware of, whether it's what will happen as a part of the split between the Springer assets or whether it's the take private of the Adevinta assets, but we've not seen anything changing in the competitive set per se, which is also why we're super focused on our own strategy, because hopefully by now we've demonstrated that we've built something really unique with, again, our customer base in the private sector, where we're having more and more active customers, then with our professional record level numbers, and then also with the new membership products we've launched in the professional world, which are more and more adopting penetration towards multi-products slash interconnectivity products. And that will make a huge difference going forward. So we are super focused on our strategy.

Very helpful. Thank you both very much.

And the next question comes from Christopher Yonen from HSBC.

Yes, thanks also for taking my questions. First one on the membership package migration. Can we get an update on that, where you stand? I think last quarter you said you had a couple thousand people migrated. I'm just trying to, if you cannot be specific just on the quarter, maybe you can share a bit of a view as to where you expect to be at the end of the year so that I'm trying to get a bit of an idea as to how much will potentially be left over as we enter 2025. That'll be interesting. And then the second question, maybe there is a bit of color you can give on what level of savings and marketing we are looking at as we sort of exit the year and go into next year. I understand the interconnectivity sort of driving cost savings, but it's I guess it's not tangible enough for me. Maybe there is some color you can give on the scope so we get an idea. This quarter was, I think, 17.5%. For the nine months, it was 3-point-something. Maybe you can give us a bit of a range or something to work with as we enter 25. Thank you.

Hey, Chris. It's Toby. With regards to your first question, you're correct. We pointed out last time that we had already successfully migrated a couple thousand professional customers. We are on a really healthy trajectory. Otherwise, we wouldn't be able to demonstrate also those numbers we've just published. Please do understand we cannot give you a concrete number towards the end of this year. It's also for competitive reasons. We are not disclosing that. But let me just give you a little bit more color so hopefully you can relate to the facts and interpret that the right way. These are the strongest membership editions and product world that we've ever pulled out. We have a really high satisfaction level and people and professional agents understand the power of these editions. We have just started to begin to roll out our own currency, ImmoPunkte, which by the way has been in the making for many years. as an additional tool set to make it easier to adopt and also to migrate into other product worlds within your either existing membership world or as an upgrade onto your next. And this is still in its infancy. So hopefully you can get a sense for not only how strong the products are but also how excited we are because the market response is very positive And we are just at the very, very early step of even trying to translate and making people understand what's in for them if they stick around and if we have more data points to finesse the exact membership package they need and then throw in the that they can make a move within their membership or moving up and being upgraded. And Dirk, maybe on marketing, you can say something.

Yeah, Chris. I mean, you've probably seen that we decreased marketing by, 17% in our results compared to Q3 last year. And I think it would be fair to think about the same decrease for the fourth quarter compared to the fourth quarter 2024. We're going to act a little bit sort of more on short notice here. If we see that we can do marketing with an improved ROI, we're going to certainly do that. But according to our plans, we're going to see a saving in roughly the same amount that we've seen in the third quarter.

Great. That's helpful. Thanks a lot.

Thank you, Chris. Our next question comes from Nizla Niza from Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead.

Thank you. I have two questions as well. The first is on M&A. You know, in your remarks, you mentioned that it still remains a key focus. Could you remind us again which parts of the business you would like to strengthen potentially through M&A, like what's on your wish list ideally? Some color would be great there. And secondly, on growth, it was another very strong quarter of net additions in your agent base, where it was up 308 on average. Could you remind us again, where are these agents coming from? Is there an element of maybe agents in Austria in there as well, or is this largely in Germany? Some color there would be great. And could these trends continue in Q4, or should we expect sort of a set down from these levels given the high base already? Some color there would be great. Thank you.

I need slides, Toby. I'll start with the first question around M&A. Yeah, we're happy to iterate what we had shared previously, which means we do have a continued focus on what we call probably strategic acquisitions that fall into the category of what we did, the spring data, which was clearly going after valuation services or anything else in the data space focused primarily on driving our professional segment growth. That's probably one. And whenever we think there's an opportunity that we can pick up pace or accelerate something that we think Otherwise, we'd have to do in-house. That's one criteria. And otherwise, product gaps, there's not many, but there's still a few spots here and there where we feel we could find a suitable target. That's our primary focus. And I think we've built a pretty good muscle now, how we identify companies, how we then speak and talk to them, and then how we maybe also get to a transaction, integrate them, and absorb them as part of our ecosystem. So that's something we shouldn't forget. Three or four years ago, we didn't really know how to do that. And by now, we've digested a few and we've made a couple of mistakes here and there, but we also, we got it right. So we feel very good about that. And that's going to be our focus. And maybe Dirk on the other question.

Yeah. I think you can assume that out of the 24,700 agents that we're having on the platform, around 2,000, and that's really more of a stable part. It's coming from Austria. We haven't seen huge changes there. And the rest is coming from Germany. And the teams, of course, want to go to 25,000. I think that's the number we are all aiming for. If that's at the end of Q4 or at the end of Q1 or Q2 next year, I'm a bit agnostic, but I have no doubts that we're going to achieve that target.

Great.

And our next question comes from Jill Thorne from Jefferies LLC. Please go ahead.

Thank you. The first question was back on transaction enablement and specifically mortgage leads. And it was hinted at earlier, but just to dig into it, it'd be useful to get a reconciliation between the industry data we're seeing on mortgage lending, which has looked pretty robust, and your comments that mortgage deeds is still quite soft. And then the second question was, Just on the organization, you'd merged about 18 months ago the CTO and CPO roles under Ralph, but I see that you now split them out again. So it'd be interesting just to hear the logic for that move. Thanks.

I think the first one, Giles, and I think the difference that you hear in our language versus the overall language in the market, which is a bit more upbeat, is the fact that we might see a bit more refinancing in the market. which is usually happening with the existing bank than we've seen in the past. But we are quite optimistic, as I said, that our mortgage business will also improve. And what you need to keep in the back of your head is that we are, with regards to growth of our mortgage and seller lease business, much more focused on delivering that on a very profitable basis. And that's why you might see us compromising on return on investors' level of growth. But overall, we have no doubts that we're going to return to growth rates that we've seen previously here. And for the other question, I hand back to Toby.

Yeah, certainly. So with regards to the organizational question, we are very happy that we found Gertrud, who joined us a few months ago as our CTO. As you know, we've had that position in the past already, and then we decided to not have a CTO for some time because there was a lot of heavy lifting we wanted to get done in order to get connectivity going between the teams and that's why Ralph decided and we together decided that we would pause but then it was always the plan to rehire at the appropriate time another CTO and that's why now with Gertrude we have strengthened that part so Gertrude obviously reports into Ralf Ralf leads still the technology engineering product and the data parts and we're just super happy that we found her because there's a lot to do around AI and what have you. And so, yeah, other than that, no other changes. Thank you. You're welcome. Thanks.

And we have a follow-up question from William Pecker from BMPP Exxon. Please go ahead.

Hi there. Just a quick one. Do you mind just clarifying the message on FY24 margins? My understanding was that you were reiterating the top end of current guidance, so near 11% revenue growth and towards the top end of 61%, i.e. 61.4%. Is that a misunderstanding? Thank you.

Well, I said it's going to be not less than 61%, and we would like to stick to that language.

So it could be 62%.

62, no. Okay, fine. 62 is the right level to assume for next year. And that's what we guided. But no.

Thank you. Sorry for the misunderstanding.

Ladies and gentlemen, that was the last question. I would now like to turn the conference back to Philipp Lindvall for any closing remarks.

Okay, so this concludes today's conference call. Thank you all for dialing in and your questions, and thank you for your interest in GAL24. Have a good day, and for those of you who celebrate Halloween, bye-bye.