5/6/2025

speaker
Philipp Linwall
Vice President Group Strategy and Investor Relations

Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Scout24 first quarter 2025 earnings call. My name is Philipp Linwall and I'm vice president group strategy and investor relations at Scout24. With me on the call today are Ralf Weitz, our chief executive officer, and Dirk Schmelzer, our chief financial officer. Ralf will start the presentation with key business highlights and Dirk will provide a detailed overview of our financial results. 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. Ralf, now over to you.

speaker
Ralf Weitz
Chief Executive Officer

Thank you, Philipp, and welcome everyone. I'm really looking forward to engaging with investors and the analyst community in my new role as CEO of Scout24. As this is my first earnings call as CEO, I would like to start the call by providing you a short introduction of myself. Many of you already know me. For those who don't, I've worked at Scout24 for 17 years, being part of growing the company from when it was just starting out to becoming one of Germany's top tech companies. When I started at Scout24, we made about 100 million euros revenue. This year, we will make over 600 million euros. That implies a double-digit CAGR since 2008, a great achievement that we plan to keep building on. The CEO transition from Tobi to me ensures continuation for the company as we work closely together in shaping our strategic framework over the years, including our capital markets day in 2024. So let me be very clear. I'm 100% committed to our strategy and targets. Looking at the slide in front of you, let's briefly recap why Scout24 is a very special company. With approximately 20 million unique monthly visitors, we are the clear leader in the German market for real estate classifieds. As we execute our interconnectivity strategy, we are seeing increased traffic and engagement from our seekers. Our B2B membership business continues to go from strength to strength. We are growing our customer base at impressive levels. And our sustained strong revenue growth reflects willingness to pay for our best-in-class membership products. We have established a unique B2C subscription business with half a million subscribers, something no other classified platform globally has achieved. The homeowner segment offers tremendous future upside potential. With our 2024 Capital Markets Day storyline to merge data and classifieds, we are pioneering a unique strategy which will differentiate us from traditional classifieds platforms. So, where are we on the journey to execute our 2024 Capital Markets Day strategy? Well, we are well on track. Without going too much into detail, I would like to mention a couple of points. On the product and tech side, we have laid the groundwork to interconnect our product suite and we are seeing customers consuming more and more of our product universe, with Scout24 taking a more proactive role in driving personalized product recommendations. With our growing collection of required data assets, we have strengthened our data capabilities meaningfully since the CMD. Momentum on the homeowner side is good, Our property hub keeps on evolving as we are growing users and registered objects. And finally, we are accelerating the digitization of real estate transactions through technology and AI implementation across the company. From a financial perspective, we are doing well. In 2024, we outperformed our CMD targets. And assuming we can achieve our 2025 guidance, we are well set up to meet or exceed all of our CMD targets. My focus areas as CEO will center on the following. Expanding our data assets, building towards our vision of providing unlimited Scout24 owned content for every real estate property in Germany, as I outlined at last year's Capital Markets Day. Accelerating innovation, leveraging our merged tech and product teams to maintain first mover advantage while preserving our startup-like agility. Strengthening product leadership. Delivering the most innovative solutions across our ecosystem for agents, seekers, and homeowners. And driving operational efficiency. Balancing our growth mindset with internal interconnectivity and simplification will lead to operating leverage. To wrap it up. I'm incredibly excited to take over as CEO from Tobii to lead this fantastic company through the next phase of our development and to continue to position Scout24 at the forefront of the industry. So with the CEO update now behind us, let's review the key highlights of the first quarter of 2025. We are off to a great start in 2025. Despite all the uncertainty out there right now, we delivered a strong quarter on both top and bottom line. With 16% revenue growth, 18% growth in ordinary operating EBITDA and adjusted EPS, 29% growth on reported EPS, this has truly been a fantastic quarter for Scout24. Organic growth accelerated 12%. driven by continued strong performance in our core business and improving momentum in our transaction enablement business. Our recent acquisitions also performed well. As I mentioned in my opening remarks, we are making good progress on our interconnectivity strategy and on merging data and classifieds. We recently acquired two data assets in Austria, which will help us mirror what we have achieved in Germany so far. Based on the strong start into the year, we are pleased to confidently reaffirm our guidance for 2025. Let's move to page 6 for an update on our customer base. In the first quarter of 2025, both of our professional and private segments continue to gain customers at an impressive rate. Starting with professionals. Total customer growth for the quarter was very strong at 5.9%, exceeding the already impressive growth of the fourth quarter last year. Customer count reached 25.6 thousand in the first quarter. Growth was driven by the continued strong development in Germany and the integration of Neubau Kompass, somewhat offset by the continued challenging market environment in Austria, Organic customer growth in Germany was impressive at 5.7%. Beyond superior buyer leads, agents favor Scout24 for our unique and comprehensive product suite, offering turnkey solutions for their daily tasks. Turning to the private segment, we grew our subscriber base by 19.8%, reaching 495.2 thousand users. Despite slight deceleration compared to the previous quarter, all products continued to grow nicely. Tenant Plus, Buyer Plus, and Living Plus. At the end of March, we crossed the milestone of 500,000 subscribers. An amazing achievement. Driven by our best-in-class teams working on these products. And it really highlights the level of innovation at Scout24 and that we are a special company. Turning to page 7, let me provide you with an update on the German real estate market. Our Scout24 Transaction Momentum Index shows continued recovery in the number of transactions in the first quarter. However, rising mortgage rates following the German government's investment program may lead to declining momentum in the second quarter as buyers adopt a wait-and-see approach. We have added a listing index to the chart as well, showing growing content on our platform since interest rates increased, supported by a decline in the grey market. The growing listings on our platform provide more choices for users and drive traffic growth. The lower graph shows that interest to buy remained high in the first quarter. It remains to be seen how this will develop over the next couple of quarters, given the increased mortgage rates. Turning to page 8, I would like to provide an update on how we are progressing with the execution of our product innovation strategy. On the left, you see our new search that we launched in April 2025. This significant platform upgrade combines hybrid map search with AI features for more personalized experiences. integrating interactive maps with property information for efficient comparison. Early user testing shows that these innovations are driving significant engagement increases. These results validate our AI-first approach and demonstrate how our interconnectivity strategy creates tangible business value while enhancing the user experience. At our Capital Markets Day last year, we stated that we have a strong track record of turning products and engagement into subscriptions. Our new subscription in the private segment, Living Plus, is a perfect example for just that. We launched the product at the end of 2023 and in the first quarter of 2025, we had close to 30,000 subscribers already. By still early, the momentum demonstrates customer demand and willingness to pay for bundled tenant services in an accessible format. We are also seeing substantial expansion in our homeowner ecosystem, which creates a powerful foundation for future monetization opportunities. Since Capital Markets Day in 2024, we achieved strong growth with homeowner registrations, surging from 1.2 to 2.1 million while objects under management expanded from 2.0 to 2.8 million. This expanding homeowner base is a strategic asset positioning us at the beginning of future transactions and extending our reach beyond active market participants. Let me conclude my prepared remarks with some key takeaways. As a management team, we are 100% committed to the existing strategic framework and financial targets. we are off to a good start in 2025 with accelerating organic growth. While we face tougher year-on-year comparisons for the remaining quarters of the year and the macro situation in Germany is challenging, the first quarter still provides a good basis for us to achieve our guidance. Amid the current economic volatility, Scout24's business model is operating entirely within domestic markets, and shields us from international tariff concerns and related trade uncertainties. In addition, it's worthwhile to recap that more than 70% of our business is recurring in nature, and we have high visibility on revenues and profitability for the next couple of quarters. Finally, we are executing well on our interconnectivity strategy, focusing on innovation and operational efficiency to strengthen our market position. This approach continues generating benefits through customer growth, traffic increases, strong product demand, and homeowner expansion. Execution of our strategy will continue to generate strong financial results. We are in a good position to meet or exceed our CMD targets. With that, I will hand over to Dirk, who will walk you through our financial results in more detail.

speaker
Dirk Schmelzer
Chief Financial Officer

Thank you, Ralf, and welcome, everyone. Let's move to the financial section of our presentation. On page 11, you can see a dashboard of our Key1 2025, showing our strong start into the year. First quarter revenue reached 157.6 million euros, delivering impressive 15.8% year-over-year growth, with organic growth accelerating to 12.1%. This robust performance was driven by continued strength in our subscription businesses, healthy growth in transaction enablement and recent acquisitions also performing well. Our ordinary operating EBITDA accelerated as well, growing 17.9%, reaching 93.7 million euros, with margins expanding by a full percentage point to 59.5%. This margin improvement is particularly impressive given the integration of recent acquisitions with lower profitability profiles, demonstrating the scalability of our interconnectivity strategy and growing PMI capability. Adjusted EPS increased by 17.9% to 79 Eurocent, while reported EPS showed an even stronger growth of 28.6%, reaching 69 Eurocent, benefiting from significantly reduced non-operating costs, which fell by 35.1% year over year. Operating cash flow came in at 58.4 million euros, 3% lower, primarily due to timing effects in working capital movements. Turning to page 12 for a closer look at our professional segment. Revenue in our professional segment grew by 16.2% in Q1 2025, reaching 115.3 million euros. This growth was driven by strong performance in our subscription and transaction enablement business. Our subscription business grew strongly by 15% to 82.8 million euros, with organic growth contributing 12%. This represents a nice acceleration compared to 2024 quarterly growth levels and highlights how we have permanently improved this business. Our professional customer base expanded by 5.9% to 25,601, showing continued strong momentum. Organic customer growth was 5.7%. APU increased by 8.6% to 1,078 euros. Growth with residential real estate agents remained dynamic, partially offset by softer growth dynamics with commercial customers. Transaction enablement revenue grew 25.4%, fueled by M&A, reaching 27.2 million euros. Organic growth was 12.2%, representing a slight acceleration compared to the fourth quarter of 2024. benefiting from the slow but gradual market recovery and strong demand for valuation services, CRM and ESG products. Ordinary Operating EBITDA grew by 14.4% to 68.8 million euros with a margin of 59.7%. The slight margin decline of 0.9 percentage points year on year reflects the integration of recent acquisitions with lower margin profiles. Turning to the private segment on page 13, let's review the results for the first quarter of 2025. The private segment delivered strong performance in Q1 2025, achieving 14.9% revenue growth, reaching 42.3 million euros. Growth was driven by continued high demand for our Plus subscription products, which continued its mid-20s growth rate increasing by 26.3% to 25.8 million euros. All products contributed to this growth momentum. Total subscriber count grew by 19.8% year over year, bringing the total to 495,150 customers in Q1 2025. While this represents a slight deceleration from the previous quarter, it was offset by stronger ARPU growth of 5.4%. ARPU growth is driven by improved unit economics due to our multi-vendor strategy for credit checks. Listing volume in the paper ad business remained stable compared to the prior year period, maintaining high levels in Q1 2025. Other revenue from credit checks also remained consistent year on year. ordinary operating EBITDA increased by an impressive 28.6% to 24.9 million euros in Q1 2025, reflecting the strong scalability of our subscription-based business model. As a result, the private segment's ordinary operating EBITDA margin expanded substantially to 58.9% in Q1 2025, marking a significant increase of 6.3 percentage points compared to the prior year, Turning to page 14, let's take a closer look at the main ordinary operating items. Our own work capitalized decreased by 4.3% year on year to 5.1 million euros. This is due to the completion of various development and integration projects. As a percentage of revenue, we stood at around 3.2% for the quarter, down 0.7 percentage points from Q1 2024. Operating expenses for the first quarter of the year 2025 increased by 11.4% compared to the previous year, growing at a moderate pace relative to revenue. This reflects the positive impact of Scout's interconnectivity strategy and our ability to efficiently integrate acquisitions. Personal costs increased by 11.6% due to salary adjustments and recent acquisitions. Organic personal cost base was virtually flat year on year. Marketing expenses decreased by 2.5% as our interconnectivity strategy leads to more efficient performance marketing. Selling costs increased by 26.5%, driven by the recovery in our transaction business and integration of acquisitions. IT expenses grew by 16.6% in Q1 2025, primarily driven by higher AWS costs AI integration and contributions from recent acquisitions. Other operating expenses rose by 12.9%, driven by increased spend on external IT service providers and higher allowances for bad debt. Putting all of this together, ordinary operating EBITDA grew by 17.9% in the first quarter of 2025, accelerating nicely compared to the already strong 2024 levels. This resulted in a one percentage point improvement in the ordinary operating EBITDA margin, which reached 59.5% in the quarter. Adjusting for the recent M&A, organic margin expansion would have been even higher at 61.1%. Turning to page 15, where we show the items below ordinary operating EBITDA. Non-operating effects decreased significantly by 35.1% to 7.8 million euros in the first quarter. This resulted from significantly lower expenses for share-based compensation, as well as reduced costs for reorganization measures, partly offset by higher M&A expenses driven by recent acquisitions. As a result, reported EBITDA grew strongly by 27.4% to 85.9 million euros, benefiting from the reduction in non-operating effects. Now turning to the items below reported EBITDA. D&A amounted to 12 million euros, reflecting an increase of 25.5% in Q1 2025. This increase was driven by two main factors. Firstly, scheduled depreciation on newly capitalized intangible assets following the completion of IT projects and platform developments. And secondly, PPA amortization related to recent acquisitions. The financial result declined compared to the previous year, decreasing by 86% to 1.9 million euros. This was primarily due to negative foreign exchange hedging effects resulting from the strengthening of the euro. Income taxes increased by 26.4% to 22 million euros, representing an effective tax rate of 30.6%. Putting all of this together, reported net income increased strongly by 26.7% to 50 million euros. Basic EPS amounted to 69 euro cent, reflecting a strong year-on-year increase of 28.6%. Adjusted net income, which normalizes for certain non-operating effects, grew by 16.2% to 57.1 million euros, while adjusted EPS increased by 17.9% to 79 Eurocent, growing in line with ordinary operating EBITDA. Turning to page 16, let's review the adjustment items between reported and adjusted net income for the first quarter. Non-operating effects excluding share-based compensation amounted to 4 million Euros, representing an increase of 36.3% compared to the same period last year. This was driven by higher M&A expenses due to recent acquisitions, partly offset by reduced reorganization measures. Share-based compensation decreased significantly to 3.8 million euros, representing a 58% reduction compared to the previous year. PPA and DNA effects related to intangibles from acquisitions contributed 2.4 million euros to the adjustment, representing a step-up of 18% compared to Q4 2024, driven by recent acquisitions. Turning now to page 17 in Cashflow. Free cash flow remains strong at 50.9 million euros in the first quarter, down just slightly by 2.6% year on year, with working capital having an 8.5 million euros negative impact. Conversion ratios remain strong, with free cash flow representing 89% of adjusted net income and 54% of ordinary operating EBITDA. These robust conversion rates demonstrate our continued ability to effectively turn revenue growth into cash generation, supporting our shareholder returns through dividends and share buybacks. Turning to page 18 to leverage and capital allocation. Our leverage ratio improved to 0.42 times at the end of Q1 2025, down from 0.47 times at year end 2024. In the first quarter, we continued our active capital return program, allocating 23.5 million euros to share repurchases. I'm also pleased to announce that we've expanded our buyback program with the second 100 million euro share repurchase tranche, extending from April 2025 through June 2026. This combination of recent strategic M&A, consistent share repurchases, and our proposed 10% dividend increase highlights our balanced capital allocation approach that creates long-term shareholder value. Moving to the guidance on page 19. Based on the strong first quarter, we are pleased to reiterate our full-year guidance of 12% to 14% revenue growth, and expansion of our ordinary operating EBITDA margin of up to 50 basis points. With this guidance, we are targeting our fifth consecutive year of double-digit growth and third consecutive year with expanding ordinary operating EBITDA margin. As the first quarter revenue growth rate is above the current guidance range, let me provide some additional context around that. As a reminder, we do face tougher quarterly year-on-year comparisons for the remainder of the year, in particular the second and fourth quarter. The same is true on the level of ordinary operating EBITDA margin. We are facing tougher comps and on top of that we have to absorb the impact from the acquisitions. As mortgage rates have increased, there is a possibility that transactions might slow down in the second quarter. While we do not expect any impact on our core business in the near term, it could potentially impact expected growth trajectory in our transaction enablement businesses. General global uncertainties could affect interest rates, consumer confidence and overall real estate market dynamics in Germany for the remainder of the year. Based on these developments and still three quarters to go, we reconfirm the current guidance and remain very confident to achieve our targets for the remainder of the year. We will provide the next update during Q2 H1 2025 earnings call on August the 7th, 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.

Disclaimer

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