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Scout24 Se
2/26/2026
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Scout24 preliminary full year 2025 results conference call. I'm Moritz, the course call operator. I would like to remind you that all participants will be in a listen-only mode and the conference is being recorded. The presentation will be followed by a question and answer session. You can register for questions at any time by pressing star and 1 on your telephone. For operator assistance, please press star and 0. The conference must not be recorded for publication or broadcast. At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to Philipp Lindvall, Vice President, Group Strategy and Investor Relations.
Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Scout24's earnings call for the preliminary fourth quarter and full year 2025 results. My name is Philipp Dienwald, 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. Thank you, Philip, and welcome everyone. Let's turn to page 4. 2025 was another great year for Scout24. We delivered strong financial results while continuing to execute our interconnectivity strategy. Revenue grew by 15% Ordinary operating EBITDA increased by 17% Adjusted EPS rose by 20% Growth was driven by our B2B and B2C subscription businesses Our ecosystem expanded across all key metrics We gained more customers and more content We introduced better and more innovative products User engagement increased Cross-selling continued to grow In 2025, we further strengthened our leadership in search. AI is now integrated across the entire customer journey, from semantic and elastic capabilities to agentic experiences through HeyImmo and our ImmoScout24 app in ChatGPT. Internally, we continued to upgrade technology. We simplified processes and embedded AI into our workflows. Combined with heavy revenue growth, this drove higher profitability. Our margin increased to 62.5%. Looking ahead to 2026, we expect revenue growth of 16 to 18% and an ordinary operating EBITDA margin of up to 61%. Scout24 is more relevant, stronger and better positioned than ever to power the German real estate ecosystem. Technology and AI will continue to enhance our platform and strengthen our competitive position. Let's turn to page 5 and look at customer development. Starting with our professional segment. We closed the year with 26.4 thousand professional customers. This represents growth of 5.1% in Q4 and 5.7% for the full year. Clearly industry leading rates. We continue to gain market share across segments. Our responsible pricing approach is working. Churn is at a minimum and we see virtually no net churn. Our success in B2B is driven by a strong and integrated product portfolio, including our market-leading agent software PropStack. We are deeply embedded in agent workflows through software, data, valuation and marketing tools. Our Bronze, Silver and Gold membership tiers serve both smaller and larger agencies. In 2025, we spent more time than ever with our B2B customers. This strengthens relationships and positions Scout24 increasingly as a business enabler. 2026 has started well. We are adding customers and continue to see healthy revenue growth across the base, including non-residential. Turning to the private segment. We ended the year with 503.6 thousand subscribers. representing 14% growth for the full year. Growth moderated in Q4 due to normal year-end seasonality, softer rental demand and following the rollout of our new group-wide ERP system. We are currently updating the private subscriptions offering, including product tiers, features and pricing. Looking at page 6, let me walk you through the German real estate market dynamics. Our Scout Transaction Momentum Index stands at 97. The residential transaction market has stabilized. Based on preliminary data, 2025 recorded around 600,000 transactions, up 14% compared to 2024. This environment supports our residential B2B membership business. We are also seeing improving trends in commercial as we enter 2026. Our listings index reached 146 in January. Inventory continues to grow following the normal seasonal dip in December. Approachable content grew to 17 million objects. This reflects improving activity and strong trust in the ImmoScout platform. On the demand side, rental contact requests moderated slightly from very high levels as rents increased. Buyer side, contact requests remained stable at elevated levels, indicating healthy demand to buy. Let me now provide a strategic update. Over the past year, we have continued to execute our strategy with discipline while embracing technology to stay ahead. In the current market environment, it is important to understand what differentiates Scout24 and why our competitive position continues to strengthen. Let me highlight five points. First, we have accelerated execution of our interconnectivity strategy. Second, we have expanded our AI-native search and extended audience reach across the entire user journey. Third, we have built the market-leading software platform for German real estate agents. Fourth, we are driving structural margin expansion through technology and AI. And fifth, we are outperforming our CMD 2024 targets and raising ambition again at CMD 2026. Let me walk you through each of these. Turning to page 8. Let me be very clear. Scout24 is not only a listing platform. We have built the digital ecosystem for German real estate transactions. Over the past years, we have invested more than 400 million Euro and executed our interconnectivity strategy. With discipline to achieve this. At the core sits our propriety backend. We operate the leading agent software, subscription products across the buy and rent journey and Germany's leading residential and commercial real estate database. More than 10% of residential units are registered in our property hub. We also provide valuation and banking software used by financial institutions. These systems are deeply embedded in daily workflows. They are exclusive to Scout24. They are not accessible to AI models or web crawlers. On top of this infrastructure, we connect all stakeholders. We reach 20 million users per month and serve 26,000 professional customers. Around 25% of annual real estate transactions in Germany now involve a Skoll24 B2C subscription product. As the ecosystem grows, our data becomes stronger. As our data becomes stronger, our products improve. This is digital infrastructure powering German real estate. Scout24 is embedded in how the market operates. At our Capital Markets Day in early 2024, we outlined our vision for AI-driven natural language search. Today, that vision is fully live. a cross-semantic, elastic and agentic search. First, AI-powered filter search. Users describe what they want in natural language and receive relevant results instantly, including image-based search. Second, HeyEMO, our specialized real estate LLM. It is built on 28 years of proprietary behavioral and transaction data, combined with exclusive residential and commercial inventory across our ecosystem. This enables contextual accuracy that generic LLMs cannot replicate. We are seeing strong user growth and engagement. Third, we integrate with external LLMs as audience extension. Through our ChatGPT app integration, ImmoScout connects users directly back to our platform for engagement and transaction execution. Referral traffic from LLMs remains insignificant at 0.4% in December and below last year's peak levels. General AI models will need trusted platforms with proprietary data to deliver a strong real estate experience. That is where Scout24 plays a central role. Our backend for agents is PropStack, our fully cloud-based software platform. This is where agents run their business. They manage contacts, listings, marketing and their pipeline. It also serves as a marketplace for Scout24 products and partner integrations, many powered by AI. AI is embedded directly into these workflows. More than 30,000 AI actions have already been executed. Voice-to-Listing reduces listing creation time by over 80%. These are real productivity gains. We estimate our market share in Germany at around 30%. And it is growing. We are on track to become a market leader. PropStack significantly increases our relevance by covering a large part of the agent value chain. And we are taking the next step. Our ambition is clear. To transform PropStack into agentic AI. Software that not only documents workflows, but actively drives them. Software that helps agents prioritize leads, draft communication, prepare listings and move transactions forward. We will share more at our Capital Markets Day in 2026. At our Capital Markets Day in 2024, we committed to building a scalable technology platform and deploying AI internally to improve efficiency. Today, we operate a very cost-effective tech platform and one integrated builder organization serving all three customer groups. We build our product solutions centrally and deploy them across consumers, professionals, and homeowners. This allows us to grow without increasing complexity or capacity. The impact is visible in our cost structure. Personal, our largest cost bucket, has remained broadly stable at an organic level over the past three years, despite continued revenue growth. At the same time, we continue to invest in technology and AI to enable that leverage. Even as we invest further, IT costs grow at a disciplined mid-single digit rate and represents only around 9% of our total cost base. The structural leverage is reflected in our margins. Ordinary operating EBITDA increased from 59.7% in 2023 to 62.5% in 2025. And we continue to see further margin expansion over the next years. Technology and AI are structurally increasing our profitability. Turning to page 12. Our CMD 2026 will define the next chapter of SCAO24. We have evolved beyond classifieds into the digital backend of German real estate. AI is strengthening our platform and our proprietary data advantage. As our products become more personalized and more automated, our ecosystem becomes more valuable and our competitive modes deepen. We will present the next evolution of our ecosystem, the acceleration B2C expansion and further scaling of our B2B leadership. We will also introduce updated mid-frame targets for 2027 to 2029, including higher margin ambition. Let me close with a few key takeaways on page 13. In 2025, we delivered what we set out to deliver. That is goal 24. We set clear targets and we execute by continuing to invest in technology and AI. Our ecosystem is increasingly central to the German real estate market. We are deeply embedded across stakeholders, workflows and data. And that position continues to strengthen. We have shown that disciplined investment and margin expansion are not mutually exclusive. Innovation and profitability reinforce each other. AI is already making our products more personalized and automated. It increases the value of our data and strengthens our competitive modes. With this foundation, we expect to deliver again in 2026. At our next CMD, we will outline the next chapter, including further margin ambition. Before handing over to Dirk, I would like to thank him personally. Working with you over the past six years has been a pleasure. You have powered our financial profile, expanded margins, improved cash generation and built a strong finance organization. Dirk, thank you for your leadership, your partnership, and your commitment. On a personal note and on behalf of the entire Scout24 leadership team, we wish you all the very best in your next chapter. With that, I hand over to you.
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