8/6/2026

speaker
Filip Lindvall
Vice President Group Strategy and Investor Relations

Good afternoon everyone and welcome to Scout24 second quarter and first half 2026 earnings call. My name is Filip Lindvall 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 Martin Mildner, our chief financial officer. Ralf will start the presentation with key business highlights and Martin 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 shortly after the event. Please take note of the disclaimer on page 2. Ralf, over to you.

speaker
Ralf Weitz
Chief Executive Officer

Thank you, Filip. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us. The second quarter of 2026 shows that Scout24 continues to combine strong financial performance with leadership in AI and innovation. In the second quarter, we delivered 20% revenue growth, continued double-digit organic growth, and further organic margin expansion. and less than three months after our CMD, we are already making strong progress on the strategic priorities we set out there. Our B2B subscription business continues to deliver industry-leading growth. On the consumer side, our B2C subscriptions are gaining momentum in a challenging market, with more seekers choosing higher value memberships that include our recently launched AI features. Immo.ai is increasingly becoming part of every customer journey across our platform. We are seeing exponential growth in AI usage, new products, and new revenue streams. I will come back to this in more detail later. At the same time, AI is changing how we work internally. Since our CMD, the use of AI agents across the company has continued to grow. And we are making good progress building our agent factory. This is accelerating how we develop products, automate workflows, and innovate across Scout24. We also continue to strengthen one of our biggest competitive advantages, exclusive content. Our platform, brand and product innovation continue to attract unique inventory, giving customers access to more properties than any competitor in Germany. Beyond Germany, Spain is developing in line with our expectations. Integration is progressing well. While our German business continues to expand margins and demonstrate the scalability of our operating model. These results reinforce our confidence in the year ahead and we are confirming our full year guidance. Let's take a closer look at customer growth, which remains one of the clearest indicators of the strength of our business. In professional, we continue to add customers across all major customer groups, while customer migration to our membership offering continues to progress well. We now have migrated more than 16,000 customers and most of them are still on-bourse memberships. That gives us significant potential for future migration and APU growth. Delivering this level of customer growth quarter after quarter in an already highly penetrated market is exceptional. On the consumer side, We said at our Q1 earnings call that customer growth would accelerate during the second quarter. That is exactly what we delivered. Our subscription strategy continues to gain momentum, driven by the updated Search Plus membership, Tiering, and Living Plus. We are continuously expanding the value we offer our private customers, and I will show you some of these innovations in just a few minutes. And there is much more to come in the second half of the year. Turning to page 6, I will give you an update on the German real estate market. What we are seeing here is a clear proof that our platform is becoming more relevant. As our brand strength and product initiatives continue to gain traction, active listings increased by almost 18% year on year. Our tenant network now includes more than 50,000 listings, up from around 25,000 at the time of our capital markets day. Today, the Scout24 property network gives seekers access to more than 6.5 million properties across Germany, something no competitor in Germany can offer. The sales market remained healthy throughout the first half of 2026, despite a more challenging macroeconomic environment and higher interest rate expectations. Contact requests volumes remained at healthy levels. The rental market continues to suffer from a structural undersupply of affordable housing after years of underinvestment in new construction. At the same time, higher rents and continued macroeconomics uncertainty are reducing overall search activity. Even in this environment, ImmoScore24 continues to gain market share, with search volumes proving more resilient than the broader German market. Continuing on the topic of the real estate market, conditions in new build remain very challenging. As the chart shows, housing completions declined from around 300,000 in 2021 to around 200,000 in 2025, with a further decline expected in 2026. That leaves the market around 40% below peak levels. High interest rates, elevated construction costs, and regulatory hurdles continue to weigh on new build activity. Even so, our membership business continues to grow strongly. We continue to add customers, grow revenues and deepen customer relationships through broader product adoption. Our developer and new home builder businesses are both growing by around 15% year to date, despite one of the weakest new build markets in years. The reason is simple. We are no longer just offering marketing products. We are becoming part of our customers' daily workflows through solutions such as Popstack, Breathing Geyser and Neubau Kompass. That makes our products more relevant, strengthens customer relationships and makes our business more resilient across market cycles. At our CMD, we showed how AI Search had already become part of the ImmoScout24 experience and was beginning to take off. We also explained how combining natural language search with our unique data assets would create a new intelligence flywheel. Just a few months later, the data is already validating that strategy. AI search actions on ImmoScore24 are up 47 times year on year, reaching 3.3 million in June alone. More importantly, AI users are more engaged, spend more time on the platform and generate higher quality leads. This is exactly how the intelligence flywheel starts to work. Every customer interaction makes our intelligence better. Better intelligence creates a better product. Better product drives more engagement, stronger monetization, and even more customer interaction. There's another very interesting insight. One year into the debate about AI disruption search, we still see virtually no meaningful traffic coming from external LLMs. The data leads us to a clear conclusion. Consumers want to use AI at the source of truth on ImmoScout24. Continuing on AI, this time on consumer subscriptions. At our CMD, we said we would integrate premium AI services into our B2C subscriptions. Less than three months later, we have done exactly that. We have launched the AI Application Assistant as part of our top-tier unlimited package, which has an APU of €30, 100% higher than our standard product. The Assistant helps customers manage their property search by continuously monitoring the market, automatically submitting applications, and keeping searches up-to-date, making the whole experience easier and more valuable. Since the launch, we have already seen strong uptake of the unlimited tier, the sign-ups doubling. This reinforces the message from our CMD. When AI is integrated into the product in the right way, it creates real consumer value and increases engagement. The same pattern we are seeing on the consumer side is now clearly visible in professional. AI is now integrated into our silver and gold memberships. It helps customers create better content, improve relevance, and generate better leads. We can now offer relevance and visibility products for AI-powered search alongside our existing search and listing products. We are also seeing strong momentum in PropStack. AI customer usage has almost doubled during the first half, while PropStack continues to grow revenues by around 20% year-to-date. And finally, ImmuPoints are becoming the digital currency of our professional ecosystem. More than 9,000 customers are already actively using them, generating €3.2 million of MRR. As we continue to launch new AI capabilities, we expect ImmuPoint's revenues to grow even further. The message is simple. AI is already driving customer growth, stronger customer value, and new monetization opportunities across our professional business. Let me close by putting today's progress into the broader context of our Capital Markets Day. At CMG 2024, our focus was on interconnectivity. We had completed the investment phase and built the leading digital real estate platform. The next step was to connect our products, our customers, and our ecosystem to create a much stronger business. We also laid the groundwork for our AI roadmap well ahead of the curve. Over the last three years, we have consistently delivered on that strategy. Quarter after quarter, we have strengthened our products, expanded our ecosystem, and continued to deliver outstanding financial results. At the same time, we have become the innovation leader in our industry. Today, Agentico S is the next step in our journey. powered by Immo.ai and our agent factory. It extends our interconnectivity strategy by embedding AI across products, workflows, and transactions, accelerating innovation across the platform. We started our AI journey early, and that is now becoming a real competitive advantage. Our AI product suite is already helping our customers find properties faster, more efficiently, and make better decisions. At the same time, it is helping us to automate more processes and become a more AI-native organization. We are now starting to see those benefits translate into financial results. On the revenue side, AI is creating new recurring revenue streams. On the cost side, it is improving productivity and strengthening our operating leverage. We are already on the technology side. We are seeing the first benefits come through, and we are still only at the beginning of that journey. With that, let me hand over to Martin, who will show you how this translates into an even stronger financial model.

speaker
Martin Mildner
Chief Financial Officer

Thanks Ralf and welcome also from my side. Before I will start with the presentation of our numbers, I like to summarize my first five months at Scout24. After the preparation of our capital markets day in May and seeing how fast we are able to implement our agentic OS strategy to life, I am even more convinced than at the beginning of my role that this is a truly special company. We combine a product innovation first mindset with leading pricing power and a relentless focus on execution. That combination allows us to deliver consistent growth quarter after quarter while continuing to invest in the future. In the current market environment, that is a rare combination. Our second quarter once again demonstrates the quality of the business model. We deliver 20% revenue growth, continued double-digit organic growth, and further organic margin expansion. This operating leverage translates directly into earnings, with adjusted EPS increasing by 19% in the first half of 2026. Underlying cash generation also remains strong. Excluding the temporary LTIP cash outs, our operating cash flow increased broadly in line with organic revenue growth. So I will now take you through the financial performance in more detail. Let me start on page 14 with our professional segment, which continues to demonstrate why it is our highest quality business. The German subscription business remains exceptionally strong Delivering industry-leading mid-teen growth supported by high retention, customer growth, pricing power, and double-digit ARPU growth. This reflects the success of our membership strategy and the growing contribution of AI capabilities. And as Ralf already explained, the introduction of our digital currency, our ImmuPoints, clearly shows that our new AI-driven products are not only highly valued by our customers, but that we are also able to monetize these new features. At the same time, we continue to reshape transaction enablement towards more scalable digital businesses. Software as a service and digital valuation products are growing at double digit rates while we are becoming increasingly selective in less scalable parts of the portfolio. Moreover, Spain also continues to develop in line with our expectations. contributing 15 million euros of revenue in the quarter. On the cost side, we remain in the integration phase. We continue to incur transitional service costs as we complete to carve out from the former owner. These costs will gradually decline over the next six to nine months as the integration progresses. What I find most encouraging is the profitability. Our organic operating EBITDA margin in the professional segment exceeded 65% in the second quarter. This reflects not only pricing power, but also our ability to successfully integrate acquisitions while improving margins. Just one year after closing, all three acquisitions, in particular the acquisition of Sprengnetter and Bullingeser, are already contributing to margin expansion. That gives us a proven blueprint for Spain and reinforces our confidence that we will continue to improve margins through the second half of 2026 with the full benefits becoming increasingly visible as we enter 2027. Now let's come to page 15 and take a look at our private business where we continue to see encouraging momentum. Overall growth remains strong at 8.4% in the second quarter, broadly in line with the first quarter. The most encouraging development is our subscription business. Search+, Living+, and our new AI capabilities are driving accelerated subscription growth with momentum, improving both sequentially and year over year. This gives us confidence that our product strategy is working and As I said at the Capital Markets Day, with further product launches still to come later this year. Our Pay Per Ad business also continued to perform well. It is benefiting from our growing content base and a more demanding rental market. While growth naturally moderated in the second quarter against a stronger comparison, it remained close to double digits. More importantly, it demonstrates that our content strategy is working. We are increasingly able to monetize different market environments, making the business more resilient as conditions evolve. And finally, the slightly lower margin reflects targeted marketing investments, supporting the rollout of our new B2C products, especially with the so-called grey market initiatives, which already lead to an impressive number of increasing listings of rental offerings on our platform, as you can read from our press release. These are deliberate investments that support the accelerating subscription momentum we are seeing today. With page 16, I will now switch from the revenues to our cost development. The development of our cost once again highlights the strengths of our operating model. Three months after our capital markets day, we continue to invest behind exactly the priorities we outlined. Product Innovation, Brand and the Integration of Spain. Yet our organic cost base increased by only 6.4% compared with 10.5% organic revenue growth. Please note that you will find in the appendix to this presentation a detailed breakdown of our reported and our organic cost developments separating the costs which are allocated to Spain into our organic core business. But let me highlight three examples that demonstrate the strength of our operating model and why we are confident that we can apply the same approach in Spain with the effect of an improving overall margin within the next two and a half years as we demonstrated it within our CMD. First, personal cost. Of course, our largest cost bucket declined by 3.5% organically in the first half. Exactly what we outlined reflecting our higher organization effectiveness, productivity improvements, and our continued transition towards a more AI-native organization. Second, organic IT costs grow by only 8.4%, way below organic revenue growth, despite continued investments in technology, automation, and our AI roadmap. At a time when many companies are experiencing AI-related cost inflation, We continue to fund innovation while keeping technology costs well under control. Third, marketing costs increased by 18.9% organically, exactly as planned, reflecting targeted investments behind our brand, new B2C products, and in addition, marketing costs were also impacted by the integration of Spain. Taken together, this demonstrates the scalability of our operating model. We continue to invest behind innovation while at the same time keeping organic cost growth way below revenue growth. Our organic ordinary operating EBITDA margin reached 64% in the second quarter. And please let me make one additional point on Spain. We are very confident in our ability to optimize the cost base over the coming quarters and we complete the carve out and integration into Scout24. We have successfully applied the SCAO24 playbook across multiple acquisitions and we are already doing exactly the same in Spain. That gives us strong confidence that we will deliver a steadily improving margin trajectory over the coming quarters and years, creating significant long-term value from this acquisition. So continuing on the next page, where you can see that the items below our ordinary operating EBITDA developed favorably in the second quarter as well, supporting strong first-half earnings growth on both a reported and adjusted EPS basis. The non-operating effects were materially lower year-on-year, mainly reflecting much lower share-based compensation costs. But I will come to these items in more detail on the next slide. D&A increased moderately, reflecting the higher amortization of acquisition-related assets following the Spain acquisition. Our adjusted EPS increased by 18.8% to €1.97, outpacing revenue growth despite the expected dilution from Spain. Basic EPS also increased strongly to €1.87, benefiting from the lower non-operating effects. Overall, our first-half earnings growth is another proof point to the stability and quality of the Scout24 operating model. Strong operating performance remains the primary driver of earnings growth complemented by our value-accretive share buyback program, which further supported EPS through a 3% lower weighted average share count. On page 18, you can see the bridge between our reported and our adjusted net income for the first half of the year 2026. Within these bridge items, there are four key elements I would like to highlight. First, our non-operating effects, excluding share-based compensation, declined significantly, reflecting mostly lower M&A-related costs. Of course, this was partly offset by continued PMI and restructuring costs as we implement the organizational transformation outlined at our CMD and build a more AI-native organization. Second, share-based compensation was broadly neutral in the first half. The positive effect from the release of the provisions for the LTIP payouts, which we made in the first quarter of 2026, were largely offset by new provisions in the second quarter covering the new ATEP tranches for 2026 and also by an increased share price. Third, PPA DNA increased as expected, reflecting the higher amortization of acquired intangible assets following the Spain acquisition. And finally, the financial result benefited from around 4 million euros of fair value gains on our VC fund investments and approximately 2 million euros from the revaluation for the Sprengnetter call options. So before I will come to our cash flow and our capital structure, please let me first put today's results into the broader context of our CMD. As I already said, after my first five months at Scout24, I am absolutely convinced about the quality of the business and its long-term potential in the light of our CMD and our presented strategy of the agentic operating system. If you go back to our CMD in 2024, We had a clear strategy, a strong operating model, and ambitious financial objectives. Today, I believe the opportunity is even larger. Not because our strategy has changed, but because the business itself has become stronger and supported by continuous important strategic investments in our ecosystem. Over the last two years, we have consistently executed, delivered on our commitments, and proven that our operating model scales. But perhaps the biggest difference today compared with our capital market stay in 2024 is AI. Two years ago, it was a strategic ambition, which we already highlighted as a key pillar of the future development. Today, it is becoming a major part of how Scout24 operates. AI helps us build better products, deepen customer engagement, and most importantly for a CFO, creates new monetization opportunities. At the same time, it enables us to innovate faster, automate more processes, and significantly shorten the time from an idea to customer impact. In other words, AI is strengthening both sides of our P&L. It supports sustainable revenue growth while making our operating model even more scalable and increasing our operating leverage. Combined with our industry-leading subscription businesses, expanding monetization across the customer journey, and our proven ability to integrate acquisitions while expanding margins, I believe the foundation of the business is stronger than ever. For me, the most important change since our CMD in 2024 is that our growth drivers are no longer developing independently, they are reinforcing one another. Better products drive stronger customer engagement. AI accelerates innovation and efficiency. A scalable operating model translates those advantages into consistent financial delivery. That is why I believe Scout24 is becoming an even stronger compounding model for shareholders than we have seen two years ago and why I am so confident in the opportunities that lie ahead of us. Turning now to page 20 and our free cash flow development. Starting from a net income of €132 million at the end of the first half of last year, free cash flow amounted to €101 million in the first half of this year. The main driver of the year-on-year decline was around €25 million of LTIP cash outflows, reflected in working capital and provisions relating to incentive programs from previous financial years. Excluding this effect, free cash flow would have increased year on year, underlying the strength of our cash generation. Cash conversion remained strong at 73% of adjusted net income and 45% of ordinary operating EBITDA. Turning to leverage and capital allocation. During the first half of this year, we deployed almost 400 million euros of capital across strategic M&A, share buybacks and dividends. To remind you, we paid a dividend of 105 million euros in the second quarter and we already bought back more than 1.7 million of shares in the first half of the year with a cash consideration of 123 million euros. By the end of the first half of the year, we had more than 3.8 million treasury shares representing 5.25% of our share capital. As you know, we are currently running another share buyback tranche in the second half of the year with an outstanding buyback volume of around 220 million euros today. In addition to the free cash flow generated during the period, these investments were funded through a 300 million euros short shine or in English promissory note issued at attractive terms and additional debt. As a result of our investments in M&A, share buybacks and the dividend payout, our financial leverage increased to just 0.99 times at the end of the second quarter, leaving us with significant financial flexibility. So let me conclude on page 22 with our guidance. Based on our strong first half year performance, we are of course confirming our full year guidance for 2026 with a very high level of confidence. We continue to expect revenue growth of 16% to 18% including around 6 to 7 percentage points from Spain and an ordinary operating EBITDA margin of up to 61% or up to 64% on an organic basis. Let me make a few comments on phasing. Based on our first half revenue performance and the outlook for the second half, we are currently tracking toward the upper end of our revenue growth range. As always, we will provide a more specific update with our third quarter results when we have even greater visibility for the remainder of the year. On profitability, the second quarter already demonstrates the strength of our operating model with a group-level organic operating EBITDA margin of 64%. This reflects the efficiency of our German business and our proven ability to expand margins following acquisitions. The path towards our guidance of up to 61% reported operating EBITDA margin will continue to build through the second half of this year. This will be supported by lower TSA costs in Spain, continued optimization of the Spain cost base, and further efficiency gains in our German business as we continue the transition towards an AI-native organization. Based on our track record of integrating acquisitions and executing PMI programs, we are highly confident in our ability to deliver the same outcome in Spain. Consistently delivering on our commitments while improving profitability has become a hallmark of the Scout24 business model. and we are confident that 2026 will be another example of that. So thank you for your continued interest in SCAR24.

Disclaimer

This conference call transcript was computer generated and almost certianly contains errors. This transcript is provided for information purposes only.EarningsCall, LLC makes no representation about the accuracy of the aforementioned transcript, and you are cautioned not to place undue reliance on the information provided by the transcript.

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