Hemnet Group AB

Good morning everyone and a warm welcome to this 2026 Q1 release call for Hemnet Group. My name is Jonas Gustafsson and I'm the Group CEO of Hemnet. With me here on my side today at our headquarters in Stockholm, I have our Chief Financial Officer Anders Örnull and our Head of Investor Relations Ludvig Segelmark. As usual, we will go through the presentation that was published on our website earlier this morning during today's session. I will kick it off with a summary of the main highlights during the first quarter. Thereafter, under show notes, we'll cover the financial details before I will come back in the end to wrap up today's session. As always, there will be opportunities to ask questions at the end of the presentation. Today's session will be moderated by our operators, so please follow the operator's instructions to ask questions through the provided dial-in details. So with that, let's get started and let's move on to the next slide, please. Net sales declined by 24.7% in Q1, driven by weak listing volumes throughout the first quarter. Sales were also negatively impacted by a timing shift in revenue recognition related to the rollout in the new commercial proposition and payment model, sell first, pay later, in which we recognize revenues first when properties are sold. 2026 financials will be impacted by self-first pay later as the new proposition has gradually been introduced, complicating year-on-year comparisons. Published listings declined by 30.7% and amounted to 28.6 thousand listings. Paid listings amounted to 25.4 thousand, with the difference between paid and published listings being explained by some 3.2 thousand sell-first-pay-later listings that were published but not yet sold in the quarter. ARPL, average revenue per listing, grew by 12.2% in Q1, driven by higher demand for Hemnet's value-added services paired with some price adjustments. The EBITDA margin amounted to 36.1% in Q1, down significantly from last year. The 11.8 percentage point decline is explained by lower listing volumes and revenues, which drives lower fixed cost leverage. As volumes starting to pick up again, as we've seen during April, we expect both net sales and profitability to follow accordingly. During Q1, we rolled out Sell First Pay Later across Sweden, starting off with Stockholm on the 2nd of February, Västra Götaland on the 2nd of March, and the rest of Sweden by 30th of March. So far, the launch has been very successful, driving more and earlier listings to Hemnet. In addition to the successful launch, we've also seen a much stronger property market in April, which is promising for Q2 and onwards. Now, let's turn to slide three for a quick look at the financial performance. Net sales amounted to 247.2 million SEK, down by 24.7% compared to the same period last year, driven by the significant decline in listing volumes during the quarter and the introduction of sell first, pay later. EBITDA decreased by 43.3% to 89.3 million SEC. The decrease was driven by the lower listing volumes, which show lower net sales and reduced fixed cost leverage. The EBITDA margin amounted to 36.1%. As per usual, Anders will break down these profitability dynamics in more detail as we move on in the presentation. Now, let's turn to page four for a look at the property market on the list of volumes. On the left-hand side on this slide, you'll see a combined chart showing published listings per quarter, yearly published listings, as well as the year-on-year change between quarters. Published listings decreased by almost 31% year-on-year in the first quarter. Listing volumes were negatively impacted by a weak underlying property market in the beginning of the year and the anticipation effects leading up to the East credit restrictions that went live on 1st of April. The slow market also continues to be negatively impacted by longer selling times, and the average listing duration on Hemnet has increased by 21% year on year to 57 days compared to 47 days in the same period last year. However, we've seen clear indications of a market rebound during April. In the first week of April, we experienced the largest week-on-week increase in new published listings that we've seen over the last decade. Thanks to a combination of the nationwide rollout of self-first pay later, and secondly, the East credit restrictions coming live, and thirdly, some calendar effects related to Easter. After the initial week, we've seen continued strong market in April compared to the last couple of months. Let's look a bit at the volume development in the first week of April on the next slide. So let's turn to the next slide, please. As I just pointed out, we clearly saw that anticipation effects ahead of East credit restrictions and the self-first pay later negatively impacting the listing volumes in March. However, starting in April, we've seen a clear momentum shift with a much higher new listing activity trend compared to the previous month. New published listings in the last four weeks grew by 34% compared to the previous four-week period. That is roughly 25 percentage points higher compared to what we've seen during the same period in the last three years, and the last three years being 2023, 2024, and 2025. When comparing the last four weeks with the same average period the last three years, 2026 is around 7% to 8% below the average volumes. However, compared to 2025, which had a very strong April, volumes are down approximately 14%. Stockholm continues to stand out with a particularly strong market development, leading the market recovery in April with higher volumes, lower lead times and accelerating price levels. With that, let's move on to the next slide, on slide six, please. ARPL grew by 12.2% in the first quarter. The ARPL growth was again driven by a strong demand for our value added services, paired with slight price adjustments in January. The conversion rates to higher tier packages continued to increase during the first quarter. The successful rollout of Sell First, Pay Later had a small positive effect on ARPL growth in the quarter and will continue to be a growth driver going forward, driving further increased uptake in value-added services like Hemnet Premium and Hemnet Max. Now let's move to slide seven and focus a bit on our different strategic focus areas for Q1, starting with marketing. In mid-March, we launched our new brand campaign, More Eyes on Your Listing. The campaign went live nationwide, but with a clear focus on the metropolitan areas in Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö to meet market demands in these high growth regions. The campaign highlights Hemnet's superior audience and the importance of using the marketplace with the largest audience if you want to increase the probability of a successful sale and the best possible price. As we've stated previously, Hemnet will continue to invest in marketing and sales in 2026 to further highlight the strength of Hemnet's offering and reaffirm our strong market position. Now, let's turn to slide eight to look a bit more into the value Hemnet delivers to customers through our platform. In mid-March, we published data quantifying the financial effect a Hemnet listing can potentially have on our property transactions. Data show Hemnet that properties in Stockholm inner city advertised on Hemnet during the first two weeks of March on average saw a 5.1 percentage point higher bidding premium compared to properties not listed on Hemnet. For an average Stockholm property priced at 6 million as an example, this in theory would translate to approximately 300,000 more in final price relative to the asking price. Stockholm inner city often serves as a bellwether for the rest of the country and has seen particularly strong activity and price trends in the last months. The data highlights the importance of choosing the correct sales strategy in this kind of market environment, where visibility is key to maximizing the chances of a successful outcome and bidding dynamics. Now, let's move to slide nine, please. In March this year, Orvesto published their full year 2025 reach numbers for the largest commercial websites in Sweden. Reach is essentially a metric that shows how many actual people that engage with a website like Hemnet on a weekly basis. The numbers from 2025 shows that Hemnet continues to have a stable market reach of above 1.8 million people on a weekly basis, despite the slow property market that we experienced. The reach is particularly strong in metropolitan areas like Stockholm, where an even larger share of the population uses Hemnet on a regular basis. Now, let's move on to the next slide, please. During Q1, Sell First Pay Later was rolled out across the country with a final phase taking place on the 30th of March. The launch of the new model where sellers can choose to pay for the listing when or if the property is sold has been very well received among both sellers and agents. We see both more listings and earlier listings coming to Hemnet, which is fully in line with our strategic ambition. The model has effectively lowered the barriers to list on Hemnet while also stimulating market activity. When comparing geographies where the model was rolled out compared to other geographies, we saw that growth of new listings in SFPL counties outperformed the rest of Sweden with roughly 15 percentage points year on year in February and March, whilst also driving a higher conversion to value-added services. Sell first, pay later conversion has so far ranged between 35 to 45% of all listings in geographies where it's been made available. The conversion has fluctuated between weeks and geographies, and we're quite pleased and satisfied with the adoption rates that we are seeing. The sell through rate for February cohort in Stockholm was 45%, meaning that 45% of all sell first pay later listings published in February were sold either in February or in March. With that, let's move on to slide 11, please. In addition to sell first, pay later, we also started rolling out our strategic partnership with Swedish real estate agents on an HQ and brand owner level. The partnerships are still in its early phase, but so far we've seen a strong demand from many of the leading agencies across Sweden to sign up and commit to integrating Hemnet across the full sales journey. To date, we've signed almost 90 strategic partnerships covering some half of the top 30 agents in Sweden. Since our last update, we have added a number of the largest real estate agent brands in Sweden, including names like Move, Cortia Group and Properties and Partner. We also continue to have positive discussions with several of the biggest brands in Sweden. One exciting feature that will be included in the strategic partnerships is what we call under the radar listings or underhand in Swedish. Under the radar will be an opportunity to highlight listings on Hemnet in a very early stage, whilst the agent and seller will still be able to maintain full control of the sales process by publishing behind a login on their agent website. In the first iteration, the properties will be visible on the listing pages of the agents and not be searchable or viewable in the result list. Hemnet will then continue to co-develop the feature together with our partners to launch the next iteration during the summer. Now, let's move on to the next slide, please. In Q1, Hemnet has continued to use AI to enhance product innovation and operational efficiency. During the past months, Hemnet has, as the first Swedish property platform, launched a chat GPT integration where users are given new tools in how to search for properties. The app delivers relevant listings directly in the chat and seamlessly guides the user to Hemnet to view the full listing, book a viewing, or contact an agent. This week, we're also rolling out our reimagination feature, which will enable our users to visualize what a property can look like in another style or without furniture. We're quite excited about this new feature and think this is something that our users will truly appreciate. We're also continuing with our conversational search beta, which we talked about during the Q4 presentation in January. As the next step, we're scaling up the features to around 30% of our web users and enhancing the user experience significantly by more advanced tagging of properties. In addition to the consumer-facing product launches that we are able to do with the help of AI, we are seeing quite significant results on the operational side. Today, more than 50% of our code is written by using AI co-pilots. That 50% was roughly 20% in December and we expect to continue to see a growth and development in this area. Our internal surveys show that current engineers are reporting large efficiency gains, and we are able to deliver a lot more product news today compared to just a year ago. We're still in the early days of this development, and we are very excited about the rate of change we're currently seeing and what possibilities that this will open up for us going forward. So now let's move to slide number 13 to wrap this up. In the business update we provided in connection with the Q4 report presentation, we highlighted four strategic focus areas for Hemnet in the first quarter. And I wanted to take this opportunity to briefly touch upon these topics. In Q1, we successfully rolled out both Sell First, Pay Later and the strategic partnerships. It is still early, but we're seeing strong initial results. and that both these initiatives are driving a change user behavior among both sellers and agents, with more listings coming to Hamnet in an earlier phase. In addition to these two strategic launches, we've continued to leverage AI to further enhance the user experience on our platform. We are rolling out new AI-enabled features at a high rate, and we're able to do so in parts thanks to the productivity benefits we're seeing across the organization. This development is further underpinned by a continued strong focus on sales and marketing with the rollout of our new brand campaign during the quarter. All in all, we continue to deliver on our strategic focus areas in the first quarter while we look ahead and plan to launch much more additional initiatives to further accelerate customer and partner value creation. And with that, I will hand over to Anders for the financial update, starting with page four. Anders, over to you.

Thank you, Jonas. Let's turn to page 15 in the financial summary. As Jonas mentioned earlier, we are navigating a challenging market environment with the volume of new published listings fell by 31% during the quarter. That development, in combination with the revenue recognition effects following the launch of selfless pay later, resulted in a net sales decline of 25% to 247 million. Paid listings declined by 38%, with the difference between paid versus published listings being SFPL listings not yet sold by the end of the quarter. On a positive note, we continue to see very strong underlying performance in our paid ARPL, growing 12%, once again proving the sustained and increasing demand for our value-added services. Another noteworthy point is the average listing time, which on a rolling 12-month basis increased from 47 days in Q1 2025 to 55 days in Q4 2025 and now 57 days in Q1 2026. The year-on-year effect of the longer listing time is negative 7 million in revenue, and the sequential effect of the two additional days from Q4 to Q1 is negative minus 3 million. The development of listing duration is important even at a time when parts of the revenue are recognized in full upon invoicing. Listings sold as pay now and pay when listing is removed are recognized over the advertising period. And remember that in Q1, we have a gradual rollout of SFPL and the number of sold SFPL listings in paid listings are therefore quite limited. EBITDA for the quarter amounted to 89.3 million, corresponding to a margin of 36.1%. The margin contraction is primarily explained by the lower net sales, as we maintain a large portion of fixed costs that cannot be fully adjusted in the short term to compensate for the drop in listings. One important component in the EBITDA margin is the compensation to real estate agents. When expressed as a percentage of property seller revenue, this ratio increases year on year from 29.7 to 30.5 in Q126, driven by further improvement in both recommendation rates and actual conversion. Higher commission reflecting a substantially stronger underlying improvement of our value-added products. I will walk you through the specific cost dynamics in more detail on the following slides. The increase in leverage to 0.9 is primarily an effect of our active capital allocation combined with the low listing volumes during the period. Notably, during the previous year, we expanded our share buyback program from 450 to 600 following the mandate approved at the AGM last year. We ended the quarter with a headcount of 179, representing a strategic increase of 23 employees compared to the same period last year. This growth was primarily driven by reinforcements within product and tech, as well as new resources within the sales team to enhance engagement with the agent community. Additionally, we strengthened our marketing capabilities with a particular focus on CRM. With that overview, let's turn to page 16 to our revenues by segment to take a closer look at the Q1 figures. Our largest segment, property sellers, which we have previously covered, generated revenue of 198 million. Revenue from real estate agents decreased by 7% to 23.5 million. While this was impacted by the weak market volumes, it was partially offset by continued growth in our sold by us products. Revenue from property developers increased by 10% to 12 million. This is a strong performance driven by the new annual subscription packages launched in January 2026. Revenue from other advertisers also increased by 5% to 14 million, demonstrating the ability to improve performance with price. The B2B segment is performing well, despite the fact that the lower volume of listings reduces the number of impressions, which of course negatively impacts display sales across the B2B division. Continued optimization and focus on how many unique products are making a significant difference, keeping the revenue on par year over year. Turning to page 17 and our EBITDA bridge, we can clearly see the dynamics at play this quarter. We start with an EBITDA of 157 million from the first quarter of last year, primary impact and by far the largest comes of course from net sales, which had a negative effect of 81 million due to the lower listings. Compensation to agents decreased in line with the decline in revenue from property sellers, resulting in a positive impact of close to 23 million. Other external expenses increased by a little bit more than 7 million, largely due to a higher overall marketing spend and the strategic front-loading of a major national brand campaign, Jonas mentioned earlier. This was aimed at capturing earlier traffic and listings leading up to and alongside the launch of a selfless payday. Personal costs decreased slightly year on year, primarily due to cost items related to organizational changes in Q1 2025. Excluding these cost items, personal costs increased by 5.4%, driven by salary inflation and high number of employees, which better reflects the underlying personal cost development. Finally, other items had a marginal negative impact of 2.4 million, related to lower capitalized development expenditure for our own staff in a year-over-year context. In total, this results in EBITDA for the quarter of 89 million mentioned earlier. Finally, let's move to page 18 for an update on our cash flow and financial position. A rolling 12-month free cash flow amounted to 690 million. Although the lower EBITDA level is reflected in the cash flow, we maintain a very strong cash conversion rate of 99%, underscoring the quality of our business model. Our stable cash generation and strong balance sheet allow us to continue returning capital to shareholders. As shown in the middle chart, we repurchased shares for 155 million during the first quarter, totaling just over 1.2 million shares. Of the 1.2 million, a small portion of 43,000 were repurchased on a separate mandate in order to enable deliverable shares to the participants in the performance share programs. With our current valuation, the share buyback program remains a very attractive tool for capital allocation, allowing us to deliver significant value back to our shareholders, together with the dividends, of course. On the right, you can see the net debt and leverage ratio. Net debt amounted to 630 million, corresponding to a leverage of 0.9. While this represents an increase from previous quarters, we remain well below a long-term financial target of below 2x, ensuring that we retain a high degree of financial flexibility. With that, I will hand the call back to Jonas to summarize the quarter.

Thank you, Anders. Let's move on to the summary slide and slide number 20, please. So to summarize the first quarter, new published listings in Q1 remain suppressed by April, signal a clear market pivot, putting us in a much better position going forward. Paid ARPL grew by 12.2% in Q1. driven by a continued high demand for Hemnet's value-added services, and SFPL is expected to help to drive this going forward as well. A very successful launch of Sell First, Pay Later in Q1, we're already seeing how the new model effectively lowers the barriers to list on Hemnet while stimulating overall market activity. All in all, we continue to deliver on our strategic focus areas in the first quarter, while we look ahead and plan to launch additional initiatives to further accelerate customer and partner value creation. With that, let's open up for Q&A, please.