Scout24 SE (G24) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

I am very happy to welcome you to our CMD 2021. We are here today in our Berlin office, with a fantastic 360-degree view of Berlin. It's a pity that you can't be here personally. In spite of that, we will ensure that you get a 360-degree view of our strategy, how we are moving Scout24 to the next level. We already provided a glimpse of that in the news we just sent out. This includes a clear financial outlook for the year 2022, and mentions our 5 value drivers, which we will detail over the course of this presentation. Now who will explain our strategy to you? Today's speakers are: Our Chief Executive Officer, Tobias Hartmann; Rowena Patrao, our Chief Technology Officer; Thomas Schroeter, our Chief Product Officer; Ralf Weitz, our Chief Commercial Officer; and Dirk Schmelzer, our Chief Financial Officer. Please note that we are all vaccinated and tested, complying with our internal COVID-19 protocols. Speaking about compliance, let's have a quick look at the disclaimer. I would like to draw your attention to the forward-looking statements, especially the fact that potential further effects of the COVID-19 pandemic cannot be reliably planned at present. I also want to remind you that all quarterly figures mentioned in our presentation are unaudited. As already mentioned in our press release, from next year onwards, we want to change our segment structure. Dirk will elaborate on that later. And you will understand in the course of the presentation why we are doing this. Anyhow, please note that all numbers we present in this new segment structure are preliminary and for orientation only. Let's turn to today's agenda. Tobi will kick it off by speaking about the group's operating model. He will be followed by Rowena, who will share insights about how our technology supports it. Next, Ralf and Thomas will move deeper into the 5 value drivers, which will be key for our future growth. Last but not least, Dirk will translate all of this into numbers. One important point to note is the Q&A session at the end. Given COVID protocols, we can only have limited people on the stage at the same time. Therefore, we will bundle your questions into groups with 2 management members on stage at a time. I highly encourage you to please send in your questions during the course of the presentation using the chat function in Zoom. Now if you were here in our office, you would feel the energy of the Scout DNA. You would see how our new office promotes creativity and motivate our people. So before we start with our presentation, we want to send some of this energy through to you with a short video. [Presentation]

Do you want to note more specifically?

And to speak more specifically, I want to invite Tobi Hartmann to the stage now. Tobi, the floor is yours.

Thank you, Ursula, and welcome. Good afternoon, good morning for those of you who are joining from a different time zone. It's a great pleasure having you all listen in and view what we have to tell you what we want to demonstrate where we're taking this company to. And it's this title that leads us through this afternoon, which is from classifieds to transactions. That's our next level operating model, and it's also an underlying promise that we are shifting gears to accelerate growth. So let's take a quick look at where we came from as a company, what we've done and what's the DNA of this company that leads us to this next chapter. We've always had an innovative role. We always set new trends. And as you can see over the past 23 years, ImmoScout and Scout24 have been at the forefront. We had a developing market-leading position because we defined early on the industry trends, increasing digitization, increasing real estate prices with even decreasing transactions, or the changing role of agents and professionals and the evolving homeowners and consumers. We actually made it happen. And how it all started was we came from a simple listings business, took us to a media and advertising to a network marketplace. We've been driving these changes. We went from web to app. We introduced property valuations, launching a new wave of consumer services and the provision of leads to agents. Now growth and innovation are a part of our DNA. It's our intrinsic belief to always create value for all of our users. And in doing so, we have managed to grow steadily throughout the past 23 years. There is one important thing though that we want you to note, for over 2 decades, the listing was the key to success. And we drove the shift from offline listings to online listings. We use the listing to create a network for parties to come together, but letting them, the parties, transact on their own behalf. Today, we will share with you how we are creating the next growth era for Scout24, by focusing on the transaction as part of the sale, rental or mortgage transaction. You get a glimpse of that because we're not building this from the grounds up. We've delivered record numbers in the 9-month publications. We showed a 9.4% overall growth, with a 12.8% revenue growth in the residential segment, which is a record growth. So this is not an accident but this is the result of hard work of all the teams and our employees where you just saw a brief video. Before we get into that, let's go back to Capital Markets Day in 2019 where we outlined what we wanted to achieve. So let's take stock in terms of what we've accomplished. Reflecting on the objectives, we've come quite far. What exactly did we accomplish? Well, first of all, there is a meaningful shift of a 9 percentage point of our revenue generation towards subscription and leads. This is a huge step forward as it represents the strategic shift that we have undertaken as a group. We pushed hard to build and to monetize the relationships with our customers, and you see this reflected in an 8.2% growth in terms of agent community, agent customers over 2019. You also see that we've positioned ourselves as a true business partner and not just as a perceived advertising platform or cost center for agents, also opposed as to being just a listings platform. You see this because we improved our ARPU by 8.1% despite COVID. And this is no mean feat given the challenges post by COVID throughout the vast majority of that time. You also see that we increased dramatically our OTP revenues by 41%, which was a key pillar of our strategy and our objective that we had shared back at the time. And yes, with immoverkauf24, we were able to complement our offerings and grow that OTP. And last but not least, we actually returned EUR 1.8 billion to you, to our shareholders, through dividends and share buybacks. So we believe we delivered on our commitments, and now it's about to think about what's ahead of us, what are the new opportunities. And this is a new beginning because the market continues to evolve. And this evolution brings new opportunities for value creation. But what are these market opportunities ahead of us? And more importantly, how do we, as Scout24, create value from these opportunities? Let's talk quickly about the real estate market in Germany and what that means for our positioning and the opportunities ahead. Most of you already are aware that real estate as an asset class has seen significant value increase over the past years, not only in Germany, but in most countries around the world. Now we have continued to reshape our offerings in light of that because there's a significant demand spike, obviously, in Germany. Now early on, as Scout24, we have seen consumers having trouble actually struggling finding new homes due to a lack of supply. We have developed consumer products to support them. Early on, we have seen agents having trouble sourcing new sale mandates. We have accelerated our lead gen product all the way, including mandate provision. And in the past 1.5 years, we've seen how COVID has impacted digitization. And what did we do? We've pushed new product launches on the back of these tailwinds to help seekers, owners and agents transact more conveniently. We have seen the agents' need to digitize, their own business become more efficient, drive productivity, and we have invested to provide them a more powerful CRM suite to drive and support their business. But what's important for you to know, since 2017, all the way to 2021, we have improved our overall agents' monetization to actually outpace the market price development. What does that mean? While overall house prices, as you can see on this slide, in Germany have increased by 8%, in peak cities, like we are here in Berlin, have seen an increase even of 11% year-on-year. We improved our monetization through different offers by over 12% for the residential segment. This puts us at the forefront of leading network players in the real estate industry in the world. This also indicates the direction where we're headed. We are getting ready to unlock new addressable markets with a complete new set of products and solutions. However, to do this, we first needed to reflect and change our operational paradigm. So let's take a step back. What is an operational paradigm? First, it's what we view as our framework for defining our top priorities and aligning our company efforts around that. It includes operating principles, it includes resource allocation and of course, execution. Historically, and you know this formula, classifieds relied on the very basic principle of listings, traffic, money. The entire paradigm was built on one of listings revenue. It was, in a way, one directional. What does it mean? It relied on a third-party content, such a listing. It was generating traffic interested in that particular content and getting paid for connecting the 2 sites, ideally at the appropriate right time. Classifieds, however, did not partake in the transaction itself. And so by missing out on the transaction, classifieds needed to rely on more listings to generate more traffic for further monetization. Like I said, it's a one directional logic. To be able to get closer though to the transaction, we needed to evolve. We needed a new way of thinking and we needed a new paradigm, which is objects, customers, transactions. What is that specifically? An object, in our view, in our world now, is an identifiable and addressable real estate unit that is enriched with all relevant data for transacting. As I mentioned earlier, listings are third-party content. They're effectively a snapshot of a real estate unit at a certain time, serving a very specific function such as marketing the property for a transaction, with the basic aim of connecting buyers and sellers, tenants and landlords. An object, however, encompasses the life cycle of a real estate unit. So by establishing objects, we establish relationships with our customers. And through these relationships, we identify their needs and develop products to address their needs, both for the professional and the private customers. And it is these customers that eventually transact the sale or rental of a property, and it is these same customers that transact with our platform through our wide array of products. So while, of course, listings remain at the heart of our business, we will shift towards objects more and more. So with this new paradigm, we wanted to grow on objects and have the right product set for both the private and the professional customers at every stage of the life cycle of the object, be it for sale or rent. And with that, we will be able to facilitate every transaction and detach our future revenue streams even more so from pure listings. Our new paradigm, therefore, allows us to tap into new addressable markets. We are massively expanding our total addressable market. Today, we are targeting the agent's marketing spend. Yes, and then step by step, we went further and we moved to the agent's acquisition spend. And now with our commission share transactions, we are getting closer and closer to the overall commission pool, and we will take that further to commercial, to rent and, as you will hear from Ralf and Thomas, they will outline later what it means that we also take it to the mortgage market. These are the key ingredients to address a 10x bigger market than we have today. And that's what we want to share with you how we are going to market. This slide here is a very important slide that captures the logic of what you will hear throughout the rest of this conversation in the afternoon. In real estate, it all starts with the owner, and any owner has 3 decision frameworks: It's either selling; renting; and managing a property or living unit. And the owners do this either through professional intermediaries or they do it by themselves. By the way, there could also be 1 or 2 decisions at the same time, of course. But by focusing on the owner, we have developed products for the whole life cycle. So let's start with the decision around selling. If you are a professional -- if you wish to sell then for professional customers, through ImmoScout, we have our traditional membership products and now also seller leads, and we've enhanced the membership additions, you'll hear more about that later. Of course, we've also enhanced our seller leads. Now through immoverkauf, we also offer them prequalified leads on a commission share basis, effectively fueling the agent's success and then participating in their success. And through FLOWFACT and Propstack, our latest addition, we offer them a complete CRM suite to help enhance their operations, their productivity and their own visibility and transparency into the business. Now on the other hand, if you're selling as a private person, if you're the owner, you want to sell, you go to ImmoScout as well and we offer the traditional listing opportunities but with a focus on our free-to-list initiative because we changed that starting in 2020, right in midst of the beginning of the pandemic. At the same time, also through immoverkauf24, we offer advisory services to individuals, to homeowners to help cater to their specific needs. Now moving on, if you scroll down, let's say, you focus on the rental space. You see that there's a similar pattern on the rental side. Now this is the big news. For professionals, obviously, we offer marketing capabilities with our subscription products, while our CM suite also enhances the agents' productivities. But if you want to do it on your own as an owner on the rental part, then through ImmoScout24, we offer not only the listing power and the tenant selection through our new acquisition, we also, now with Vermietet.de, we offer a personalized CRM capability. And then on the last part, on the managing part, which is not the last part in terms of interest, but it's an important part of the whole life cycle, it's the management of owners' properties, we again cater to the professional customers with our IS24 rental management subscriptions, which includes the digital rental contract, didn't exist 2019, another one of our innovations in the market. For owners who wish to manage rather themselves, such as landlords, we now offer a state-of-the-art platform with Vermietet.de for end-to-end tenancy management. So this clearly depicts -- this slide depicts our 2 customer segments, the private and the professional. And digging a little deeper into these 2 segments, of course, there are subcategories, which we all are trying to address with our product suite and go-to-market strategy. So within the Professional segment, of course, we have the agents, be it on the residential or on the commercial side. We have the property managers, we have the developers, the new homebuilders and we have financial institutions and brokerage. Within the Private segment, we have the home sellers, we have the buyers, we have the landlords, we have the tenants. And if you do the math and add up what's behind those segments, you see that we are massively increasing our TAM. And the new TAM is 10x bigger than where we used to come from and what we used to be focused on. So this is what this company is focused on. This is where this company has built the product and solutions for. And this is the underlying foundation for growing the company into the future to become more transactional. We've also asked ourselves, how can we do better, how can we be faster to make sure that we can execute our strategy in the best possible way? Of course, we have fantastic developers. Of course, we have fantastic product managers. But can we be faster? And so on our path to do that, we decided that there are important bolt-on strategic assets that we'd like to take on. So yes, we acquired couple of assets because we felt they fit perfectly into our network. These assets play a vital role for the next few years and for the growth plan that you will hear about and also the numbers that you will hear later on from Dirk. So the acquisition of immoverkauf24 brings us closer to the sale transaction. In a nutshell, immoverkauf24 helps homeowners and assesses their needs. It delivers these prequalified seller leads to partner agents, allowing agents to spend more time on mandate acquisition and transaction. It's a win-win for both the agents and us. And the question, aren't you going against the agents is no question. The agents love the service because it's additional business we are bringing to the table. We fuel the agents with hot leads. That bundled and coupled with our Realtor Lead Engine, we accelerate the owner lead generation. So it has flexibility to optimize the split between the direct leads, sales and the commission share transactions. In essence, we maximize the monetization potential of a particular seller lead. And effectively, it allows us to directly participate in a EUR 6.5 billion residential sale agent commission pool, as it's outlined here. On the other hand, and similarly, same pattern, same execution we acquired for Vermietet.de, which brings us closer to the rental transaction. It's a state-of-the-art platform that helps landlords manage their rentals. Ralf and Thomas will cover that, and they'll give you insights into how it works and what it means. Do you think you would like to register your units on multiple platforms? We don't think so. You register them once with the market leader. So together with ImmoScout24, we have end-to-end rental management, from listing and tenant selection to digital rental contracts and full tenancy management as the rental market is so vitally important to the German real estate market. So the combination of Vermietet.de together with ImmoScout24 creates a network effect that allows us to participate in the combined EUR 7.8 billion residential rent and sale commission pool. So that's the logic behind shifting gears, setting up a new operational paradigm, enlarging and multiplying the TAM and adding strategic bolt-on assets, fully integrating them and taking advantage of a fantastic brand and the traffic machine that we have. Now growth has come from 2 sources when we are talking about our company. The people are such an important ingredient, and we need the technology foundation also. So as a digital business, obviously, we are focused on developing both, allowing us to scale faster in the future. So our investments into people and tech foundations help us to develop our digital network further. So within tech, we develop strong lead gen capabilities to fuel the industry and participate in the transaction. You'll hear more about that in a second from Rowena. Our platforms are now fully fledged cloud-based, so it gives us more flexibility. We developed our agent CRM FLOWFACT further and are now integrating it into the IS24 platform, together with the acquisition, the recent acquisition of Proptech. So these digital tools really help the agents to process more effectively and enhance their own productivity. At the same time, of course, we are creating stickiness. And as I mentioned before, with the integration of Vermietet.de and ImmoScout24, we deliver seamless experience for landlords to manage their rentals. Likewise, we've also invested into our other core foundational pillars: people. We increased diversity plus 9 percentage points for women in leadership roles since 2019. It's hard to do it, and it's especially hard also if you're not a multinational global company. But we took this on, and it's a core pillar of our people strategy. Our employees are more engaged than ever before with a 13 percentage point increase in the employee engagement score compared to 2019. And last, but not least, which is really very important to me, we have finally completed our leadership team by bringing in 2 fantastic additional partners, with hiring a CTO and with hiring a Chief Human Resource Officer to complete our team. And with that, I would like to summarize what we call the recipe for sustainable double-digit revenue growth going into the future. It's the first part, which is really and truly understanding and delivering against our customers' needs as a fundamental precondition. We have improved our focus on these 2 customer groups. We've organized ourselves around these 2 customer groups. And we need to understand them before we're talking about how we can go to market and build the right products. We've developed and implemented a new operational paradigm, as I just walked you through in a very brief snapshot, which is fundamental to a company that has, for more than 20 years, operated according to the former paradigm, which was listing, traffic, money. We've built a leading product suite to facilitate transactions for all stakeholders, seekers, agents and owners. And we have executed highly strategic acquisitions to complement our strategy. We have a product suite and a go-to-market approach that is clearly defined and these 2 companies are either already fully integrated or are on their path to be fully integrated. And with that, it's a great pleasure for me now to introduce you to our new CTO, Rowena Patrao, who joined us earlier this summer 2021. Thank you.

Thank you, Tobi. Hello. Good morning, and good afternoon, everyone. It's really great to be here. I know it's a virtual event, and I would have loved the opportunity to meet all of you in person, but hopefully, we'll get that chance soon. As Tobi mentioned, I recently joined the group, and I'm really excited to be a part of the team here at Scout24. When Tobi and the rest of the ELT spoke to me about this opportunity at the company, I was very interested. The work that we are doing here overlaps very nicely with my own experiences in my career. The products that we are building here have a focus on various different elements: B2B, B2C, the consumer, and of course we are developing a scalable architecture. These are all things that I have worked on at various companies in my career, Microsoft, Amazon, VMware and more. So personally, there was a really good intersection between my own experiences and what Scout24 was looking for. Also, the real estate industry in Germany is at a very interesting turning point right now, where demand for real estate is high. With Scout24 being the leader in this real estate market space, we are in a unique position to continue being successful through digital transformation that is in progress right now. So personally, I'm very happy to be a part of this journey that takes us to that next level. As Tobi mentioned, I've been here since July this year. But obviously, even before I got here, the team has been busy working on the digital ecosystem. So let's take a closer look at what's in place today. First and foremost, we have moved from listings to objects. Listings are temporary. They give us a onetime opportunity to monetize on the transaction. With objects, we have a lot more data about the property that is mapped to a very specific address. We have structural information about the property, the number of floors, the rooms and so on. But we also have transactional data and now we can capture the transactional history. What this means is no matter who is working with that property object, we now have multiple opportunities to monetize on the transaction over the lifetime of the object. This is huge. This gives us leverage. This is our currency. The next thing we've done is we've implemented account logic. This allows us to get a deeper understanding of our users' requirements. And it helps us personalize their experiences on our platform for different user groups. For our private customers, we have seekers. We have made it easy to search for a property to buy or rent and then act on it. For our landlords who have one or more properties that they have to manage, rent to track, contracts to follow up on, the whole set of things to do, we have given them a rich feature set through our subsidiary integration with Vermietet.de. For our professional customers, we have automated the back-office operations. We have removed the heavy processing work and given them a platform that allows them to be efficient. Also, we have integrated with another subsidiary, FLOWFACT. Thereby, we have provided a powerful CRM. This not only handles their day-to-day operations, but also provides data and analytics to take action quickly and close on those mandates. Our transactions are powered by a strong Realtor Lead Engine. This qualifies leads before they are distributed to the customers. So essentially, the information that we give our customers has already been filtered to meet their requirements. Again, this is an efficiency gain. We've also invested in APIs. For example, we have a contact API. No matter how our users are using our system and our platform, they can communicate with each other in a consistent way using this API and they stay connected. When you take a look at all these different pieces and you put them together, voila, you have a transactional ecosystem. The potential here is huge. We know now what our users want, we can track our objects and our transactions. What this means is we can use this data to build experiences and products to match exactly what our users need. This is key. So the question is, how is this helping us today? Let's take a look at some numbers. I personally believe that these numbers speak for themselves. And just to be very clear here, these are numbers from this year 2021. We have an average of over 100 million monthly sessions on our platform. 100 million monthly sessions. These translate to 4.7 million contact requests for search results that have been made on our platform. Again, that's 4.7 million contact requests for searches executed on our platform. These numbers show us that we have a very strong position in Germany's real estate industry today. Also, every month, we are seeing 4.6 million unique users accessing the platform through mobile apps. There's a significant increase in mobile usage and we are definitely paying attention to this trend. With our work on objects, we now have 1.5 million objects in our database and counting. That's a good number. In the 9 months that we've had of 2021, we've generated almost 500,000 seller and mortgage leads and distributed them to various monetization channels. And last but not least, we have over 20,000 residential and business customers that we are working with closely to meet their requirements. We are clearly doing well, and we are successful. Now where do we go from here? As I mentioned earlier, with the ecosystem that we've put in place, we now have access to a lot of data, data about our users as well as our objects. And what we are going to do now is use this data to add more precision and accuracy to our products. First, we're going to invest in a lead distribution algorithm. We will distribute qualified leads to agents based on the market demand in their region, along with expectations for that specific property and the probability of conversion. We want to be able to act on insights. What does this mean? Since we are monitoring what's happening with an object, we can now act on changes quickly and get ahead of our competitors. So for example, if someone is selling a property, chances are they might be interested in buying a new one. So let's engage with them quickly and actively before our competitors do. We want to intelligently match demand to supply. Here, we want to understand the interest of our seekers and personalize the results that we give them to meet these requirements. We can then match these qualified seekers to the sellers and landlords. This will only increase the likelihood of conversion. And last but not least, we want to make sure that the platform is accessible on any device, anywhere at any time. We are investing in efforts to make sure that this is secure, reliable and performing so that everyone comes to our platform to meet their real estate needs. So as you can see, the data that we get from our digital ecosystem will power some very compelling experiences on our platform going forward and help create value. All this technology will only come to light through products and features that we design and present to our customers. But to tell you more about what's in store, I'll now hand it over to my colleagues in product and sales, Thomas and Ralf. Thank you very much.

Hello, everyone. I'm Thomas.

And Ralf. Thank you very much, Rowena. So what have we learned so far? I mean, we have learned that we built the strong -- that we built strong foundation since the last Capital Markets Day and that there is a great and significant opportunity ahead of us. So now, Thomas, we need to bring it home, right?

That's right. In order to talk about value creation, we focus on our customers and of course, on the needs of the customers. Because only by addressing their needs and building and selling the right product we can generate value for them and for our shareholders. So if there is one thing you should remember, and you need to remember from this -- for this session that is coming up now, is that we have 5 key value drivers of value creation. And let us be very clear. These are not plans, but this is in full swing. We are in execution mode. We are full steam ahead in order to deliver against these 5 value drivers. So let's get started.

Yes. And Thomas, before we go into the value driver in more detail, let's start with our customers. And so we have 2 groups of customers at Scout. So one, we have the professional customers, and we have the private customers. And of course, the organization is also organized along the customer groups here. We have journeys in place and we follow the journeys of our customers. So -- and I would like to start with the professional customer side. So what we are seeing there is that those customers are also more and more digitized. That means they're using all the technology which is available and which we are offering more and more intensively. And of course, corona was a boost for the usage of the technology we are offering. And so for instance, the communication is completely digitized now. So the -- our customers, the real estate agents are used to technology of communicating with their customers via app, video calls, whatever. Private customers, Thomas?

Yes, the same development is actually true for the private side. You all know that consumers have been driving the shift to online, that is no news. We have been driving the shift to online real estate classifieds by empowering the consumer in the last 20 years. What we have been starting to see and what we're increasingly seeing is that also homeowners, so both sellers and landlords, they are going online, and they are doing either parts or the entire transaction online. So for our customer groups, we have to provide the right set of digital tools and products and features to make them successful in this new and this changing digital world. So let's have a closer look at that, Ralf.

Yes, of course. So what is the environment and what has changed over the last, let's say, 2 years or from the last Capital Markets Day? I mean the audience we have, so we have audience, we have the market, and we have also the technology, which kicked in. So let's start with the audience. The audience is becoming younger. So we have younger buyers on the portal. So -- and we see that, of course, the expectation of those buyers, of those users of our portal is then becoming different. And we see that also the homeowners, they can imagine to sell the property more and more online. More than 70% of the homeowners tell us, okay, why not selling my property online completely. So -- and the market environment is also really favorable. And what we see is that the mortgage rates, for instance, are still low here, means the interest rates are low. And that this is also driving the house prices and the demand for real estate. This is, of course, helpful for us here. And what makes technology now with the market is the question here. And what we see is that for small agents in the current market situation, it's getting harder to gain their business because they need new mandates. And we see also that agents who are using all the technical tools and agents who are more digitized than others, that those agents are more successful in the market. Thomas?

Yes. So one key takeaway. So we need to provide the right product set to make our customers succeed in this changing environment. So it's a perfect segue to actually talk about the product set in greater detail. So you have seen a version of this slide before in the very beginning when Tobi did the introduction. Tobi has talked about our customers. So what we'd like to do now is we'd like to add a product perspective to this customer group. So if you have a look at every customer group, for every group, we have a product suite, which is designed and which is tailored to address the specific needs in a more and more digital environment. Let me walk you through the product suite in a bit more detail. So if you look at our professional customer group, we do have the subscription product, and that is the good old membership that you probably all have heard of before. We also have an old world product, a listing product, a PPA paper ad product. Tobi was also talking about that. And then lastly, we have a set of other products, including mortgages. Now what we are trying to do and what we're effectively doing and what we are speeding up to do is to shift our revenues from the old legacy products into the new recurring and transactional product suites and revenue streams.

And this means that we are moving from a listing into a customer lifetime value model. So our interest is to participate on the customer lifetime value and not so much on the onetime effect of a product we offering. And so -- and we have value drivers for driving revenue in the future. We have 3 key value drivers for the professional customers, and we have 2 for the private customers. And now we go in more detail through every value driver. The big picture is that we have the memberships, as Thomas described that. And on the professional customer group, the first value driver is the memberships and the OTP products we're having. Of course, the membership is our core product. Every customer who wants to buy, for instance, on top product, later on needs to have a membership here. It's our entry product. And we have different tiers here, and we come to that a bit later. It's important to understand the membership product is a core product for our professional customers. And the OTP product, the on-top products, are products where our customers can boost their success. And this is one of the main drivers for our revenue here. So revenue growth comes out of the memberships and comes out of the on-top products. Let's talk about membership first. We do. So what really customer needs at the moment, Thomas, in a market where we have much more demand than supply?

Tell me.

They need visibility. And they get visibility via their listings, of course, but also they can add to it, they can add with more visibility if they spend more marketing money into visibility products we are also offering. Could be media on the site, could be placements you can buy in order to boost your acquisition power on our website. So customer needs really visibility. Visibility gives you brand power, gives you acquisition power, and this acquisition power leads into more business for you as an agent. This is important to understand. So what we did over the last 3 years, we brought every customer into our membership logic. And our product set is really, really easy. It was not always the case in the past. You know that, Thomas. So now we have 3 memberships here in place. We have our basic edition, our image edition and our acquisition edition. And as higher you get on the membership ladder is more acquisition power, is more visibility you are getting. So Thomas, tell me now how the product really works in detail, please?

If you have a look at the 3-tiered membership, you have a very basic entry product, which is called the base edition. You can list all your properties, it's a list-all model. And then you get regular -- or you profit from our regular marketing machine that we do have, being the #1 in Germany. But that is not good enough these days, right? Because it is not that hard to market your property, but it's really hard to get the next mandate. So we encourage and upgrade our agents to move up the ladder, to move up to the image edition, which gives you additional visibility, a so-called image boost, which helps you build your local brand and your local community where you're active as an agent. And on top of that, we have the highest tier membership, which we call acquisition edition because that is what it does. It gives you, next to the full marketing power of Scout, also full acquisition power because it connects you with homeowners directly so that it's easier for you to get the next mandate in a changing, in a digital environment.

So the question now is a bit how to grow in this membership model with our customer base? So we have different opportunities here. And you can see it on the right-hand side, there are some levers how we can drive the success of our customers and how can we drive revenue at the end. For instance, we established a rate cut, and of course we can increase rate cut prices. Every contract has a discount so we can reduce the discount level of the contracts. And we can, of course, upgrade the memberships. So customers, we can bring customers from the basic edition into the image edition, as Thomas already mentioned. So we have different elements and options here in order to grow the revenue. And of course, on top of it, we have a lot of pricing power. So at the end, that brings us to 4% up to 6% revenue growth on the CAGR side here. And this is not all. Now later on, we come then to the on top product, which will drive this much further here. But before we do that, Thomas, let's have a look on the product.

Absolutely. But again, just to be very clear. So this is value driver #1. And for this value driver, we're standing here with confidence to say we're targeting a revenue CAGR of 4% to 6%, which is the beginning, but not the end of the value drivers. But as I am the product person, I love to talk about products. So I have one product slide for you to make that very tangible because we're always talking in abstract forms about the 3 tiers and then you move up the ladder, et cetera. But what does it actually mean? This is how the feature set of the acquisition edition looks like. So this is what you see as a consumer, as a seeker. This is our search results page. It's one of the most visited pages, of course, of our core funnel. And so as an acquisition edition customer, you get your placements on top and you get them with the highest visibility, they have bigger pictures, et cetera. So you don't only benefit in terms of your marketing effort, but also you get that visibility. You have a second row where you have an additional product, which we call the image boost, which gives you as an agent, Ralf, at Immobilien in Berlin [indiscernible] the opportunity to show yourself and say, "Hey, I'm the local hero. If you want to sell or if you're interested in a valuation or a first consult, give me a call," and that is the entry point for homeowners to directly connect with Ralf. And then finally, you have a set of acquisition toolkits that actually help you, like the [indiscernible] report, et cetera, that help you win the next mandate. Because you go with that report, it's an ImmoScout [ renter ] report, you go to the homeowner and say, "Look, this is what I've done on ImmoScout. This is how successful I am, so please give me your mandate."

And the good thing also is, and therefore, it's really, I would say, maybe not easy, but it's simple to pitch that product in front of the customer because more visibility is something you can also measure, and we are doing it. So we have a lot of reports in place where we show customers, okay, if you invest more marketing on our platform, you get more visibility, you get more acquisition power, you get more mandates. And this is what we can measure. And therefore, it's a really clear sales go-to-market approach we are having here. And as Thomas mentioned, we have a high confidence level that we are here really successful. And so far, we are really, really successful of bringing customers from a basic edition into the image edition, and from the image edition into the acquisition edition. So we talked about the membership.

Correct. And just to wrap it up on the membership side, Value driver 1, this is the access product, as you were mentioning, right? So it's a strong product, you need it in order to be successful on ImmoScout. But that's not the end of it, yes? Because Tobi has talked about the market, we are talking about the market. The way to grow in this market is through acquisition products, through OTPs, on-top products. So Ralf, let's talk about on-top products next.

And correct, Thomas, you said, you need to buy the access product first, and then you can buy the on-top products. And we see that more and more customers buying memberships. So we could grow the number of customers and the memberships here, and that's really a good sign. So on top to the memberships, if you want to boost your acquisition further, you can buy leads and more or less mandates from us. And so -- and we are really flexible here in HL to our customers. So we are offering acquisition power. And with that, we are really at the beginning of the transaction. And what Tobi mentioned, we want to go deep into the value chain. We want to go deeper into the transaction. And that means we need to initiate the transaction and we need to know what's happening with the object here. So we are offering to customers different models. We have the lead model. So you can buy a seller lead from us. That's the entry product here. So -- and we are selling those leads to customers and then you need to qualify on your own the leads. And then what we're also doing, of course, if a customer says, okay, no, I don't have the capacity to qualify here. We are offering qualified leads, and we are also offering the model where we qualify the lead as long as needed in order to initiate the mandate. And then we hand over the mandate and get the commission out of it. So -- and so we are really [indiscernible] and we are oriented on the need of our customers here because we have small customers, medium-sized customers and really big ones, and they are in different stages of their business, and we're trying to support them with the right products. So how does it work in detail, Thomas?

So let me walk you through the basic funnel. It's essential to understand how this 100% is black bar, which roughly corresponds to 430,000 submissions, how that actually comes together. So we were saying earlier, homeowners and consumers, everyone is going online. And where do people go? They go to the #1, they go to the top brand, and that is ImmoScout. That's how we are bringing homeowners, how we're bringing consumers into the funnel. And then with these homeowners and the objects in that funnel, what we're doing next is we are verifying and we are qualifying those submissions. And by doing that, we are actually landing at roughly 1/3 of so-called seller leads. So owners who actually have an intention or are relevant in terms of selling their property over a certain period of time. Out of these, let's say, 100,000 to 120,000, we are applying these 2 business models that Ralf was mentioning. And the business model one is we're selling leads. So there are lots of customers of ours who want to convert the lead themselves. They want leads, but they want to do the final sales pitch, they wanted to win the mandates. Roughly 80,000 leads now we are bringing into that model, right? We're selling it directly through ImmoScout. But then there are also other customers who are more interested in a ready-made mandates. And these leads we're actually bringing to immoverkauf. So that is roughly 25,000 to 30,000. And these leads are then converted into actual sales, and that means sales that we are participating as ImmoScout through a commission share. We have a set of associated and partner agents who are selling these properties, and we're doing a split of the commission. There are 2 call outs. Call out #1, if you're starting to do the math on the numbers that I shared with you, there is a big time lag between submitting a lead through, let's say, immoverkauf and then selling the actual property. And that time lag is between 6 and 18 months. So that means all the leads that we are bringing to immoverkauf this year, they will actually materialize the next year and the year after. And then call out #2, there are also a number of other leads that we are bundling into the acquisition edition in order to give acquisition power. What are the results? The results are what you're seeing at the bottom of this chart. On the one hand, we are selling the realtor leads with the revenue per lead of roughly EUR 200, and that is generating roughly EUR 16 million in the first 9 months. and we are already at more than 1,000 transactions with immoverkauf24. Here, you also see that the revenue per transaction is a completely different level with more than EUR 6,000 than on a lead level. So to wrap it up, that's how the funnel works. That's what we are optimizing. And of course, the question is what's next? What's the road ahead? The road ahead is that we are striving for and we're executing against a revenue CAGR of 30% to 40% with this on-top product set. How will we do it? We continue to improve top of the funnel on platform, but also off-platform through marketing. And then we are improving in the funnel itself. Rowena was talking about the algorithm that we are optimizing in order to distribute leads the most effective and efficient way, and then finding the right balance between short-term revenue with retail leads and long-term revenue through immoverkauf. That is value driver #2. Let's continue.

And another value driver, Thomas, of course, is the mortgage business. So we started the mortgage business quite some time ago, and we started this business also as a classic lead business. So now the question for us, what's next with the mortgage business because we are by far #1 in lead generation for mortgages here already. So we are sitting on the consumer. The question is now how to monetize this product better as we -- or what are the opportunities? And we want to follow the same path like what we did on the [indiscernible] lead engine side, on the seller lead side. And so let's go to the next slide and I'll explain a bit the market and also how the product and the business works here. So first of all, the market is really fragmented. So we have here in Germany, more than 50,000 mortgage workers. And they are acting between the consumers who are buying the mortgage at the end, and the banks who are signing the mortgage. And the broker in the middle is often our partner because we are selling leads to those brokers. And now the question is how to go deeper here in the value chain and how to unlock additional revenue puts, and the total addressable market, of course, is getting bigger as deeper you go into the value chain here. So therefore, what we said is we want to help consumers to get the right mortgage and to get the best mortgage. So in order to do so, we need to qualify those consumers better. We need to know more about them. So -- and therefore, the next step for us, of course, is also that we are prequalifying those leads. So we are strong in the lead generation, and we need to become better in lead qualification, and therefore, we're building and investing a lot here in technology, but we will add another element here to the business, and that's the advisory. So we want to partner with the brokers. We want to create a kind of affiliate partner network, and we want, together with them, give the best services to the consumers. So that means additional to the mortgage lead engine, we will offer the prequalified leads, and we will offer a kind of mortgage advisory together with partners here. And then we are able to unlock an additional market here. And you can see it on the right-hand side, the total addressable market here is EUR 2.3 billion, that's the commission pool in the mortgage business. Good. That's exciting, Thomas.

That is exciting. The question is how do we get to the EUR 2.3 billion. Now as Ralf was saying earlier, the market is very fragmented. And the fascinating thing is that means the power is with the consumers who sits on top of the consumers has actually the right to win this market. Now let me walk you through the basic funnel, and it's a similar funnel to the funnel we've shown you earlier when it came to seller leads. As Ralf was saying, what we are doing, not what we will be doing, but we are already doing is we are executing the RLE and immoverkauf playbook to the mortgage business. How does the funnel look like? The funnel again starts with a black bar, which writes 100%. If we translate that into absolute numbers, we have around 300,000 mortgage requests per year. And as Ralf was mentioning, we are by far the #1 consumer platform on this site. And that is the good news. So we're getting lots of requests in. The opportunity here for us is, all of these requests, and that's what you see in the middle bar, are actually directly distributed and sold to brokers with a revenue per lead of EUR 27. So we're selling the leads away immediately, and that is the opportunity because what we will do and what we have already started to do is we start to verify and qualify the leads. And the effect will be similar to the Realtor Lead Engine and the OTP world, we will be able to lift up the revenue per lead for these types of leads. But that's only the one piece. You know from the playbook that the other piece is moving into the transaction. And that's what you see on the right-hand side. We are -- we have already sold -- cold sold the first mortgage, I think, last week, and we want to expand that and we are expanding that aggressively. What does it mean? In the next year, about 4,500 requests, the most qualified, the hottest requests and leads will be given to our affiliate network of brokers, and we will actually be able to convert about 450 mortgages out of that. Just to give you a sense of the opportunity, the revenue per transaction is roughly EUR 2,500. So by applying this playbook, we can actually swing the mortgage business on a similar path as we have done with the OTP product world.

Thomas, maybe just one comment I would like to add here is that, I mean, at the end, the mortgage product is a kind of attachment to a real estate transaction. So -- and as more real estate transactions we are initiating, as more likely it will be that we are able to attach here a mortgage as well if we have the mortgage-broker partner network here in place. And so therefore, there's not just an opportunity on the, oh, we're bringing more consumers into the mortgage directly, there's also an opportunity that we attach the mortgage product on the real estate transactions we are initiating.

Correct, so we can piggyback on that, exactly, which will translate, again, value driver #3 into about 18% to 20% CAGR, revenue CAGR within the next 5 years. We'll do that by opening up top of the funnel, by using the playbook we've just outlined and by also leveraging our transactional model from the object side. Good. So that is the professional part. Now let's talk about the private part. So we don't only have professional customers, but also private customers. And please don't forget, private customers, they are a key of our strategy. They are a key pillar. Only with private customers a real estate ecosystem in Germany is complete. Why is that? It is because we don't only have lots of private seekers, but also lots of private sellers and private landlords. And they're essential for us in order to also create network effects, which are so important for our business. So the very first value driver on the private side is plus. Plus, you have seen it in the video, probably or maybe not to know what it is exactly. So let me start with explaining it. And Ralf, then you transfer that into numbers. Good. So Plus, Plus is our so-called consumer subscription product. We're very proud here to state that we are probably the only real estate classifieds in the world who has built and scaled a consumer business and a consumer revenue stream. This consumer business and this consumer revenue stream has actually helped us a lot to initiate that transition from the old PPA or the old listing world and then also the free listing world, into a sustainable and subscription-based consumer private revenue stream. So this Plus product is a prime example of us executing on our strategy. But what it is concretely? What is it about? So on the left-hand side, you have MieterPlus, so Tenant+. You have a big tenancy market in Germany, more than 3 million transactions happening, more than 300,000 or around 300,000 seekers every month. And every seekers seek for 3 to 6 to 9 months. So there is a big opportunity. What Plus does, it actually be it gives you a booster. It gives you a booster to bring you into your new home. As we were seeing in the video, it's a bit like e-commerce, it's safe, it's efficient, it's completely digital and is the speedway for you into your new home. And the same holds actually true for the second product, Buyer+, or KauferPlus. Again, it's this gateway into your new house, your newly bought house or apartment. And there's a very important additional element here. If you're buying a new house, this is your single most important financial decision of your life. So you need safety and certainty and confidence. And with free valuation and additional services, we are actually providing you with that safety and confidence that you're making the right choice for you.

There's one element I would like to add, Thomas, is that there's also benefit for professional customers, right? Because as a tenant, you get faster your new flat, your new apartment. Or as a potential buyer, you get faster your new property. But you are also prequalified, because you've put in a lot of data into the system, so your application form is there and so on. So you are prequalified. The lead quality we are giving to professional customers in this perspective is better, and this is actually what they appreciate. I mean remember, we have more demand than supply. So to produce a lead for a listing or for an object is not the problem today. The question is, is it the right lead we are handing over to our professional customers. And actually, quality sells here, right? I mean if we can say our lead quality is better than with the competition, this is obviously an advantage for us.

Absolutely. And that means it's the win for the consumer side, it's the win for the agent side. A classic win-win. But let's -- I mean, let's talk about numbers that we are associating with this product. It's for you.

And Thomas, and you said this is a subscription product. And that's, again, important to understand, we are moving here into customer lifetime value. Instead of asking for, let's say, EUR 80 for a listing, we're saying, "Oh, you get listing for free." But with this listing power, we are generating subscriptions on the consumer side here. And those subscriptions, they stay for longer than 4 months at the moment here. And you can see in the numbers, we were able to grow number of subscriptions on the consumer side really significantly. So now we have more than 240,000 subscribers here for our MieterPlus, Tenant++ product. And we believe, in the next years, we can grow this number over 400,000 subscriptions. And this gives us really revenue power, Thomas, and also power on the consumer side.

Yes. Just to add on that, you're seeing the ARPU here and you're seeing the CLV. So you should not be worried that the ARPU is going down. This is by intention. And the reason is very simple, we have changed our pricing model that we are offering longer-term subscriptions, 2, 6 and 12 months. So of course, the monthly revenue per subscription is going down, but the overall lifetime and also lifetime value is going up, and it's going up nicely.

At the end, we want to keep every customer in the system as long as possible, right?

Right.

Because as long as customers are with us, is more opportunities we have to monetize them.

And just to bring that to a close, this is land grab mode, right? We're investing heavily here in product and marketing. We're going for market share. And as you've seen on the chart, with the trend, we're going all in on -- in land grab mode. Good. This is value driver #4. Now there is one more to go, Ralf.

Yes. You mentioned land-grab mode, right, Thomas? So -- and we are running a marketplace, as you know. And therefore, you have always 2 sides here. And so you have the tenants. And of course, on the other side, you have the landlords. And the landlords are also important because they have the objects. So therefore, we need to keep them in the system as well. And instead of offering to landlords the service of, "Oh, you can publish your listing," and then we know for the next 8 years, for this unit, they don't need our service anymore, instead of that, you want to bring them into the system. You want to keep them in the system. And therefore, we need to offer additional services here. That actually was the reason why we acquired Vermietet.de. And with this company, we are able to keep the people in the system. I want to give one example, Thomas, and then you can explain the product a bit more. But I mean, a digital rent contract, it's easy here. You sign a contract digital, but that means also, it's not that easy. But you provide this product, and then this contract is in place for the whole period of the relationship between the tenant and the landlord. And so that's one product how we want to keep the people in the system. And of course, along this journey, you can sell additional products, and that's actually the strategy behind that. So how does the product work?

How does the product work? Let's have a look. So you might recall the product suite we showed you at the very beginning of our section. And you hopefully remember that we said we are transforming from that old PPA, that legacy product into the transactional products. And exactly this is what you see here and what is happening here. But before we talk about the product, maybe just a couple of sentences on the market. Let's start with the market, and that's what you see on the upper right of the chart. We have about 42 million residential real estate units in Germany. About 50% to 55% are being rented out, so let's say, 24 million, 25 million. What's important to know is the vast majority of these units are actually not owned by big property management companies. They're owned by private landlords. More than 50 million units are owned by private landlords, and these units need to be managed. So I can give you a prime example because I'm a private landlord. So how did I manage my properties? With my millions of fellow private landlords, you use an Excel sheet. You're writing letters to your tenants. You look on your bank account to see if you actually get the rent. You have a rental contract that you send around. Then you're starting to fill in your tax statement, et cetera, et cetera. And to sum it up, this is a mess. It's really not a good experience, neither for me as a landlord nor for Ralf, who is the tenant hypothetically. So what does Vermietet.de do? It all brings this into one platform. In the end, Vermietet.de is a digital property management platform for private landlords. It is efficient. It is fully digital, and it's completely tailored to the needs of the private landlords. So why is this so cool? Why are we so excited about it? What we are doing with Vermietet.de is we are taking this platform, and we are plugging it in into our private PPA business, our listing business. So every listing, and we have thousands of listings every day, they will actually automatically come with a Vermietet.de subscription. So every day, we'll bring in thousands of listings and owners to Vermietet.de. And once they're on Vermietet.de, we make them stay. We make them stay because, as Tobi was saying in the beginning, you once register your property. The product is very sticky. Once you sign up, you use it, you don't leave the platform, and you don't start using a second or a third platform because then the mess starts again. But we don't only make them stay, we also make them pay. We have started to charge a monthly subscription, and it's subscription fee that is per unit. It starts with EUR 5, so it's actually relatively low. And it goes up, depending on the number of units, to EUR 15 per month. Now EUR 5 is not a lot. But if you add up EUR 5, let's say, into a year, it's EUR 60. If you add that up to 6 years or 8 years, as we have a tenancy, it's actually way higher than what we can charge with the EUR 80 or EUR 90 listing. So this model has 2 major implications. The first implication is a revenue shift. We'll be able and we are able to shift revenues from the old legacy PPA to a recurring subscription product. And this will increase the CLV that Ralf always talks about, the CLV of the landlords over time. That's implication number one. Implication number two is the landlords, the tenants and the objects, they stay on the platform. So over time, they will no longer appear anywhere else, and we create a network for us where the objects stay with us and are renewed with prequalified buyers or prequalified tenants. In other words, what we're doing and what we will be doing in the next 5 years, we're building out the biggest property manager in Germany without owning an asset. We'll have 4.5 million units on the platform within the next 5 years.

Thomas, how many units do we have so far?

400,000. That's already almost the biggest property manager to start with, but we're tuning that up factor 10.

And we are also so excited about it because we have now the 400,000 units on our platform. And we also know about those units a lot, right? We know, for instance, if the tenant is moving out and we need to provide a new tenant here. So we are creating exclusive content for ImmoScout24 as well. So -- and therefore, we are plugging in different technologies here. And at the end, this helps us to monetize this in our own ecosystem. And this is really the beauty of this model here.

One more slide. Let's bring it home.

Let's bring it on, Thomas. So we talked about subscription. We talked about value drivers, and let's go through the value drivers again. So membership, really our core product. We are able to grow in number of memberships. We are able to grow here the revenue because we are bringing existing customers into higher-tiered memberships. And we have a lot of tools in place here in order to have pricing power and also to bring it -- to make it happen at the end, right? So we can erode discounts. We have the rating cut in place now. And also, we brought every customer into this new model, and this gives us a lot of power and pricing power and also uplift for the next years. So this other value driver we talked about was the OTP product, the seller lead product, which is quite new for the company but so powerful, and it's growing so heavily at the moment. And this will really drive the ARPU, of course, but also the overall revenue for the company, which is great. And we have a new product, at least in this version. This is our mortgage product, where we go deeper into the value chain and where we partner up with mortgage brokers and -- in order to get more out of the commission pool for mortgages in Germany. We have the Plus products, also subscriptions again, right? We are moving away from our onetime product, the old PPA product, into our subscription model here. And we are able to participate in the customer lifetime value much more than it was in the past case. And we are here in this you call that land-grab mode, right? So there's a lot of growth ahead of us. And as I said before, we want to hit the 400,000 as soon as possible here, 400,000 subscribers for the Plus products. And we have the new family member, Vermietet.de. And this product and technology helps us to keep the landlords in the system to create this exclusive content. And we want to become here the biggest property management company, as you said, without owning an asset here. And that's really great. And then at the end brings us really to secure and sustainable double-digit revenue growth for the company. And if you would ask me if I'm confident, yes, I am.

I fully agree. Just to wrap that up, what you're seeing here from us is an ambitious plan. But it's not only a plan. It's us moving to the next level. It's us moving into the transaction. It's us delivering double-digit growth. It's not only a plan that is in paper, but it's a plan that is in execution. It's in full swing. But in order to succeed, we have a couple of investment areas. We are deliberately investing in a number of areas. On the first value driver, it needs heavy lifting on the product and sales side. But we are in full swing in execution mode. On the second value driver, OTPs, this is also strongly marketing driven. We want to win the homeowner. We want to be at the beginning of that journey. And for that, we have to build out our brands for the homeowners. We have to invest in marketing. So we're tuning up our marketing investment here in order to deliver the promised growth. Value driver #3, mortgages. It's product driven. As we are applying the OTP playbook, we are investing on the product side in order to enable a similar growth pattern as we have seen for OTPs. Value driver #4 and value driver #5, we are in land-grab mode, which means we are investing on the product side to build out that product suite. As an example, value driver #5, if you want to have 4.5 million units, there has to be a robust and scalable platform. But also, we are investing in marketing. As an example, value driver #4, consumer subscription. We are heavily going after that. We're going for market share, market share, market share. That is the summary of the value drivers of the growth targets leading to double-digit growth. How that translates into exact numbers, Dirk will show but only in a couple of minutes because now we're handing over to a 15-minute coffee break. Thank you very much.

Thank you. [Break]

Welcome back, everybody, also from my side. Thanks to Ralf and Thomas for the concise summary on how we are delivering on our strategy. Growth put into numbers, we are guiding towards continued double-digit growth. I think that summarizes it adequately. Over the past 2 hours, you've gotten familiar with our strategic approach. You've seen how we developed it, the foundations we laid and how we continue to execute it. Where we are strong already, we grow slowly in volume and strong in price. Membership upgrades will generate 4% to 6% CAGR. In our key investment areas, we will grow double digit with new business models. On-top products and seller leads will contribute a 30% to 40% CAGR over the next years. Where we want to get stronger, we focus on volume and less on pricing growth. Mortgage will grow with a 20% CAGR, and our consumer products will grow strong on subscriptions and units, 400,000 subscribers and 4.5 million units until 2026. That's what we're targeting, and that comes along with a CAGR of 26% to 28%. Against that background, it is only consequent to get more transparent on segmentation. Hence, we will reflect our strategy and focus in the segmentation going forward. As you have seen in Ralf's and Thomas' presentation, we focus on the private and on the professional customers. In both segments, digitization is the driver for change. Professional customers need to digitize to improve productivity, and private customers get more and more tech savvy. And they expect a digital journey in all areas of their lives, also in real estate transactions. To give you an overview of the changes, we have displayed both segmentations on this slide. While group numbers in the Media & Other segment certainly don't change, Residential and Business customers and products will be reshuffled in the following logic. The new Professional segment in the future includes all revenues with professional customers. That means residential agents, property managers, finance partners, commercial agents and developers, and they also include new homebuilders. It includes subscription revenues, on-top products like the Realtor Lead Engine and immoverkauf24. It includes paper ad revenues, and it also includes other revenues like mortgage. The new Private segment, on the other hand, will include all revenues with private customers. That is homeseekers, private listers and landlords and not to forget home buyers. It therefore includes subscription revenues from our Plus products and from the Vermietet.de product. It will, in the future, also contain paper ad revenues we are delivering with private customers. The scope of the Media & Other segment remains unchanged. It therefore continues to include our CRM platforms FLOWFACT and PropTech, ImmoScout24 in Austria and third-party media revenues. All in all, we believe this is a more balanced segmentation than you have seen previously. And the balance will even increase in the future when we grow our Private segment. To give you a much better overview, you will find the Professional segment and our future disclosure on the next slide. As stated, it contains parts of the Residential and the Business segment. Membership today reflects around 80% of those subscription revenues. Together with on-top products, it separately states the growth drivers on pricing and on-top products. In other revenues under Professional, we have reflected the mortgage business. Paper ad business contains the business with onetime listings mostly from smaller agents. To revert back to what you learned earlier in the session, the growth drivers, membership upgrades and pricing of 5% -- of 4% to 6% CAGR, on-top products with seller leads of 30% to 40% CAGR and enhancements in the mortgage business with a CAGR of 18% to 20% will be reflected in the Professional segment in the future. On those professional customers, we chose to simplify our ARPU calculation going forward. We have decided to disclose the example based on the Q3 figures because Q3 was the first quarter which fully reflected immoverkauf24. So this ARPU will contain revenue from all professional customers, residential and business. It will contain membership revenues and on-top product revenues like seller leads, and we will add immoverkauf24 revenues on top of that. It is a better reflection of our growth strategy, and it creates a higher transparency for our investors and analysts. The increasing size of the buckets on-top products and commission-based sales via immoverkauf24 reflect our monetization mode. But keep in mind that in the customer numbers, might slightly vary as we can only take the deduplicated customers into account that also created revenues with immoverkauf24 in that specific period. On the Private segment, we choose the same disclosure. It has the same subline structure as professionals. So we differentiate between subscriptions, paper ad and other revenues. Mainly, it includes what we, in the past, published under consumer with residential. What you see reflected in here is our main value drivers, increase Plus subscribers and increase Vermietet.de units and landlords. Both will contribute a CAGR of 26% to 28% over the next years. Besides the Professional ARPU, we will also provide you with a Private ARPU going forward. Similarly to the previous slide on Professional, we chose to compare on the basis of quarter 3. As we are gaining customers month-on-month, don't expect this ARPU to grow in the next years. The decreasing size of this KPI is reflecting our value drivers 4 and 5, land grabbing for consumer subscriptions. We will focus on increasing the customer numbers. Customer growth has been 70% in Q3 year-on-year. And only on top of that, we believe it helps to display sign-ups for Vermietet.de. Those sign-ups are not paying and, hence, are not reflected in the ARPU, but those are the customers that we want to translate in paying subscribers in the future. So this is the way we display our Private segment in the future. We believe it creates a much higher transparency for you. The land-grab mode that we are deploying here is reflected in that, and the ARPU might go slightly down. But don't forget, as you learned in Ralf's and Thomas' presentation, we are looking at the customer lifetime value, which is going up in this segment. Now you will ask yourself, what's happening on the cost side? To accelerate our transactional ecosystem, we will invest into 5 value drivers, as Thomas and Ralf mentioned before. At the same time, we believe we will keep structural cost under control. On this slide, you see a very strong investment mode during the next year reflected in the orange bar above, while cost intensity will go down the years after. Most important cost position for the investment mode will be marketing and selling cost. Personnel cost will be affected as, for example, the immoverkauf24 business is much more personal intensive than our core agent business. But in the years to come, the overall growth in cost will significantly decrease compared to revenue increase. And that's why it will -- we will return to a higher margin 2026 going forward. Own work capitalized is not included in the graph here. It has peaked this year while we have implemented Vermietet.de into our portfolio. But as I told you already in the Q3 results call, we aim to keep this at a level of below 6% of total revenue in the future. And you will see the first effects of that already in the next year when we are going significantly down in the second half of 2022. Now you have seen the revenue numbers. You have seen our plans to support that with cost mainly in marketing and sales and a very high cost discipline on structural cost. And of course, that then translates into the following numbers. On the Professional side, we believe we can grow the business 10% to 12% over the years to come. Especially in 2022, we believe we can deliver that growth at a higher level in the Private segment. 12% to 14% overall growth is what you will be seeing in that segment. On Media & Other, we're ramping up again. ImmoScout24 in Austria is growing heavily. The media business will roughly stay constant, and FLOWFACT and PropTech would continue to support our existing ImmoScout business model. Here, we will see 12% to 14% growth. For the overall group, that translates into a growth figure of 2022 of 11% to 12%. In '23, we continue with that, slightly going up to around 12%, looking at a CAGR for the period of '22 to '26 of 12% revenue growth for the next years to come. As I told you earlier, 2022 will be a period where we are investing into Vermietet.de and our new acquisitions, where we will invest into marketing and we will invest into ramping up the machine to grow even further. We will lay those foundations in 2022. And starting 2023, we will accelerate our margin growth again, where we believe that in 2023, margin will grow 13% to 15%. And in a time period between 2022 and 2026, the overall CAGR in margin will be 13%. Besides that operational strategy, we have also redefined our capital allocation strategy. We will continue to reinvest into growth as a first priority. As we continue to have a very attractive cash conversion in our business model, this will be done through our cash flow from operations. Any potential M&A activities will be undertaken in a very disciplined manner with a focus on the 5 value drivers we presented today. We are, at the moment, discussing with our financing banks about debt refinancing. We will make sure that we have sufficient M&A firepower of more than EUR 1 billion, assuming a leverage of up to 3.5. As we are operating in a highly cash-generating business, we will also continue to return cash to shareholders. And that means we stick to our existing dividend policy to pay out 30% to 50% of adjusted net income in the form of recurring dividends. We are planning to continue to return any excess cash to our shareholders through share buybacks, targeting an overall leverage without M&A of around 0. Talking about share buybacks. Since Capital Markets Day 2019, we have repurchased EUR 1.6 billion worth of shares. Let's have a look at how our share count developed in this context, from 107.6 million shares to 83.6 million shares. With the share buybacks that came in 3 capital reductions, that brought us to where we are today. With the ongoing share buyback program, we have already built up a new treasury share position of 630,000 shares. This brings us to a number of outstanding shares of EUR 83 million (sic) [ 83 million ]. And the outstanding number of shares is relevant for the EPS calculation, hence, value creating for our investors. To come to the next slide, I would like to point out that this doesn't need explanation as our strategy needed explanation. Because for us, environmental, social and governmental targets are daily business. We believe that any company in our size and our importance in the German market should take close care of that. I mentioned in our upcoming refinancing before, and I know that some of our debt bankers are dialed in as well, we are planning to include ESG goals in our upcoming refinancing. One of these goals will be on reducing our carbon footprint going forward. We have already communicated before that we intend to be carbon-neutral by 2025. Another goal will be on increasing the ratio of women in leadership positions. We have already made great progress here over the last years. As of September, we stood at 38% of women in leadership positions in Scout24. But our aim is to become even better. There are 2 more operational goals we are working on. First of all, we are taking efforts to align all our suppliers with our culture reflected on our code of conduct. And secondly, we want to bring information security to the next level and receive an ISO certification 27001 until 2025. With that, I would like to hand over to Tobi before we dive into Q&A. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Dirk, and thank you to all my colleagues for walking you through our strategy, our update, our product strategy, our tech stack and why we are confident about our future growth plan. What I'd like to share with you before we get into the Q&A session is what are the things that we wanted to bring across. Firstly, we do understand our customers' needs in a very challenging and even changing market environment. And our organization is fully focused on the private and the professional customers. We run a very unique business model. We run a consumer business, a B2B business and powered by a leading brand with massive traffic and trust. The network is led by the consumers' direction, which is an important point. They have the choice, any choice how to interact and transact for their real estate transactions. The future is about creating a network around the object beyond the mere listing, and we have already embarked on creating just that foundation. And we do have the leading product suite to move our company and business to the next level, which is the transaction level. The products and solutions you saw -- you heard us talk about today, they are in place. There is no ambiguity about whether it will work since we can refer to tangible results and a track record. We've invested to get here, and we will continue to invest to capitalize on it in the future. And as Dirk just pointed out, of course, we will see scaling effects in the future. We have demonstrated in the past, and we will continue to do so in the future, that we can innovate, that we can launch and that we can execute. So we are as a team of Scout24 employees and the management, Board and the executive leadership team fully committed to this growth plan to creating value for all stakeholders and, of course, for you. Thank you for being with us so far. We will now take a 5-minute break, only 5 minutes, and then we'll turn it over to Q&A. [Break]

Welcome back to the Q&A session. The sun is going down in Berlin. Let me send you over the last sunbeams into your home offices. As I said earlier, we will run the Q&A session in groups of questions. So first, I invite Tobi and Ralf back to the stage. Welcome back.

Thank you.

So let's turn to the first question, which is for you, Tobi. We received several questions around this. The new coalition agreement in Germany is in place. What are the likely effects for the real estate industry and Scout24?

Yes. It's a very actual question. Thank you for that. What we know by now is that the new government, the future government has announced they will have a new Ministry of Construction that will be established. So that didn't exist before. There's also a number around their commitment to have 400,000 new residential units built per year, of which there are about 100,000 publicly subsidized, which is more than the prior government. There is a promotion for energetic refurbishments and new construction. There's also a discussion about an extended tenant protection, limiting rent increase from 15% to 11%. And then I think the most important piece is -- for all of us is that there's no talk or discussion about a commission cap. So that is off the table.

Thank you. Tobi, you spoke about immoverkauf and prequalifying leads, which was also detailed by Ralf and Thomas. This sounds like you're moving deeper into the value chain. Do you plan to become an agent yourself someday?

So before I begin to answer that question, let me just reiterate how committed we are and how close we are to the agents out there. It's a core pillar of the strategy, and we spent a huge marketing campaign this year and also the prior year to -- just to promote that. We also have the highest number of agents in our network, which is a testament to our partnership with them. At the same time, we must be cognizant that we are a consumer-led company, and we need to continue to address whatever the consumers are looking for. So having demonstrated the value of immoverkauf24, it's a natural extension of our product suite and what we can offer to those agents as a go ready-made mandate. So we will start adding growth towards that, which is in partnership also with the agents. So the participating agents don't see us going us against them but rather as a help and support to create more business. So this is a natural extension, and we'll build on growth on top of that.

Thank you. The next question is for you, Ralf. Various factors support a more aggressive use of the price lever, and that's an increase in ARPU. Why do you only guide to a targeted growth of 4% to 6% for membership revenues? A price lead strategy could lead to higher growth and operating leverage.

Yes. As we -- thank you, Ursula. As we presented today, I mean, we have the memberships, and we have the on-top products. And at the end, even the on-top products bought by the customers were buying also the membership. So it's coming out of the same pockets. So therefore, of course, we want to grow prices first on the membership because we're putting also more value into it. And we want to bring the customers up on the ladder, as we described before. And this will push revenue here, 4% to 6% CAGR as we show today. But on top to that, and that's much more important because as Tobi mentioned already, we are acting in the interest of our customers, and we want to keep the customers in the system as we showed today. And we want to make them happy, and we want to deliver products they need. And therefore, we see higher potential here on the seller lead side at the moment. We are focusing here. But as I said before, membership is an important part of it. And there might be a bit more pricing power. But -- while there is a lot of pricing power, there might be maybe more revenue growth in. But you need to see it together, both on-top products and memberships.

Okay. Thank you. Another one for you, Ralf. You spoke about the customer growth. How long and how much can this go on?

Actually, I don't know. I mean, what we know is we have 35,000 real estate agents here in Germany, Ursula. So there is still a bit room for us to grow business. And so therefore, I'm really optimistic here. So at the moment, we have more than 20,000 agents under contract. And we are growing every year, which is a good sign because the customer is perceiving our products as helpful. So therefore, I expect that this can continue for a while. But as I said, it's not the only way to grow revenue here. We want to grow revenue within the memberships, bringing customers from the basic edition into the acquisition edition. That's our target.

Tobi, could you comment on possible M&A targets or Scout24's strategy in this regard?

Sure thing. We've demonstrated over the past, let's say, 2 years already, that we take careful picks for feasible targets that are perceived as bolt-on assets and that help us to accelerate the ecosystem strategy. Again, we talked about immoverkauf24 and we talked about Vermietet.de. So future targets should also contribute to 1 of the 5 or more of the 5 value drivers that we laid out, which is, just to recall, the membership, the leads gen, the enhanced mortgage business and also the consumer Plus products. And then another factor I would share is a general acceleration of our product strategy or adding further value to our users. That will be another criteria.

Okay. The last question in this session would be for you, Ralf. You spoke about the migration into the 3 membership tiers. With the acquisition edition, you currently stand at 19%. Where do you think this can grow in the future?

As I said before, I'm really optimistic. So what we did last year and the year before last year is bringing every customer into the membership framework, and that's what we achieved. And now we are bringing customers -- if this product is for them, the right one, we're bringing them up in the ladder. And what we see is that customers need the acquisition power at the moment. And for this product, we have the acquisition edition. So putting 2 things together, I will say there is a lot of need in the market for this product. And therefore, I expect that we can bring at least 30% of the customers into that product.

Okay. Thank you. So thank you, Tobi and Ralf. For the next session, I'd like to invite Dirk and Thomas to the stage. Welcome back. First one is for you, Dirk. Will you give ARPU details in the future for different customer groups?

Yes. As I said before, we are changing the way how we report on ARPU. We will give a total ARPU for professional customers, including residential and commercial agents and subscription ARPU for private customers. These are representing our new core segments. But certainly, we will explain in the future the composition of the changes that we see in ARPU.

Okay. I think this will make life much easier for the analysts in the future.

This is partly our intention.

Okay. Another question for you, Dirk. It's on marketing. You obviously intend to increase -- yes, maybe it's for both of you?

No. No, you answer.

Read the questions first.

You obviously intend to increase spending in this area. Is it right to think about this as being focused on growing the leads business rather than general brand awareness? What do you think marketing might peak at as a percentage of revenue?

Please?

I wanted Thomas to start off with our aided and unaided brand awareness, but I'll leave that for following the answer from my side. So the question basically refers to the cost slide I showed you earlier on. Marketing is definitely one part of the investment mode cost portion that I outlaid. It will peak in 2022 at about 11% of our overall revenues, and this includes spend for general brand awareness on the one hand and spend for performance marketing to generate seller leads and mortgage leads. From '23 onwards, we expect a stable marketing spend of up to 10% of revenue but certainly, significantly below our overall revenue growth.

Nothing to add from you, Thomas?

That's okay. Thank you.

Okay. Then I have another one.

Brand awareness.

The brand awareness. So the brand awareness is already very high, yes. So our aided brand awareness is in the high 90s, 98% to 99%. So people know us. That is why we're investing especially and with a heavy focus in the areas where we are in land-grab mode. That means on the consumer Plus side but also on the seller lead side, making us as aware with homeowners as consumers are already aware with us.

But I have a nice, interesting question for you, Thomas, now. It's a quite mathematical question. It's on the leads business. If you get EUR 200 per lead and you had EUR 16.1 million of revenue, it implies you sold over 80,000 leads for the 9 months. So in theory, it implies well over 100,000 direct leads sold in 2021. If that's from a conversion rate of 30%, it implies that you originally had over 300,000 submissions. But there are only 375,000 homes sold via agents in Germany each year. So this implies you have nearly all those houses via submissions. So how can you grow submissions and thus, leads?

Thank you for that question. So I think here's my answer. The -- it is right and correct to assume we have roughly 100,000 leads that we are selling throughout this year's seller leads. But with all respect, it is not correct to assume that we are already covering the entirety of the market, and the reason is very simple. Yes, we have about 400,000 agent-enabled sale transactions, but we have millions of homeowners who are considering to sell. So they're looking at evaluation. They might be selling. They want to know what their house is worth, and then they will be selling over time. So the funnel is actually much larger than the 400,000 agent-enabled transactions that you're seeing, and that is why you cannot bring the 80,000 to the 400,000. You should bring the 80,000 into a funnel of a couple of million. What is relevant for the 400,000 agent-enabled transaction is what you're seeing on immoverkauf, so the 1,200 transactions that we enabled, yes. And that is just a tiny fraction of this 400,000. So we have a big opportunity to grow top of the funnel as well as bottom of the funnel.

Okay. We are now moving to the consumer side of the business.

Is it numbers again?

No. It's -- yes, there's one number in it. So how sticky are the consumer subscriptions? Why would the consumer keep paying EUR 16 after a home is found?

So what we are building out with the consumer subscription product is a product set that's supposed to create value in the entire real estate journey. As of today, we're providing lots of value in the search phase and in the application phase. And that is why the duration is 6 to 7 months on average for MieterPlus. But what we are also building on is to provide more and more value in the living phase so that the consumers actually stay with us throughout the tenancy, which is not a couple of months but a couple of years. Again, if we achieve that, we are on a really good trajectory. What we will also see if we're achieving that is that the lifetime will increase, but the ARPU in the living phase, so the revenue per month will go down, but the overall lifetime will actually increase.

And that's -- this quite well leads to the next question. Dirk, by when will you be able to get into monetization mode for your private customers business and show an increasing ARPU?

I mean, first of all, I hope it became clear from the presentation we've been giving. For the Plus products and the landlord subscriptions, we believe it is the right strategy to deploy a land-grab mode to bring as many private customers as possible to our platform very quickly. We have the right products in place, and there is a first-mover advantage with a very attractive total addressable market opportunity. So the Plus products and landlord subscriptions strengthen our network effect by creating leads and further monetization potential with our ecosystem. Vermietet.de allows us to get closer to the rental transaction and to become the #1 property manager without owning a single asset. So reflecting on that, and based on the traction and customer feedback we get, we target to achieve 400,000-plus subscribers by 2026 and 4.5 million registered units. And that implies already a 26% to 28% revenue CAGR for private subscription revenues. So I believe it is absolutely the right thing to do to invest in '22, continue to invest '23 and '24 and, in parallel, deploy a better monetization mode on the already existing customers and then move into a new growth. And that's what we're going to see. And that's reflected in the guidance we just outlined.

Okay. Last question is for you, Thomas. It's about the mortgage business. You said you wanted to enhance the mortgage business on mortgage leads. You already get a lot of requests given the number of homes sold per year via agents. Do you think you can get more requests or is growth in this business more about better verification and qualification and thus, a higher price per lead? On mortgage advisory, you talk about in-house advisory. What does this mean in practice? Do you need to be registered, et cetera? And what is the time scale for moving into this area?

Thank you. So on question number one, so we're already in a good position when it comes to the consumer side of things. So 300,000 consumer requests are a lot. But again, similar to the Realtor Lead Engine, not every single consumer request is actually a sale transaction. There are consumers who are wanting to test their opportunity and their ability to finance to even afford a home. So you have to keep that in mind. And the second thing you have to keep in mind is the 300,000, you should put against the overall number of sale transactions per year because every single sale transaction, irrespective if it's private or agent-brokered, will need a mortgage. So that is 600,000, and there are about 600,000 mortgages that are being renewed every year. So if you put that into perspective, top of the funnel, we actually have opportunity to grow. And then the second opportunity to grow for us is enhancing the quality of the leads, which will lead into higher revenue per lead but then also into transaction revenue. That's question number one. Now question number two, there is regulation around mortgage brokerage in Germany. ImmoScout has the required regulation in place and the licenses in place, and we already have started to build that set of associated brokers because we already brokered a couple of mortgages this year. So this is in place. It's not a plan. It's happening, and all the regulatory elements are there.

Okay. Thank you. Thank you, Dirk and Thomas. In the meantime, we have been able to process some more of your questions. So I'd like to invite Tobi and Ralf back to the stage. Welcome back. Yes, there's -- I think there's only one question for you, Tobi, here. You talked about every listing ad sold to private landlords, including a free Vermietet.de. As you shift to monetizing Vermietet.de with a higher CLV, should we expect PPA revenues to fall?

So as we explained throughout the session, we believe in the life cycle management. And whilst the PPA for private is for free, there's a paywall product also that's taking place. So you shouldn't assume that this goes down to 0. But we are shifting parts of that, which will be recycled in a more valuable path as part of our CLV view, as Thomas also pointed out in the prior session with Ralf, i.e., we were replacing a onetime listing with a much more valuable CLV pathway where consumers, owners, landlords and tenants and so forth are engaged with each other, and we sit on top of it.

Thank you. Ralf, if you have pricing power, why are you providing agents discounts?

I mean, first of all, agents are also salespersons, right? So they like to negotiate. It's completely okay. And so therefore, it's usual -- it's often in the nature of the contract that there is a kind of discount in there. But -- and that's maybe new or that's new that we have a rate cut behind. So we know exactly, okay, how far is the price in the contract away from the rate cut price? And the rate cut prices are connected in the contract. So -- and that was what I'm trying to explain is how the contracts are structured here. So there is a discount in there. And so we have 2 tools in order to optimize the contracts. We can say, okay, there is a new rate cut price or we can start to renegotiate discount prices with our customers. And of course, I mean, sometimes you have to give a discount in order to bring the customers from a lower-tiered membership version into a higher-tiered membership version. And then if the customer feels, "Oh, this product was successful for me," you have a better pricing power next year. And if you need to renew the contract, and then, of course, you reduce your discount. That's normal negotiation between contract partners. So nothing to do really with the pricing power. The pricing power of this company and this product is really, really strong, I have to say.

Thank you, Ralf. I do understand it. I hope our audience also does understand this next question. What do you expect to be the impact from the market share of smaller agents decreasing?

So I mean, so far, we don't see it, right? What we see is we are able to increase the number of customers, but we expect that there will be a market consolidation, means maybe the market share of smaller agents is getting smaller, which is what we have seen in other markets as well already. So what we then know is that this -- what agents really need, in particular, agents who are not that big, they need more support. And that's actually what we are offering to them, right? We are offering to every customer group, smaller agents, midsized agent, big agents, different product sets. And for those who need more acquisition power, in particular, the smaller agents because they have -- they don't have the marketing power of a big agent or larger agent, we are offering support to them. So I expect that then there is more demand from those agents for our acquisition products, which is positive for us.

Okay. I'm processing more questions. That's why I can only listen to you with half an ear. But next question I have here for you. When you talk about submissions on the Realtor Lead Engine side, do you effectively mean requests for property valuations? Or are there other ways to get submissions, for example, "Please have an agent contact me?"

So what we built over the last 2 years is we built -- call it Homeowner Hub. So it's not -- we want to register homeowners and not only for the purpose of getting a valuation for their properties, also for, "Okay, I need additional information here and there are other services." So -- and because we know it takes time until a homeowner really is sure, "Okay, I want to sell my property," for instance. And so it takes time. Therefore, we want to onboard every homeowner in Germany. That's actually our objective here. And therefore, we moved the system into objects, transactions and also customers here, the new paradigm. And that helps us to onboard every -- hopefully, every homeowner here in Germany. And then, of course, there are different ways to generate submissions for our seller lead product here because then we can go to the registered homeowners and say, "Hello, where are you -- where do you stay at the moment? Are you considering to sell your property?" And that's actually what we want to do. So at the moment, we are spending a lot of marketing money to onboard homeowners but also to acquire seller leads outside of the portal. But in the future, it will be much more from coming from the portal. That's what we expect. And therefore, we are building the products for the Homeowner Hub at the moment.

Okay.

Tobi, is that correct? Or anything to add here?

No. No.

Thank you.

Quite comprehensive.

Then I would say we move to the next session. And it appears that there are a lot of questions for Dirk. So let me invite Thomas and Dirk back to the stage. Okay. So let's start, however, with Thomas' questions. I might mix Dirk's in between. How ambitious is the 400,000 subscriber target, given you are already over halfway there and growing at a very fast rate?

It's a very fair question. It is an ambitious target. Please keep in mind these 40,000 subscribers we have today, they are not granted, right? We have to earn them because today, they are with us through the search and application phase. But then they leave us after 3, 5, 6, 7 months. So what we are building out is we are building out more value in the tenancy in the living phase. So by the end of '26, we will have 400,000 subscribers, and they stay with us. They don't go away after 3 months, but we make them stay. And that's why also, the asset of Vermietet.de is so important because we can connect the landlords and the privates on this platform and really have them in our ecosystem.

Okay. Next one for you because they are so -- to be clear, the figure you gave for IV24 leads of 25,000 to 30,000, was that a number for 2021? Should we think about that as proxy for transactions through IV24 in, say, 2023? Or is there some leakage there?

That's a very good question. So there is some leakage. In every lead business and also if it's a hot lead business, there is leakage. So you can roughly assume a 10% conversion. That means out of the, let's say, 25,000 to 30,000, about 10% is really ending up in a transaction. And that is because of many reasons. People might still decide not to sell, do something else, et cetera. So there is leakage because we are trying to bring up that number, but it will translate into about 10% sales within the next 6 to 18 months.

Okay. Let's move to Dirk, and I'll reserve 2 questions for you for later. Dirk, based on your guidance, OpEx in fiscal year '22 will be EUR 200 million and nearly EUR 300 million by 2026. Meanwhile, Rightmove operates their property vertical in the U.K. for GBP 80 million. What is driving the difference in cost base? Do you think you could be more efficient in your operating model?

No. Otherwise, we would have found those efficiencies. But I think the comparison to Rightmove is a very fair one here. If you take our new segmentation and you take the professional segment and within that professional segment, you take the membership revenues and the PPA revenues and you associate the cost with that, that is about the profitability I would expect for us to be very comparable to Rightmove with margins of 70% something. But what we put on top of that and why we believe our strategy is the right one is we put a Private segment on it, and we invest for our agents. And this is where we spend our money, sales cost, marketing cost, product cost, tech cost, just because we want to accelerate. And if I look at the growth rates that we just outlaid to you, double digit, 12%, 13%, I think these growth rates really show that in order to grow at an attractive rate, you need to find new addressable markets. We found them. We wrote a strategy for it. We defined measures, and we are executing on them. And that's how we take the business forward.

Talking about growth rates, at your 2019 CMD, you guided to ImmoScout24 growing low to mid-teens in 2022, a proxy for your view of medium-term growth at the time. Now you are saying circa 12% CAGR in the next few years. It is a small difference, but this sounds more cautious. Of course, there has been a pandemic, but global peers haven't seen midterm growth prospects slow. What is your take here? How have medium-term expectations changed in those 2 years?

Not at all. I think, first of all, comparing us to global peers, I would like to point out that within the classified segment, be it real estate, be it auto, I've seen no other businesses growing at 12% in the consensus over the next years. So I think we're at least ahead or on top of the crowd. Coming back to the CMD 2019, I think it just displays the consistency of our guidance going forward. So yes, at Capital Markets Day, we guided low to mid 10s, and that's what we're delivering. And we could deliver that until 2026. So I think we're very consistent with what we said before.

Yes. I have another guidance question here for you. When we look at the new guidance, you are guiding for fiscal year '23 to return to historical profit drop -- no, to historical profit drop-through of revenue growth of 60%. After much lower levels in fiscal year '20, '21 and '22, why should we expect that drop-through to accelerate again?

Yes. You just need to look at the reasons. 2020, we are in the middle of COVID. 2021, we acquired Vermietet.de with drop-through to margin of roughly 1 percentage point. We invested into immoverkauf. And of course, like every good businessman, we are awaiting that the investments we are making, and we are expecting that, that the investments we are making will return profit in the future. And I think the plan we laid out is very clear on that. 2023, '24, '25, '26, you will see margin improvements. Is it conservative? I'll leave it up for some analysts to build their opinion on. It's a commitment from our side, that's what I can say.

I think the next question is a good one even for both of you. It's again on guidance. The guidance implies that by 2026, Realtor Lead Engine could contribute close to EUR 150 million, probably EUR 150 million revenue.

The question is?

That's -- is that true that it could contribute EUR 150 million revenues in 2026, the Realtor Lead Engine?

I mean, we've shown you in this session the revenues we are currently having with the different models. We have shown you the CAGR, and that's our commitment to it.

I can only add to that. Yes, certainly, we believe that there is a huge market out there for the Realtor Lead Engine, and we have tested that over the past quarters. And that's why we came out with the guidance. We're not coming out with something we haven't seen in the market before, we haven't tested in the market before, we haven't seen agents' reactions, consumer reactions to. Anything we bake into our guidance has been tested and tested all over again. So the numbers we've been giving you are based on the experience we made with our product set in the market. And that's why we stick to them. And yes, there is a huge revenue opportunity out there.

Some more questions on guidance. When we look at the new guidance, you are guiding for fiscal year '23 to return to historical -- no, that's the one we had already, the drop-through. Yes. So let's -- the drop-through, we don't need. Can you discuss the evolution of investment beyond fiscal year '22? Should we consider profit growth comparable to revenues in fiscal year '23?

Exactly as you can see on our guidance slide, '23 onwards, we're at a CAGR of revenue of 12% and at a CAGR of ordinary operating EBITDA of 13%. So obviously, we are improving guidance year-on-year as we come toward 2026. And there, I believe, you can do the math. Margin will be somewhere between 58%, 59%, 60%. So that's our return to profitability on a growth path.

Okay. So I don't need to ask the next question. You just answered it. I will read it out, but it's answered. Doing the math, it looks like by 2026, you would be at 58% margins on the trajectory you have given. Is that a fair assumption? Does that seem conservative? So I think it's answered. So...

I can repeat my answer to the first question if you want to, but I think I was pretty clear on that.

Let's go back to Thomas. If average time to find a rental property is 3 to 6 months, and -- we have a lot of mathematical questions.

Yes. Thank you for testing my analytical skills here.

Okay. "If average time to find a rental property is 3 to 6 months and 90% of subscribers are MieterPlus, I'm surprised the average lifetime value is 7 months. Why is this? You said you believe you can increase customer lifetime value further. Is this driven by increasing share of BuyerPlus+ in the mix? Or do you think there is scope to increase lifetime value of MieterPlus as well? If so, how?"

So the answer will probably be a bit of a repetition of what I said earlier. So yes, the average time to find a property is 3 to 6 months. And yes, we have BuyerPlus+ subscriptions, which bring up the average duration because it takes longer to find a property to buy. So we have -- we will grow our subscription base both for MieterPlus and for BuyerPlus+, which brings the overall CLV up. But as I said before, we are building out a stronger value proposition also in the tenancy phase so that our TenantPlus+, our MieterPlus subscribers stay with us not only 3 to 6 months but years and years throughout the tenancy phase.

Last one.

And to add on that, I mean, if you've seen the slides, overall subscriber growth was 73%, right, although the ARPU dropped. And that shows you, as Thomas since outlined, the subscribers stay longer on our platform. And instead of doing a 3-month revenue, we migrated them up to 7 months right now. And that is improving the customer lifetime value.

Yes. Now we are coming -- I think this -- yes, this is a question on Vermietet.de. You're guiding to 4.5 million registered units by 2026, but you spoke about EUR 5 to EUR 15 per month. That gets to a very big number. Again, calculating.

I'm just calculating.

Yes. Can you help us understand what is -- what the disconnect is?

I would love to get a nonfinancial question at some point but maybe at the very end. Yes, it is right, but here's the reason. So we are managing these 4.5 million units, but we are monetizing per landlord. So every landlord with a set of units gets a certain monetization level. And we are starting very low with EUR 5, and then it goes up to EUR 15. That's number one. Number two, not every landlord will be monetized. There is a basic free version of Vermietet.de in place. And then there is a monetized version, which has more features. So only 1/4, maybe 1/3 of our private landlord population will be monetized, which is a regular model that we are applying by design. We are applying it because of 2 reasons: first, we want to build out the number of objects as much as possible. And then secondly, also, we are not -- yes, we are testing our way into the right monetization levels because as for the consumer business, this has not been done before. So this is new waters. And so we are assuming 25% to 30% of landlords will be monetized, and the rest will be not.

Okay. Thank you.

Thank you.

So As we have -- and by the way, it's dark outside now. So we are really coming to the end. But as we have also received questions on tech, for the last Q&A session, I would like to ask Rowena together with Tobi back to the stage. And thank you, Thomas and Dirk.

Thank you.

Thanks, Ursula. Thanks, everybody.

Welcome back.

Thank you.

Rowena, first one for you. Tech talents in Europe are really hard to find. How do you plan on tackling this?

A very relevant question right now, I know. Well, so one thing is that we do have tech hubs located in different locations like in Berlin, Cologne, Vienna and Spain. And this does allow us to attract strong talent in all these different locations. The other thing that we're doing is we are developing strong leadership, and this is something that we know that a new talent is always focused on as well as existing folks in the company. Everyone wants to join a company that has a clear vision and has leaders who can deliver on that vision. As part of our hiring process, we also have a lot of focus on diversity, which is another key driver that everyone is interested in. The other thing that we are like also focusing on is participation in tech events like conferences such as droidcon and so on. We want to make sure that we represent ourselves effectively as citizens of the tech community. And one of the things we're going to be doing is also increasing the number of tech recruiters so that we can actively engage with talent on a continuous basis. And of course, Ursula, one point is being #1 in the industry is a really good way to attract talent. So that always helps.

Thank you.

I would agree.

So another one for you, Rowena. With all your plans for product development, can you comment on the scalability of the platform?

Yes. When it comes to scalability, the way our architecture is written and the code is written is modularized. So we have a lot of micro services in place, which, by nature, can be scaled as needed to meet the business needs. So that's definitely there. On top of this, we are also built on a cloud platform. So that gives us very critical infrastructure that helps us meet our scaling needs. And the other thing that we're doing is we're also investing in failover strategies, and this is required to help us meet our reliability and performance requirement. So with all of these items in place, these components, we are more than ready to meet the demands of our increasing customers in the future.

Okay. Tobi, I have the first final question -- the perfect final question for you. We've heard you speak in detail about your exciting plans for the future. How confident are you in delivering these?

The precondition for delivering a plan like that and sharing this with you is you need to be confident that there is a market we've tested, that we do know and understand the customers' needs, so check there. The second one is you need to be confident that you do have a right to play because you have the trust in the brand and the traffic to attract the audience, check. The third one is you need to be able to have the right products. We didn't just come up with these products a month prior to Capital Markets Day. We've been working behind the scenes since literally after the last Capital Market Day, so check. And then you need to be able to have the confidence to scale, which Rowena just answered a few questions. So my personal confidence level is very high, and the entire team's confidence level is very high. We are committed to delivering that.

Thank you. And thank you is actually how I would like to end this. Thank you. Well, before we turn it off, let me say thank you to everyone. And I'm sure I can also say this in the name of the whole management team. Thank you, our analysts and investors, for listening and actively participating through your questions. Thank you, everyone internally at Scout24 for making this happen. Very specifically, I want to mention the wider IR team, including our Chief of Staff and Assistant of the CFO; the communications team who took care of the video; the product teams who gave so much valuable input for Thomas' and Ralf's slides; the brand team who gave a perfect look to the slides; the controlling team for all the financial numbers; and last but not least, the event team. You can't see them, but they're all here. This was a perfect one team effort. And with this, I would like to say goodbye and speak to you soon.

Thank you.

Thank you.