Scout24 SE (G24) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

All right. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Scout24 2024 Capital Markets Day. I think many of you have met me already. For those of you who don't know. My name is Filip Lindvall. I am Vice President, Investor Relations at Scout24. I would like to start by extending a very warm welcome to everyone here in the room, investors, analysts and everyone else who has come here. I know we have some investors from U.S. who have flown over here for this. So, thank you very much. It's great to have you here in our cool, vibrant new Berlin offices. Of course, I also want to extend a very warm welcome to everyone who has dialed in, if I assume. Please rest assured we will do whatever we can to try and transpose the energy of the room. All right, so let's have a look at the agenda. As you can see on the slide, today is essentially divided into 2 blocks. The first block, which we will start in just a few minutes will be the earnings presentation regarding our preliminary results released this morning, which I'm sure you have read. This will be done by Tobias Hartmann, our CEO; and Dirk Schmelzer, our CFO. The only difference to the way we normally run our earnings calls is that we will not offer opportunity for Q&A. After this presentation, we will instead have an extended Q&A of 45 minutes at the end of the Capital Markets Day. So we do ask for your patience with any questions. As you can see in the schedule -- on the schedule, the earnings call will take us to around half past 1. Then we will have a 10-minute break before we then officially kick off with the Capital Markets Day. The Capital Markets Day is divided in 2 sessions, 2 blocks. The first block will run until approximately half past 3, where we will then have an extended coffee break and for the people here in the room, there will be a great opportunity to test, see and feel our products just outside of this room. I am sure you saw the big screens, so please take the opportunity. The product [ VVPs ] will be there to show you our great new innovative products. We will then resume around 4 o'clock and we will then run the presentation until approximately 5 o'clock and then we will have the Q&A of around 45 minutes, which will then conclude the event. But for everyone here in the room, there will be an opportunity to network to have some food upstairs and drinks and continue to test our products. Two more points before we can get going. Number 1, I would ask you to kindly not take any photos, do not record a presentation or the session. It's not necessary, the presentation will be uploaded tomorrow or Friday, of course, as well as the webcast. Final point, you see on the slide, the legal stuff. Please take note of the disclaimer. And now I would like to welcome Tobias Hartmann, our Chief Executive Officer.

Hello, everybody. Great to see so many of you at our office here. Thank you for being with us, and thank you also for all of you who have dialed in remotely. Again, as Filip pointed out, we'll do our best to make sure that you feel almost like being in the room. So let's get started with the full year results 2023. You saw the results, but we'd like to provide more context and more color around it. And it's a simply stated summary, 2023 was a very successful year for Scout24. And you see a couple of points, and let me grab a few and comment on those. First of all, the company turned 25 years old last year. 25 years is a lot to celebrate, but the main thing we'd like to put context around is, is 25 years of uninterrupted growth. It's 25 years of expertise in real estate. It's 25 years of just thinking about real estate digitization in Germany and also Austria. The second point I'd like to make is that we delivered a third year of double-digit revenue growth, albeit some of you have argued in the past that this would be impossible given the market environment and the significant market changes that had occurred in the German market. The third point I'd like to make is that it's also a special year 2023 because we have surpassed the EUR 500 million revenue mark and we've also surpassed the EUR 300 million o.o. EBITDA mark, which is a significant milestone. And it shows that we've delivered against 2 earnings upgrades within the year and closed out when EBITDA growth at the very high end of our latest upgrade. And the last point, since it was already a busy year, we also closed a highly strategic acquisition, which is part of our playbook. It's part of our playbook of keeping investing and making sure that we have the right foundation in place to take this company to the next level, which we'll talk about later this afternoon. And with Sprengnetter, we have the capability to get into the next stage of we would say the 3-sided interconnected marketplace that we'll talk about as a theme this afternoon. So we've delivered in a very challenging macro environment. We have shown growth, continued growth with our [indiscernible] base, which is the core of the company. You see that not only have we added new customers, we were also able to deliver growth in ARPU that shows the significant relevance of our company in these challenging and changing market environments. The second part is our unique private subscription business, which, again, some of you may have questioned in the past, why we would do that, has shown continued growth and relevance in these markets, which we believe we are the only one offering such and such product suite. And we also believe that only as a market leader, you can offer such service convincingly. Our adjusted EPS turned out to be EUR 2.52, which is growing 32%, which is over 2x the revenue growth for the full year 2023. And as Filip pointed out and as you may expect, we will provide the guidance for 2024 as part of this afternoon session of the CMD. So let's start with a quick review of Q4 before we get into the full year. The good news is that when we look at the last quarter, we saw a 15% growth in quarter, reaching EUR 132.5 million, which shows a very steady healthy growth. So it was a continuation of what we had delivered throughout the first 9 months of the year. The core membership continued to grow. You look at the customary base by 2%. So yes, we are actually in a position to add new customers. And we fell short of the 22,000 mark, but we know it's already there and so that's the next milestone we'd like to realize. Our ARPU also grew by 12%, and it grew by a combination of continued migration that we showed as well as the strong trajectory, which we also saw with the different product mixes for people upgrading and booking additional services and products. And then obviously, in our TenantPlus in our subscription business on the private side, we continue to show a customer base increase of 18% to almost 380,000 subscribers. Also, we were able to show overproportionate revenue growth of about 20%, which shows that we're doing the right thing between customer growth and monetization and CLV optimization. So all in all, -- we're very pleased, and this goes out as a huge thank you to all the Scout24 families and teams that have delivered a very, very strong operational execution in a tough environment with lots of uncertainty. Moving to the full year. We put this in context. So you can do the math, but we closed it out with EUR 509 million in revenue, which again is a great milestone for Scout. We also closed it out with about EUR 304 million in EBITDA, which is again at the upper end of the range that we had upgraded twice throughout the year with a 21% increase. And again, to put things in context on the professional side, we showed a very, very solid and healthy growth of subscription revenue with 12.4%, which is again a mix of the customer growth at slightly slow of 22,000 and also the ARPU growth with our professional customers with an incoming of EUR 1,114. On the private side, again, we're very proud of that. We were able to convince a lot of new customers to join our offering in this heated market, but heated now a little bit upside down with the rental market, obviously very red hot with 20% increase in subscription revenue and almost 18% private customer growth. And with that, I would like to hand it over to Dirk to provide more color on the financials. Thank you very much.

Thank you very much, Tobi. Good afternoon, and also welcome from my side. Now after the beginning remarks of Tobi, I would like you to take a look at our performance on the respective segments. What we are particularly proud of in this environment of 2023 was that we managed to grow our revenues in all segments while growing margin and profitability. With that, meaning we improved our operating leverage. Particularly the outstanding was, of course, the growth in the professional margin, where we added around 300 basis points, a testament to once a very favorable mix in revenues and second an increased relevance of our membership products and thirdly a very tight cost management. On the private side, we slowly but very consistently improved margins while growing in the high teens and adding relevance quarter-on-quarter. While on a low scale, but nonetheless remarkable, we saw growth in the Media and other segment and that was due to 3 elements. First of all, the [indiscernible] Austria, that have grown a fantastic business, once again, in the mid teens. Secondly, it was due to our CRM businesses, FLOWFACT and Propstack, where we have seen a finalization of a migration of all our customers to the cloud. So we now have around 4,000 customers completely cloud based on our market-leading CRM systems. And as you recall from the past, we are executing on our media strategy, which means more of our inventory is going to our professional customers, less of our inventory is going to advertisers. But nonetheless, with less inventory, our media teams managed to improve revenue and also margin. And all of that led to more than EUR 500 million -- EUR 0.5 billion of revenues and a year-on-year EBITDA -- sorry, an EBITDA margin of 59.7%, a year-on-year improvement of the EBITDA margin of 21%, while growing revenues 13.8%. Now let me dive a little bit deeper into 2 segments, which is, 1, the Professional segment. What have we seen here? We've seen an overall annual growth of 12.3% and we've seen a quarterly growth of 15.9%. And that wasn't a mere pricing issue. That was the fact that we managed to add customers to our base. So you saw a 3% customer increase year-on-year. We managed to add features, which add more and more relevance to our customer base, the agents. And we managed to convince more and more agents to move into higher membership packages, adding more relevance to them. And that led to an ARPU increase, as Tobi just outlined, which we saw at 12% in the fourth quarter and 8.7% overall year-on-year. So there was, of course, a much lower performance on the Lead businesses, where we have seen transactions going down roughly 30% year-on-year. And nonetheless, our performance was going down 13% in revenues on the Lead businesses which tells you that also in a tough market environment that we've seen in Germany, we've been able to grow market share. On the other hand, if you see here, a seller leads growth of 38% or 4% year-on-year in the fourth -- in the full year and 38% in the fourth quarter. That is merely a technical effect that you see from the inclusion of Sprengnetter, which we report under this revenue line. The PPA business in total, was down 4% year-on-year and 19% in quarter 4. Now that is not bad news because what we are doing is we're taking PPA customers, so pay-per-add customers and migrate them into our membership. So a lot of those customers that have formally relied on Scout once a year, twice a year, 4, 5 times a year, they are now relying on Scout month-on-month, and they are consuming the full product suite. Now let me move to the Private segment. Tobi has already outlined, we saw a very good performance with our private customer base. And of course, as we have seen interest rates going up over the year 2022 and then finally in 2023, a lot of consumers have decided to move from the decision to buy an object into the decision to rent out an object because they couldn't afford it anymore. So what we have seen was a huge demand for rental objects and a huge demand for rental objects for us translated into a huge demand for our TenantPlus product. So on the average of the fourth quarter, you saw 378,000 customers on the platform, consuming our product and taking up the ability to be the first in line to be pre-informed about new apartments, new units coming up on our platform to have a credit check and to have a digital application map. And that led to an overall growth across the year of roughly 19% in revenues. We added 20% of subscriptions. We slightly improved the average subscription time, and we improved the average revenue per user in the full year by 2,%, in the fourth quarter also roughly by 2%. On the listing side, we saw a similar development then we saw on the PPA side on the Professional segment. Now why is it a similar development. The listing in the Private segment is mirrored by the listing in the Professional segment. In Germany, as you have seen from one of our publications, more and more sellers are relying on agents to sell their object. So what we have seen was a growth in our PPA product that was 18% year-on-year, but slightly went down to 6% year-on-year in the fourth quarter. As I said, not necessarily bad news because the listing comes to our platform anyway. Let it be via a private listing or with the help of an agent that can use our product suite. So in total, what you've seen year-on-year was an overproportionate EBITDA growth. We've been growing 20% -- roughly 19.5% the private EBITDA while revenues have been growing roughly 19%. So the margin has seen a slight decrease overall in the fourth quarter, but across the year, if we look at the full year 2023, we've been growing margin by 0.3 percentage points. Now that adds up to an overall picture on our group performance. As you've read now, 13.8% revenue growth, I don't think I need to continuously repeat that number, but what is of particularly importance is acceleration of revenue growth in the fourth quarter, where we've seen 15% growth. As we announced our strategy to peak our investment in 2022, accordingly, what we saw was a slight decrease in own work capitalized throughout the year from roughly EUR 29 million to EUR 23 million, and throughout the fourth quarter from EUR 7 million to EUR 5 million. As I said in the beginning, we also saw a huge operating leverage, which was due, on the one hand, to a favorable product mix but on the other hand also due to measures we undertook throughout the year in order to make the business scaling and more efficient. So you see that our personnel costs slightly increased, which is due to the inclusion of Sprengnetter. If you just look at the fourth quarter, there was an increase of 9%. We added around 200 full-time equivalents with the acquisition of Sprengnetter. But across the year, personnel costs just increased by 4%. Marketing spend, we've seen a decrease from EUR 51 million to EUR 48 million, although we saw a significant uplift in revenue growth. That means we spent 4.5% less on marketing year-on-year than we did the previous year. IT costs, I think of particular importance for us because we've been managing to drive down cost through negotiating prices on the one hand, but we've also been managing to drive down usage of the cloud platforms we are engaging with by optimizing the architecture. So what you see was a growing business with shrinking IT cost. And then you saw selling costs up roughly 20%, absolutely 100% corresponding to what we've seen on growth on the private subscription side. Recall for a private subscriber, we also offer what we call a credit check and that credit check we pay to a third-party provider. So those selling costs obviously increased in line with the customer increase. Other operating costs, we saw a slight better performance than in the previous year, so 10% down on other operating costs, which led us to an ordinary operating EBITDA margin of roughly 60% -- 59.7% year-on-year and 59.9% in the fourth quarter. But more importantly that dropped down to reported EBITDA, which was growing in the same number. So here, you see the nonoperating effects, which led us to a reported EBITDA in the fourth quarter of EUR 76 million, in the full year, EUR 279 million, we slightly went down on D&A due to the purchase price allocation that we had with ImmoScout, which went down in 2022, already improving our EBIT by 29% year-on-year. The financial result has been positively impacted by the full allocation of our AutoScout proceeds with share buyback. Because in the previous year, we still had parts of the AutoScout proceeds in a fund, which, in the fourth quarter was loss-making. So we profited from that. So earnings per share on a non-adjusted basis -- earnings before tax, sorry, were growing 40% and 19% in the fourth quarter. Our net income, on a non-adjusted basis was growing 19% in the fourth quarter and 45% year-on-year. And what is of particular importance and Tobi mentioned it already. So we managed to drop down the operating leverage we created on the top line to our adjusted EPS, which came out 32% above the year 2022. The measure, which helped in that was, of course, our share buyback. You've probably seen the average number of shares that we had out decreased to EUR 75 million in the fourth quarter compared to EUR 78 million on the average of -- at the end of the financial year 2022. So with that, I would like to remind you, once again, to our value creation building blocks, which are a strong revenue growth through organic revenue and M&A, creating operating leverage and hence growing our earnings before tax and interest, net income accretion, growing our dividend while maintaining our overall dividend guidance of 30% to 50% of the net adjusted income, and capital allocation with share buybacks. So usually, at this point, you will see my financial guidance for the ongoing financial year and the years to come. But as Filip and Tobi outlined, we would like you to stick with us for a while, explain our product strategy, attend our CMD and then we dive into Q&As. Thank you very much. And with that, I think I hand over to the break, right, Filip? Thanks very much. [Break]

All right. Welcome back again. Thank you for coming back. And those of you who are still online, thank you for being with us. So let's move to the main part of the day. which is the Capital Markets part. And I'd like to, first of all, give you a little bit of a rundown of what we've planned to cover with you. And it's a very comprehensive agenda because this team has worked so hard in wanting to make sure that you track actually where we're coming from, but also and more importantly where we are going from here. This is not a new strategy. This is an update on the strategy that you've heard in the past, and you'll have a much better understanding, hopefully, afterwards because we put it in context. What do we mean context, we put it in context. How we have been growing the business in the past, what the key drivers were then also putting it in context of what the German real estate market looks like currently and what we think it will look like and this will be covered, of course, by Gesa, who will give you more insights, then we'll move over and talk about our product portfolio and our tech portfolio because at the end of the day, we are tech-driven product company and we believe in the fact that we need to have the best product out there in order to grow. And that is something that Ralf, our CPTO, will deliver. And it's not just PowerPoint, but it's also then a coffee break where you can walk out and engage with our teams and test the product because those are not PowerPoint products. These products are up and running. And as a matter of fact, there's a new product that also being launched just around the corner beginning of March, and you will get a very sneak preview of what that would look like. Then, we will talk about our growth strategy when we have Gesa coming back talking about how are we going to bring this to market. How do we take those drivers for the various constituencies and translated into growth and then obviously, Dirk is the man of the day and will share some updated financial numbers and the outlook with you. Then we'll have a wrap-up and then we'll have a Q&A session where the full team is available. We have plenty of time to address anything that you may want to discuss with us. So thank you again for being with us. Thank you for being dialed in. And we thought a good way of getting started might be with a little movie. So enjoy the next 2.5 minutes, and that should give you a good flavor of what's there to come. [Presentation]

Okay. A couple of powerful messages, but it was just a movie. So we're trying to dig deeper and walk you through the various parts, what we understand when we talk about the next chapter, the next level, which is all about interconnectivity. But before we get there, we do think it's a hygiene factor and a good practice to go back to what we stated in 2021. This was December 2021. Obviously, very different times, very different environment and we very well remember when we presented our strategy and the numbers, and let's compare notes where we are today. So first of all, building on our earnings call before, when we look at the hard facts, there's basically a couple of things that I would say speak for themselves. We talked about very strong growth. We talked about the fact that we had grown double digit in the third year in a meaningfully different market environment in a very changing market environment, where some questions were asked, rightfully so. Can we deliver what we stated in 2021 when we are in 2023, what started mid of 2022, to become a very different market environment. It shows that we delivered against the numbers, actually, we not only delivered, we out delivered. So to put it in context, it's a 31% revenue growth since full year 2021. It translated into overproportionate o.o. EBITDA growth of 36% and it also translated in adjusted EPS growth of 66% compared to 2021. So we delivered these financial results against a very tough and changed market environment. And when we talked about Capital Markets Day 2021, we presented a strategy where we said we would add new offerings and we would approach this like a portfolio product powerhouse, and we would continue to invest into product because we would like to be the partner, a resilient partner, a resilient company in any market environment. To be a bit more concrete, we break this down for you. Again, we outperformed on 3 very important financial metrics, revenue, absolute o.o. EBITDA and o.o. EBITDA margin. As you can see, the uplift in o.o. EBITDA also outpaced the revenue growth uplift while we invested in the past to then be the beneficiary of a scaled operations and being able to monetize it the right way at the right time, which was exactly by design what we wanted to do and we delivered against it. The EBITDA outperformance in 2023 versus 2021 is even more impressive when you look at the margin profile. This is a company now that we approached the 60% margin profile that we could not have delivered. If we would not have taken the steps that we took to balance the portfolio and be able to market that accordingly whatever the different customer groups needed. So we overdelivered there, and we have a much more attractive margin profile than we thought we would have and that we stated what we would deliver. The reason for that, why we are there and the reason why we are excited to have you here in the room or on the screen is because this didn't come about in just 2 years. This has been in the making for many, many, many years, and it's important to understand the story of ImmoScout where we're going by understanding where we're coming from and what are the ingredients. There's so many ingredients and we just picked a few. But these ingredients are utterly important, especially in times that are uncertain and there are a little bit upside down here in Germany when it comes to who is the real estate matchmaker of the future. 25 years of expertise that is an asset of expertise in the German real estate market because the German real estate market is a lot different from other markets. You'll hear that later, when Gesa talks a little bit about the market, the market specificities and also the complexity. You need to have some sort of traffic. We got that traffic. We got that traffic in a very healthy and stable environment with about 19 million unique monthly visitors. You need to have something else, which is trust. And you need to have something else, which is you got to be known out there, which is the 90% aided brand awareness or when we talk about trust later on, how we also transitioned that into being the most trustful marketplace. And then there's something which we didn't have in 2021, but which we've now built out, which is a part of the assets foundation that we're going to put to play, which is the 378,000 private plus customers, yes, we had already a bunch, but now we have more. We have more insights. We have more data, we have more inventory. We have more content around it. We have the 1.2 million registered users are on the Homeowner Hub, well, we didn't have that because it was just an idea. And the idea of the Homeowner Hub is not that we just have registrations, the idea of the Homeowner Hub is we have content. The content sits right there, and we have engagement. So we'll get to talk about that. And of course, the backbone of the company, we have more customers than we used to have, and we keep growing. So this is not just a 2-year thing. This is following a very strategic puzzle piece that we've laid out, and we are here now to take it to the next level. Another fact we wanted to bring across, which is the DNA of this company. The DNA of this company is for 25 years this company has been growing. There were a lot of challenges along the way. Dot-com bubble, financial crash, COVID, you name it. This company, for any year, has grown because it's resilient because people know what to do because teams are very well connected and because we've always had a fantastic product suite. So that's why our proof is for 25 years, we've done so, and we intend to do so for the next years as well, no matter what happens in the environment. This is an important picture. Many of you are fantastic experts in the classified space. You know competitors, you know peers, you know other business models, you internationally networked with other experts. And the majority of businesses that are put underneath the ledger of classifieds follow a very clear and simple, that's why we love it, formula, which is listings, traffic, money. So it was with Scout24 and ImmoScout up until 2018, 2019. And it worked as we saw 25 years or 20 years, it worked. But we said, wait a moment, there is a limitation, in particular, if you operate in the German market, which has some specificities that we do not see in any other markets. So we took it to the next level during the CMD 2021. We introduced the paradigm shift, what we call objects, customers, transactions. And that's what we call internally the value circle around the Happiness Triangle. The 3 different customer groups and a very circle around it. And we didn't just introduce it as a PowerPoint picture, we did work behind the scene, massive work, product, tech investments, M&A and everything. So what we're here to kick off now in 2024 and what we're going to talk about, and that's the word that you'll hear a lot will be interconnectivity because what we've done is we've built out the 3 constituencies, obviously, the professionals, which was the starting point, but then also the seekers with the Plus subscriptions that you're all very familiar with. We've gotten a lot better there. But then we added the Homeowner. So we have 3 constituencies and we built out 3 fantastic platforms, but not enough. Now we are about to connect these platforms because that is the interconnectivity that we'll talk about this afternoon. So let's define interconnectivity a little bit closer what we mean by that because it's a beautiful word, but the question is what's behind it. And interconnectivity is complex because interconnectivity is something you can't just pull off and say, okay, let's interconnect. Let's interconnect the seekers and the agents. Well, you can do that -- but if you don't have the Plus seekers, you can't interconnect them in a way like we can because we get the Plus seekers. It's a subscribed seeker with a very specific profile, with a very specific engagement. If you're a Homeowner and you say let interconnect, of course, you can interconnect at the mercy of the Homeowner to say now I'd like to reach out to a real estate agent, okay? But we have new forms of interconnectivity points that we can offer up and we are the only ones to be able to do that. And the recipe behind that is put together on this slide from 2 and let me just grab a few. Let's talk about optic logic versus simple listing logic. Ralf will get deeper into that, but imagine a nonproprietary content, which is part of a listing that you get delivered that you don't own, that you don't know, that you don't know where it's coming from. You don't even know whether it's correct or not. It's just a listing and a description as opposed to, I know what Invalidenstraße 65 looks like as an object because it's like an SKU if I'm on an Amazon database. And I know that the pair of 501 jeans at Amazon looks different than a pay of 501 Levi's Jeans with Macy's. So we have established an object logic because we think everything in real estate is around the object itself and not a listing. Let's grab something else. Generic content, personalized content, self-explanatory, but yet very important. In order to pull off what we just stated on that slide, you need to be able to turn unknown traffic or visitors into known traffic or subscribed people, which means you need to have an account logic. You need to have an account logic, not only on a membership part with professionals, but on a private part and on the Homeowner part. We established that. We reconfigured our entire IT. And then we look at the data points, and so all of a sudden, it became from unknown data and very impersonal to personalize content because people are actually uploading their own content, they are generating it and they're willing to share if it's a benefit to them. So whole point is interconnectivity is a means of from 2. And we are talking about, we did the 2. So now let's talk about interconnectivity. How do we enable interconnectivity. We talked about the 3 platforms. We built these 3 platforms. To our knowledge, no one else has 3 platforms like that, no one. Building these platforms is hard, but then you got to do something else. You need to have 2 things in place, which is the object database that we talked about. We also built that. It's live. Ralf will share it. You can test it out here during the break. And we also have a lot of data and we have AI. Data, as you can imagine, 25 years of operations, having been around the block and so forth. So we've got lots of data. So we take these 2 and put it on top and underneath after 3 platforms and then we interconnect them, and that is powerful. And that is another step that I would state, nobody else has. Because it's not just any data, it's Germany specific data and doing business in Germany is more complex and a little bit more onerous than maybe in some other countries. And why are we doing this? We're doing this because we believe that the only way how to grow this company is you got to have great products and great products in our business means you need to be able to drive emotions, engagement to drive as opposed to, oh, I'm about to sell my home. Let's see which realtor, which -- no, no, no. Hey, I got a home. I know it just increased its value by 2.5%. I know if I wanted to have an offer right now, there would be a hypothetical 252 bidders. Do I want to put it live? I'm not so sure. Do I want to put it discretely? I'm not so sure. Do I want to have a real estate agent? I'm not so sure. But I can do it. It's at the fingertips because content is there because I have a partner I can trust, which is ImmoScout, which means we will drive better matchmaking because at the end of the day, why did we pull up with Plus subscriptions. There was no matchmaking. You were looking at a seeker. You send an inquiry. On the other hand, there was a landlord and owner and they were bombarded with 150 inquiries. So there was no matchmaking because the one heard never from the other party. And so there was a lot of frustration. So that's how we learned from matchmaking. What it actually takes to get a better engagement into finally a matchmaking, which then obviously drives the foundation for monetization. The strategic framework we'd like to share with you today is rather simple. That's exactly how we operate it. That's exactly what we looked at when we looked at the market opportunity, the challenges, the pros and the cons and so forth, we'd like to share that with you today. First of all, the question we always have and had -- and you asked a lot of great questions, of course, continuously. Well, what's the German market like and we understand what it was like, but what is it going to be? Like what will happen if interest rates go up, if they go down, if number of transactions goes down if the German administration comes up with something else and so forth. So we'll talk about that. And as a catch -- preemptive catch, we actually think Germany is like, in many other areas, very complex, but complexity is our friend. It's actually an opportunity for Scout24. Why is it complex? It's not very digitized, very bureaucratic. Everything takes forever. And that's our friend. That's why Scout24 has a phenomenal opportunity. So Gesa will walk you through that and will also explain to you why this is a very attractive market actually for agents, for real estate agents, much more attractive than other markets. Then we'll get to talk about the interconnected marketplace, what it means. When we talk about interconnected marketplace is the first phenomenon which we call content audience trust. If you want to interconnect something, the first question you need to ask yourself is like, do I have the relevant content? Do I have the relevant audience and do they trust me? We will walk you through, and the answer is, we do believe so, absolutely. We've got that. And we've built it over the past 2 decades, but we've also built it proactively and really got deep into it over the past 3, 4 years or so. That leads us to, okay, which products do you have to unlock that? So we walk you through the product, we walk you through the evolution, and we walk you through what we are about to launch beginning of March and also what's planned in store, what Ralf's teams have actually done, and they've done superb work. And then we're talking about the growth strategy, but that actually means, of course, how does this all unfold in terms of monetization, subscription growth and financial update, and that will be presented by Dirk. So I'll just wrap it up real quickly. Why is Germany an attractive market for realtors. Well, if you're in Germany, and you're a realtor, first of all, you got really good take rates, okay? It's a very high take rate. And the other part is that it's a very resilient market in terms of prices, very resilient. Okay, it went down by 3%, 4%, but again, we look at all the stats, unless you didn't purchase a home, which was overly priced in 2021, it's a great asset to have and wait a couple of years, and now it's not going down because there's a fundamental issue in Germany, which is shortage of living units. So it's a large and stable market. It's a good market. It's very complex and it's not very transparent, which is, again a great thing to have for Scout because that's what we are here for. We would like to drive more digitization, more transparency. Again, we are far away from the U.K. market or the Scandinavian market or the Australian market or be it the U.S. market. Then let's talk about the numbers. You've seen these numbers before. A couple of things we'd like to add. We have played traditionally in most of these addressable markets. That's no news. But of course, with different scale and different market shares. And as you can see, we got still a lot of headroom. We can grow our way into these TAMs with a more significant market share and penetration and also we're able to extend and unlock new TAMs by some of the products that we've actually built and come up with such as a subscription [indiscernible] business, which didn't exist before. But again, due to transparency and complexity, we felt this was a good product to launch. And then lastly, we'd like to turn your attention to the EUR 4 million and EUR 30 million, which is obviously a huge addressable market for us, the one being the rental market and the other piece being the homeowners, which are a beautiful source of future business and content driver for our ecosystem where we've now built the product for them to onboard to engage or to become part of our Scout ecosystem. When talking about content, audience and trust. There's a couple of numbers I'd like to go over with you. Left to right-hand side, it's really helpful in these days to have the largest database in terms of demand data. It really helps because we know exactly what we're looking for, and it's changing, and we know it regionally, and we know it by age groups and we do by gender and we know it by different types of cities. So that's great. On the other hand, this is how we grow the unique supply data, okay? But unique supply data now is enriched because we got the homeowners, not just the listings what used to be the supply. Now we got the homeowners, and it keeps growing. We just got started. By the way, you haven't advertised anywhere. We just launched this. We didn't do anything. There's not a single marketing dollar or marketing euro behind that because it's a for free service, and we like to see how it works. Then Sprengnetter is another great addition to market insights and analytics because we actually know now what are the API calls. We got close to 40 million API calls just from Sprengnetter alone. And as you'll hear later on, we also know now what not only the offering prices are, but also the transactional prices because we get real pricing data, which we didn't have before. And then finally, we beefed up our work with regards to media outreach and providing data insights into the real estate market. And that's how we actually reached out to about 3 billion folks last year alone through our very, very targeted social media and media reach. Now then talking about the audience. This is an important one because our audience is not just the unique monthly visitors. We look at the audience slightly differently and more differentiated. We also have platform engagement that's a strong indicator. We see a good CAGR here of 14% between '21 and '23. Now in that regard, platform engagement means e-mail contact requests. So what people are engaged, not just looking at something, but actually inquiring something. So that's a good uptick. And then on the homeowner engagement, we know it's new, but we wanted to share it with you. Again, we didn't do anything, okay? We see a [ 333% ] increase 2022 versus 2023 just in terms of our spend. Our spend, and that's great. People -- you will see later on. It's great to see like watching your stock in your portfolio, what happens around me or what happens maybe with my landlords unit, maybe I have a better position because now I have the address of my landlord and I can check what's going on there. Trust is important. We did some work there over the past 2 to 3 years, and it has paid off. We are the most trustworthy partner. We are the most reliable one. We have a strong and positive reputation and we have invested heavily into fraud and security. You wouldn't believe what's happening the stuff here in Germany that people are trying to take advantage of others looking for apartments and then fraughts us all along. We've really beefed up and invested heavily here. We think this is a major asset to have when dealing with real estate in the future. In Germany, you got to be the #1 trusted partner. And then when it comes to First Choice, there's also 3 things we'd like to mention. We put a lot of effort into moving away from not just offer but also searching and finding and vice versa. So we balanced it out. And you see that we are the go-to platform here on any of these 3 dimensions. And you also see that people doing business with Scout make some good and healthy business because you achieved great pricing when listing and doing business on the Scout platform. That leads us to the tech and product portfolio, which is an important part of what our teams have done and what has happened over the past 5 years, 5.5 years when I had the pleasure of joining the company and working with such great people. We basically sat down and said, let's double and triple down on product and tech investments. That's what we want to do. So we've invested approximately EUR 300 million over the past 5 years. Yes, it's true. That's what we've invested to build the most comprehensive product suite that is out there, at least by our definition that's out there. I wouldn't say worldwide, but I would say in Europe. And a couple of things, how we've spent the money and where we spent the money, some of it hopefully is familiar to you. But it actually adds up and it also follows the logic because it's equally spread between Professional segment, Private segment, [indiscernible] platform, basic and foundational issues, data and valuation, it all basically went into like making us a stronger company because, again, we are a tech-driven product company. That's what we believe in. It's not the marketing spend. It's the tech and the product that makes the difference. The name of the game, a lot of you write about in question, AI. We do so too. We do have 3 dimensions when we think about AI and when we talk about AI, how we've categorized it, probably not a surprise. What will be a surprise, hopefully, is you'll see some of our products that are in play or about to be launched, you can test them as well. It does play an important role. We are not afraid of AI. We see it as an opportunity. And yes, we use it and for example, what Dirk mentioned on the operational efficiency or also organizational efficiency, it has already played a role or otherwise, we would not be in a position to share these numbers with you. Growth strategy going forward, it's all about the interconnected ecosystem. So that's the picture we want you to maybe walk away tonight or maybe have some sort of pillars in mind about the interconnectivity and what we mean by that. Interconnectivity plays a role on any of the 3 custom-dimensional groups. On professionals, the future is about obviously scaling our membership models. We've got a very exciting membership model coming out. It was actually announced on LinkedIn today and we're doing some pre-go-to-market messaging as we speak. We want to be the #1 partner in digital solution provider to the professional customers out there. And just to be clear because we get that question from time to time, and it's the right question, and I understand why you're asking the question. Oh, is it your intention to do the realtors business? Is it your intention to replace the realtor? It is absolutely not the intention. Absolutely not. And none of the numbers that you will see and none of the numbers you saw in the past are driven by the fact that we are replacing or trying to replace or trying to substitute the realtor, the realtors are a fundamental partner and will always be. And we believe with the numbers that you'll see later from Gesa that there's a lot to be excited about being a realtor actually these days in Germany. Seekers. It's all about starting with the search experience. And you'll hear about how innovative we will be. And right now, we have a filtered search and in the future, it will be different. But it's also about extending our subscriber base, about launching new features and extending the customer lifetime on the Seeker business, we think we've got a long runway to go. And then finally, on homeowners, we just scratched the surface. We are just getting started because this is really exciting. We do believe this is proprietary content. This is proprietary data. This is proprietary engagement. This is proprietary relationships that we will obviously support and where we will invest. So key takeaways -- if there's a key takeaway, what we'd like to bring across is we are merging the data powerhouse and the tech platform with the traditional well-run and well-oiled machine of classified business to enter the next stage of growth, which is about interconnectivity. And if we do it right, it will strengthen the company. It will translate into very healthy financials, and it will absolutely grow and improve our competitive edge. And with that, I have the great pleasure of introducing to you our dear friend and colleague, Gesa. Gesa you may pick it up is currently and has been for a number of years, the Managing Director of ImmoScout. She's been with the company since 2016, but we're very happy that the Supervisory Board also appointed her to become a part of the Management Board as of April 1, 2024.

Thank you, Tobi. Yes. Thank you. Great to be here and actually fantastic to see as well the great interest in Scout. I would like to give you the following section an overview of the German real estate market and this actually consists of 3 parts. First, we will take a look at the market changes that happened since 2021 and what they actually mean for our industry. As a second part, you will get to see the healthy fundamentals of the German real estate market and how they are actually underpinning our growth in the years to come. And last but not least and probably most importantly, we will take a look at the growth opportunities that simply result from that market environment. So let's get started with the changes that have happened since '21. You're obviously all more than familiar with that because it's everywhere and you've been writing and thinking about that. The first part, starting from the left is the modernization pressure. Due to the fact that there are new standards in the European Union, but as well as Germany on the modernization and on the energy efficiency scores of building, there was a lot of insecurity on the buyer side and the market, and that led to a reluctancy to buy. This, and of course, much more the steep increase of the interest rates, which caused the increase of the market rates you had to pay led to a drop of demand and of course, to the drop of real estate prices and you saw that already to as well decline of the transaction volume. So all these aspects, obviously, sound very challenging, but you will come to the conclusion that actually they have a positive effect on Scout. And the first proof point you can see actually here already on the slide is the average standing time of a listing, which increased by 82%. So what this means, it's really just taking much longer and it is much harder to sell an object. And this led already to the fact that a lot of the gray market moved online. It means that are less objects agents acted outside our platform. So we had an increase in content. And as well, of course, that it's harder, it needs a bigger marketing invest to actually get the right reach, but we will come to that later. First, let's look at the development of the transaction volume again. So the German transactional market is actually structural growth market, and you will see that later again. The year '21 was a bit like a boom year, of course, with interest rates below 1%. And you can see the drop and Tobi described it already as well to a volume of only 435 transactions in '23. Of course, that was very challenging for the agents and as well for us, specifically in those business lines that are directly connected to the transaction. And we said that last year, we're going to continue feeling that a bit on this year. Having said that, we see very, very positive signals already starting with the stabilization of interest rates last year. And now in the beginning of the year, we have really much more interest on the platform and buying properties. So there is an increase of inquiries people are contacting agents for viewings and there are -- the mortgage leads are going up, so people are requesting loans. And as well, the agents are more optimistic, and we see that in studies that the majority is happier. But to be quite honest, I speak to customers every day, and I can sense the relief in the room because the market is recovering. So let's go to the health fundamentals of the market. And let's start with one -- number #1 here is the resilience of prices. Of course, we saw a drop in Q4 '22 with the tripling of the interest rate. But as well, what you can see here is that immediately the price level stabilized and since then is moving sideways. The data you can see here is offer data that is on the listing. So it's ask price. When we look at the Sprengnetter data, which is actually the latest transaction data from the banks, you can see as well the same information. The prices are resilient and are moving sideways. What the Sprengnetter data shows on top though, and I want to show you this, too, is a shift in the negotiation power from the seller to the buyer side. And you can see this here by the price discrepancy, so the difference between the ask and the bid price widening since '21. And what this does to the market is, of course, there's more insecurity. And there's insecurity on the buyer side and on the seller side for the right valuation. And with the data that we have at Scout and with Sprengnetter, we can really make a difference here by giving access to that data and making better and faster matchmaking possible. I will show you later how we embed this access to this data into our offering for agents and as well for other target groups. But let's go back to the resiliency of the prices. So why didn't prices decline as much in Germany as in other European countries? And the reason is quite simple, the demand for properties in Germany is high and is growing. And you can see this year that just in '23, 1.5 million people more we're living in Germany than 3 years prior. And this is due to, of course, demographic migration, but as well because we need people to come to the country to keep the workforce stable. So just to have a stable workforce, we need roughly 400,000 people entering our country every year, and this makes population going to grow further. So you can see that there's already housing unit shortage of roughly 800,000 and the latest information says that this is going to increase probably to 1 million soon. So another reason why demand is high in Germany and is going to be high is the low homeownership ratio, yes? So I think in Europe only in Switzerland, you have a lower homeownership ratio. So in Germany, we have 42%. And this is going to increase and it is going to increase for 2 very basic reasons. Everyone in Germany or the majority over 75% and probably U.S. [indiscernible] wish to live in their own privately owned home. And that's one reason. And the other reason is that all political parties have to foster home ownership on their political agenda because, of course, homeownership is a very powerful tool for financial stability and to prevent property specifically in the older age. So this is going to grow. The prediction is that it's going to grow by roughly 20% to a ratio of 50% by 2030. If you're pursuing your dream of buying your own home, of course, the property value, it's predicted development and investment that is needed in that property are the most critical factors when you buy. And to the new energy efficiency standards in Europe and Germany, this is an absolute important new dimension for the property market because you can see that the energy efficiency score is almost becoming a new price determined in the property valuation. For instance, in the metropolitan area, as you can see here, an energy Class B, it's already a 7% lower value than a Class A. And the less important the location is, like a rural area, the importance of this factor, the energy score becomes more important. So on the rural are, [Technical Difficulty]. So that is an important factor for the German real estate market. You can see because 40% of all German properties actually needs renovation and refurbishment. And again, with Scout being the data provider to all parties, we can really make a difference here and create transparency and again, allow better matchmaking. And again, Ralf will show you data, and you will see it as well in the break, how we embedded this into our products. And it's not only going to be beneficial for us, but it's going to as well and create business opportunities for our agents and mortgage providers. Of course, when we talk about the German real estate market, we have to look at the agent him or herself and how healthy the agents are. And in principle, Germany has a structurally very attractive market for agent as Tobi has pointed out already, and this is because Germany has worldwide one of the highest commissions with 7% being paid equally from the seller and the buyer. And as well compared to other European classifieds, we have as well a very high average real estate price, as you can see here. What I would like to add though is that the market is very, very attractive because it's highly fragmented. Germany doesn't have a population that only lives in the capital city, but it's spread in different sizes of cities all over the country. So there are a lot of regional players and smaller agents, and that is obviously good for us and it's good for the stability of the agent business. And even though it was a bit of a challenging year for the agent in -- for the agents in '23, the agents as well are a beneficiary of the market development and from the shift from a complete seller market to more of a buyer market. And this is because it's more difficult to sell. So the agent expertise on marketing, on valuation, on regulations, and of course, in negotiation are very sought after. And Germany always had a low quota of agent usage, which is basically how many objects are transacted via an agent. And this is, of course, because of the high commission value. But with that change in the market, you can see that in just 1 year, there is an increase of agent usage by 11 percentage points, which is, again, almost 20%. And this is going to as well increase the professionalism of the industry. So let's focus a bit on the agent for a second. Scout is in this market environment, the perfect partner for the agent to succeed. And why is it so? It's because the agent and you can see this on the center here needs to be more efficient. The changing market dynamics that I pointed out and Tobi said, are making it longer and harder to say, so you have more objects to handle. And it's more difficult. So you need a partner who doesn't only provide the biggest reach, but as well the highest quality of buyer and so it gives you innovative marketing tools to get visibility for yourself and for the objects you would like to sell. On the other side, to be mentioned as well, it's more complex. We have a lot of regulations in Germany. We love regulations. You've just seen the ones of the energy efficiency that is well the regulations on how high a rent can be in certain districts and so on, which is very important knowledge if you are as an agent consulting people who want to buy to become a landlord, right? So all this -- for this, the agents need partner who can provide them with the relevant data, with the relevant tools to concile the buyer and the seller and as well, they need a partner who can provide training and knowledge to them. And to Sprengnetter, we have a real asset here. So it's more and it's more complex. So the agent really needs to be more efficient and digitized for instance, with an end-to-end CRM system with a fully integrated data layer to have an operating business that can really allow fast and efficient transactions. So having said that, of course, I would like to summarize all these positive effects that we can see here. So the market changes happening in a healthy market and are fundamentally very positive for Scout. We have seen the structural decline of the gray market, which is bringing more content to our site. We have a higher effort with the objects to sell, as I just discussed. So we need CRM systems and digitization, and we need someone who can provide this to the agents and with reduced bioaffordability, we need a partner who can have fast marketing power and give the reach to the home sellers and the agents they need. And as I pointed out as well, the topic of Buy & Security due to the insecurity on price levels in this market environment, we need profound valuation expertise and the tools to provide transparency to allow matchmaking. Last but not least, of course, the energy efficiency topic is very critical for the market and therefore, is going to play an important role as well in our product set. With this, I would like to hand over to Ralf, who will show you how all this will happen in our product set and lay the tech foundation for a competitive position in the future.

So hello, everyone. So maybe I should take a second for a deep breath before we start with the product portfolio. So my name is Ralf Weitz. I'm heading the Product and Tech Department. I'm already 15 years with the company with Scout. So people at Scout would say, I'm a longstanding listing. So I have the pleasure today to present a product update to you. And before I do this, I would also like to start with what we achieved since we had the last Capital Markets Day in 2021 because I think we achieved a lot. We achieved that we have now 3 different platforms for different customer groups. We have now the Homeowner platform, the Seekers platform and the Professionals platform. And we also moved into the transaction business where we said we would like to digitize the transaction. On the Homeowner side, we established a unique identifier. So we call it object ID. So every [indiscernible] in Germany has an own ID. So -- and that's -- that's important to understand because we're using this unique identifier later on to add on the product, all the information we are collecting along the transaction. So we implemented this object ID. We also build the technology around that, and we launched our Homeowner Hub, which is a cool product I will show to you later a bit more detail. On the Seeker side, we personalize the search further than what we had in 2021. And that there is still a way to go, but we are moving into this life cycle management of Seekers. And of course, we also scaled our Plus subscription business on the Seekers side, which is unique in the classified world. On the professional side, it's important that agents become more efficient because they have to deal with the right complexity in their business. So therefore, we are trying to help them to simplify their processes. And for this, we automated their backbone systems more and more and we made a big progress here with our own CRM systems. So on the transaction side, we promised to you last time that we want to be the leading player if it comes to seller leads here in Germany. And if it comes to mortgage leads, I think it's also something we achieved. So -- but today, it's all about interconnectivity and why are the different customer groups interconnected because they are on the same transaction more or less. They are all stakeholders of the same transaction. And therefore, they are connected and what they do, they communicate. And what we want to achieve with the new product is we want to bring this communication into our ecosystem because we know as more they interact and the more they are engaged is more relevant we are with our technology and systems. And of course, we, again, here also monetization power then. So therefore, what we want to have as an outcome here, we want to have more content than any other marketplace out there. So we are focusing on content, content, content, right? And for this Homeowner is an important puzzle piece because the homeowner is owning more or less the content. He is making a lot of decisions. He's deciding, okay, who will be my professional agent, who will be my next tenant? Those decisions are all on the homeowner side. Therefore, it's so important to engage with the homeowner. And how those new products could look like? I prepared a short video. So please enjoy. [Presentation]

So I think it's important to understand from where we're coming from and where we would like to move into. Most of the classifieds, you can see it on the left side, they rely on external content, which is provided by professional agents, for instance. And those content actually is limited. So because you just have the content you're getting from third party. And that's actually -- or could be classified in the future because maybe this product or the listing content will be commodity then because we find those listings on other platforms as well. So therefore, it's important for us to create unique content. Unique content, we just have on our platform. And for this, we need technology and for this, we need data. That are the 2 main ingredients for that. And actually, we built since 2021 hit the foundation for that. We invested heavily into the technology. And now we have the technology for scaling this data business and also content game I just described. And we are doing it Gen AI, I'll come to that a bit later. We're using data lake technology for that and we're trying to personalize our search experience on the Seeker side. And this will lead to the fact that there will be no limit on content anymore because we have a lot of knowledge for every address, for every unit here in Germany. And we can do this not just because we have the data, we have also the models behind. So with our marketing model, for instance, we can address nearly 70 million Germans here in Germany. We have an audience advantage at the moment, and this is also helping us to shape the market in a way that content is different to just having a listing. And we have data, as I said, for at least 30 million units here in Germany. So what we need to make it happen is, we need 3 building blocks, I would call it. We have data and content what we need to be unique here, and we need technology and AI and we need the interconnected product, we call it, and that's actually the exciting part is coming to the -- at the end then. And you can also explain those products later here outside of the rooms. So let's start with the data and content. And that's -- as I said, everyone or most of the market players out there or marketplaces and classified, they have this listing content they are getting from their customers, which is fine. But this content is not exclusive. Of course, we also have those content and we're adding those content into our systems into our object database. What we are adding to those listing data. We are adding additional data. We are having, for instance, from Sprengnetter, from other sources. And this is transaction data, for instance, we have our own valuation software, where we generate specific data, for instance, if it comes to ESG. We have our modernization we call it, Modernizer or modernization tools where we collect data from users as well. And we add those data also to the system. And then we have more data and if I say more, nobody else has it. And this data is exclusive for Scout. And this is, for instance, demand and supply data. So we see in this moment, for instance, how much demand we have for a specific object here in Berlin. And this data is exclusive to us. Nobody has it. And we also taking this data point and adding it to our object database and into our data lake. So we also have insights on the agent side, which is partially exclusive, and we have consumer intent data we are using here. So we have 3 different data pools, I would call it, something which is not exclusive, something which is partially exclusive and something which is 100% exclusive to us. And what we did since the last Capital Markets Day that we invested nearly EUR 100 million into technology to deal with this data, so to organize the data, but also to harvest the data. And this technology, we call it the data lake, is something we introduced last year, and we finished the work here as now we have a really competitive data system we can use to bid cool data products out there. And as I said, we added here also some additional data into it and last year, we acquired Sprengnetter as Tobi mentioned, it's also data, which is now available in our data lake. So -- and the output will be, and we are working here heavily on products. maybe that we have at the end a much more personalized customer experience. And it's not just on the seeker side, it will be also on the professional side because we are able to make this efficient matchmaking and this will save time, for instance, on the professional agent side. So, let's continue with the AI topic, what is AI doing with our products. And AI actually is a technology, right? And this technology is embedded into our products already. And we are working heavily, as I said, on new products as well here. So we have our three different customer groups here. You can see it on the slide, professionals, homeowners and seekers, and we are working here on products where AI is helping us to personalize the product but also to add and to create more content. For instance, if you type in today listing content as an agent, for instance, we recommend additional content created by AI technology to the listing. So we are able to create a different listening to, for instance, the listing, you can also see on other classified businesses here in Germany, so there seeker would always get more content on our website than on other marketplaces. On the homeowner side, we are adding here AI-based also information where we predict for instance evaluation for a homeowner, Tobi mentioned if you are a user of a Homeowner Hub, you can register your asset and you see the asset value development on our portal, but we also predict here the value based on, let's say, ESG topics or what's the energy level, how much do we have to invest to increase the value for this property further? And this is all questions we have seen that in the video we can answer here with AI technology. So we're working, for instance, here on the copilot for the seekers where they can optimize or where they can imagine what would it mean if I would optimize my property and what would it mean in terms of value creation for me. So as the output at the end, we also do internal stuff here with AI, of course, but I did not mention it today. What it will bring at the end is we will have content advantage. That's maybe a question you always have if it comes to competition, is Scout able to maintain the content advantage. And the answer here is clear. Yes, we are. So now it's a bit more a technical slide. I just want to show that we have it under control here now. Actually, what we do is on the technical side, we combine the data sources we have. You can see it on the left side. We combine it with the tech platform, the infrastructure we have, where we have the data processing, for instance, the monitoring and everything. And so we are plugging in here AI technology tucking it into our data platform. So we have the data lake technology, and now we can plug in here technology, different AI models, for instance, and then we can add also the product experience on top to it. And this is actually so efficient that we can now scale our product features. So we never launched so many features as we did last year, for instance, because now we have this modern technology in place, which is really cool. So let's move on to the interconnected stuff, right? And the interconnected stuff, now we come to the product part here is where we combine audience and products. Audience is actually, of course, we have the users, we have the data. So we have the 22,000 professionals, as you can see it here on the right side. And we have the data and we bring it together in order to make this efficient matchmaking. And matchmaking means we can process transactions, for instance, much faster, right? So we can advise, for instance, the homeowner, who will be the right agent for you. If you want to optimize your price level on the -- as a homeowner, you should maybe choose this agent and not Tobias Hartmann because Tobias Hartmann is not able to sell this kind of property for this level you would like to see on the price side, right? Sorry, Tobi. And these are all questions we can answer because we combine the different data pools with the audience we have on the other side and using here AI for this efficient matchmaking. And this will lead to a wide range of products. We are going to offer to the different customer groups here. You can see the example on the B side, on the professional side, where we try to cover the entire journey of an agent. So you have the face where you are going to acquire a new mandate -- new mandate is maybe a homeowner, which we have already in our system. So we advise the homeowner, okay, this is the right agent. And then we have the agents here to do this mandate acquisition, right? So then we have all the marketing tools you might know where you can push your listing, but you can also use AI here for optimizing the listing for the agent. So if the agent -- and you might know that agents are not so much familiar with the latest marketing tools, we are providing those marketing tools to the agent and we are also offering them optimization. That means we are doing the right stuff for them in order to push the listing maybe or to make the listing more visible in order to generate more leads or to fulfill for instance, a price expectation from the homeowners. So if the homeowner has a higher price expectation than the average market price, at the moment, you need different marketing strategies we can provide that with our tools for the agents. We have all the valuation and market data tools also handy for the customers here, and that's maybe also important and different to other markets where often valuation data is publicly available. This is not the case here in Germany. So here, everything is in different places. So you need to collect those data if it is publicly available. But of course, you don't have the transaction date because the status for instance, not available. You don't have the demand data and this is something we have unique as I said and we are bringing it into our data tools and we give here access to our customers. So back office, something I mentioned at the beginning. I think it's important that you can do proper marketing on your customer base. And every agent has an own customer base because he's getting leads from us and from other marketplaces. So we need to do something with those leads with those addresses for this, you need a tool. We have a couple of tools here in place already. We just added [ FINRA ] which is a tool for mortgage brokers here in Germany where they can do proper lead management. And yes, this helps agent and professionals to become more efficient. So on the training side, this is rather new because we have this now with Sprengnetter that have an own academy here. It's all automated, and it's all digital. There's no teacher. So it's -- so we are helping the market to get all the certificates you need. I mean, as an agent, it's important to show to the market, "Oh, I'm an expert here" So -- and we have the tools and also the data to understand whether this agent is an expert. We call it in German [indiscernible] and of course, you can book some seminars here, and you can use our digital library here to improve your qualifications and everything and then we certify also your qualification level. So now we come to the exciting stuff, I would say, to the new products because next Monday, we are going to launch a new membership edition, our new membership editions, they have a different name. Now we call it bronze, gold and silver. And those editions contain a lot of new features we have built last year. So we have much more value in those editions. It's not just value customers now. It's really, really really new stuff. For instance, in the Gold membership, we are extending your marketing power into social media, for instance, which is now part of the Gold membership. If you are a Gold member or if you have the Gold membership, you get all the new products we are building automatically. So -- and what's also new is that we are introducing an own currency, this is so-called [indiscernible] and what can you do with [indiscernible] you can spend much more flat [ flexible ] your budget in our product suite. So because we want to make sure that you are not just having the membership that you take or that you pick the services you really need because there are different needs if it comes on to different customer groups, of course, but also within the professionals, there are different needs, and we want to make sure that they get the flexibility. And for this, we introduced here [indiscernible]. You can experience the new memberships later in the break. So take your time and spend some minutes with the team there. You can meet our Vice President for Professional on the stand out there here. There's also a new product for a customer group within the Professional segment and our commercial customers. So we have built and we acquired here also data from outside. We have a new tool if it comes to commercial data because we learned that there is a need for one place where you can get all the data if it comes to commercial real estate. This data is not -- it's partly publicly available, not everything. But we are trying to combine the public available data at one spot and we are adding also data we have here as a marketplace unique. And so we bring it together for the commercial customers, and they can do here valuations for commercial properties. This tool is really, really cool. You can also experience that later in the break. So -- and now let's come up with an example for interconnectivity here. So interconnectivity, we have -- we take you the example of, let's say, of an evaluation product where -- this product is used by professionals. So they're using the tool of Sprengnetter for -- do a property valuation, let's say, on behalf of a homeowner or they're going to inquire a mandate and part of this acquisition process will be that they have to present the valuation for the property they want to sell. So -- but this valuation data is not just relevant for professions, for agents here, it's also relevant for the homeowners. So we use the same data actually, and we show this data to homeowners. And for those who are familiar with the German market, it is not that easy for German homeowners to get the valuation right out there. Usually, you need to ask an agent, an agent or you need to hire an appraiser to do evaluation. Now you can use our Homeowner Hub and you get access to the same data as an appraiser would get. And so that means also that they are now also interconnected, right? So because they have the same data point. So the homeowner has a valuation from an independent third party so-called ImmoScout, yes, because we are independent. The agent may be not 100%. So the agent is also showing the same data point to the homeowner. The homeowner checking on ImmoScout, whether the valuation of the agent is the right one. Yes, because it's the same data, and now they can engage. And on the seeker side, because the seekers, they show -- buy the property later, they get also the information. So there's much more transparency now if it comes to price. So and that means that the three parties, they can engage much easier because they all have the same information now. So -- and they can process also much more efficient. So we can set the right expectation on the seeker side, we can set the right expectations on the homeowner side with the homeowner products, and we can set the right expectation if it comes to the agent is consulting the homeowner. And that's a new cool thing with interconnectivity, they are all connected. And they are also able to communicate here because they are using the same messenger tool on our platform. So let's move on the private side. So on the seeker side and on the homeowner side, we have also a couple of products here. And so of course, on the seeker side, you have the real estate search for instance, which is our core product, I would say that this product is also evolving, and you can experience that also later because now we have a new AI search. I come to this in a second, which is new and based on AI, as I said. So we have the messenger product also since 2021. In 2021, we had no messenger here. Now we have a messenger tool. We are adding now WhatsApp for instance, so that we keep the communication on our website. And it's also important to -- because we want to be the trusted party at the end. And communication here is key, right, because you're going to share your income data, for instance, with the agent. And you can decide as a seeker, you send this to an email, you don't know or you can do it via ImmoScout and we take care that the data is safe and only used for the purpose of, oh, okay, I'm applying for this apartment, for instance. So we have exclusive data content that we have exclusive -- sorry, we have exclusive content on the seeker side. Here, we have the application form and the Plus membership. This is also great. So people applying with the application form we provided here, including, for instance, the Solvency Check product, which is not true for anymore. This is our solvency check. So we are moving here into a direction that we managing more and more the life cycle on the seeker side. Because there's not just the phase where you're looking for property, there's also the phase where you are the tenant or where you are owning the property. If you're owning the property, you're moving over into the Homeowner Hub, if you stay -- if you are a tenant for instance, we want to keep you on the system. There is a new membership coming for this use case. So let's move over to the Homeowner Hub here. homeowner is actually important because, as I said, he's making a lot of decisions. But he is really, really important if it comes to listing content because Tobi showed the numbers, we have 1.2 million homeowners. They have registered their units on our website. This every homeowner or every unit, which is registered is actually more or less a listing. You can just with one click, you can publish your unit in the marketplace. So you can convert from the homeowner world into a listing on the platform. So this product is called open for offer, so you can check easily as a homeowner with one click, what's the real value for my property, what's a real demand for my property. So you click, you publish your unit on the portal a bit differently to a normal listing so that you see the difference as a seeker. And as a seeker, you can communicate with the homeowner here. So just to give you a bit an idea, I mean, this product is not really -- there's not a lot of marketing on that on this open for offer product. But the share of listings, unique listings, we are creating via this flow is already really, really significant on the portal. So it means the homeowners there creating unique listing content for our marketplace. And they do it with the interest. They want to know what the real value and the real demand for my property and real demand taker, who has it? Scout has it, not me, Scott. So -- and -- let's imagine you are a homeowner right, and you're owning a couple of units here in Berlin. There's no vacancy at the moment. They are all rented out. Let's imagine there will be a waiting list, right, for those units. So as a homeowner, you can create a waiting list. So if there is interest for the unit and somebody is moving out, there's already a waiting list of people who would like to move in. So -- and that is what we mean this matchmaking and making it more efficient. You don't have to go or you don't have to go to the platform. You don't have to create the content again, you don't have to publish a listing. You don't -- maybe you don't need to engage with an agent, I don't know. But you can do it just with one click. There is a waiting list, you see what's the real demand for your unit. You can also experience that later on at the Homeowner Hub view there is a stand for this. So personalization, we talked a lot about personalization, and that's maybe also new for most of the classifieds. So what will happen if AI takes over everything. What will happen if there is no mobile phone in the future in 10 years? What will happen if there is no Google result list, if there's only one result coming. So you need to be much more personalized if it comes to what's the result for me. And you need to deliver this result in different channels via voice, for instance, different interfaces and so on. So we started the journey here with the AI search, we call it. So at the moment, how is the search going, right? I mean you have a couple of filters, you select the filters and you get a result list of let's say, 50 user here in Berlin. So if Tobi is looking for an apartment, 3 bedroom here in [indiscernible] back in Berlin and is collecting a couple of filters. And I'm looking for the same apartment or a type of apartment, I'm collecting the same filters. What will happen? You will see the same result list, right, because you choose the same filter set. But this will be not the future. The future will be that even if we express the same search inquiry that we get a different result list because the search is much more personalized because I know a lot about Tobi. He's a chain smoker by the way. I'm not. So -- and it means even if people looking for the same type of property, we are able to add data to the search because we know the behavior of Tobi's -- we know Tobi's search behavior from the past. We're adding here, and we are able to do this proper matchmaking, and this will end in a personalized result list and maybe also only in one result. Yes. So this is not just future. The AI search is life, right? There's also a stand. You can type in. For instance, you're looking for a house close to a lake or are you looking for an apartment where you have in the backyard playground, you can type in, in English, Italy, Italian -- sorry, Italian whatever you want. So it gives us much more access also to what really seekers looking for. Yes. And now we come to our famous Homeowner Hub. We talk a lot about that. I think what's important to understand is that there is always an intent, right? Homeowner is registering the unit and there is an intent. Maybe he just want to know -- you just want to know what's the value of the property, but maybe the intent is different. He's looking for a tenant. He is looking for an agent, he's going to sell. So we are trying to catch the intent of the homeowner, and then we are offering the digital process for this intent. So there are different use cases. You can see it here, we call it intent box [indiscernible], and you can just -- you can choose here. I would like to inform myself or you can say I would like to hand out -- I would like to sell. And we are generating already a lot of business, even if we are not monetizing the homeowners, but we are generating a lot of business out there out of the intent box here. So in there's, of course, also an interconnectivity example for this, right? So because I mentioned it before a bit, there is -- the Homeowner Hub is creating exclusive content for us, and it's actually exclusive listing content. It's also helping us to generate seller leads because if there is the intent, I want to sell my property, you can choose. You want to do it via an agent. You want to do it on your own. We can help you to assess how much do we need to invest in order to upgrade the energy efficiency of your property and so on. So these are all questions we can handle. And so -- and let's imagine we would be able to, instead of spending millions for marketing for creating seller lead, we would be able to replace that with the homeowner seller lead engine we built. So there is also on the cost side, a lot of potential for us if we are doing it right, if we are connecting the homeowners right with the agents and also with the seekers. So the waiting list is also something I explained a bit -- just to mention here, an example of what we do, we give the ability to agents or we give agents the ability that they can contact their followers. So let's say Tobi is interested in 3 bedroom apartments, but he's not contacting an agent, but he is following. He's putting the listing on his favorite list on his [indiscernible].Those people are also relevant for the agents. So we give the agency opportunity here to contact those people who put the listing on the [indiscernible] on the favorite list. So agents can do active marketing here and they can create an own follower base for listings but also for their brand. And that will lead that the agents will stick with us because they have a relevant follower base and they cannot and it makes no sense to give it up if they are not with us. So now we are close to the break. Let's bring it home. I think I tried to explain that, first of all, we delivered against the Capital Markets Day in 2021, that we are on the way to redefine what is listing content and that we are able to create own content. And we did acquisitions here. We build the technology. We invested EUR 100 million in infrastructure. So I think it's -- we are ready to scale now. It's not that we have to invest from now here. We did it. And we already have the first products out there if it comes to AI experience and personalization and the connectivity. So it's not just future. We are on the way here. And we are doing this at the end to have more transactions in our ecosystem. So this is in line with the strategy. We're moving deeper into the value chain. We want to cover the transaction in digital in our ecosystem, and we want to gain our monetization power. And we are sure that we can do it with the products we are building and we already have. So now we have a 40-minute break. And I would like to encourage you to use the time and to spend some minutes with our product people out there, you find a couple of stands out there out of the room here on the right side to me. And there will be a stand for the new professional memberships. There's one for the homeowner hub. We also give you a bit of an idea of how the future could look like on the tenants subscription product here. We have the new AI search product also, which is also live. You can experience that at home as well. We have Sprengnetter and Jan Sprengnetter is also -- he was in the room here. He's over there. So if you want to engage with the founder of Sprengnetter, please use the opportunity. And we have our new commercial data product also here outside on one of the stands. So you need to be back here at 3:50. Yes, I can see there. So there will be also coffee, some snacks over there. Have some, enjoy the break and our new great products. Thank you very much. [Break]

Welcome back. I hope you enjoyed the break and the cake. I can recommend the Tiramisu for sure. I hope you enjoyed our products presentation. And I would encourage you, we're going to have them later, a floor higher again. So if you haven't seen it all, I want to encourage you to take a look around so that you can get a glimpse of all the things that we have presented here. In the following section, I would like to show how this all translates into growth for the year to come. I would like to start a bit with a high-level slide that you have seen already and Tobi stacked very briefly. And what the slide has explained of how we want to create with the interconnected ecosystem, personalized experience for all user groups. The agents, the homeowners and the seekers. And by providing our customers along the object lifecycle with the relevant information, the relevant data and services and products at the right time, we can create this engagement, and we can connect them. How? I have explained. And with the connection of the customer, we can allow matchmaking and transactions, of course, and we can have a higher monetization for us. But to simplify this a bit, is return engagement and experience into value and into subscriptions. And we actually have a track record of doing this. On the professional side, we have, as Tobi mentioned, 22,000 customers. That's the biggest professional customer base in Germany, and that's the biggest base we ever had, and we had a continuous customer growth here. On the private seeker side, we managed to establish a standard product in the market, specifically on the rent side, and I will come to that later, but you have seen the drastic increase of the subscription numbers here. And the last group, and we split them out specifically here. So you get a glimpse where as -- will have exponential fresh but an exponential growth curve on the homeowner side. But let's double click on the professional side, and I want to look at it shortly in the past. How did we establish the growth foundations in the Professional business? With the membership world that we put into play, we really streamlined the product offering, a very clean offer that we were capable of offering to different target groups. And we really worked hard on the tiering logic of the membership and of the on-top product world so that always there is a pull and an upgrade mechanism for the existing customer base. And of course, we worked on automated pricing mechanisms that are embedded in the membership. And with this, we resulted in a strong acceleration of our growth and we outperformed our targets. But Dirk will talk to that later, I'm sure. But you are probably more interested in the future, I guess. So how will the future look? So we're going to continue to have 2 basic pillars for the growth of our professional product set. One is the customer growth, and I have touched that already in the market part that we have an increased usage of agents and this is going to remain. And we have an increased usage of agent in a highly fragmented market. Sometimes we stay here because there are no entry barriers, you can wake up and decide to become an agent. So there is this good market out there. Secondly, by verticalizing our product offering towards the agent Tobias explained on providing much more than just only a marketing set but reaching from data and CRM systems to consulting and education towards. We, of course, intensify the customer relation and we intensify customer loyalty, and we increase customer loyalty and customer lifetime. And last but not least, on the customer side, [ Tobias ] was as well on the basis of the products that specifically we got through the acquisition of Sprengnetter. We can go deeper into specific customer segments such as commercial, as you have seen already or as well into banks. On the monetization side, of course, of the unit is equally important. I hope you have always seen or experience of the deeper, the new membership project that we put into place. It's a new membership world. And I'm 100% convinced that this gold and silver memberships as well are going to trigger this continuous upgrade mechanism. And as well with the top currency and our new marketing, 360-degree marketing tools as well will trigger upsell in that space. In the time, specifically where marketing is highly needed as you saw before. A second point is that the intensified customer relationship and the verticalization doesn't only increase loyalty. But with the product depth it actually increases the value that we offer to the agent. There are, it's not only, as I said, just the marketing side that you can use much more services and products we offer. And because these products are interconnected as well, it makes much more sense to use all the product set from our side because you have 2 benefits on one side, you have an increased value as Ralf explained. And secondly, you, of course, have a cost advantage if you have one solution provider instead of many. So even that increased product set is going to help our monetization. And last but not least, I want to say this, we still have, of course, our transaction product suit here. And with the recovery of the market that is going to work like as a growth accelerator on top. So it's the cherry on top. So let's move over to the private side. On the private subscription base as well, I would like to look first to the past. I said this, we managed to implement with, specifically with the RentPlus product standard in the market. And this is, because we really implemented features that matter. If you think you're a homeowner or a landlord and you receive more than 100 requests in less than a day to rent your apartment, as a seeker, you really do not want to miss out on a product that offers convenience and advantage on access and advantage on information and in the application phase. So the RentPlus product really became a standard in the market. What we did in addition is that we really worked on the duration and on the lifetime of the product by optimizing the subscription durations and it extended lifetime already. And last but not least, we, of course, worked on pricing, but as well with AI, we worked on the paywall logic that is the most important entry point to the Plus product today and that as well accelerated number of subscriptions coming in. And like this, we have outperformed our growth in the past. I'm sure as well Dirk's going to point that out again, all right? So again, here, let's take a look to the future and the future is very straightforward. You have seen some of the numbers already during the presentation. The most important here is the EUR 4 million potential that we see the total addressable market of people moving and changing houses. And today, with our subscription base that we have, we have roughly 20% of that market. So we haven't at all reached the ceiling of subscribers we can get here. Specifically, in outside metropolitan areas, we have a huge potential for this product. And on the other side, as well here, we have the second pillar, the monetization. And on the private business side, it is very simple because we are going to extend the product lifetime and therefore, the customer lifetime value. The product has been traditionally positioned in this finding phase, right, to have an advantage in the search and in the application. And we have already extended this to the actual transaction with contracts, with handover protocols and so forth. So the lifetime of the product is extending. And the next step is with the integrated products that you have seen and with -- to extend into the living or owning phase. And I actually had this discussion in the break that every buyer becomes an owner at a point in time too. And of course, the owner as well wants to be with us and his or her portfolio on our side. And as well as the tenant, we can provide a lot of solutions that will help you to live, secure and legally supported, for instance, utility checks for your utility that comes in or insurances for the deposit and so on. So we have already a lot of innovations there, and this is going to extend and the extent the lifetime. So that at a point, you're with us all your life, yes? Scout Forever, that's the goal. So last but not least, I would like to give the homeowner some attention, and we discussed the homeowner a lot today. And what the homeowner really does and the homeowners and their properties are creating really in our object-based ecosystem, a completely new flywheel for growth. And this is because of many reasons. Number 1 is, as I have explained, it gives us much more content, proprietary content. And in the future, it could be that you're not only, already the case actually, not only searching for active listings, but as well for listings or objects that might come to the market. So it's much more content that we can offer here, which is a source of the flywheel. The second part is we can connect the homeowners with the agents or other professionals in a much more quality assuring and transparent way. And like this, for instance, it's possible that the home seller in future could track the success of the marketing phase that the agent is currently having and could get standardized and very transparent reporting on how it's going and how the valuation, for instance. And like that, the agent -- he doesn't get only more efficient, but the whole agent base is going to be professionalized like that. So that's another source of a flywheel that can start. And the last point is, of course, a completely new business line that is going to evolve there, specifically if you think about the fact that almost 100% of the properties in Germany either need refinancing or modernization. And in that respect, by having the content of these objects, we can as well create new business lines, not only for us, but as well for our partners around banking and mortgage that is well around everything related to ESG. Now you're probably going to ask and when are we going to see this. And there, I would like to remind you of the first slide that I showed what our growth principle is. So the third thing that we want to do is we want to acquire home sellers and their objects or homeowners and their objects to our side. We have 1.2 million homeowners at the moment registered with 2 million registered units. And there are roughly 30 million privately owned units in Germany. So you can see that were already achieved something, but there is room to go. The next step is then creating an experience based on our growth principles and keeping them engaged. And you can see that we are actually quite successful already here because in just 1.5 years, we managed to grow the active user base on the homeowner platform by over 500%. So we want to keep that engagement and that's then going to be the foundation for monetization that comes out of matchmaking and the way that I have just explained. We are forecasting sort of at the moment that we will start this beyond '26. So like that, we walked through all the target groups that we have. And I'm sure you are more than interested to see how this plays down in our updated financial framework which Dirk is going to present.

Thank you very much Gesa. Yes, This is the situation, you're all familiar with, right? It's the last episode of the latest season, you sit on your sofa and you want to watch it. And then it comes, what happened so far and the fast forward button doesn't work. So I would like to take you through what happened so far. Many of you have been our guests at the Capital Markets Day in 2021. And we outlined there that on membership upgrades and pricing our core product, we're going to increase revenues with a CAGR of 4% to 6%. Ticking the box, the market was our friend. But we've also been there with the right products, at the right point in time. So we grew with an 11.5% CAGR. We also said we want to grow 30% to 40% on seller leads and mortgage products, which I'll come to later on. We grew 10%. The market wasn't our friend. We saw interest rates increasing. We saw transactions going down but nonetheless, we managed to grow the business by 10% in just 2 years' time. On mortgage, I mentioned that in the beginning, we gained market share. We thought there would be room for an 8% to 20% CAGR on revenues. We delivered 17%. And then we had the Plus subscriber business and the landlord [indiscernible] business. And over the course of the day, you have learned that if you applied the CAGRs to what we have seen so far in 2023, that would lead to 400,000-plus subscribers by 2026 and 4.5 million registered units by 2026. Now looking at the numbers, you see that we already delivered 358,000 subscribers. We just take the fourth quarter, sorry for that, if you just take the fourth quarter, it's 378,000 subscribers, very close to achieving the target 2 years in advance. We have said that we're going to grow to 4.5 million registered units, we're already at 2 million registered units. So if you look at the CAGR here, it's 35.2%. So ticking the box on that one as well. And to sum up, 4 out of 5 delivered, that's okay. But what's more important, I think, is that we delivered with our product base and the execution of our strategy, a portfolio of products that is enabling us to grow in any market phase. We have been discussing it. I mean what we have seen was an unprecedented increase in mortgage rates end of 2022 and throughout the year '23. That was unprecedented. And I said, yes, it helped us. The high interest rates helped us because agents were needing buyer leads. We've been there at the right point in time with the right products. Now a lot of you asked me now what's happening in a new normal? I would think that in a new normal, we should be able to buy -- to grow high single digits in that environment. It shouldn't change to what we have been able to achieve over the past 2 to 3 years. On the private subscription stock, we can grow in any market environment. There might be a low interest rate environment. We can deliver high growth. There might be a high interest rate or a new normal environment, we can deliver high growth. Now why is that the case? Because you could theoretically argue, well, if interest rates go down again, people stop looking for apartments to rent and people want to buy. We have a buyer product that's what you've just seen when we presented the products. And we have created a product which is a German market standard. So if you are a tenant these days and you're looking for an object, you are better looking for that object with a subscription of Scout24. So we established a market standard here. And then on the transactional assets, of course, we have seen a shift to rent. We have seen less and less transactions. So a shift from seller leads to buyer leads. We believe there will be a return to a market where the sale will reaccelerate. But we believe that in that new normal, the fact that we saw double-digit CAGRs in real estate prices from 2010 to 2022 that will not come back. So anyone looking to sell a real estate will not simply go to a real estate agent and sell at any price. Anybody that is going to sell real estate in the future will go to the real estate agent and say, "I want proof that you sell at the highest price." And that proof can only be achieved if the real estate agent comes with the object to our platform and increases the amount of potential buyers for the object. So we believe that also on the transactional assets as well as the core, we can grow in a new normal environment. Now coming to what I've outlined in the earnings presentation, our value creation building blocks. What I would like you to take away is we would improve revenue growth, and you will see how we did that and you will see how we plan that over the next slides. We will continue creating operating leverage. We will continue to drop that down to cash, EPS, dividends and share buybacks to shareholders and that is how we will continue to manage the company. But let me start with the first one. So a few numbers you've probably seen. But if you look at the private growth of 24% over the past 3 years, if you look at the 11.6% CAGR in the Professional segment and the 9% CAGR in the Media & Others segment, that all adds up to 14.4% CAGR that we managed to achieve over the past years. And we managed to achieve that in the areas that I just outlined in the growth drivers you've seen. But there have been a few outstanding growth drivers. Those growth drivers where we have recognized over the past years that these are the key metrics that will enable us to grow the business. So it's membership revenue growth. We've grown that from EUR 203 million in full year 2021 to EUR 252 million in 2023. I already said we outperformed the CMD target here. We delivered 12%, 11.5% growth. On the number of Plus subscribers, 358,000 across the full year 2023 compared to an implied CAGR of 14% to 15%, we delivered a CAGR of 32%. And this is important going forward. And here, you will see a first glimpse to what you hear later on. So on Professional memberships, our target was 4% to 6%. And I think the updated target is clear, it will enable us to grow in high single digits on the membership revenue side. We are also upgrading our guidance on the number of Plus subscribers for 2026 by 25%. If you do the numbers from the 2021 Capital Markets Day and compare that to what we are guiding today, we're not coming up with 400,000 subscribers. We're ending 2026 with 500,000 Plus subscribers. On the other hand, what we figured out across the course of the year, while managing the growth drivers and achieving the performance I outlined is that mortgage lead engines, the homeowner units or private subscription revenue CAGR is not the key metric for our analysts and our investors. So we will suspend guiding you on those value drivers in the future. And I will also outline that this is less than 5% of our overall revenue base when it comes to mortgage and retail lead engine products. On the second value driver, which is profitability, EBITDA growth. I think it's straightforward, looking at financial year 2023, how did we manage to grow our margin. If I take the 2021 CMD guidance, we would have delivered a 13% CAGR on EBITDA and came up with 57.5% margin. You have seen from our numbers that we delivered a 17% CAGR against that guidance and came up with a 59.7% margin. Now how did we do that? First of all, we've been very careful and very efficient on our staff and not because we wouldn't have the money or we wouldn't have the ability to equip us with more and more headcount. It's just a question of what is our will to drive this company forward. And we want to drive this company forward in the interest of our shareholders and employees in the most efficient way. And that's why we've been growing very under-proportionate on the personnel cost side. You have seen that marketing as a percentage of revenue significantly going down. Marketing spend is going down. We've been doing our homework on procurement and IT cost, significant adding to the margin. We've been putting down vendor spend on external support and everything else. So that has increased margin by an additional 2 percentage points. And Own work capitalized. I outlined at the 2021 Capital Markets Day, this will significantly decrease and we're now beyond -- below -- sorry, below 5%. And that led us to a 59.7% margin and an outperformance of the 2021 guidance. That also makes us very optimistic looking into the future. because we believe we will be able to deliver continued healthy revenue mix with lead-based products, on the one hand, but membership-based products, on the other hand, focusing on higher-margin products, adding more value to our customer base. We have a very strong and very well-established organizational setup now and that will help us to improve and continue delivering operating leverage. We are focusing on marketing efficiency. Now what does that mean? We are watching that on a weekly basis. So on a weekly basis, we are deciding where do we spend money, how do we allocate our capital on the marketing side. What are we doing there? Are we doing the right things? Are we doing the right things short term with affiliate and performance spend. And are we doing the right thing long term with brand spend? And you can expect us to be very, very careful with that part of our business line because we've made a very positive experience with that. The ZIA spend in the past has helped us to grow organic traffic. It has helped us to grow SEO traffic. And based on that, we feel comfortable that it will pay into an increased profitability in the future. And in the break, I've spoken to some of you and you were saying, "Oh, this product landscape that you outlined there, what additional investments do you need? How do you take that forward?" And my answer was always the same. You saw Tobi presenting a EUR 300 million invest over the past years. That is done. We're out of that. So in the future, if you look at the cash flow profile of the business, that will even increase, but you will see that later on as well. Because, as I said, we're focusing on net income accretion and dividend growth. And here, I would also like you to go back a little bit and see how we developed. We've been growing earnings per share by 30% as a combination of operating efficiency on the one hand and share buybacks on the other hand. We delivered what we promised 2019, 2020 when we sold out of Scout, and we delivered what we promised later on. And some of you have been asking me also in that same context for leverage guidance. And I have to say, I am not a friend of leverage guidance anymore because we have valued partners on the depth side. And every decision we are taking on buying back shares is just based on EPS accretion. So if the financial result from that with ourselves putting up a little bit more debt on the balance sheet is not decreasing to a larger extent than the value of the assets we are buying with our own shares, we will continue to buy back shares. It's just a question of EPS accretion and nothing else. On the Dividend payout, we haven't changed, and we will not change our policy of paying out 30% to 50% of our adjusted net income. And we have done that for -- in 2023 for the financial year 2022 with EUR 1 per share that it has already been an improvement versus the EUR 0.85 in the year 2021 for the financial year 2020 and an improvement for the financial year 2019, when we paid out EUR 0.82 in 2020. Now come to the next point, I already touched on it a little bit, capital allocation and share buybacks. What are we going to do with the money? What are we going to do with the very attractive cash flow profile of this company. Organic growth, growing on what we have built up as a platform, growing on what we have built up as a customer base organically. That's our main priority for the business going forward. On M&A, we might invest to improve our product depth, but what you've seen outside when you did the product presentations, what you've seen with Ralf's presentation, with Gesa's and Tobi's presentation so far, we are pretty happy with the product suite we're having. If we can improve that here and there, fine, we might do an M&A transaction then. If we can improve our market share, which is already very sufficient or if we can buy relevant adjacencies, we might consider M&A, all under the umbrella of EPS accretion. We have enough M&A firepower. We have value partners that would help us to do that, but it needs to be accretive, and you can assure and rest assured that we will be very disciplined on that subject. If we're not conducting M&A, we're going to return excess cash to shareholders. I outlined it, our guidance remains. We're paying 30% to 50% of the adjusted net income as dividends, and we're using excess cash and moderate debt to buy back shares and increase EPS as well. Now that leads me to our full year 2024 guidance where we believe, we can grow revenue by 9% to 11% in the ongoing financial year and increase our ordinary operating EBITDA margin by roughly 100 basis points to 61%. Looking forward until 2026, we believe we can grow in the high single to low double digits. And as I outlined earlier on, we're going to see a 63% margin in the financial year 2026. Now what does that mean? With the guidance in the ongoing financial year as well as going forward, we certainly want to be and remain a double-digit growing company. But on the other hand, I told you about the importance of capital allocation for this management team. And therefore, we want to retain the flexibility to invest when it's good to invest, and not to invest into growth, when it's not good to invest. It's not EPS accretive, if it doesn't pay into our long-term plan to improve the profitability, we won't do it. And the same holds for the following years. Years of our ambition, our aim, our target is to make what we have invested in, a product suite, a sales team and everything else into a double-digit growth company and we remain a double-digit growth company, but we want to retain the flexibility that we have and ask you for to grow the business with regards to capital allocation and profitability. So with that, I would like you to have a few takeaways from what you heard so far. We outperformed our CMD 2021 targets. We're very proud of that. That's why we said it so often today. We upgraded targets for our memberships and private subscribers for 2024 and 2026 for the outlook. We invested around EUR 300 million in our next-generation product suite and expansion of our total addressable markets. That helps us to have a more diversified business and helps us to grow in all market environments. Yes, the transactional business has been significantly impacted by the environment we've been seeing, especially in Q4 '22 and 2023, but we are prepared to accelerate growth when transaction markets recover. And we have updated our organizational model and increased operational efficiency. And that's why we are happy to improve our EBITDA guidance for 2026, with a margin of 63%. Thank you very much for that. And with that, I would hand over to Tobi for a wrap up of the day.

Thank you, Dirk. Thank you, Gesa. Thank you, Ralf. Thank you, Filip. We're actually 30 minutes and a bit ahead of schedule, I guess it's good news, better than the other way around. It won't take me long just to boil it down to 4 points, we really want you to take away. Ideally, it resonates with you. Number 1, which gives us comfort and gives us some certainty about what we just told you, we have a proven track record of delivering. We understand how it works to lean in, to throttle back, to adjust when it's needed. And we have a fantastic team, platforms in place, everything to know how this is all stitched together and how it's working. And we have a commitment with a fantastic next-generation product suite to enter the next stage. Second point, interconnectivity is the name of the game. We firmly believe this will make the difference in the long term because it is complex here in Germany, in particular. It is the next logical step to put the various constituencies together with a lifetime view and not just a pure transactional view, be it rent, be it financing, be it sales or be it in the same person, a homeowner, but also a landlord or a buyer. We do think that we are the only ones being able to deliver that. So someone else showing up around the corner saying, "Hey, we kind of like that." It will be very hard because it builds on what we've built so far. Third point, yes, actually, Germany is an attractive market for Scout24. And while still muted and Gesa talked about that in great detail, the complexity and the structural differences and the fundamental characteristics of the market, also and in particular, for the real estate agent in Germany, a great, it's great to be a real estate agent, and it's better to be a real estate agent with ImmoScout on your side. And the last piece is important to me personally well. We are here for the long term for the company's long term. Could we push a little harder on monetization? Of course. Could we push a little harder on pricing? Of course. But this is not a front-loaded financial plan where we say we go to the upper extreme because we would like to continue the journey to be positioned as a partner of the various parties out there, which is predicated on trust and on having a sensible relationship with the various parties out there. And a major part and our backbone is the real estate agent. And we will not overprice in the short term to be outpriced in the longer term. So we are here for the long term for the company's health because we think there's a long runway for this company. And we would like to continue with the 25 years in mind of what we've built and what the teams have done so far and interconnectivity is not something as a short-term gig. It's a longer-term thing that we now define stepwise to deliver against the next 2 to 3 years. But we are, of course, committed to returning and generating capital returns for our shareholders. That is an embedded part of our company strategy and company philosophy. We're excited to deliver. We are excited to enter that new stage and thank you so much for staying with us, being on screen at home or in the office and in particular here with us in Berlin live. We saved about 30 minutes. So that's good news, and I will now open it up, and we will move towards the Q&A session. Higher team, so we'll make sure that we can hopefully best address any question you may have. Okay, Filip?

I will moderate the Q&A. The way it works is we will start off in the room. If you have a question, raise your hand. I see you already queuing up, state your name and company. And please also try to keep it one question at a time because there are many people here, so we want to make sure everybody can ask a question. And there will be mics available, and I will allocate the question to the responsible person. Can you put up the mic?

It's Will Packer from BNP Paribas Exane. One question is tough, but I'll do my best. Could you help us think about free cash flow growth in the period of guidance should be aligned with EBITDA growth or low teens. Looking backwards, there's been some headwinds from share-based comp, exceptional costs, et cetera. Any kind of colors on how we should expect those dynamics to develop over time?

Yes. I would think that you've seen is a 70% cash flow conversion from our reported EBITDA, you see CapEx going down. So that's quite healthy. And we also see sort of a ceiling that we have in the area of EUR 20 million to EUR 25 million of M&A and share-based compensation for the management team plus exceptional costs we have seen from time to time. But that shouldn't change as well, so as a percentage of revenue, it should go down. And to answer your question in 1 sentence, free cash flow conversion should improve.

It's Andrew Ross from Barclays. I wanted to ask about the drivers of the membership ARPU within the kind of high single digits you're talking about that piece of business. And I guess there's 2 elements to that, but just to understand what's baked in, in terms of underlying price both for this year, where I guess some of our compensation has happened, but also beyond I meant to understand how to think about this kind of [indiscernible] tiering with bronze, silver, gold and how that might contribute as you make that migration. I appreciate there's quite a lot in that, but just help us through kind of breakdown M&A. It's kind of what bode this year and out to '26.

So I would ask maybe you start and Gesa you can share.

Andrew, you will follow a similar logic as we've been following in the past. We believe that there is a certain amount of value adding to any package, which is reflected in pricing changes that we are doing on a terms and condition basis. So we are investing more in reach. We are investing more into genuine products that indirectly and directly help our agents. So that's the one part. The second part is, of course, managing churn and win back, which we've been quite successful in the past. The third part is convincing agents to move into higher packages. And the last part is that has been a source of agent growth in the past. The last part is convincing agent to move out of PPA into membership additions. And what I think what we -- with the new product suite we're packing on now, it gets much more attractive for a real estate agent to be part of our platform because with what Gesa will elaborate on the bronze, silver and gold packages, we can put much more into it. and increase value on a regular basis. And the agent has the ability with the points to pick what in his specific or her specific region is really important. And with that, I would hand over to Gesa.

Yes. Thank you. I think you have seen, hopefully, the product out there a bit in detail, but I would like to state is that really silver and gold are new levels of value that we're providing to the agent. So if we compare that to what's out there in the market is that already the silver product is outstanding to what's available. So I assume that -- not assume, sure. That's just the existence of silver and gold is going to cause an automated upgrade pool. Because you want specifically in this market environment, have the best products to serve your customers on the seller side and as well on the buyer side.

Okay. One more follow up question. Just on the 2024 pricing, can we just clarify what kind of increase has gone through as part of this year, what feedback has been just as part of closing this conversation.

Well, feedback has been positive, otherwise, you wouldn't see us smiling. Secondly, we're not disclosing, right? But what I can say is that we've been managing to grow in the high single digits on that end. And we've been managing to decrease churn. So you will see customer additions as well.

So kind of a net high single digit, and it's a way to think about it. That's very helpful.

Chris, you are awaited.

It's Chris Johnen from HSBC. Following up on that question -- sorry about that one. Just trying to understand -- just to confirm, maybe yes or no answer, are in terms of service price increases going forward be still a thing for you? Just to confirm that because that seems to be the easiest way every year to increase [ partner ], most obviously.

I can answer that immediately, and then I haven't been too clear on that. But as I said in the beginning of my last answer to Andrew's question, Yes, that is an issue for us. And it will remain an issue for us, not in the sense of an issue of a problem, but it is something we're investing in and something where we put money as a company, and we believe that this can be reflected in a general price increase based on more and more value we bring to the real estate agent, yes.

Perfect. And then -- it's really a follow-up. But in terms of what could be interesting for you guys in terms of M&A, what on the product side, for example, are there any obvious things that where you should say if we had something -- historically, that was on the data side, right, which Sprengnetter probably has sold now, is anything "obvious" something that we should -- could be of interest?

I will not disclose that here. Otherwise, we have to pay more later than the targets. No. I think if we look where the market opportunities are, I think, definitely in the ESG topic. I mean this will be more and more relevant for the future. So it's also here a kind of data game at the end, but there are not many companies out there. So it will be hard to find a right target at the moment here. But this gives us -- I mean, this market at least has a big opportunity for us. So other than that, I mean, there's nothing what we really need in order to complete our product set at the moment. I think we are well packed with the features we need in order to grow further. And it's -- I mean, it's also not -- I mean, I think you mentioned price increases, it's not just price increases. It's also -- I mean, we are offering this ecosystem and the connectivity within this ecosystem makes it more efficient for agents. And that means it makes also sense for them to replace some of the products they're using at the moment, for instance, CM systems, pricing -- valuation products and so on, they can use it as part of the membership that will also push membership upgrades. So it's not just that we're asking for higher price here for the same product, that's definitely putting more value, and therefore, we are able to catch more at more share of wallet on the agent side.

It's Giles Thorne here from Jefferies. A question for Gesa. It's back on the new membership packages. It'd be interesting if you talk about the design [ ecos ] for the new memberships. What problem were you trying to solve that the old membership approach was lacking. And I'd be interested if you could build on that around how you're going to see [Indiscernible] your ability to be around [ Immo-Punkt ], which seems to be quite an interesting feature to all of the packages.

Yes, I can try and probably someone wants to add. So I think the old membership world was a good membership world, but it was built for a seller market environment. And you could decide whether you're into marketing or whether acquisition is more the topic because for many of our customers, marketing wasn't a problem because it was quite easy to sell. And so we've invested as well heavily in an acquisition product set there. And what we noticed with the change of the market is and -- two things in reality. I tried to point that out. On one side, the agents have to handle more. So it was more about efficiency. So we try to add and swap products that help them to consult and get the knowledge they needed for more stuff and for more complex stuff. And it's not they need just a specific feature, they need everything. So one needs acquisition product and one needs a marketing product and different levels. And that's why we rank them like on Silver, Gold. And the higher you go, basically, the logic is that the more tools you get to make your business easier and to create new business for yourself. Specifically in the Gold membership, we have a sort of section that is called growth tools, which has the modernizes and the valuations and you as an agent can use that as well to get business for yourself. So that's a bit the difference in the words that resonates.

I think it's still -- yes, I appreciate it's [indiscernible] , it's only going live this week or next week, but...

Yes. Monday.

Monday, okay. So do you have any feedback that you can share -- agent feedback?

So I can tell you that the sales force is absolutely high because they feel that it's because of the new products that we put in they really feel there is a difference and something new. And we've, of course, shown the customers and one testimonial and we have a very, very positive feedback so far.

Let me just add something organizationally for those of you who weren't familiar it's advantageous if you had the former Chief Commercial Officer being Ralf Weitz, now being the Chief Product and Technology Officer because he obviously understands like no one before, what's needed here. So Gesa now has the right product also to sell. There's no -- there is no pushback. It's really like interlocked.

Yes. And probably -- sorry, no...

Yes. Sorry, also the question for Gesa. I want to talk about the agents here. You gave a very good presentation about the market in Germany. One basic question that I still would like to understand. Is the commission rate now, why in a market where transactions are falling is it, first of all, initially so high at 7%? And secondly, why is there not more of an initiative to bring the commissions down. It would be a normal behavior in a difficult market. So why should we assume the 6%, 7% is something that will last the next few years. And then the question related to this, in the same context, do you expect the number of agents in the market, not on Scout in the market, to be the same or fall in the next 2, 3 years. And obviously, why?

Yes. So probably on the commission rate, so the commission rate has been always as high, and it's never been touched and it's going to remain on that level. And the last time it was touched, I have to think how many years ago, but that was quite recently when we introduced the Bestellerprinzip, and that was their conversion rate was on the table already had to be changed, and it wasn't changed. What was done is that the commission -- the sale commission is now by law equally paid from the seller and the buyer, yes. And that led, of course, to the fact that there is as well a higher value expectations from the seller side into the service of an agent because you pay half of the commission. And therefore, that's not going to change. And specifically, in a market where it's harder to sell, I don't think there's any reason to make the selling service cheaper. So there is no indicator that the commission rate is going to change.

Normal behavior. If you just have a less transaction, less people come into your office, obviously, Bestellerprinzip introduced in the good times, more or less, but you don't see any of this activity at all any indication -- it would be so obvious. And obviously, I see that the commission rate stays. But I don't really [indiscernible] stays like this for the next 3 years?

Yes. But I think you're either selling a house or you're not selling a house. So that's not really related to the agent commission rate. And as you saw, the demand is high, we have had phases in Germany, where the interest rates were 5% or 6% and that we still have [ 600 ] transactions. So -- and the commission rate was as well on that level. What we see, but is -- and I tried to show that is that the service of the agent is becoming more and more important. And we see that there are more agents used at that rate. So I think it's very, very stable and positive.

This is Henry from ABN AMRO. I have a question on data integrity and trust, you've talked about this several times. Can you guide us through what can you do to make sure that this is self-guarded, right? And also to prevent fraudulent activity on the platform.

So I can start free to jump on it. So, I mean, first of all, we have a lot of experience of understanding where it's caught in the system and what is the latest development here. And it's -- and we know that trust is important for us as a brand. We are the trusted brand out there. So we have also to invest more than others maybe here into technology. And be implemented, for instance, our 2-factor identification service to every customer group, which is -- so you need to -- you need to identify yourself. Firstly, really clear with your -- as a professional, with your documentations and there's even as a seeker, sometimes you need to show us the ID card. We've [indiscernible] services, for instance, so this is lowering the fraud level, and we are also using AI technology for detecting for listings, for instance. So -- and we have customer care then also as a back office service here, more than others, I would say where we're also checking listings by hand in order to identify for listings here. And I can share some numbers here. We were able to decrease the number of fraudulent listings by 80% last year because of using this latest technology here. I mean, of course, there will be some upgrade also on the fraudster side. But as I said, we are behind that.

Its Pete from Morgan Stanley. I think this was kind of a little bit touched upon, but on [ Immo-Punkt ]. So from the agent side, what is the advantage of you launching your own currency is my question.

You want to start, Gesa and then -- or us...

Okay. Let me start. So the reason #1 is flexibility in the current or -- in the current product, but you always had to decide to want to, for instance, upgrade a listing. Let's take it from a very basic point whether for what type of listing you want to buy it, because the prices of the upgraded listings are dependent on the property type. Because it's like an ROI pricing that's behind that. And so that's very stiff if you want to buy contingents for instance, right, because you really deeply would need to know how you portfolio is composed. And that's, of course, limiting your spend a bit because you might be worried that you can't use it. And for instance, that flexibility, just on that example, can probably explain at best, that you're capable of having a committed spend that you can then use flexible.

And it's maybe also fair to say that we have some experience already in those credit system because our commercial customers, they have the commercial [ punkte ]. And we know this is well accepted by the customers. They like the flexibility. But you also have to see that our product suite is much bigger now since it was -- as it was in 2021, for instance, and we don't want to sell every product separately. I mean, actually, we want to give access to our product suite. And instead of signing a contract for each new product or for each different product. You just signed one contract. You have Immo points and then you can test the products, you can use the products and that's easier for the customers.

Okay. And then an unrelated follow-up question. So on leads from the Homeowner Hub, so what level of leads are you currently kind of driving from the Homeowner hub, if any? And over time, should we expect these to be mainly transactional leads or realtor engine?

So I mean, I presented today the [ intent box ]. Using the [ intent box ] means your you are entering a flow. It could be a lead flow for seller leads, for instance, could be a lead flow to engage with an agent in a different way here or could be also a private listing flow. So actually, what we see already is that there the number of leads we are generating out of this [ intent box ] is increasing month-over-month. And that gives us the confidence at the end that we think this could be significant organic lead source in the future. And that is what Dirk mentioned that we want to reduce marketing spend for paid leads, and we want to replace those paid lead traffic by own products. And when we see first results here, and we are quite confident.

I just want to make a call out to everybody who's dialed in via Zoom, you can also use the function to ask questions. Will you can go first.

It's Will Packer from BNP Paribas Exane, again. Could we talk about the range of outcomes in the context of the property cycle. So if we look backwards for the outperformance, the market being in a way week has helped you PPA revenue has been better. Inflation has helped us to say price increases. If we look forward, what's the best market for you, what's the worst market for you? And how bigger impact can that have? It feels like the message you're selling today is that you're relatively benign to the market backdrop. But clearly, if inflation is 10% it's going to make a difference as to kind of price increases you put through well, we think. But any kind of color on how you're thinking about that would be helpful.

I would think that if we are talking about a slow migration into the new normal, that would probably -- if I had a wish, I would make that wish. And when I say slow migration, I would think about '26, '27, '28, when we come back to mortgage rates going down, interest rates going down market becoming more and more of a seller's market as we've seen in the past, not so much with high pricing growth, that would be an ideal environment because that will then be a market where we have filled up amount of units in the Homeowner Hub where we have filled up our competitive mode and could then also significantly grow in the market environment.

In your view on the cycle, you had a pretty gradual recovery in property transactions. If they rebound faster, is that a downside risk for margins because you start to have more reals or lead engine, for example. Should we be concerned about that kind of thing?

No. It's not going to be a drag on margins because what we're seeing as of today is a pretty healthy development since 2021, where we started our investment program, and we know how to play that. That's what I can -- what I can assure you.

Just wanted to follow up on the consumer subscription business and probably be more into the increased target of 500,000 subscribers. And hoping you can touch a bit on the new Living Plus subscription and how big of a that is and how monetization works? And then I guess kind of thinking about the mix, we've clearly had a big tailwind from, I guess, rental seekers, maybe that will slow a bit as to market dynamic starts to change a bit. So just trying to understand, are you going to keep those people and add on top or how we kind of think about the mix and the 500,000.

I think there's a product question and a bit of a AI question, maybe you start.

Had a bit similar discussion during the break, and I was answering the question where it can go. I mean as we started with the product, I mean, we had a discussion with the teams what's realistic in terms of number they said why 15,000 subscribers. And I said, okay, I invite you for a football game in Madrid, if you hit the 70,000 subscriber, they hit the 70,000 in less than a year. So it shows that nobody knows really what kind of potential this product still has. Why? Because it's new, we are shaping here the market. What I know is we have 4 million moves in Germany. So EUR 3.3 million out of the EUR 4 million are rent transactions. And we also know that people are looking 6 up to 12 months actively for a new apartment. We also know that people stay on average 8 years in the apartment in the rent contract. So let's imagine, we would be able to extend the lifetime into a living subscription then we would have a lifetime of 8 years of those who are subscribing for the living subscription. So the question for us is now to find the right product where we are relevant in this living phase, we call it. So first of all, I believe that the 500,000 is more than realistic because, as I said, 3.3 million transactions. So why not 1 million. So I see -- I believe that there is much more to gain. And secondly, in the living subscription. We did some testings already, and we are also quite confident that we are able to offer here a product set which is attractive for those who became a tenant. But it's also clear that the price point will be different to the RentPlus products because, I mean, the price point for the RentPlus product at the moment, it's EUR 20 -- nearly EUR 20 per month. I think the [ Living Plus ] subscription has to be lower.

And adding the strategic component to answer your question, where interconnectivity really plays a big role. Imagine a service where you've been on Rental Plus. We give you the option to sign up for a prenotification service where within a certain ZIP code area of where you live and with certain financial criteria and certain size of an apartment or a living unit would become available, you'd be amongst the first to be notified with the permission, obviously, of the counterpart where we talk about interconnectivity and bringing these pieces together. Would this be worth something to you to maintain a membership and subscription in our [ Living Plus ]. We think so. Yes. Has anybody else done so successfully yet in Europe and launched that? No. But we do know that we have a track record of launching services making people happier about an utterly complex and frustrating process about living in Germany, and we think we can add value here. So we wanted to bring across today that whilst we don't have the final features disclosed today of what it will look like. Everything is in place in our platform from a data from having access to, having the audience, having the confidence in the trust level, being able to talk to each other. And now if you think about [ Immo-Punkt ] as an additional tool to steer behavior to make it easier to engage as opposed to, "oh, you got to pay $55" as opposed to like imagine "hey, dear MieterPlus, you get another credit for 300 [ Immo-Punkts ]. You may use those [ Immo-Punkts ] to then be a partner of a subscription lineup where we inform you proactively about something that might be in your neighborhood that you could. So that's the type of stuff you're thinking about.

Don't disclose too much, Tobi.

No. I will stop here.

Please. There's a question from Zoom. I think it was inevitable. I think it's for you, Tobi. So in your opinion, what is the probability that Co-star tries to enter the German market if they do it by buying #2 or #3, what could they do better to gain share on you on the traffic product side and agent side?

Thank you for the question. I don't know what this company's objectives are and what their strategy is all I know, and I know that pretty well is our strategy and what we've shared with you today. And what we've shared with you today is a strategy that is grounded in fact about how the market is structured and grounded in fact about what is needed to be successful when you're dealing with real estate in Germany. And it's more than just having the right features in place. It's more than just having a marketing war chest. It's more than having just a platform. It's about content, audience, trust orchestration of content and steering on the professional side with [indiscernible] the agents, but then also having the C side on the Seeker side. So we respect each and every competitor, and we have the utmost respect for anyone trying to enter or maybe entering the market. We have seen a lot of competitors over the past 25 years. We'll probably see a few others. We'll deal with the challenge once the challenge has arrived, but for the time being, we'll just hands down, focus on what we can control, which is the stuff that we just presented.

Chris from HSBC. I wanted to follow up on a question or a topic, better said, specifically mortgages. I know that has been a bigger topic like throughout the past, I don't know how many years. It's always come up, presumably very attractive because for the leads you give to the financing partners you get very little money, I guess, EUR 50, EUR 70 or something. I understand that the strategic focus has shifted a little bit because there is more -- many labor involved and everything. But is there ever going to be a chance when there's a greater degree of digitization in that space where you could jump like more focused on to that part of the business? Or is this like, we touched upon a complexity in Germany. Is that still an opportunity at some point? Or should we just start forgetting about it?

Do you want to take it, Ralf?

I can take it. So as I said, I'm really along with the company. And actually, I started with the mortgage business at Scout here. And we had the vision of everything will be digitized and that it's easy to consume a mortgage in Germany. And yes, and I share the frustration that this is so far not materialized. So it means it's still complex. I know that banks are working on a digitized process here and the decision -- on the loan decision process. But yes, this is nothing we can influence really. I mean what we can influence is that we stay in the upper funnel where we are today and that we stay here relevant for the users. So if it comes to buying a property, you have the question, how much can I afford? So that means we have access to the consumers if it comes to mortgages. How we are able to monetize that in the future. At the moment, hard to say because the market changed completely over the last 12 months here. I mean there was a shortage of leads a couple of months ago. It has changed completely now. There's oversupply of number of mortgage leads. And for me, it's hard to say and I think also what be -- what the future will bring. But what we can do here and that we're doing all the best of all what we can in order to stay relevant in the upper marketing funnels. And let's -- it could be -- just iterate a bit on that. I mean if you take the ESG example, right? If you want to modernize the building, it's actually, at the moment, really hard to finance it. Because it's not a mortgage. If you want to monetize your house, what you're owning, I think it's not a mortgage. So if it comes to buying a property, you can finance, then the modernization, together with the main mortgage if you're buying. So the buying process will be combined with the modernization use case. So -- and that's actually where we also have our hand on because we are owning the buying journey. So that means during this journey, we have to come with the estimation for how much it costs to modernize the [ building ] and so on we need to package it up into all this -- the mortgage size actually. So how big the mortgage is, is something we can give an answer to, and that's maybe an opportunity for us.

Right. I just want on the cross-platform marketing feature that comes with the Gold tier now. I mean, would you characterize that as the most significant feature upgrade. And was that something that agents were asking for that you went out to agents and sort of requested feedback on?

Yes. So we know as from the past always that the embedded marketing power of the membership is one of the most important selling arguments. So what we did now is we actually, for all tiers from Bronze, Silver and Gold, we upgraded the marketing power of those memberships sort of each on the respective level. And yes, that's one of the most asked features. I think what we as well did is that, we wanted to offer a product. It's very complex for a single agent and a small agent to do marketing in Facebook and instagram. And what we have here, we have 90 million users on the platform. And for us to do retargeting for the relevant audience. It's much easier from a marketing knowledge side of things, but as well, of course, we have the audiences. So I think that's an additional feature that was asked by the agent to have the option to extend.

[ Brian Perry ] with Reed Street. Thanks for having us. And thank you for the very coherent and compelling long-range interconnectedness plan. And we really do hope that German home ownership gets to 50%. That would be a pretty tailwind. Something we haven't heard about in a while is the so-called digital agents. I'm thinking of McMakler and Homeday. I'm just wondering if you could speak to how you see their presence in the market may be evolving? And any impact on your business that you see there?

So they're all customers and we do business with them and we very much appreciate the business. there's various forms of digital agents. Some of them having been positioned as if you do business with me, you'll save a little bit on the commission rate. Gesa touched on that. It's not really a -- from our point of view, not really a primary reason why someone would choose a digital agent these days because it's really about having the best agent helping you close a deal and as the business gets more complex in choosing the right partner. So from a position as of today, we don't think that this will be a market that is exponentially growing. We do think there's relevance, and we do think -- some of the names you just mentioned are probably the ones that are there and that are there to be around in the future, but this is not something that we see going to 20% or something off the market because again, the market is becoming more and more complex. And the unique value proposition you need to bring to the table is not so much predicated in price or anything other than its best deal maker for you personally.

Will. And then, Pete, I see you have another question.

It's Will Packer from BNP Paribas Exane. One of the most interesting numbers that you shared today was that the agent intermediation had shot up from 60% to 70%. Could you just sort of talk through a little bit the extent to which you think now sustainable or cyclical. What factors do you think have driven it? Because it's been an -- mitigator to the pressure on the commission pool, which has clearly helped your customers and probably Scout itself. So to sort of expand about that would be very interesting.

Yes. I do think it's very sustainable. I am -- and why I think that this is because the -- even in a market environment which was a clear seller market where you could argue that the seller that the agent wasn't really supporting the sales process. But was distributing the ratio was at 60%. And now as we emphasized, it's much more difficult. So you need an expert on your side. And even if the market normalizes in the sense that the transaction volume is going to go up, the complexity of the regulations of the energy efficiency topics of the valuations is going to stay. So you need an expert on our side and the agents will as well develop further expertise to fulfill that. So for me, that's super sustainable. And I think it's actually going to grow more.

Pete from Morgan Stanley. You had somewhere buried in the slides, a mentioned about its potential Copilot service sometime in the future. So this is a question about a Copilot service. How do you make sure that it doesn't cannibalize like the upselling potential towards agents? Because obviously, if the Copilot scours the Immoscout website, and it will deliver the perfect match for you whether it be on the first listing page or on Page 49. So why would an agent pay for Gold if the Copilot is going to find the basic or the brand listing just as well?

Yes. I mean first of all, the question is who is getting the Copilot and the Bronze edition, and the Gold edition. So yes, I mean, you have to see how the listings come to our website, right? At the moment, they are, yes, more than 50% of the listing coming via CM systems to our website. So the question for us is, okay, how can we make sure that agents use our service in the best way and the CM systems, if it is not an CM system of Scout, then it is really hard. So -- and therefore, what we're thinking about is that as part of your membership, this Copilot is embedded and just making sure that you get the most value for your money. And we have to do it on the Scout side, and we can do it on the CRM side because not every CRM system is owned by Scout. So I think it's actually a benefit for the customers to have it. And then of course, you can switch it off or you can decide is it helpful for you, yes or no. But I think actually, the Copilot will help us that the people who use our product better and that they use the products more.

Right. So it's a Copilot service for agents. All right.

For agents, but also we do it for the -- on the seeker side, sometimes because, as I mentioned, we see personalized search. So a personalized search is nothing -- it's also a kind of Copilot, right? Because we are selecting the new listings for you, and we distribute those listings to the people who are most likely matching to this listing. So -- and that could be also something, right? I mean on the seeker side, and that's actually the reason why people are buying plus also there is some pressure. If you want to have an apartment in an urban area where you have more demand than supply. There's also a need to push you up for instance. And that -- so at least there's a willingness to pay. So the question is how can we go after this. So -- and that could be also a Copilot idea for seekers.

Sorry, it's still going. Just maybe one for Dirk to ask about the plans for personnel cost, which is obviously something new controlled very tightly through most of last year. Obviously, we kind of got to absorb the acquisition of Spring matter, but just help us understand what's kind of baked in to that 63% target. I would agree to which you could flex that depending on lots of puts and takes that could happen between [ Autumn ].

Maybe two elements of my answer. The first one is, you saw on the video, we have around 1,000 employees these days and we feel quite comfortable with that number and on delivering our strategy and going forward. Secondly, you were asking about the flexibility between personnel costs and delivering the margin. We are flexible on that, and we will use that. But most importantly, I think is building a bridge from your question to an earlier question from Will because he was asking how comfortable are you feeling with regards to the market coming back again to a seller's market. And to what extent do you then need to buy by a lease. And I think a combination of the cost items, I displayed to you on what we've done there is also to say that the revenue guidance we gave is a bit of a creating a flexibility for us in order to deliver on the margin guidance we gave to you, right? So we feel very committed on the margin, and we're very committed on the profitability. And that's why we gave you a bit of a revenue guidance for '24 and the corridor for the years to come as well.

It was a question on 21st Real Estate. I think that completed in January and the press release came out from Sprengnetter rather than Scout. So I was just curious if Jan has own -- Dirk suggesting not -- and secondly, yes, commercial hasn't appeared a huge amount today. Just how much does that acquisition accelerate your ambitions and capability in commercial?

You want to take the communication part and then...

Yes. So why did it come out as part of Sprengnetter because we operate where we feel is a logical place to put it. And with Jan, we've not only gained a great asset, but Jan has also become a member of the family. So he's the expert because he's a lot closer traditionally to the valuation part and to the products there. So it was a natural place for him to lead that as there's also synergies between the two businesses. So no other reason than that. And secondly, strategically, yes, you're absolutely right. We feel like there's more to go after. And this is a first step, but probably not the last step because we feel what we presented is very, very compelling, and we have a lot to offer to commercial real estate part of us going forward. We've also announced a partnership model with another company. So there's more to come, and you should stay tuned around that.

How much did you spend on 21st Real Estate?

Not so much that it's worthwhile to share it with you because it was a very attractive deal.

So I think we're running out of time. There's one more question from Zoom, which I would read out, and it's probably for you, Ralf. You mentioned a 2.x audience advantage versus your #2 competitor. Could you comment on how this gap has evolved over the past 2 to 3 years?

Yes, I think what we see is that there is not much change. So we could maintain the audience advantage we have. And in the last 3 months, we could even extend here our advantage a bit what we see in the numbers. I think the audience and that's actually also a point I wanted to make during my presentation. If you create content, right, I mean, homeowners for instance said, you also create audience. So with the sweet sided marketplace, where we have dedicated products for each customer group, we are also making sure that those customers stick with us, and they are an audience at the end. So as more homeowners are able to onboard as big as the audience advantage will be in the future. And so I see audience has mentioned on the seeker side that is how we measure it today, but I see also audience advantage if it comes to listing creation if it comes to homeowner and also if it comes to agents.

Thank you. So Q&A is over. So this concludes today's event. I want to thank everyone who dialed in online for this event. Thank you very much for your interest in our company. Thank you, everyone here in the room. As we mentioned before, there are networking opportunities now with food and drinks upstairs, and we have lifted up the product demo. So you can continue with that as well. Thank you again. Bye-bye.