Hello everybody. Welcome, and super excited that you are all here with us today for our REA Group 2026 Investor Day. Before we begin, I would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land we are meeting on, the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, pay our respects to past and present. I would also like to very briefly draw your attention to the disclaimer in our pack, which is covering off some of the information we will be talking to today. Okay. In terms of the agenda, obviously very jam-packed. We have a lot to get through this morning. We are going to start with Cameron McIntyre, our CEO. He is going to give an update on our refresh strategy.
We are then going to talk to our edge, and when we talk about our edge, that is our proprietary data and the deep relationships we have, which really fuels the outcomes, and the outcomes from our consumers, vendors, customers, and brokers. We are then going to talk to just how we see the consumer experience is evolving and how we are shaping those. We are going to finish the first session off with our residential business. We will talk to you how we will be growing both our advertising and our customer solutions revenues with AI-powered campaigns over the next few years. We are then going to take a short break, and we will be back talking about how we are going to scale our adjacent growth engines. By that, I mean our commercial, new homes, and financial services businesses. We are going to give an update on Distilled.
We will then have a session on people and tech, and so that is really how we are accelerating our own organization. So focus on culture and innovation, and importantly, productivity improvements that we are driving there. The last session we are going to finish up with will be Andrew Cramer, our CFO, who is just going to talk to the strength of our business, revenue, earnings, and cash flow, but also the resilience that we have been able to extract through cycles and through all sorts of market conditions. So there is going to be plenty of time for Q&A. We will have Q&A after the first and second session. For those people who are hanging around for lunch, we are going to have an informal lunch with the leadership team, so there will be plenty of opportunity to ask follow-up questions if you have any after that.
Just before I hand to Cam, just four things we would really be very happy if you left the day with confidence in. The first is our extended runway for value and for yield growth in our core residential business. The second is confidence in the portfolio of businesses outside of residential and just our clear plans to accelerate growth in those businesses and to tap into some fairly attractive TAMs. The third is AI and just our confidence that we are not only going to survive, but we are going to thrive, and we are going to lead in the AI era and really build on the very strong foundations of our unique edge. The last is just around our financial capacity to continue to grow with very cash-generative earnings to fund that next wave of growth with a very strong focus on shareholder returns as well.
With that, again, lots to get through, I am going to hand it over to Cam to take us forward.
Thanks, Alice, and good morning, everyone. Thank you so much for taking the time to be with us this morning. We have got a jam-packed next few hours, but we are really excited about the journey we will take you on. What I am going to do is I am going to talk to you about our next move strategy, which is looking at FY 2027 and beyond, alongside our ELT, who I will introduce you to very shortly. Today is really about sharing our longer-term vision and doing a deep dive into many of the ways in which we will reach that vision that we have. It is not about guidance, it is not about short term and Q1 results, et cetera. We have got an earnings call on that coming up very shortly.
It is really about us taking the opportunity to focus on our product pipelines and doing demonstrations and talking to you about how we are going to build on the fantastic track record of growth that we have as a company. Look, before I introduce these folk on the screen, I just want to thank our board, and Hamish McLennan for being here today. I would also like to thank our guests from News Corporation. I would like to thank Lachlan Murdoch, the Chair of News Corp, for being here, along with Robert Thomson, the Chief Executive Officer, and Lavanya Chandrashekar, the CFO, and also Michael Miller, the Chief Executive Officer of News Corp Australia. It is great to have you here, and thank you for your support. Also from the ELT, we are doing a full court press with the team. We have got Andrew Cramer.
Cramer started as CFO in February this year. We have got the newest executive in the team, Katrina Konstas. Cat started as the Chief Commercial and Marketing Officer only a month ago. We have got Jonathan Swift or Swift. He is the Head of Product. Our CTO is Steve. Jane is the Head of Strategy. We have got Anthony here as well, who runs our financial services. Elisa looks after our people and our sustainability, and Tamara, our Chief Legal and Company Secretary. We have also got some other fantastic executives up on the stage to take us through a bunch of different cool things. We have got Tim, who is going to come up and talk about consumer. JC or Jonathan is going to talk about residential.
We've got Jarrod, who's going to come and talk about new homes, and Kris is going to come and talk about commercial and PropTrack data. As you also would recall, we recently announced a minority investment in Ireland's leading digital marketplace operator, Distilled, and I'd also like to welcome the CEO and Founder of that business here today, who's flown all the way from Ireland, Eamonn Fallon, up the back. Eamonn will address us a little bit later on and talk to us about what's going on at Distilled. Look, we have a fantastic group of people at REA and with a real focus on the opportunities that lay ahead for us. I've been really impressed by the team that we've got in the business.
I came into the role nearly 12 months ago and feeling really energized and ready to take a fresh look at how we do things at REA. Along the way, we have made a few changes and many of those we'll discuss today, I'm sure. The first thing that we've done, which I'll talk to you a little bit about in a moment, is just about our strategy. We've also moved quickly to innovate and build scale in our AI experiences for our consumers. We're deepening how we engage with our customers to bring more value to them. Our enterprise-wide Pro subscriptions with our partners is a really good example of how we're doing that. We're moving from annual cycles of value to always on innovation, and AI's been one of the big unlocks here for us as a company.
That obviously leads to increasing customer ROI, which is always great. We also have a new approach to product development and we'll be dialing up, and we're always dialing up on this, but collaboration across the business, both here and with our global partners. With M&A, obviously discipline's key, and we're focused on delivering strong returns for shareholders. When it makes sense, we'll also return capital to shareholders like we did earlier this year with our first market buyback. We've got a great new management team as well, which you'll see on display throughout the day. I know I'm going to be telling you things you already know on this slide, but at REA, we're very proud to be the number one address in Australian property. Core to our success are the millions of people who engage with our platform every month.
We've got leading brands in both residential and commercial property platforms. We've got the largest audience with nine out of 10 Australians choosing realestate.com.au when searching for property. Not only do we have the largest audience, but it's very deeply engaged as well. The quality of our experiences and the strength of our flagship brand ensures Australians continually return to our platform. Consumers actually visit our app 20 times on average each month. Our engaged audience drives the greatest value for our customers, which is why we're an essential industry partner with them. Our customers believe in the value that we offer with nine out of 10 agents recommending us.
We've also got over three decades of changing the way the world experiences property, and in every chapter of our journey, we've found new ways to grow, to have impact, and add value as both technology and consumer expectations have changed over time. We've always been there as a company. Through each evolution, we've developed premium products that deliver the best outcomes for customers, consumers, and brokers. Our next move is about bringing all that together in our ways of working and building on the incredibly diverse portfolio of assets that we have across attractive TAMs and leveraging our alpha in AI to accelerate innovation, value, and creation of growth. I'm sure you've seen parts of this slide before as well, but as you can see here, we've got 30 years of a track record of sustained revenue and earnings growth.
We've also shown resilience as a company in all market conditions, growing through the cycle, including interest rate-driven changes and policy-impacted downturns as we're seeing today. Our revenue's increased across our five chapters as a business, quadrupling over the past 12 years to AUD 1.7 billion. We've roughly doubled the size of the business in each chapter, which we've done through innovation and creating new sources of value. Looking ahead, that is exactly how we're going to be successful going forward as well. Look, as I've mentioned, and some of you would've seen this slide in some of our investor presentations, but earlier this year, we evolved our strategy and we think we're entering this next chapter of growth from a position of strength. Our strategy builds on the success of the past three decades, and our focus is on unlocking growth.
Our purpose remains very clear and consistent. We've introduced three new enterprise missions, which you can see on the right-hand side of the slide there, and you'll hear about those today. So they are to reinvent property experiences, to scale our growth engines, and to accelerate the organization. In the past, we've focused on audience, customer value, and unparalleled data insights, and these are still critical to us as a business. But in the era of AI, trust becomes a key differentiator. So trust is now how our core business, our new strategy, is underpinned, and it's underpinned with our deep relationships that we have with our key stakeholders, our rich data, and driving better outcomes for our customers, consumers, brokers, and our business partners.
These three strengths give us our edge, and in an AI world where trust and customer experience will always win. There's no one else in this market that can give customers the experience we give them when it comes to having the best products, continuous innovation, data insights. No one else can match what we have. AI is already amplifying our business, and we've only just scratched the surface with its potential. Jane and Swift, in a moment, will talk to you about our edge in more detail. As I said, AI's already creating value for us as a business, and we are AI beneficiaries. We are metabolizing AI extremely well through the company.
We've delivered over 40 AI experiences, including our flagship AI assistance, and you'll see more of those during the course of today, along with how we're creating new value in the features that we're delivering as well. On top of this, it's enabling our teams to deliver product faster, and Steve's going to talk to you about that at some stage during the morning and talk to you about how our investment is disciplined. We use a fit for purpose approach and track commercial benefit, application, and usage and make sure that we are getting the returns that we're after. AI unlocks monetization opportunities for us as a business in four different ways. First, through the delivery of vendor outcomes, which will support the growth in our advertising yield. Second, by providing the capability to uplift customer productivity and growth.
Third, through new tooling and the development of practices to accelerate our time to value and capacity to reinvest resourcing back into our growth engines. Finally, the ability to enter new TAMs by leveraging AI to extend current relationships and our product reach. You'll hear more about that throughout the day as well. As a business, our focus is on technology, but we're also very focused on the importance of our customer relationships, too. That's always been at the heart of this business, and we are trying to deepen our engagement with our customers. If our customers succeed, we succeed. Which is why as a leading property portal in Australia, we have the responsibility and the opportunity to support our customers through this AI transition.
We're partnering with them to educate their teams, to improve their workflows, and to create new products that solve real problems for them. In this video, what you're going to see is how we're working together, the importance of trusted relationships, and how REA's embedded tools and data are powering better outcomes.
Australia's property market never stands still. Staying ahead takes great tools, unparalleled data, and a partner you can trust. That's why the biggest names in property have partnered with REA over many years. Together, we're shaping the future.
The fact that REA has got the latest data sets has enabled our agents to be more informed. Data, information, insights, and knowledge are key factors in driving our business forward. We're happy and proud to be in this partnership. With the AI age dawning and new emerging prop tech capabilities, I think it's just the beginning.
From national networks to the local office, our people are on the ground with agents every day, helping them digitize their workflows.
Gone the days of hard copy papers, gone the days of DocuSign, PDF, trying to convert everything. It's amazing. It's all in one place. Realtair, Ignite. I don't believe you can get the same information, the same data anywhere else. Without REA, we couldn't do it.
We continue to innovate and collaborate with our customers side by side. This year, for the first time, we open the doors to our Hackdays event, inviting customers to build with us and solve real-world problems.
We've had MyREA come all the way down from New South Wales. They have been incredible at bringing a whole new insight, and we're really excited to bring it to life in some brand-new products here at REA.
REA has access to data that, from a customer perspective, we can't get access to any other way.
They can take something on that's new and just expand on it. That's valuable.
A trusted partner powering better outcomes for our customers.
What grabs me about that particular video is just the enthusiasm from our real estate partners about what we do and what is coming. The culture of collaboration that we have with them is real. There is no better representation of culture in a business like ours than through Hackdays. I have been doing Hackdays for a long time, but that Hackday with our customers was the best I have seen in 20 years. Looking at our growth runway in our residential business, there is significant opportunity ahead for us. Our prices remain only a fraction of the average sale price, and our take rates barely changed, only 2 basis points higher than over the last six years. We deliver outstanding results for our customers and vendors, yet still account for less than half the typical marketing schedule. Our product pipeline has never been stronger.
More innovation brings more value, and that is what is the most important. There is plenty of upside in our resi business, and we will continue to price to our value over time. We are also becoming an increasingly diverse business as well with strong financial momentum. In FY 2026, we delivered AUD 1.7 billion of revenue, growing our compound annual growth rate of around 14% over the last five years. Our EBITDA was AUD 1.5 billion, demonstrating our strong margins and operating leverage that we have. When we look at revenue contributions by segment, our core residential business is still clearly the powerhouse of REA, and we will continue to prioritize our attention and investment on that core business to drive growth. We are also very bullish about the growth engines that we have got in new homes, commercial, and financial services.
These are already significant businesses, each generating more than AUD 100 million of revenue and operating in attractive segments. Together, they account for roughly a quarter of our total revenue, and they are key contributors to our growth aspirations, and we are investing behind them. There is also good room for growth from our future businesses as well. Outside of all of that, our domestic growth engines are still under-penetrated, as I have mentioned, in large and growing markets, where we are focused on growing these businesses over time. We think we are positioned well to do that. Distilled, which you will hear more about later on, provides an attractive entry point into a digitally mature market and high-growth property market that is very similar to Australia, and where our IP and our technology is directly relevant. The team at REALTOR are doing a great job as well.
They are really thoughtfully growing that business and collaborating extremely closely with REA and our team, our product and innovation teams in particular. It is also worth pointing out the value of the access that we have to global technology players through our relationship with REALTOR and through News Corp as well. It is incredibly valuable. Outside of our property marketplaces, many of the large potential adjacent TAMs include things like conveyancing, utility connections, building and pest inspections. With AI business models, these areas will continue to evolve. We will continue to explore opportunities here as well. We have got a clear understanding of our levers for growth across our portfolio. As you can see on this slide, there are multiple opportunities that we have across our TAMs. There is plenty of growth runway in our core resi business.
As I just mentioned before, we can accelerate our growth in new homes, commercial, and financial services. We can also create value exchanges as well with our global growth engines and also unlock new TAMs using AI. The team will take you through many of the things that are highlighted on here as well around where we will capture value throughout the morning. Again, you will be familiar with some of the stuff on here, but we are pursuing our growth ambitions from a strong financial position. We are a disciplined, high-margin business and we generate strong free cash flows from operations. The combination of these strong free cash flows and our balance sheet provides us with the engine for further sustainability of our growth through our next chapter.
Before I get Jane and Jonathan up here, I just wanted to reinforce the messages that Alice gave you already and why we are here today. These are the four takeaways that we want you to take away from today with, and they are that our core resi business is number 1, with a clear runway to grow. We have got a great portfolio of businesses and plans to capture further value within them. We are a proven innovator and our relationships, data, and outcomes, our unique edge, positions us to lead in the era of AI. Finally, we have got the financial strength, strong cash flows, and balance sheet to fund further growth.
On top of this, you will see today we have a fantastic team of people who are energized about the next chapter at REA with a clear strategy to unlock the growth potential we have as a business. With that, I will hand you over to Jane and Jonathan. Thank you.
Thanks, Cam, and good morning, everyone. It is really great to be here. This is such an exciting time to be leading strategy at REA. Our incredible innovation culture was built for moments like this, and we have got so much to show you. Before we dive into sharing how we are bringing our new strategy to life through our products and business units, we firstly wanted to take some time to share why we believe that REA has a unique edge to lead in the AI era. It starts with considering what is unique about the property vertical itself. As you will see today, AI unlocks incredible opportunities across the end-to-end property journey. However, we believe that doing this well requires specialization for a number of reasons. Firstly, it is deeply human. The decision-making process isn't a simple matching formula.
It is a process of discovery that takes up to 40 weeks for the average consumer. That is why consumers spend so much time on our site. They do not want to be served up a small handful of options. They want to see all the possibilities. The hunt is part of the experience, and they enjoy it. It is unique every time. No two properties are the same, no two geographic markets are the same, and market conditions are changing all the time. Property is not homogeneous, making it vastly different to other verticals. That is why property valuation is so specialized and why rich, immersive content and local expertise is so valued. It is complex. Agents are managing campaign performance and seller leads across multiple properties all in parallel, and everything is urgent.
Consumers are often trying to buy a property, sell a property, and secure finance all in those same 40 weeks. That is why supporting all sides of the transaction and connecting across the end-to-end journey beyond search is key. Finally, the stakes are high. Buying a property is the biggest financial decision that most Australians will make. For owner-occupiers, it is also highly emotional. It is their home. Property isn't an experience that consumers want to outsource. What they want is help to get the best outcomes in an experience that they may experience, on average, only once every 10 years. General intelligence and horizontal agents can help for parts of the journey, but ultimately, high-intent buyers and sellers will come to a specialized destination to immerse in properties themselves. REA is Australia's property specialist.
Our edge uniquely positions us to lead the reinvention of property experiences for the AI era. We have the deepest relationships in the market, which earns us proprietary access to unparalleled data that we further enrich to fuel our experiences to deliver better outcomes, which in turn strengthens our position as the trusted partner that people turn to for property decisions. We will now step through how we create this edge, starting with our deep relationships. AI does not change the fundamentals. Success still requires listing coverage and audience engagement at scale. An AI-primed REA already starts with this. For consumers, we are the default destination for property. One in two Australian adults visits realestate.com.au every month, and over 80% of our traffic comes from direct and owned channels.
For customers, we deliver superior value and we are also deeply embedded in their day-to-day workflows through tools such as Ignite, a self-service platform for managing campaigns and leads, which is integrated with over 370 customer tools. Our growing network of partners, from mortgage brokers to photographers, extends our visibility of signals before, during, and after the transaction. These deep relationships earn us access to rich consumer behavior intent signals and the most comprehensive property listings and market context. As we know, data is the fuel of AI. So our proprietary data that we earn through these relationships is unparalleled. For example, we have realEstimate for over 12 million addresses. We capture over 7 billion behavioral data points each month, and 5.3 million addresses have been claimed and are being tracked by their owners. That is fine? Okay.
We then further enrich that proprietary data by adding third-party sources such as location and lifestyle data, local planning and zoning information, and agency sales outcomes. However, the greatest value comes from our specialized intelligence, which is the output of proprietary AI models that we've been building for over a decade. For example, our serious buyer model predicts which consumers on our site are more likely to be ready to transact based on their behavioral activity. We can do this because we know that buyers who spend a long time on a listing looking at photos, videos, and immersive content, and who take a lot of actions such as saving, sharing, and using our financial tools, are more likely to be the eventual buyer of the property.
These models keep learning over time, because when the eventual buyer then claims their property on our owner dashboard, it confirms that they were indeed a serious buyer, and we can confidently apply those behavior patterns to inform our next prediction. This is just one example of REA's specialized intelligence system in action. I'll now hand over to Swift to share how we deliver better outcomes.
Thank you, Jane. In a high-stakes decision like buying or selling a property, AI needs to provide more than just a plausible answer. It needs to offer the most accurate, personalized answer, and a clear path to action and outcomes. That is the role of our specialized AI. We bring together signals across the listings, the location, property insights, lifestyle, financial affordability, customer performance, and consumer intent. Each signal adds context. Together, they help us understand not just what someone is looking for, but what they really need. That richer understanding can deliver outcomes in three ways. First, consumers can discover more possibilities. In the example shown, a user is asking our agentic AI assistant where to find similar homes in more affordable suburbs. To answer that question, we need to combine their lifestyle preferences, price, and affordability to display similar suburbs beyond the listing.
Second, we can turn complexity into confidence. Personalized, proactive guidance that remembers what matters to each consumer and helps them compare options relevant to them. Third, we can help consumers from intent to action. We can connect online with offline experiences such as inspections, finance, and building and pest checks, powered by our customer workflows, helping consumers act confidently with less friction and stay in control. We're already seeing early signals of value here. 13% of all listing views are driven by our personalized AI assistants. We're now seeing healthy growth with 25% of all AI conversations leading to a high-value action, such as sharing a listing, saving it, or inquiring on a property.
Our specialized intelligence powering the assistant improves over time as we create more AI experiences that encourage deeper engagement, which in turn generates more context and signals, making the outcomes that it generates hyper-personalized to the consumer. Tim and I will share more around the consumer experience and where we are going shortly. We are embracing the possibilities of agentic AI by extending our specialized intelligence into the workflow of property professionals. We have an exciting opportunity to shape the industry's future by leading the specialized agentic AI platform that helps them work more effectively. This platform will extend agentic capabilities across customer integrations, connect with our consumer experiences, and work with the existing tools and channels our customers use every day. The goal is to bring the right signal into the right workflow so customers can act at the right moment in efficient, impactful ways.
With more than 50,000 monthly active Ignite users, we have a scaled platform to build this experience upon. We will continue to help our customers win more listings. Ignite AI can combine property and consumer intent to surface early qualified seller opportunities. This uses our seller data to help customers proactively identify and convert sellers by prioritizing outreach and relevant local market context. Once the listing is won, our specialized AI will continue to optimize the campaign and drive campaign results. The use of our Ignite assistant that is live today is growing rapidly, with thousands of agents already using this tool to help them make their campaign work harder. With our full view of the market and real-time buyer demand, we can help agents turn buyer intent into timely action.
For example, when an offer comes in, our agentic AI will be able to alert all serious buyers that now is the time to act. Finally, the platform will create greater efficiencies. Agentic workflows can extend across the tools and communication channels professionals already use. This reduces complexity and manual tasks, reducing operating costs, and enable our customers to be more productive. The opportunity is to turn our connected intelligence into more listings, better campaign results, and greater efficiency while helping our customers maintain professional service. To bring this to life, I would like to share our vision video.
We spent 30 years building the most complete view of Australian property. Now we are harnessing AI to transform that knowledge into a new era of property experiences. The journey starts before the buyer is even looking. We inform what they can afford, their lifestyle needs, the properties that are right for them through a new way to search, one that understands them, properties unique to their needs. For this buyer, and nearly 12 million Australians, our AI anticipates what is next. Learning from every move, understanding them better every day, acting on their behalf, getting financial pre-approval, booking the inspection before they ask, reviewing contracts, flagging risks, connecting to a conveyancer, and submitting an offer with confidence. For sellers, selling is the most stressful move Australians make. There are nearly 500,000 sales a year, and we know what makes a good one.
What the market's like, what to fix, what sets the home apart from others. We build confidence through real-time insights of buyers already waiting. Then recommending the right agents, building a personalized connection before the first call. Agents understand the seller with data and context at their fingertips. Their proposal builds itself in their voice. Buyers arrive qualified with real intent, waiting to be contacted. Responses are done in minutes, not days. With a deep context of the home to actively moving the sale forward. We know this market. Matching the right home to the right person at the right moment. Buyers, sellers, and agents connected by the same trusted intelligence. With every interaction, we grow smarter. Every agent makes the platform stronger. Every outcome better than the last. realestate.com.au, the trusted partner powering every property move.
As we move through the rest of the sessions this morning, you will see these experiences brought to life in our consumer, customer, and broker products. As general intelligence becomes more widely available, trust becomes the rate limiter of adoption. As Jane said, property decisions are deeply emotional and personal. For Australians, property is bound up with people's identity, security, family aspirations, and financial future. Trusted support is especially critical, and trust is earned, not claimed. It takes decades to acquire and can be lost in an instant with one hallucination or newsworthy event. realestate.com.au is the trusted brand in property. Millions of Australians trust realestate.com.au to help them with one of life's biggest decisions. Our edge is built on three strengths that reinforce trust. Our deep relationships help us understand and address the human needs behind every property move.
Unparalleled data, together with an understanding of the property context, real-world constraints, helps provide accurate, trusted insights that support better outcomes. Better outcomes validate that trust placed in us and can continue to help consumers act with confidence. Together, these strengths of our vision make it possible to be the trusted partner powering every property move. To summarize this section, property decisions require trusted, specialized intelligence. This needs to be at scale. REA has a unique edge to lead in this AI era. Our deep relationships, proprietary data power better outcomes. We are putting that edge to work in building an agentic platform for the property industry. Our AI experiences are already reshaping the market, and the platform gives a way to extend this impact. That is how we can help shape what comes next for property with trusted, specialized intelligence at the center.
I will now ask Tim Bradley to join the stage. Tim is our Executive General Manager of experience and platforms and leads our consumer products. Thanks, Tim. REA has been built around the consumer at the center of everything we do. We are Australians' destination for property. With 12 million unique visitors each month, making realestate.com.au the number one place for property. Our advantage is not only scale. For over three decades, REA has repeatedly adapted to changes in consumer behavior, from the web to mobile, and now from search to AI and immersive experiences. That history matters. We simply do not follow consumer changes. We actively lead them with our technology and scale. We do not just reach a large audience. We have a deep and increasingly valuable relationship with our consumers.
The mobile phone is the most personal device we own, and our apps generate over 60 million visits each month. Three in every four minutes spent searching for residential property is spent on realestate.com.au. Our membership base has continued to grow by 50% over the last three years, and that combination of reach, engagement, and trust creates three unique sources of value. It enables us to better learn the needs and dreams of our consumers and enables us to personalize their property journey. By deepening our relationships with members, strengths are core advertising products by making listings and experiences more relevant and engaging. Our membership base provides an opportunity to serve consumers in high-value adjacencies like financial services, buyer due diligence, and other property-related adjacencies through relevant, personalized actions. Every interaction creates a richer understanding of the consumer intent, the property attributes, and the real-time market demand.
Those signals improve the products we build, for example, in our PropTrack and data ecosystem. This is a foundation for an AI advantage, the most engaged audience, high-intent interactions, and a trusted role. Tim's now going to take us through some examples of how we're shaping this next-generation consumer experience. Over to you, Tim.
Thanks, Swift. Good morning, everyone. As you heard from Jane earlier, property is complex, highly personal, and deeply human, and it is also high stakes with buying a home, one of the largest financial decisions most people will face. Our scale and depth of relationship with consumers put REA at a unique position within this property journey, and it is a long journey. On average, it takes over 40 weeks monitoring the market, narrowing your search through inspections, offers, and settlement. The relationship does not end there, with on average people owning their property for more than 10 years. This has created an opportunity for REA to move from a point-in-time property search to an always-on relationship. I'm really excited that I get to take you through how we're reinventing this consumer experience and why REA is uniquely positioned at each stage of the journey.
The way people search for property is changing. REA was originally organized around suburb-based search, which was the best way to organize property content at the time. However, consumers increasingly want to express what they're trying to achieve, whether that be travel times, financial growth, or lifestyle factors, rather than the type of suburb that they're looking to buy in. Over the past 12 months, we have launched two new experiences: an AI natural language search and an AI assistant. While these are early in their infancy, we're already seeing 31% month-on-month growth of these experiences. Already, 59% of searches originate from lifestyle-based content, such as "Show me a property near a beach within a 30-minute drive to the CBD." That's generating four times more data points around consumer intent, and that's a strategic shift. We're moving away from just matching a query. We're understanding the need.
And for consumers, that means more relevant properties across more suburbs. For customers, we are going to be able to give a richer insight into what the consumers are actually looking for, whether that be proximity to the CBD or school zones or rental yield or capital growth. During this stage of the journey, understanding affordability is one of the biggest challenges consumers face. Many buyers begin looking outside their realistic range, while fewer than 10% are already pre-approved. More than a quarter are already using AI today to understand their repayments and other costs. Our opportunity is to connect that property discovery with the financial readiness. REA brings together the audience, the property context, the consumer intent, and also the network of brokers that can help people move from preparation to transaction all in one journey. We are already getting thousands of requests today.
Let us look at some real examples of what consumers are searching for and why this really matters. Consumers are asking about the market. What are the rental vacancy rates like, or what is happening with price values? They are combining distance and finance. What are budget-friendly suburbs within reach of the CBD? They are getting really specific, like, "Show me a two-bedroom apartment between these roads with a courtyard and excluding high-rise."
Sometimes they are just simply asking, "What is this property really worth? I have seen cheaper." The important point is not just the variety of questions. As Swift mentioned earlier, it is that each interaction produces a richer signal about intent, constraints, and preferences that helps power our models. To now bring this to life of the future experience, let us look at it with the eyes through a typical buyer. I am going to introduce you to Steph. Steph is 33.
She has been renting for the past 10 years, saving a deposit with her husband, Chris. Steph starts with a voice search, looking for a home close to their workplace and near green parklands. Our AI search looks at the criteria and returns homes matching across several suburbs. North gets new to them, so they decide they want to go and explore it. While they are walking the streets, Steph falls in love with the weatherboard homes, so she uses photo search to find similar properties in all of those similar suburbs that she likes. The results are wide in range in terms of price, and some of these suburbs might be out of reach for a first home buyer.
So she asks the AI assistant, "Can you find some more affordable suburbs that still fit her needs?" While these suggestions help, she still feels that some are too far from work. So she asks the assistant for something closer. The assistant checks, will they actually consider a knockdown rebuild, which could give them the style of home they want in the suburb that they are interested in. These trade-offs are real, buying established or to build. But Steph needs to know what can they really afford. So she enters some high-level financial affordability information, and the assistant suggests to connect with a broker. Arranges the appointment, and she lets Chris know that they are off to meet the broker. The very next day, Steph then receives an alert. Good news, they have been pre-approved.
Based on their budget and their search behavior, the AI assistant builds a tailored list of properties, automatically saving that to a collection, and Steph can browse these options. But there is far too many to visit on the weekend, so she sends that list off to Chris. Once consumers have understood their budget, they have narrowed their search, they really want to experience the property before they invest time in a visit. Our attribution models show that the successful buyer of the property spends over 6 hours interacting with photos, videos, floor plan, reading content, and trying to understand what is around the property. Today, around 20% of listings include video, and that number is just increasing. Our partnerships and acquisitions with iGUIDE and IMMERSIV are making the property content much more engaging.
Consumers also want to understand what is around the property, whether that be the school zone, public transport, or cafes nearby. They also want to know about capital growth, rental returns. PropTrack is providing the data and insights that help bring this into the context of the decision. Our opportunity is to combine the content, the property data, and the place intelligence into the one experience, so the consumers can build confidence in the property before they have even stepped inside. Before the weekend, Steph is reviewing the listings so she can make the most of inspection day, and she really likes this house in Wright Street. The listing content, it gets organized based on what is most important to Steph, a great kitchen space and spacious bedrooms. While she is diving into the kitchen and really loves that, the backyard looks stunning.
The bad news, Steph is not a gardener, and she is a little bit worried that that is going to need a lot of maintenance. She asks the AI assistant to add a note to remind her about checking the backyard. While she is adding this note, the AI assistant then suggests that there is a nearby three-bedroom house that has a smaller backyard that is open for inspection between two others in her plan. She adds that to her shortlist. All of her notes and her schedule are all in one place, and she is ready for the inspections on the weekend. Once a buyer has fallen in love with a property and the neighborhood, the journey changes from evaluating to acting. They need to inspect the property, complete the due diligence, and get prepared to make an offer.
Engaged consumers share listings, they send inquiries, and they book inspections with more than 10.7 million high engagement points happening each month. When consumers are ready to act, 53% of them say they feel overwhelmed by the steps involved in buying a home. This is where REA can connect the right guidance and professional services at the right moment, from building and pest inspections, utility and service connections, and in the future, conveyancing and other parts of the transaction. This will make the experience simpler for consumers and also considering opportunity in adjacent markets for REA. Let us see how the buyers are progressing. A timely alert comes through, and their first house felt right, and they really love that backyard. They are letting them know that the contract of sale is ready to review. As a first home buyer, Steph is unsure of the next steps.
The AI assistant summarizes the contract of sale in plain language. It highlights the key points and reminds her to have a conveyancer check the details. Steph doesn't have a conveyancer, so the assistant suggests some potential candidates to connect with. She asks, "Well, what else should I do?" The assistant recommends starting with a building and pest inspection because it sees from her notes they're worried about mold in the laundry, and so they purchase that report immediately. The assistant has the ability to track the progress Steph is making, what's still outstanding. She can follow along and stay informed as they get ready to make that offer. The relationship with REA does not end when the buyer moves in, and in many ways, it's just the beginning.
People own their homes for more than 10 years on average, and 5.3 million properties are tracked by owners today. Today, consumers get insight into the value of their property. The next opportunity is to help them decide what to do next with that insight. Over time, the assistant will surface relevant actions, such as changes in demand for property like theirs, renovation decisions, refinancing options, and other moments where the property information can help them act. The differentiator is context. REA understands the property, the neighborhood, the owner's journey, and the decisions that may come next. We're making that assistance useful, timely, and transparent. Turning this one-off property search into a relationship that continues throughout ownership. So Steph and Chris have loved their home for the past five years, and their life's taking a turn.
They've got some great news, they're pregnant, and congrats, it's twins, so they're going to need to upsize. They've been thinking about extending into that backyard, and they've just received an alert that a property like theirs just sold around the corner. A similar weather board home sold above market expectation, and there was a lot of buyer interest. The AI assistant offers to connect with the agent that made the sale, but it also says, "I can find other agents that sold similar weather board homes to yours." While they're considering their options about selling, they're going to need to start a search for bigger homes with great school zones.
Hopefully you can see that we're really excited about the reinvention of the consumer experience from smarter discovery all the way through to property ownership and the role AI is going to help play in helping us accelerate that vision. I'll pass you back to Swift.
Thanks, Tim. Our consumer experiences will be tailored and proactive, powered by AI, built with strong relationships, and fueled by REA data and insights. Our consumer experiences continue to evolve in this AI era, underpinned by being the number one address in property for the largest, most engaged audience. Our relationship is built across the full property journey. Every search, inspection, and action helps us understand consumer intent and serve people more usefully. A lifelong AI companion can deepen engagement, strengthen our core advertising products, and open up opportunities in adjacent markets. This is not AI added on top of a property portal. It is a rethinking of the property journey around consumer intent, confidence, and action. We have repeatedly evolved with our consumers from web to mobile, from listings to personalized experiences, and now from search to AI-powered property companion.
I will now call Jonathan Cameron to the stage, our Executive General Manager of Residential, who will talk about how we are evolving our residential products in this AI era.
Thank you, Swift. I am Jonathan Cameron. I am the EGM of our residential business, and I have been with REA for 12 years. Today, I am pleased to share with you a bit more detail about our residential business, our current products, and importantly, our product pipeline, and why in residential, we have the best years still ahead of us. Residential is our core business at REA, with a clear position of market leadership, trusted by both consumers and by customers. In fact, nine out of 10 Australians searching for property choose realestate.com.au. As importantly, nine out of 10 customers recommend our platform to vendors to market their property. This leadership has driven residential revenue growth of 15% CAGR. Australia's residential market has distinct dynamics that underpin our model.
We drive revenue from vendor paid advertising, which means our depth and our add-on products are covered by the property owner. Increasingly, our revenue base is supported by customer-derived revenue, where agents and agencies are paying for products such as subscriptions, workflow, and branding products. Our residential business has a proven track record, and today we will show you the product pipeline that drives our next wave of growth. Residential has a large and attractive TAM of AUD 3.7 billion, which is made up of AUD 2.7 billion from residential advertising and AUD 800 million from our customer solutions. We have three distinct growth drivers that will power our next wave of growth. First up, we want to grow our customers' business through seller leads and importantly, seller leads that convert.
We want to accelerate their efficiency through AI-powered workflows, and most importantly, we intend to extend our double-digit yield runway through AI-powered advertising. First on seller leads. Customers choose to partner with REA to grow their business through seller lead and branding solutions. We produce seller leads from our large and engaged audience and deep relationships with owners. In fact, over 50% of sellers track their property on our platform before listing. In FY 2026, we delivered over 100,000 seller leads, which is up 22% year-on-year, and that has a huge runway to go into the future. In this market, this currently challenged market, seller leads, and more importantly, seller leads of high quality that actually convert, are more valuable to our customers than ever. We monetize seller leads through three distinct mechanisms.
First, with our subscriptions, where today over 30% of our customers have already upgraded to our top-tier subscription, Pro. Pro unlocks AI seller lead insights and workflow tools to help customers identify, nurture, and convert seller leads faster. Secondly, our comprehensive agency and agent marketplace, which features rich agent profiles, ratings, and reviews, and is relied on by our property owners to choose the next agent to lease or sell their property. Lastly, our newest product, Likely to List, where we have developed an AI propensity model built on PropTrack property, market, and behavioral data. This product will enable customers to focus their prospecting effort and convert leads quicker to gain a competitive advantage in their market, ultimately leading to a listing showing up faster on our platform.
Currently, we're in a live trial testing the pricing model and go-to-market of Likely to List, and we intend on launching in calendar 2027. Likely to List is our hero data product designed to specifically help customers in a challenged market. Now to show you how we drive our customers' growth, I'm going to walk through three experiences. First, the owner dashboard, which is the trusted place where consumers track their property and the market. Ignite, our customer platform, which is relied on by over 50,000 customers each month to manage their campaigns. A first look at our newest product, Likely to List. First, property owners. We engage property owners with rich local data from PropTrack in the owner's dashboard, giving them confidence to decide their next move. Owners see their property's current value, local insights, and we promote agents in the area.
It's a critical consumer experience as the behavioral data it captures feeds our intent models. In this demo, a property owner now submits a customer appraisal request and it's on the way to one of our customers. Now let's see how a customer would manage that seller lead in Ignite. They can see the seller lead land directly in their Ignite inbox with all the information provided by the consumer. Exclusively for our Pro customers, they get to see leads enriched with data to help them prioritize their prospecting. Ignite AI Assistant streamlines lead management, and in this case, it has looked at previous performance for similar properties and has recommended to assign this lead to the best agent for the job. Now, a preview of Likely to List.
We will use our live intent data captured across our experiences to empower customers to identify and convert sellers faster. Likely to List takes our AI propensity model and applies it to a customer's CRM to surface the properties that are most likely to sell next. Customers provide a list of addresses from their database, and we apply the Likely to List score from our AI propensity model. They can then focus their prospecting on these leads, and early signals from our commercial trial have our customers excited. We are seeing already one in three highly scored leads go on to list within 90 days. Since we are in commercial pricing model trial with our customers right now, I wanted to share a little bit more about how we are thinking about monetization.
We are exploring selling the data on a suburb-by-suburb basis with a 90 days exclusive access to the purchasing customer. To enable fairness and competition, we are trialing a proven pricing mechanism. We will offer a floor price per suburb, and then we will allow customers to bid in a digital auction to arrive at the exact price for each suburb. Our first auction goes live next week. I am really excited to see where we can take it, and thus far, the most common feedback from the customers, we have 70 suburbs that we are trialing for. The most common feedback thus far has been, "Can you please include more suburbs?" I am really excited to see where this can go. The next time we are up here, I will have some results. Next, on to Ignite. Ignite is our platform that customers rely on across their entire workflow.
Ignite empowers customers to win more listings, move properties faster, and run their businesses more efficiently, all powered by our unique data and intelligence. Ignite powers customers across their key jobs, and we have 95% of agencies already using Ignite today. The next phase will unlock agentic AI capabilities across the platform. First, I have just described how they use it to generate seller leads, which is unlocked by the intelligence in our Pro subscription. Next, when it comes to nurturing and converting sellers, Ignite provides the nurturing tools to enable customers to convert leads faster. Then, of course, when it comes to marketing the property, our depth in add-on products unlock Ignite to manage campaigns, track performance, and to use Ignite AI Assistant to optimize their campaigns in real-time.
Then, of course, when it comes to finding and converting the buyer, Ignite delivers campaign outcomes with inspections, inquiries, offers, and rental applications with Ignite AI Assistant improving outcomes across the workflow. Ignite drives residential growth through subscriptions, depth, and add-ons, and Ignite AI capabilities will accelerate this into the future. Now let me show you the connected workflows in Ignite. In this demo, a customer is building a branded listing proposal backed by PropTrack market data using our pitch product. Ignite AI Assistant has selected the best comparables for the customer and they confirm it and accept it. Now we guide customers through pricing, we recommend vendor paid marketing, and we predict the campaign outcome. Now the customer can share this branded proposal with the property owner to nurture them towards listing. Now the campaign is live. The customer uses Ignite to monitor performance.
They use Ignite AI Assistant to optimize the campaign with product upgrades and setting the optimal inspection times. Luxe has been recommended based on performance and then purchased, and Ignite AI Assistant is now rescheduling the open to the optimal window and is updating the agent's calendar as well as notifying consumers in real time. On the go, customers have full access to data and insights through the Ignite app. They manage their campaigns, they check buyers into physical inspections, and view enriched leads, all of which is being synced with their CRM on their behalf, saving them time and energy. We are confident in the next phase of residential growth. We have a long track record of evolving and innovating on our offering through multiple cycles and major shifts in consumer behavior and technology.
We started with our subscriptions, then a major shift to vendor-paid advertising with our depth tiers. Then we introduced, launched, and scaled our top-tier depth product, Premiere+. Now we are unlocking further growth through add-ons. We see in difficult markets like this one that our add-on products play a critical role in helping customers drive outcomes for their vendors and to stand out in order to grow their business. To touch on our key add-ons, we have Luxe, which is our most premium add-on. This creates differentiation not only in the search results, but across our entire experience. We have Audience Maximiser, which is our social extension product, and this generates more campaign exposure, ultimately driving more consumers back to the listing on our platform. iGUIDE, our newest add-on, strengthens buyer confidence through immersive media and rich data.
Our depth and add-on packages deliver the best campaign outcomes for our customers and has contributed to a 14% 10-year yield CAGR for REA Group. Our next phase of growth, which is even more exciting than where we have come from, will be delivered by AI-powered advertising, which makes campaigns more targeted, more measurable, and more effective, creating further yield runway from FY 2028 onwards. Now we will zoom in on what our AI-primed advertising pipeline actually looks like and how we are evolving the value of our depth model beyond paid prominence in static search to proactive targeted campaigns that drive stronger customer and vendor outcomes. The AI search experiences that Tim showed you before will create brand-new surface areas for us to drive customer exposure. We will provide differentiated prominence and performance to our top depth customers.
Immersive media and AI-enriched data will elevate listings with immersive content already driving 22% more serious buyers than listings without. Ignite AI Assistant will drive campaign performance and customer efficiency with AI-powered workflows and campaign optimization. More important than ever, AI-powered advertising will deliver attributable outcomes with converted buyers and faster speed to sale. Our AI-powered product pipeline will shape the next wave of growth to grow both the marketing schedule and REA's share of it. Now, let us have a look at our next generation of listings. Here, a consumer engages with our AI companion you saw earlier. The AI companion promotes a top depth listing to a buyer matched on their preferences and needs, and we drive them directly into our 3D immersive tour experience.
The AI companion guides buyers at every step, calling out what matters to them most, really like a personal buyer's agent in their pocket. Immersive listings showcase the complete picture of the property with buyers moving seamlessly through the property, including video, 3D tours, and aerial. After deep research with the property, after an inspection, the buyer submits an offer directly to the agent. Back in Ignite AI Assistant analyzes campaign performance for customers in real time. They view live offers, and Ignite AI Assistant acts on their behalf. In this case, sending notifications to other bidders that a new offer has been made, as well as sending a WhatsApp to the vendor to keep them up to speed on the latest in their campaign.
As you have seen from the demos today, our product pipeline empowers customers at every stage of their workflow, from finding and converting a seller lead, managing the end-to-end workflow, and ultimately finding a buyer for the property, all powered by our data intelligence and AI product pipeline. REA captures only 0.22% of the average property value, highlighting the significant opportunity still available across the residential market as we enhance and importantly prove out the campaign outcomes that we deliver for customers. We have a long, strong runway of growth across vendor-paid advertising revenue and through our depth and add-ons. More so today, our customer-derived revenue through subscriptions, seller leads and workflow. AI will amplify the value that we deliver to our customers and vendors, creating the next wave of growth for residential and for REA.
I have shared the product pipeline that will power the next wave of residential growth. To reiterate, our core drivers for our next chapter is to help grow our customers' business with seller leads that convert, accelerating their efficiency with AI-powered workflows and insights in Ignite, and most importantly today, extending our double-digit yield runway with AI-powered advertising campaigns. Thank you for your time. I believe now we are going to move on to Q&A, and I will invite the rest of the gang onto the stage.
We have probably got 20 minutes for Q&A before we jump into morning tea. Happy to start with whoever wants to start.
Just go and chuck this down.
Okay.
We're good.
A mic. Probably need a mic.
G'day, Louis Bannon here from Berkholts Investments. I'm just curious as to how people actually interact with the app. By that I mean, a lot of your AI initiatives are prefaced on people actually using natural language search. From my understanding, speaking to other executives from the real estate classifieds businesses, most people still interact with a map view. I'm just curious as to how people actually interact with your app.
Swift?
Traditionally, the way most people go in, they will start actually in the search bar. Depending on what I am trying to do, map or listings. Actually, most of our consumers just like to see all of the listings. They will go to the map to understand relevance around location, et cetera. In this market, traditionally, I want to see all the listings. What we are seeing is people really like to go in that search bar, and what we have built now is that ability for us to do natural language search and the assistant, so we can actually interpret what that conversation is and whether we want to put that into the assistant or into traditional search. We have not seen a major shift in any consumer behavior around that at all.
Hey, guys. Do you mind if I just do a couple, both around Likely to List? Just on Likely to List, can you help me think if I am framing the upside properly? I realize it is very early, but just qualitatively, back in 2022, you guys were talking about things like property.com.au to drive more transactions. There is kind of a volume upside there, not just from properties that we are going to list, but potentially passive properties as well. Secondly, it looks like you are kind of doing that U.S. model auction kind of auction for leads. Thirdly, you have kind of bundled things like benefits for agents to drive uptake in other products such as AMAX and things. There could be a subscription kind of uptake benefit. Sorry to kind of lead, but am I thinking about it the right way?
Do you want me to first part?
Yeah
You do the second part?
Sure, I can.
Yeah. Just on the thing we talked about that stimulate the market, and JC with the Likely to List questions. A lot of the things we did on property.com.au are now actually on realestate.com.au. So as we touched on that ability to activate our own adult audience, 50% of seller leads coming from that channel. That is a growing channel all the time. So a lot of the things we learned around that stimulate the markets in there, and you will hear from Anthony later taking some of that proposition, buy before you sell, and bringing that into the experiences. You will hear more about that later as well. I will let JC finish the rest of these.
Yeah. Just on Likely to List, if I understood your question correctly. So we obviously already monetize our seller leads through our subscriptions Pro and through other branding products, and we have a great track record, and we will continue to do that. When it comes to Likely to List, it is too early. So as I said, we are trialing the pricing model right now. We have had great feedback from customers. We are only trialing it in the three major eastern states right now. But we do plan to scale that in early 2027. How far it can go, I cannot comment. It is year number one. But we are really excited. And really importantly, we have buy-in from our customers on this mechanism. And to answer your question, are we going to the U.S. model of charging per lead in an auction? It is not quite that.
We have another similar product called Suburb Sponsorship, which we already execute through this mechanism. Because it is exclusive basis for a particular geography, to be respectful to the consumers, we do not want a number of agents calling them at one time. So in order to get that exclusivity, we need to have this auction to make it fair between customers so that the ultimate winning customer gets access to the data.
For that entire window exclusively. They are not paying per lead, they are ultimately paying for that enriched data. We have a long way to go, but I cannot comment on the exact financials. Then I think on your second or your third question, Eric, around how we are thinking about bundling it with subscriptions, I think, initially it is a standalone product. Absolutely, we like to look at supporting our customers with all of our products and taking it to market in a way that they can easily digest and reward them for engaging with our products. But initially, standalone product. Down the track, sure, there is definitely an opportunity to package it, but we are going to start with it as a data product on its own.
Can I do a super quick follow-up? I do not know if you can comment on this, but you have got a double digit for the yield target. Early thinking on whether that applies to FY 2028 as well, just given your friends and macro charts up there and maybe the macro is a bit soft, but obviously you are driving a lot of new product and value to agent initiatives. So I am just wondering if you can still deliver double digit, just with more of that second part.
Yeah. Thanks, Eric. I will handle that one. As you guys have seen, just from the recent presentations that the guys have done, we have got a great product pipeline, and we are super excited about the value that we are going to continue to deliver for our customers. In terms of 2028, and how we are thinking about 2028, we have not had those conversations yet, and they are several months away. Clearly, we are looking at our product pipeline, we are looking at the market conditions and where things are at, but we have not made that call. Thank you, mate.
Yep, it is okay. I will ask
Sriharsh, do you want to go first?
Sure.
Right.
Maybe three questions. First one, it is fascinating to see the consumer intent that you are talking about where, previously, people thought research stays outside realestate.com.au, right? It is coming to the listing part. So what are you seeing in terms of the change here? Is it new users who is doing this intent, where they are doing the research within REA, or is it existing users? Any split would be great. Thanks.
Sure.
Sure.
To date, with the AI assistant, it has been to members, is what we have trialed it to. AI natural language search is now available to 100% of the audience. Given that we have focused on a membership to start with, it is largely around the new users. There has been some interesting, as I showed some of the examples of the real world questions, is they are really varied. What we are seeing is that people are actually viewing more properties and they are also inquiring more often, that are using these experiences.
If I was to use one interesting use case from a person who was actually on the team, they were actually looking for a house with a swimming pool, then the assistant suggested, "Would you look at a house with a bigger backyard for a lower price and then add the pool later?" What it actually did was broaden the search. It is really fascinating in terms of what we are learning and we are just excited to bring it to as many consumers as possible because we think it can stimulate and actually have a bigger set of properties to explore.
Essentially you are saying people might have been doing this anyway, but the conversation search is surfacing it for you. You are actually seeing what people are doing right now.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We definitely have a deeper insight into what people are really after. What are their real needs? The most interesting insight we have taken is that lifestyle prime. Traditionally, search is three bedrooms in a suburb, great, let's go away, and a certain price point. We are seeing that people actually start at lifestyle, and that is really interesting. We have always had great research capability, whether that is on property.com.au. Our content has played a huge role in that. What we are seeing is the AI assistant is surfacing that in a more relevant and actionable way for our consumers, so that is really interesting as well.
Got it. Second one, just thinking about personal AI assistants, Muse, Instinct, et cetera, right? How are you thinking about integrating with them? You spoke about signals that you are seeing because people are in the app today. What if agents are coming where the signals do not exist anymore? How are you thinking about that?
You mean kind of that agentic world?
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
I am using my personal AI assistant, it is going and finding through REA. You do not get the signal because it is reaching out to the agent, not through you. Yeah.
Really excited by the possibility of agentic AI. We actually see it as a new acquisition channel. In fact, we were in San Francisco last week and validated a lot of this thinking. You may start off in your personal assistant, just like you start in google.com today. What we have, though, is differentiated content, differentiated data. You saw on the immersive listings, et cetera. We will not surface that in agentic experience. You may start there, and as long as we have got that fair value exchange, that proprietary data, those unique insights, they will always encourage a consumer to come to our experience. Property is both an online and an offline experience, and it is the combination of those and the tooling around that that ensures you will always stay relevant throughout the entire property journey.
The initial discovery is one small stage of the entire property journey. It is important that we have got connections and capabilities all the way through that. I am really bullish on agentic AI because I think it gives us a new opportunity to capture people. We will get more intent because when that agentic agent interfaces with our agentic agent, and it will because it will want to go on the easiest path for the most listings, we will be able to have the most relevant content, and there will be more handshake. We will actually get more intent data from the agentic AI than we do from a traditional search today, for example. I am really excited by the possibility, because it will let us service all the way through, and we will stay relevant in that journey.
That is interesting. Just last one, just quick thing. You sort of mentioned that the add-ons, you are seeing increased take-up in a weak market. Are you actually seeing that right now because the feedback we are hearing is Portal spend is the same, but some of these social media, et cetera, is getting cut. That sounded surprising. Are you actually seeing increased take-up of AMX and Luxe right now?
Yes. We have successfully launched a new package for Luxe at the beginning of the financial year, and largely, the performance is in line with our expectations. I will just point to a good example is actually where in Melbourne, Victoria, where we have seen, I guess what you would say a flat or distressed market from a price perspective over the last three even to five years. We have actually seen a greater add-on attachment rate consistently, through that time period. What we see is that when the market is more difficult, our products have to work harder, and the customers who understand and engage with those products are not hesitant to take those up to drive outcomes.
Thanks, Sriharsh.
Hi. Hey there. A couple of questions from me. Just thinking about the consumer AI assistant that you have launched. A lot of what it does, is what buyer's agents used to charge for or still charge for. Have you thought about that TAM? Is the commissions earned by buyer's agent, is that a relevant TAM for REA in five years? What stops you from disrupting that besides some channel conflict?
I think the real opportunity, buyer's agents are great, but they're relative niche in this market. Our job is to have the largest, most engaged audience, drive our membership proposition, and ensure that we're doing the best job for our consumers. The way I see it, our opportunity is actually to do buyer's agent-like activities. Let's go and actually review the contract for you. Let's go and drive build and pest inspections. We have a strategic investment in Before You Buy that does building and pest checks. I think that's where we can do real monetization opportunities. We're doing something really meaningful while still retaining membership value, an engaged audience, and maximum reach.
And just to follow up on that, as these AI assistants, both on the consumer side and the B2B side, as they see more adoption, what's the cost to the company in terms of, like 1% to 2% of sales? Is it higher, lower because you're using open source models? How should we think about the cost to the company? Thanks.
Yeah. Steve, later on, when he talks about our approach to AI across the company, will talk a little bit like this. But at the moment, it's still relatively scale, so we're not concerned about the cost, but we've got lots of optionality there, and I think things like open weight is a real option for us. Not only from a cost management, but to create a really specialized intelligence, and we're doing some work around that space at the moment. So I think we've got those levers in there to ensure that we've got that managed cost base. But Steve will share more information on it later.
Fraser.
Thanks. Fraser McLeish from MST Marquee. Just a question on the kind of monetization model and the depth sort of tiering model and if that needs to evolve, as the search changes and it's more AI-based search and maybe the best fit listing is not the top depth listing, it's a standard listing. Does that need to change and evolve?
You want to start?
Yeah. I think you are spot on. The way that a consumer will find the property is evolving, so whether it is in our AI companion, as Jonathan mentioned earlier, we still see search playing a huge role for a long time to come because they want to see all the listings. But I think in this new paradigm of search where you are finding individual properties beyond geography and price, and you are doing it in AI search, we actually have a new way to monetize and differentiate these listings. So we are getting questions around how far is it to a school or to a sporting club. We have a lot of property data on the properties, actually more than we put on the search. So we can actually provide prominence to these listings in the new surface areas. Now, does depth need to evolve?
It needs to evolve beyond just being ranked in an order, if you will, in the traditional search way. But I think the idea of depth as differentiated prominence absolutely stays true. Will we evolve it beyond Premiere+? I think we absolutely are from FY 2028 onwards. We can call it something different to depth, but ultimately, it is paid exposure and performance that actually in the AI world gives us new levers to do that job.
The other thing to add to that is the campaign performance as well. So it is prominence, and as we get more and more intelligence into the AI actually driving the campaign itself, you are paying for that access as well. So it is doing both things, prominence, but also having the intelligence and the platform to drive the right outcome as well.
That is right.
It is both sides that we are working on.
Speed to sale, whatever
Yeah
it is the customer wants, we want to be able to serve that up.
Yeah.
Hi, it's David Fabris from Macquarie. Just looking at the TAMs on slide 16, I am curious to understand where that sits in the priority list and then theoretically how it may work. Would it be driven by a leads model, or would you be looking to greenfield or do M&A and own the whole end-to-end service within that column?
It's a mixture of all of them, really. Some of them are just partnerships that we have. For example, energy connections. Others are financial services in-house, and then others from strategic investment. I will go back to BYB again as a great example of that strategic investment. So we are doing a mixed approach to unlock which are really attractive TAMs versus ones where it's more just a lead referral, and we are confident we can grow those with agentic AI being more relevant and action-oriented.
Another thing I would just add to that too, our TAM between probably the last time we talked to you about TAMs and now has changed because we have now got iGUIDE. So we have now got all these immersive experiences, photography, et cetera that we never had before. Also, the TAM has grown. You have seen us grow the TAM as well over the last four years. So, there is a number of drivers that have driven our TAM growth. But yeah, immersive content has been
Yeah
a big driver.
Really bullish. You will talk more about iGUIDE later. It is a great opportunity for us as well.
Morning, everyone. My first question is around Cam's comments at the start. Cam, when you spoke about moving to always-on innovation as opposed to annual product release cycles,
Yeah
does that impact your pricing strategy as well? I know it is probably difficult to move to any sort of dynamic pricing, given agents' budgets and marketing schedules are set in advance. Is there scope over time to introduce some more dynamic elements to pricing?
Thanks, Entcho. Great question. Not really thinking about pricing. What we are thinking about is how do we get products in the hands of our customers faster? How do we support the sales team getting new products and features out in the market, talking to customers, and get them using them? Value and packaging comes down the track, and hopefully our customers recognize the value that we have created for them always being on and delivering through the previous 12 months. It just makes that discussion a little bit easier as well because they see the value that we have created. I think you are going to hear from Steve today talk about all the things that we are doing to really empower our engineering, and try and get product out the door faster.
We don't want bottlenecks either, so you don't want to be all of a sudden dropping a whole lot of product in just before you do value and packaging. It's not a great experience for our customers. As a business, we want to be always on in terms of innovation, so it smooths the pipeline.
To add to that, though, we wouldn't, Likely to List is a great example. We do want to launch products through the year as well that are tied to value and packaging.
Yeah.
It gives us more flexibility. Something like Likely to List that we can test in the market, see if we might market fit, have data to back up the claims.
Yeah.
We'll continue to innovate and release products outside of value and packaging that can drive new monetization opportunities as well.
Guys, you had one other question or Okay.
Just one other, if you don't mind.
Yeah. This will be the last one.
A quick one. Likely to List seems to be reasonably major announcement this morning. Well, a slightly different approach to the product strategy. You've tried to monetize seller leads directly in the past, and it didn't work, so obviously it got bundled into the subscription product. I guess, have you had any early feedback from agents that maybe distinguishes it? I know you sort of spoke before about they wanted to have the suburbs expanded, but could agents almost see that as kind of getting into their commission pool, and could there be pushback in the use of that product as a result?
Yeah.
It is a good question, and there is some history in what you described there. We have developed this thus far in collaboration with our customers. To be really clear, we are not providing a seller lead. What we are doing is they provide an address to us, and we enrich that address with our propensity model, and then they take that data, and it fuels their business to focus their prospecting. The way we are looking at it is it is really monetizing our data and intelligence. We have had customers ask us, "Could you only pay on the success or conversion?" That has been a conversation and something that some customers have asked. I think, in the early days, we are going to keep it at a data product, and it is really based on the strength of their CRM.
We augment it, and then they can go back to what they do best initially. So far, great feedback. I am looking forward to more next week.
Great. Thanks for the question, Entcho. We have got 15 minutes now for a quick break, so if we could be back ready for the second session at 11:15 A.M., that would be fantastic. Thank you, everyone. Back here on the second session. All right. Thank you. Thanks very much. We are going to jump into the second component of today. We want to talk to you about our other growth drivers that we have as a business, and we also want to talk just as importantly about our growth enablers that we have as well. First, to take us through new homes, we have got Jarrod Scott. Welcome Jarrod to the stage. It would be great. Thanks, Jarrod. Good work, mate.
Thank you, Cam, and good morning, everyone. It is great to be here to talk about REA's new homes marketplace and the opportunity ahead. New homes is a large, complex, and increasingly important part of Australia's property landscape. It is also essential to meeting the country's future housing needs. REA has a strong position in this market. We are the nation's leading destination for new homes, with significant audience reach, strong customer relationships, and deep partnerships with leading builders and developers. The market has faced a difficult period recently. With construction costs, challenges across the building sector, and lower consumer confidence affecting supply and demand. Even so, new homes has remained a steady grower for REA and outperformed the broader market. That resilience matters. It shows we can grow in challenging conditions. Looking ahead, Australia's need for more housing remains clear.
Governments are focused on supply, and whilst there are headwinds, approvals are encouraging and elevated against long-term averages. Activity is also high, with ABS October data highlighting that there have never been more homes under construction as there are right now in the country. Another notable feature of this market is its size, with new homes representing around one in three property transactions in Australia, with just under 200,000 homes commenced every year. The market comprises two distinct segments, developments, including apartments and land estates, and individual detached home builds, including home design catalogs and house land packages. These customers have different needs, different buying cycles, but both serve people making complex, multi-stage decisions where a simple listing is not enough. REA has a strong foundation in both segments, and our opportunity is to play a deeper role powering our customers' businesses and capturing more value across the journey.
When we survey buyers, 70% of them tell us that they consider both new and established homes equally at points throughout their journey. They are open to both scenarios. Yet today, only a small share of our audience is deeply engaged with the new homes journey. We strongly believe we can bring new homes into consideration earlier and make them easier to discover for our audiences. The product advances discussed earlier, particularly by Swift and Tim, apply directly to the new home space. New entry points, including AI Assistant and natural language search, can take buyers beyond suburb-first listings and surface relevant new home options. Our partner ecosystem further extends support for consumers and customers at key moments, strengthening the proposition through the funnel. By combining advertising with data and intelligence solutions, new homes represents an addressable market of approximately AUD 1 billion. We see 3 connected ways to grow.
Firstly, by improving advertising performance through richer content, broader buyer consideration, and more qualified, higher value leads. Secondly, by expanding our advertising suite for this segment, adding audience intelligence and campaigns that reach beyond the listing. Thirdly, by moving into the wider project life cycle. Upstream, we can support site selection, feasibility, and product planning. Downstream, we can help with lead nurturing, finance, construction updates, and settlement. Together, these opportunities move REA from a campaign channel towards an always-on intelligence and workflow partner, helping build trust and confidence in the sector. Our key message is clear. This is not a small adjacency. It is a large market where we already lead with meaningful headroom to grow. Three features make the new homes buying journey distinctive. Content is critical because buyers can't touch the walls or experience a home before committing. The journey is long, data-intensive, and rarely linear.
Trust is essential. Buyers need confidence in both the finished home and the builder or developer's ability to deliver at settlement. That creates an opportunity to use richer content, personalization, and AI to make options easier to understand, build confidence, and deliver more qualified leads. I'll now bring this to life with Project Profiles, our flagship listing experience for new home buyers. AI helps us personalize, represent, and simplify a project's concept. Our customers are selling communities and lifestyles as much as they are selling individual homes. Using immersive technology, we can showcase the vision, amenities, and shared spaces through stitched renderings, virtual walkthroughs, and movement in the environment. We're also moving towards real-time inventory representation, which enables these richer 3D visualizations. Buyers can understand what is available now, compare options, and act with greater confidence.
Inside the home, we can transform customers' static renders into walkthroughs and interactive experiences. Buyers can explore colors and more information, such as sunlight and natural light modeling. Their engagement helps them progress through the journey and become better qualified before connecting with our customers. Double-tapping on real-time inventory and visualization, we believe this represents a leap that will reshape the sector as listings move beyond the limitation that text and image experiences offer today. We think the benefits apply equally across apartments, land, and individual home building. Tech can also play a role in helping buyers match land with home designs, over time moving us towards automated feasibility and clearer information on planning and cost implications. This supports better-informed purchasing and decision-making earlier in the journey. We can also then connect our digital experiences to customers' immersive showrooms, mirroring the project's online implementation in a physical environment.
This enables a seamless handoff for buyers, which adds personalization and service whilst reinforcing trust. This is how we move beyond advertising towards inventory management and distribution with a focal point for marketing and sales and a distinctive data-rich buyer experience that delivers high value and more qualified leads. Beyond listings, we can deliver broader campaign solutions. New homes marketers run sophisticated data-led and multi-channel campaigns that are often significantly deeper and longer than residential campaigns. Irrespective of the project or build size, we can support more of that life cycle with audience intelligence and stronger personalized content informed by our supply and demand signals. From reaching qualified audiences to off-platform distribution and video, editorial, and podcasting solutions, we are building a connected performance marketing suite that drives deeper buyer nurturing and better qualification. The opportunity extends beyond marketing and sales. New homes are well-suited to AI.
The journey is rich in content and data, and customers and buyers need support at every stage. Projects are complicated and dynamic, bringing together many variables such as designs, inclusions, timelines, finance, and construction updates. Our customers and buyers are asking us for more support and help at every step of the journey. Connecting these elements and providing a unified experience helps customers and buyers move confidently from concept through to construction, and then into completion. Alongside our partners, we can help deliver better service, more informed planning, and ultimately homes that better meet buyers' needs. To recap, New Homes is a leading marketplace with a strong audience, trusted customer relationships, and a large addressable market. We have demonstrated resilience through a difficult period and have three ways to grow: improving our lead quality and breadth, expanding our advertising proposition, and extending our role across the project lifecycle.
AI accelerates all three, creating richer experiences, improving demand quality, and unlocking intelligence and workflow products. Our ambition is not simply to sell more listings. It is to help customers plan, market, sell, and deliver new homes more effectively while helping Australians make a confident decision to buy or build new. Thank you. I am now going to hand over to our Executive General Manager of Commercial, Kris Matthews. Kris
Thank you. I am pleased to talk to you today about REA's commercial business, realcommercial.com.au. Over the next 10 minutes, I will outline why commercial is an attractive growth opportunity for REA. In short, we have the number one audience, we have a proven business model, and we have room for growth. We are also investing to continue that growth by delivering better customer and consumer experiences powered by our proprietary data. Commercial is already a scaled and differentiated business with significant opportunity to drive further growth. realcommercial.com.au is the leading destination for commercial property with a 2.5 times unique audience lead. More importantly, though, we rate as number one for return on investment and have an 83% customer preference score with agents. This reflects our ability to continuously innovate and deliver value to consumers and customers, translating into sustained growth over the past six years.
Commercial property is inherently complex, spanning different ownership structures, tenancy arrangements, and property uses. Whilst this creates challenges, it also creates opportunities for diversification. For example, weakness in retail and office can be offset by strength in industrial and warehouse. Similarly, around 50% of our revenue comes from leasing, enabling us to navigate market shifts between sales and lease. Commercial is like residential several years ago, highlighting there remains a significant opportunity to accelerate digitization by applying the residential playbook. We see that opportunity in three areas. First, digital advertising. Commercial is at 65% of ad spend on digital channels when compared against residential. That gives us real headroom to keep disrupting non-digital channels and accelerate add-on products such as Audience Maximiser. Second, premium depth advertising. Elite Plus, which is our equivalent to Premiere+ in Resi, creates a clear pathway to increase penetration of higher value products.
Third, customer workflows. Our ambition is for Ignite to become an essential platform for our customers, bringing trusted data, performance insights, workflow tools, and AI-guided actions together in one connected platform. Residential shows us what is possible, and commercial has the white space. Our focus is to continue to digitize the spend, continue to evolve our depth offering, and make Ignite indispensable. This will ensure our ability to continue to grow. Commercial is a AUD 1 trillion-plus asset class with a AUD 350 million TAM across advertising and agent solutions. With TAM penetration at around 30%, growing penetration is our core focus. Learning from our playbook, there are three connected commercial growth drivers. First, consumer experiences. Using data and AI to lift engagement, inquiry quality, and advertising value. Second, customer return on investment and our relationships. Helping customers achieve better results and deepen our role as a trusted partner.
Third, data and agent solutions. Using realcommercial.com.au's differentiated commercial property data and content to solve critical needs. Importantly, data and AI connect all three. They make advertising more valuable, experiences more engaging, and customer outcomes more measurable. Our first lever is improving lead quality, starting with a clear understanding of the commercial property buyer journey. Decisions can take more than 30 weeks, creating an opportunity to build confidence earlier through unique data and insights, AI-assisted search, and immersive visualization. These experiences can drive stronger engagement and higher quality inquiries through logged-in experiences. We are already seeing evidence of this. Inquiries are 46% higher among consumers who download a document. Ultimately, greater confidence helps consumers engage earlier and move to a transaction sooner. Let me show a practical example how this comes to life. I am going to introduce you to Nina.
Nina is a small business owner who really likes Surry Hills. However, she is finding it difficult to find a property that suits her business requirements. Nina needs to find a retail space which also has an office for her team. With unique data, Real Commercial brings the neighborhood to life with insights such as foot traffic, nearby amenities, and points of interest. Nina can begin to understand how the location, especially for her shop, could work. AI-assisted search helps Nina express what she is really looking for, not just a postcode or a property type, but a specific need. It helps Nina explore relevant options and move through search with greater clarity. Our new multi-space listings feature gives Nina a clearer way to understand the multiple options available for that property, making it easier for Nina to discover, compare, and ultimately inquire.
Greater immersive experiences, such as 3D tours, help to demonstrate the layout, scale, and potential of the property. They give Nina the ability to explore, defurnish any area, and measure the space accurately to see if the space meets her fit out needs. Once Nina is ready to take the next step, she selects a document to access from our document download feature. We notice we do not have a validated mobile, so Nina is asked to update her details before entering the document room. Whenever Nina is now logged in, she can access the information memorandum and other important information on this and any other property of interest. All of this brings the property to life and turns browsing into confident action, creating better engagement and higher quality leads. The second growth driver is yield. We see three levers to do this.
Deepen premium adoption through new products, through examples like multi-space listings, which is exclusive to Elite Plus listings. Expand customer reach through Audience Maximiser, optimized by REA's proprietary data. Increase workflow by adding AI-powered solutions into subscriptions. Early indicators demonstrate the potential. 25% of Elite Plus properties for lease have spaces buried in listing descriptions. Multi-space enables customers to elevate individual lease areas with their own photos, descriptions, and floor plans. While Audience Maximiser is under-penetrated today, we are already seeing strong growth of 30% year-on-year, showing strong market fit. Together, these opportunities can move customers beyond individual advertising products toward a more valuable, integrated workflow relationship, deepening our role in how customers market, manage, and grow their business. The third lever is proprietary data. For customers, proprietary property and market intelligence, including ownership, occupancy, comparable properties, pricing, and yields, can become an essential growth tool.
It will assist customers identify opportunities. It will help them prospect and nurture relationships, and ultimately win more listings and sell and lease more property. This strengthens our role as a trusted growth partner, moving beyond a platform customers use to one they rely on to grow their business. For consumers, proprietary data creates a compelling reason to log in, helping them assess property suitability, understand the market, and make better investment decisions with greater confidence. Better informed, more confident consumers generate higher quality leads and are likely to transact sooner. This matters strategically because it strengthens our differentiation, our value not only in the audience we reach or the listings we host, but also in the proprietary content that make Real Commercial more valuable to both sides of the marketplace.
To conclude, Real Commercial is already the leading address for commercial property, with a strong growth track record and a diversified market. We have a clear path to continued growth by applying the proven residential playbook to deepen product penetration. Beyond this, we will continue to create greater value for customers and consumers while strengthening our advantage through proprietary data. Together, these give commercial a clear path to continued growth of both the market and our share of it. That said, I am now going to hand over to Anthony Waldron, CEO of Financial Services. Thank you.
Thanks, Kris. Our financial services business is built around our desire to help people find and finance property. We operate through the life cycle of the consumer, from when a buyer is looking for a property and needs a loan to when they are selling, and then we are helping the vendor through funding the campaign costs through CampaignAgent. Through the immense amount of property data we have and our valuations models, we are then able to also service the needs of lenders and the broader property industry and their growing desire for these data and valuation services. Over the last few years, the business has grown strongly, with revenue growth of 12% and strong margin expansion. Financial services is a natural adjacency to the core business. For consumers, they may start as independent journeys, but ultimately they become intertwined and essential to each other.
For consumers, we can help them build confidence to act, and in doing so, create high-intent leads for our broker network, from the property seekers on realestate.com.au, and now also realcommercial.com.au. For our customers, we create high-intent buyers who are financially ready to act, with those leads going to Mortgage Choice on the residential side and now Simplicity on the commercial side. We know those consumers want to act and are ready to transact. We also help customers by providing campaign finance to help them get sellers to market. We have a huge proprietary property data set that when combined with what we know about the consumer's finance, can create highly valuable intent signals for our brokers and customers about who is able and ready to make their next move.
The TAM we have across financial services is large and growing, and we have substantial room to grow given our current share of revenue is around about 9%. We see four sets of growth levers. The first three, growing REA leads, building consumer confidence to act, and accelerating broker efficiency through AI, all focused on the core mortgage business, and the fourth on our opportunities to grow to beyond mortgages. Let me just walk you through those quite quickly. As Tim mentioned earlier, with the growth in our AI experiences, we are seeing that affordability is the key in helping consumers on their property journey. The concept of helping consumers become financially ready as part of these experiences will continue to grow and improve the lead volume we generate off realestate.com.au. As you can see, we have been growing that lead volume solidly over the last couple of years.
But just as importantly, the conversion of those leads has been improving as well as we contextualize and nudge consumers along the way through digital tools and value adds like making sure they understand what they can afford during the property search. Now, with the advent of our AI companion, we see this growing further. Of course, we have mortgage experts available as and when they are needed to help them then fulfill the mortgage. Building consumers' confidence to act is done by helping them solve some of their big issues when they are looking at their next move. We know that about two-thirds of people who think about moving every year don't. There are a lot of variables. That is why we have built experiences to interrogate those decisions, like that you can see playing behind me now. Can I afford to buy before I sell?
What about if I can get a simultaneous settlement? Can I afford to keep both properties? Our move modeler is a first-in-market calculator built by our teams across Mortgage Choice, PropTrack, and Athena, and it is helping consumers compare these options as they go. Building experiences to help provide confidence to act and then providing innovative financial solutions around these options with the experienced set of mortgage brokers there when they need that support. This is not just about getting value through the loan. It is about creating confidence for consumers to act, and ultimately, this leads to more listings opportunities for agents as well. At the same time, we have to make our brokers more efficient, and our goal here is to build a full broker coworker.
Over the last 12 months, we have productionized 15 agents across the different stages of the broker and consumer life cycle, and adoption is high. In fact, people are now using these agents more than they are using email. This has increased the efficiency of a loan application by between 30% and 40%, saving days in broker offices for themselves and their support staff every week. This is really only the first part of the story. Much of the value we can create with AI comes from the proprietary data we can bring to it. We have recently connected data across Mortgage Choice, REA, and PropTrack, and together, these data sets give us a richer picture of the client, their finance context, the property and its value, and the signals of their likely next move.
Of course, it is no surprise that there is a real overlap between these businesses, with more than half of Mortgage Choice's clients regularly active on REA. We are now using these combined data sets to build models that surface signals of intent and help our brokers prioritize the right conversations that then deepen the relationship, and then tailor their support off the back of that. It helps them see more of what is happening in a client's world and to service them more proactively.
Our AI retention agent is a great live example of what this connected data makes possible. It gives brokers timely prompts to support clients when they are ready to buy or sell, get a clearer view of the property equity, or explore a sharper mortgage rate. It then suggests relevant next steps for the broker to take and provides automated workflows to make sure those actions occur.
So in other words, it goes all the way from the signal, all the way to the action for the broker. Beyond mortgages, we see three sets of growth levers that we want to pursue and to grow and diversify the revenue in financial services. We recently acquired 70% of Simplicity Loans & Advisory. Simplicity operates in the fast-growing commercial broking market. At present, commercial brokers make up between 30%-40% of all commercial lending in the Australian market, and this continues to grow rapidly. As a parallel, in the mortgage side, this has grown to be 82% of all mortgages in the country. The growth and lead volume to this business will come from our Mortgage Choice brokers, who largely operate only in that mortgage space, but it will also come from our new homes customers and our agents.
On an already fast-growing business, we think we can turbocharge revenue growth over the next few years. Similarly, our campaign finance business, CampaignAgent, has grown strongly over the last few years through the increase in distribution that has come from being part of REA. There remains considerable runway through greater penetration of this opportunity over the next few years. Finally, our data and valuations business, PropTrack, has grown its customer base broadly over the last two years. With the proprietary data sets we have access to as part of REA, we see considerable upside, not only in the core valuations business, but also in the broader market beyond lenders, where the growth for property data is increasing. For example, in utilities, who are actively looking for data to assist in their acquisition and retention of consumers as they move homes.
In summary, financial services has grown strongly over the last few years, with four years of double-digit EBITDA growth. As a natural adjacency to the core REA business, we extend the reach across the property journey and have considerable headroom for growth in a growing TAM, not only in mortgages, but also across commercial broking, campaign finance, and valuations and data. With that, let me pass you back to Cam.
Well done, Matt. Okay. We have Eamonn here as well. Look, we want to now start looking at our global growth engines, and I will briefly do a couple things. I will cover off on iGUIDE and Realtair in North America quickly. But we want to spend the bulk of our time talking about Distilled in Ireland and Northern Ireland, and that is why we have Eamonn here, clearly, to do that. Look, we acquired a majority stake in iGUIDE, a property camera and software platform, just over a year ago to accelerate our ability to offer immersive 3D digital tours and interactive floor plans, and you have seen some really good illustrations of that. iGUIDE is growing strongly in residential, in commercial, and in the construction markets.
As you have seen from all the demos, it offers vendors a real way to differentiate their listings and gives buyers more information before they do a tour or an open for inspection, which really instills confidence. It is used by real estate agents and photographers in over 50 countries globally, and it is the number one provider of 3D tours and floor plans in Canada, with 25% of homes sold in that country featuring an iGUIDE. After launching in Australia back in March, we now have over 500 iGUIDE cameras in market. We are probably pushing close to 600 now, and we are seeing an uptick in iGUIDE listings on our platform. It is really exciting in terms of data capture and more immersive property experiences, and we are seeing a really strong runway of growth, particularly in North America, open up for us.
It is also a really good example of M&A, where we can buy a technology solution and leverage its value across multiple markets and geographies. In the U.S., the team at REALTOR are also doing a great job, too, speaking of the United States. They are thoughtfully growing the business there. Recently, there has been a real focus in terms of pushing into some more adjacent areas around new homes, rentals, and seller leads, and they have grown revenues despite challenging market conditions. REALTOR are investing in scaling AI-primed consumer experiences, just like we are here. The IP transfer is really mutually beneficial between us and realtor.com. Collaboration is really close, as I mentioned earlier on, in terms of product and innovation. With iGUIDE is also collaborating with REALTOR in the United States to accelerate its penetration in the U.S.
The North American market is a significant opportunity, and REALTOR is really well-positioned there. With iGUIDE, leveraging REALTOR's reach, agent relationships, while REALTOR benefits from the more immersive portal experience and the ability to drive consumer engagement. Let us talk about Distilled. We are really excited with this acquisition, or proposed acquisition. It is still not completed, and at the moment, we are still arm's length, so it is great to have Eamonn here, as I mentioned. This is a really good example of M&A underpinned by strong strategic logic. As you know, when we announced this, we agreed to buy the 35% stake. It is still subject to regulatory approval. We are really looking forward to working closely with Eamonn and the team and doing some great stuff with that business in the future.
Just in terms of some of the investment fundamentals in our business case, Distilled provides an attractive entry point into a high-growth property market that is similar to Australia and where IP and tech are directly relevant. Over the last five years, it has grown at a 21% adjusted EBITDA CAGR, and it has got a portfolio of number one portals, each with an established brand and leading audience. Ireland and Northern Ireland are both digitally developed markets very similar to us here in Australia. The company has got a proven track record of profitable growth, and there is significant opportunity for future growth, including continued adoption of the VPA model. Its operating model is well aligned with our experience in audience-led marketplace with premium products, depth penetration and data and product development. Finally, our businesses are really strategically and culturally aligned. Actually, very aligned.
And it has been really great getting to know Eamonn, and I think every time we catch up, we get more and more excited about the fantastic opportunities that we have and the natural alignment that we have culturally between the two businesses, and really looking forward to collaborating further with the team at Distilled. With that, I will hand over to Eamonn to give you a little bit more color on his business.
Thank you, Cam. I am delighted to be here. In the early days of Daft, I actually came out to Australia to see if I could expand Daft into another country. From my little flat in St Kilda in Melbourne, I built out a prototype, daft.com.au, and then I went out to talk to estate agents all across Melbourne. What I learned was very interesting. REA was already doing everything that I dreamed of and many things that I had not even considered. I cut my trip short. I shut down the prototype daft.com.au, went back to Ireland, got an office the next week, and scaled up the business with everything I learned from Australia. The rest is history.
I have been a student of REA ever since, for many years, and we have more recently rolled out our version of vendor paid advertising in Ireland, more of which I will get to later. Really for me, this investment from REA is a real full circle moment, and I am very excited to work with Cam and the team as a partner. A little on where we have come from. I set up or founded Daft with my brother Brian in 1997 when I was a student in Trinity College Dublin. It started as an experiment listing house rentals, flat shares, et cetera, on the internet. 30 years on, we have grown both organically and through a few strategic acquisitions. In property, we are the number one or the leading portal in Ireland, and last year, we had PropertyPal, the leading portal in Northern Ireland.
On the motor side, DoneDeal is the leading portal in Ireland, and UsedCarsNI joined us last year also and is the leading portal in Northern Ireland. We also operate the leading online general classified marketplace in Ireland called adverts.ie. What is interesting about Distilled is when you look at the web and app engagement globally, we are in the top five globally, as you can see here. In fact, the only company that beats us across property and motor is REA. We are in good company. Historically, we have also been growing our revenue in the high teens. What do all the sites have in common? Each business in the portfolio is profitable. We have an established brand, a leading audience, and is accountable for their own sales, customer success, marketing, product, and technology. This is by design.
We really want our teams as close as possible to the customers and the consumers, so they can remain focused on solving real consumer and customer problems. Let me jump into Daft because this is really where the REA collaboration is most exciting for me personally, especially on future product and tech innovation. Let's look at how the business breaks down. Our residential, which includes agents, private listers, institutional landlords, and of course, vendor paid advertising is our biggest contributor to revenue. New homes is second, and it's very significant. Here we're well-positioned in Ireland to benefit from the projected new homes volume increases over the next few years. Finally, we have data, mortgage, and other adjacencies. As you can see in the slide, there's significant room to grow by delivering more value for customers and consumers.
We have just completed a multi-year re-platforming of the Daft platform. I'm very excited to redeploy our brilliant product and tech people armed with AI agents, of course, to tackle consumer problems in 2027 and beyond. Our key drivers of growth are growing our penetration of VPA, which I'll talk to in the next slide, and then continuing to grow our residential and new homes business by delivering more value for agents and developers. VPA. We introduced our VPA product called Advantage Ads. We introduced that in 2023, and we're seeing strong momentum in adoption across the market. In two years, adoption has tripled. We're at about 24% of monthly new listings as Advantage Ads. While VPA is the norm in Australia, we're early in the journey, and that's exactly where the opportunity ahead of us is. Why has VPA worked in Ireland? Really two reasons.
Number 1, the market was primed. Irish vendors have already paid for print advertising for decades. Paying to market your home isn't new in our market. We've just brought it online. Second, we can prove it works. Our top-tier ad, Gold, gets 6x the visibility of a standard listing. Advantage listings get 37% more inquiries. On average, a home sells for 2.6% more. That's a very compelling value proposition for vendors. On the other hand, agents that embrace Advantage Ads are also more likely to gain market share due to the increased branding presence they have both on and off-site, and through access to our bundled seller leads. Agents and vendors can see huge value in our VPA products for themselves. In short, the VPA product works, and it works for both vendors and agents, and that's why we expect adoption to continue growing.
Once the transaction completes with REA, we see very clear opportunity to leverage REA's expertise in growing VPA in Ireland and in Northern Ireland. Moving on to macro. Between the 2 markets, Ireland and Northern Ireland, there's a population of about 7.4 million people. Ireland is amongst the fastest-growing economies in the EU and one of the fastest-growing populations. Overall, there's strong fundamentals in our market, and a growing population, economy, and housing demand all underpin a growing property market. In the longer term, if we manage to hit government new home supply targets and supply begins to close the gap with demand, we would expect housing stock turnover to revert to more normal levels of 4%-5%. Finally, just clicking into DoneDeal.
While we've a very exciting growth opportunity in property ahead of us, we've an equally strong motor business in DoneDeal that's also growing revenue in the high teens. Breaking down revenue lines, dealers are the biggest contributor to revenue. Private car listings is second, followed by finance, media, and other adjacencies. Dealers get exceptional value from DoneDeal today, and our growth comes from delivering even more of it. Our plans for next year focus on better products, better leads for dealers, helping more dealers get the most from the platform, and expanding revenue through adjacencies. DoneDeal is a financially material business and adds resilience and diversity to the portfolio.
Before I hand back to Cam, I just want to say on behalf of the whole Distilled team in Ireland, we're extremely excited to work with REA post-completion, and make the most of the opportunities for sharing IP between the two businesses. We've spent a lot of time with the team over the last few months, and we've had many laughs, and I know our cultures are really going to gel well together. Thank you. Thanks.
Okay. Look, just to finish on our global growth drivers, we're building increasingly diverse portfolio of attractive TAMs in this space. I've just touched on it a couple of times, but collaboration and IP transfer is really important in terms of how we unlock the opportunities that we have globally and bring real value to the table for shareholders. It's very important that we continue to do that and execute with our expertise. Look, speaking about expertise, we're going to move on to the next section now, and I'd like to welcome Elisa and Steve to the stage to talk about how we're going to accelerate as an organization. Thank you.
Thank you, Cam. AI is changing the world at a rapid pace, and this creates challenges and opportunities for REA, but this is really just the latest technology for REA to adopt and benefit from. We have a long history of leading through change, and our dynamic culture and our technology have enabled three decades of product innovation. We led the industry in adopting agile ways of working and realizing productivity gains from working faster and smarter. We've integrated major changes to our technology stack, from cloud-first infrastructure to mobile development, and we have the platforms and systems to succeed in the AI era. Our decentralized delivery structure allows us to innovate at the edges and move at pace. In recent years, we have created efficiencies in our delivery process, and now through our innovation hub, FlowLab, we are scaling agentic-first software delivery for the next chapter. Elisa.
Thank you. Well, our culture has also grown and adapted over this time. Innovation has always been a key part of REA at its core. Going back to its early days of Hackdays, now up to the 45th edition. We have protected our entrepreneurial mindset while scaling, and now this DNA is also part of our new global centers of excellence, so Cyber City in India, and Global Business Services in the Philippines.
Our history of enabling innovation through culture and technology positions us to lead in the next chapter and deliver for our customers, consumers, and brokers. At REA, we are deliberate in the way that we protect what is unique about our culture, while also evolving it as we grow and scale. This is not culture for culture's sake. It is culture that we need to achieve our strategy. Today, we have a highly engaged workforce. Our recent results put us at the top quartile of engagement against the global tech benchmark for organizations of our size. We are recognized as one of Australia's best workplaces. This makes us the top choice for talent, helping us to attract and retain the skills and capability we need to deliver on our strategy. Our workforce strategy enables us to access talent and skills globally and provides a flexible labor cost model.
This sees our capabilities remain in Australia, enables us to scale tech capabilities in Cyber City, and extend our support areas through Global Business Services. This workforce model provides us with a strong platform for global growth and the flexibility to scale up and down as required. In addition, our investment in iGUIDE delivers access to specific expertise and talent. Our culture and workforce engagement has allowed us to accelerate AI adoption and workflow redesign in our teams. Our people have embraced multiple AI capability programs, and post-training, over 90% feel confident in recognizing opportunities to use AI to enhance our products and processes. We know that through our sentiment work, that where we have trained and capable people, that their confidence and optimism towards AI is high.
Open two-way communication on AI with our people is core to our approach, and we do this consistently by aligning to three AI value zones. I will pass back to Steve to talk through these value zones in more detail.
Thank you. AI is creating tremendous value for REA, and to harness that value, we divide AI into three value zones, which I will go into in a minute. Underpinning these three zones is what we call the control plane. This contains the components that deliver value safely and efficiently, and it gives us budget certainty over AI inference. The further point I want to outline is our broad portfolio of global partners. We have built a multi-partner approach, which means no vendor lock-in and provides flexibility on cost, capability, and resilience as this technology continues to evolve. Our three AI value zones are as follows: AI in our products, AI to build our products, and AI to run the business. These three distinct zones each have their own audience, enablers, and ROI.
In zone one, we create value through our products and services, and we already heard about some of the amazing products from the team today that AI has opened up across residential and growth engines. In zone three, we also use AI to accelerate the wider organization. We have laid strong foundations, including building AI literacy across the enterprise, providing people with leading AI tools and agents grounded in REA's rich organizational context. Today, I will focus on zone two, which is how we are using AI to accelerate the way we design, build, and deliver products. We have already seen exceptionally strong results from our initial experiments. An agentic-first delivery will unlock capacity for increased product delivery. In zone two, we are leveraging AI to create new products and features faster than ever before.
We have prioritized this area because it offers the most compelling applications for AI and delivers very clear ROI. We are accelerating the entire journey from vision to value, and this is not just writing code faster. We are designing the entire flow of work through the organization. We want to ensure that the productivity gains from software development translate to new economic value for our business. Through this end-to-end approach, we are increasing velocity across the entire value chain. This prevents bottlenecks appearing and ensures we can deliver value to our customers faster and more frequently. For example, in product design, which is upstream from software development, we are now using AI to rapidly validate prototypes. This is compressing a process that would normally take weeks into a couple of days.
We are not just building faster, we are also increasing our go-to-market efforts as well to ensure that our customers receive this value that we are creating a lot quicker. We are moving away, as Cam said, from a few large value drops each year to always-on value with multiple release moments. In support, we are amplifying our customer-facing teams with AI coworkers, helping them through the entire life cycle from initial activation through to long-term retention. One of the most exciting applications for AI remains software delivery. We are already seeing tremendous productivity gains at REA. We have recently proven in trials that agentic-first delivery models can rapidly accelerate time to value in 2.6 times. That is just not writing code. That is actual speed to market. This step change in productivity is possible because we have reached a point where AI agents can act with increased autonomy.
They can break a complex task down into a series of steps and execute them independently. Human expertise, however, remains critical. Our engineers are shifting from writing code to a supervisory role, planning and reviewing, rather than doing all of the code themselves. This is important. While software delivery is undergoing significant change, particularly at REA, our philosophy remains the same. Human-led, but agent-powered. The model does all the heavy lifting, but humans stay in command of the decisions that matter. Throughout FY 2027, we are progressively scaling our agentic-first workforce to ensure that we can make the transition efficiently. FlowLab's providing our teams with reusable tools, support, and creating repeatable playbooks. Rewiring our engineering teams through FlowLab is already beginning to release human capacity, and we are reinvesting that unlocked capacity in the highest value growth priorities.
It allows us to accelerate our world-class property experiences, and now we have the means to scale exciting new growth engines such as commercial, new homes, financial services, and new markets, including global. At REA, we've always had more great ideas than capacity to deliver them. Agentic-first product delivery allows us to turn those untapped ideas into new value. Elisa.
Thanks, Steve. In summary, AI is transforming how our people deliver value to market. Our strong culture and long history of innovation means our workforce is well-positioned to thrive through this change. While AI is changing the product delivery process and enabling exciting new opportunities, people remain at our core, with human expertise, creativity, and judgment more important than ever. We have a clear framework for how we think about value from AI. We're investing across the three zones, prioritizing our spend in areas that provide the best return on investment. We are focused on scaling agentic-first product delivery, increasing our velocity across the entire organization to get value in the hands of our customers faster, unlocking capacity to reinvest in our growth. We know that our combined people and tech strategies will enable the future of REA, human-led, agent-powered.
I will now pass to Andrew for the finance update and to bring us home.
Thank you, Elisa. It has been a privilege to join a company in REA which has such a long and consistent track record of delivering strong, profitable growth and shareholder returns. Nine months into this role, and I couldn't be more excited about the opportunities that lie ahead. Over the last 10 years, we've delivered a revenue CAGR of 12%. That strong revenue growth rate has been delivered through different market cycles, including the 2019 Royal Commission into banking in Australia, the COVID era, which disrupted property in Australia from 2020 through 2021 and into 2022 if you're in Melbourne, Australia, and fiscal 2023, which presented one of the harshest cyclical housing downturns that REA has ever experienced on the back of 13 consecutive interest rate rises.
Through all those conditions, REA has focused on excellent innovation and execution, a deep engagement with our consumers and our vendors, and very strong relationships with our customers. Importantly, REA was successful in delivering EBITDA and NPAT CAGRs of 13%, which outpaced revenue growth. This is something that Cam and I are particularly focused on, driving operational leverage across EBITDA, NPAT, EPS, DPS, and free cash flow. Over that same time period, we expanded EBITDA margin from 60% to 65%. We've grown yield by investing in technology, data, and product experiences to support our yield and drive that top line. Having a major shareholder in News Corp with such a long-term view of value has enabled us to continue to invest through the cycle with a focus on maximizing returns for all shareholders.
Buy listings can be cyclical from year to year, as you can see from this chart on the left-hand side of the page. But despite that year-to-year volatility, volumes have been broadly flat over the last decade, as you can see from this chart on the right-hand side of the page. Importantly, against that flat backdrop, residential revenue has grown at a CAGR of 13%, underpinned by a 14% yield CAGR. The strength, resilience, and consistency of our residential business have been key drivers of REA's growth throughout our history. Importantly, over the last five years, we've delivered half of our yield from pricing to value. We've been able to take price because we've continued to invest in delivering value, delivering choice, and delivering better outcomes to our customers and to our vendors.
With the remaining 50% of that yield growth a result of our customers electing to upgrade to higher depth tiers and our customers electing to purchase add-ons or upgrade to higher value subscriptions. Listings and geo mix have contributed 0% to residential revenue growth over the period. As Cam and Swift highlighted earlier, there is further runway in our residential business, particularly with AI which offers us new surface areas, new personalization opportunities, and new ways to deliver value to our customers and to our vendors. Our take rate is just over 20 basis points and less than half of the marketing schedule. While our core residential business is our largest growth engine, we've scaled three adjacent businesses in commercial, new homes, and financial services, each that now have AUD 100 million of revenue. Commercial has delivered a 15% CAGR over the last five years.
New homes has grown despite a decline in new home construction over the same period. Financial Services has grown at a 12% CAGR since we acquired Mortgage Choice back in FY 2022. We are really excited about the work that Steve is doing in FlowLab, that it will give us the opportunity to accelerate investment in these areas, drive efficiencies, and help them to scale faster. In addition to our track record of delivering revenue growth through the cycle, we have a track record of cost flexibility and optimization through all market conditions. The chart on the left-hand side of the page shows you revenue and cost growth in Australia since FY 2016.
As you can see, during periods when revenue slowed or even turned negative, as it did in FY 2020 and again in FY 2023, we were able to adjust our cost base quickly to protect margin and ensure the long-term sustainability of our business. Over 60% of our cost base relates to people. We have been able to proactively manage our investment in this area in a smart and disciplined way to ensure we manage costs during slower market conditions and invest appropriately to maximize returns for all shareholders. In recent years, we have invested in centers of excellence in GBS Manila for our support functions and Cyber City, India, for our technology and product teams. This workforce model allows us the flexibility to scale up and scale down as required. We also greatly benefit from News Corp's scale in our access to global technology, relationships, and local marketing partnerships.
While our immediate focus on FlowLab is to get through our product pipeline faster to put value into the hands of our customers and our consumers, we will have the flexibility over time to drop more of those efficiencies to the bottom line. Importantly, REA's earnings are highly cash generative. REA has delivered a free cash flow CAGR of 14%, which has outpaced EBITDA and NPAT growth over the same time period. REA's operating cash conversion is consistently at a 95% level, reinforcing the quality of those earnings. This has facilitated continued investment in product development, with CapEx to revenue at 8% in FY 2026, well within our targeted range. Finally, we have delivered strong returns to shareholders with dividends per share increasing at a 14% CAGR, in turn delivering AUD 390 million in dividends to shareholders in 2026.
In addition, last year, we commenced and executed a AUD 200 million on-market buyback over the second half of the fiscal year. We have a very strong balance sheet. We will continue to balance returning value to our shareholders while maintaining financial flexibility to reinvest in the business, both organically and inorganically. Unsurprisingly, given the current market conditions, we expect new buy listings to be down low single digits. We expect controllable buy yield to be in the low double digits. We will continue to target operational margin expansion. We expect group and Australia cost growth to be in the mid-single digits pre-M&A and mid to high post M&A. Finally, losses from associates are anticipated to improve in FY 2027. Beyond 2027, our financial aspirations span three key areas: growth, earnings, and capital management.
We will continue to invest in our business to deliver double-digit revenue growth underpinned by double-digit controllable buy yield. As we do this, we will maintain a strong focus on working with our customers, mindful of market conditions, to ensure we remain supportive and aligned with the industry. We will continue to respond to prevalent market conditions with cost and productivity levers to expand margin and deliver double-digit EBITDA growth through the cycle. In doing so, we will maintain a laser focus on delivering long-term value to all our shareholders. Hopefully now you are just as excited as we are about the future here at REA. We are the number one with clear runway to grow our residential business and our broader portfolio of growth engines, commercial, new homes, financial services, and our recently announced investment in Distilled.
We are a proven innovator with a unique edge across our breadth of relationships, our depth of data, and the quality outcomes we deliver to customers, consumers, and to brokers. We are confident in our ability to deliver highly cash generative earnings and strong financial performance through all market cycles, enabling us to continue to invest for the long term with a focus on maximizing value for all shareholders. With that, I will invite the presenters back on stage, and I will pass to Cameron to conduct the Q&A.
Good?
Yeah.
Yeah. Okay, so we have 20 minutes, so any questions from the floor?
Hi, Bryan Raymond, JP Morgan.
Bryan.
First one just on the take rate, just thinking about the broader marketing schedule that vendors are paying for, essentially. If you guys are taking 22, there is another 29 basis points there sitting in your competitors and other parts of the value chain. Just interested, with all the great innovation we heard about today, do you expect to take more of the other 29, so a larger share of that overall marketing schedule, or is it about actually adding value to the point where the overall marketing cost can go up for the vendor over time?
I think it is probably a combination of both. To be honest, with iGUIDE and the acquisition of iGUIDE, that has given us the ability to extend the TAM and the opportunity that we have. But also clearly, you have seen the products that the guys are delivering inside our current platform, and that obviously gives us an opportunity that is slightly different, too. So I think it is a combination of both. Yeah.
Great. Just one follow-up if I can.
Yeah
On the Daft business, maybe one for Eamonn. In terms of the five basis points they are running at at the moment, how does the VPA side of the business compare to the overall, and what is the sort of scope for that to move higher over time?
Yeah. You okay with that?
Yeah.
Thanks.
We haven't closed the deal yet with REA, so we're not going to comment on future numbers. I would say we've got strong momentum in our VPA product. If you look historically, we've tripled in the last two years, and we're seeing strong adoption in the market and strong interest from agents in that product. We're at about 25% conversion rate, 24%, 25% at the moment.
Cam, you've always been a company that's innovated in advance of technology changing rather than being reactionary. You were saying you were at San Fran last week, on an offsite with your tech partners. Just two or three of the interesting learnings for you or from the team from last week.
Yeah. No, thanks. A great question. Last week was fantastic. It was the second time we've been there in 12 months, and you can see a clear change and evolution. I think the vendors that we spoke to, it seemed more strategic in their thinking, and we got a lot out of it. Maybe Swift, you should comment.
Yeah
to start with.
Yeah, I can comment. We touched on the agentic opportunity, so very valid, and that is real. What we need to do to win in that world around that data, that alpha, et cetera. The startup scene and staying close to that, we identified some great opportunities there that we could bring to the Australian market. The models have become commoditized increasingly, and the distinction will be in the application, and that is a great opportunity for REA, again, to continue to differentiate and win as we go through this AI era.
Steve, you?
Yeah, I would probably add that, look, yeah, we are hyper-connected to the Frontier Labs. We see them twice a year in person, and we also stay connected via monthly meetings. I think 18 months ago, it was all about the models, who had the best model, and it certainly was a race. 12 months ago, I think the Frontier Labs were chasing the consumer, and they wanted to be the front door, the pane of glass to the internet. On the trip we just went on, it is all about enterprise because their investors are expecting returns now. They are now laser-focused on selling tooling into the enterprise. There was a big shift, and again, all about the application layer and the harness capability.
Cam, the other thing I would probably add is just the importance of data. That was reinforced just about in every meeting we went to. A lot of the time, they are wanting access to our data. Yeah, which I guess reinforces the quality that we have. Yep. Thanks for the question, Andrew.
Thanks, Cam. This question is probably for Andrew, and it was useful talking about the flex in the cost base, but I am curious in your perspective as to whether the company now has greater flex in the cost base than it did, say, when the last Investor Day was held in 2022. I am conscious that the aspirations are quite similar, and you have spoken about all the AI initiatives, so it feels like there should be an opportunity to have more flex.
Yeah
Interested in your thoughts.
I will not comment exactly on what was discussed four or five years ago, Andrew. What I can say, with where the business is today, we have got a high degree of flexibility in the cost base. It is similar in shape in terms of the labor contribution to overall costs. Since then, we have established centers of excellence in Manila and also Cyber City, India, which gives us that flexibility to scale up and down. I think the work that Steve is doing in FlowLab gives us another lever, which we did not have before. Again, which at the moment, we want to go faster and try and put more product into the hands of our customers and consumers. But in time, that is an efficiency lever, too. So we feel really comfortable at the moment to be able to manage the environment we are in.
Okay. Thank you. Maybe a couple of other quick ones.
Yeah, sure.
If I may. Is there anything you can do as a Distilled shareholder to accelerate the growth that Daft and Distilled have seen so far? Conversely, are there any products you can take away from Daft? I know Daft has quite an interesting office product, for example. I do not know if Eamonn wants to talk about that and perhaps how that is a differentiator.
So maybe we will both comment. Look, there is a lot that we can do together. Eamonn talked about some of those things. There are a couple of people up here that know a little bit about automotive as well, and we can help where we can in that space, clearly. But yeah, look, we are very excited.
There is a very broad range of opportunities that we feel that we can help Eamonn and the team with. But also, I am really excited about the opportunity that we get to get IP back from Eamonn and his team, because we know property really well. But there are some lessons and some things that we can take away from those other vertical marketplaces that I think are going to help our business too, to grow and evolve as well. So I think it is going to be definitely a two-way IP share.
Eamonn's got, and he wouldn't say it because he's too modest, but he's got an amazing team. His team are all jets, and they resonate really well with our guys, and really looking forward to working with them. I do not know if you want to add anything.
I would echo that. I think REA, from my perspective, is one of the best property portals in the world. We are really excited about-
We are the best.
Yeah.
Thank you.
Or next to him. We are really excited about getting access to know-how intellectual property. I think what we bring is we are a smaller market, we are a small team, we have a lot of entrepreneurial energy. But I think REA is so much further on the journey than us on the BPA kind of journey, that I think it is probably going to be more us pulling IP from REA than the other way around.
Thanks, AJ.
Hi. I have got two questions. First one is just on the current property market downturn. If we look at your comp in Sweden, Hemnet, which is still a dominant player now, but they have lost some market share to their competitor, Booli, during the market downturn. I am just wondering, what can you do to make sure that it is not happening to you guys in the current cycle?
Yeah. Thanks, Siraj. Do you want to do this?
Yeah. I would not want to comment on another portal around the world, but when we think about some of the things we always pay close attention to, the health of the market, absolutely, but price to value. We talk a lot about this so that we can really stand behind the value we deliver. Then when we actually put a price in front of that, there is a justified price that demonstrates strong outcomes, and then we are keeping a close eye that we can always attribute the nine out of 10 buyers, et cetera, on realestate.com.au to do. It is about the health of the market, but really clearly demonstrating value to both our customers and to the vendors. If the vendors cannot see that value, then they are going to look for alternatives as well.
You have got to demonstrate that value all the way through, that will ensure that you retain the best place to list your property, and that is what we have seen happen in other markets around the world where you are not necessarily the best place for the value you deliver to the price point you charge.
Lucy.
Thanks. I have got two questions, if I can. Firstly, just kind of distilling the takeaway from today. A lot of the AI innovation on the consumer and agent side, how would you distill that into the key value proposition when you are talking to agents? Do you think really what they want to pay for is more leads, and that is what you should be pushing to them, or is it higher intent? I ask this question because some other verticals in the classified space are starting to evolve their depth tiers to differentiate on kind of high fit matches. Is this the way we should be thinking about how the model evolves over time?
Yep. It is really important that we are aligned with what the customer is trying to achieve. They are trying to grow their business by winning more listings. It is really important. We are the best place to source your next listing from. That is either for our seller leads or our products around things like sold. These do amazing, all our branding products drive awareness in the market.
Then making sure that we do the most fundamental job we are hired for, which is the best place to find your next buyer, to ensure that we are the best place to transact and list your property. We are always focused on aligning to that outcome rather than necessarily trying to get too smart with the business model. Are we aligned to the outcome we are trying to achieve? Is that aligned with what our customers are trying to achieve? Tick, tick.
We will always go after that as our best path forward.
Just lastly, on maximizing shareholder return, just keen to hear any early thoughts on what the preference would be and if you guys have thought about what the right balance sheet settings could look like in that environment.
Lucy, what I would say is we have a privileged position with the balance sheet that we have, and we have always balanced returning value to shareholders with investing in the business, both organically and inorganically. At different times in the market cycle and at different times in our evolution, we will make different decisions. Last year was a year where we returned more value to shareholders. In total, we returned just under AUD 550 million to shareholders. Right now, we think the balance is right with the dividends we have in place and the recent investment we have made in Distilled. It is something that will continue to evolve over time. Siraj.
Oh, hi, it is me again.
Yeah.
I've just got a question about commercial. It seems like it's a big TAM there, but how should we think about the competitive landscape? I've heard that CoStar is investing heavily here in Australia, and obviously they've been in the game for a lot longer in the U.S. market.
Well, I'll say up front, we value competition and it's great for the market. We're here to run our race, and that's what we care about and what we're doing with our customers and how we're evolving the commercial market. I don't know, Kris, do you want to comment on any of that?
Yeah. First of all, a data question, I love it. Look, I think first of all, hopefully you've seen today the importance of the data and insights that we get from our largest and most engaged audience, and we obviously share that across resi and commercial. I think first of all, it starts with that, and you see a lot of the innovation today coming from that audience. The other things I'd probably talk to is this has been a journey that we've been on for a while. We've been investing in the PropTrack data business for in excess of 5 years. If you look at some of the acquisitions we've made, we've acquired a business called Neighbourlytics. You saw some of the foot traffic, hopefully on the demo today in commercial.
We obviously invested in iGUIDE in terms of the immersive experiences and obviously the data that comes with that. We've also made an investment in a business called Arealytics. I think the combination of the audience, the behavioral insights in conjunction with the investment we've been historically making, puts us at a really good position in the Australian market. Really confident.
Morning, team. A question for Cam and perhaps Eamonn. I am just interested. Naturally, if we look back in history, REA has acquired a lot of businesses overseas in the past, and it has not always worked out as well for shareholders as perhaps what the team expected at the time. Can you give us some insights into why you think this might be different with Distilled? Then I might ask the second question now, and you can touch on both. Just a question on key risks. Given the framing today with AI as more of an opportunity than a risk, which I think is fair, what are the key risks occupying the management team from your guys' perspective, and how do we think about the areas of investment that are more growth-focused relative to more defensive? Thanks.
Yeah. I will start with the M&A question. Look, from our perspective, and as Eamonn said, Ireland is a high growth market, so we look for high growth markets. We look for markets where there is an opportunity to deploy our intellectual property and to deploy our technology where it makes sense. We are not just bringing a check to the table. It is about delivering value. We look for management teams that we can culturally align with and strategically align with. Clearly, as you can see up here this morning, Eamonn and the team, we have clear and absolute alignment with them. We are also looking for profitable businesses. We are looking for businesses that are number ones in their markets because in these sorts of marketplace businesses, it can be from time to time, a winner-take-all. Having that number one position is incredibly important.
We are also looking at TAMs and where the business is at in terms of their TAM journey, and how much value over time can be created as well. There are many things. In terms of the past and so on, I cannot comment because I was not here, but that is certainly the future. When we move into a market that we are unfamiliar with, I think this is an example where we take a minority stake. We learn the market, we learn the business, and what happens down the track happens down the track. It is about your question to risk. It is a great way to reduce risk by taking minority stakes, and growing those positions over time. In terms of how we think as a management team about risk, particularly in the AI environment, we are a paranoid business.
We are focused on where we can be disrupted, and last week was a great example of that. Getting out and talking to technology vendors, but also spending time with tech startups and looking at where those startups are coming from, how they are thinking about the world, and does that relate to us? Should we be thinking about acquiring minority stakes, et cetera. Yeah, in terms of risk, we are focused on the possibilities for disruption. But we are a people-led business too, and making sure that our people are engaged and evolving as we evolve on our AI journey, I think is really important that we are taking everyone with us. But I do not know, you guys, anything else? What am I missing? Am I missing anything?
No.
No, I would say, we have heard all about tokenmaxxing and companies handing out tools to employees going crazy, spending lots of money on inference and not getting any results. That is one of the reasons we established FlowLab, is to really control the workflow. We are not just focused on writing code, we are focused on end to end, and we can do that through a centralized program and because of that, we are seeing results. I would say, if we were not doing FlowLab, budget risk would be a factor. But also, what is the quality of the code that you are writing? What is the quality of the products and services you are building? We get to manage that very tightly with FlowLab, and again, it is the reason that it exists.
Yep. Just a couple of quick ones. Sorry, Cam.
Yep.
First, just wanted to have another go at the Jaws. I guess historically, you have done-
Operational margin expansion, Eric.
Say that again?
It's called operational margin expansion.
Oh, sorry.
Yeah.
Gotta get with the program. Operational margin expansion has been sort of 1% to 3% historically, kind of high single-digit cost growth.
Yeah
And you kind of grew a headcount over that time. Just listening to Elisa and Steve, they are going to be using AI to drive
product and just thinking about your headcount, 3,200. You got 300, 400 people in tech already. Just on that headcount piece, can that be more flatter going forward, which would suggest a kind of different cost growth profile going forward versus history.
Our guidance for this fiscal year is, as you know, mid-single digits ex M&A. We have got more, as Entcho helped me point out, we have got more levers than ever to manage our operational flexibility, to scale up and scale down. In terms of where our workforce evolves to, we would expect to make better use of those offshore centers of excellence over time. As we work through the FlowLab process, some of those efficiencies in time may well be delivered to the bottom line. But at the moment, our commitment is to driving the top line.
Super quick one. No one has asked on listings and it is not a short-term one, but one of the debates is we are going through a rocky patch now, but is this structural? Is it cyclical? If you are a bear, you could look at some of the overseas examples. There are some New Zealand people here who have probably gone through 2 or 3 years of bad listings. Eamonn is probably seen turnover stay at 2%-3% for many years. Whereas if you are a bull, you probably go, "These are not lost, they are just deferred, and you are going to get a glut." So I guess my question is, you guys have shown how much information you have on vendors. Do you have insights that there is a bunch of people that have just held off on listings, and therefore it is more cyclical?
I will open up to the floor. I am a bull, as you can possibly imagine. My view is, as you said, people tend to not list or not sell because there are multiple reasons why people buy and sell property. I think historically, we have always found that people will defer as opposed to not sell. Clearly, I think what the signals that are being sought at the moment are where is the peak in the interest rate cycle. I think that is the thing that is probably holding some vendors back from making that sell decision. They are waiting to see where the cycle caps out, which by definition means it is cyclical. I do not know, do you guys have any views
I think that is a good
Outside of that
I think that is a good summary. You saw in the data that we presented in the finance section, Eric, that listings have been relatively flat. Flat to down 1% over a decade. Over the last five years, they have not contributed to revenue growth. So, they may ebb and flow month to month, quarter to quarter, maybe even year to year, but over time, they are relatively consistent. What we are able to do through all those market environments is to deliver yield growth, which underpins double-digit revenue growth.
So look, this is probably the last question. Sorry.
Lucky last.
Yeah.
Hi, Cam.
Hey.
Hamish from Drummond Knight. Just thinking about the subtext, and really great AI presentation, by the way.
Thanks.
But thinking about the subtext of the 2.5 times acceleration to the speed of the market, speaking about that you guys really want to put down the floor on, I mean, the pedal to the metal on AI development. Just strategically, how do you think about that? Because that, I guess, from a high level, agentic AI increases the risk of disruption from new entrants because they are faster. The team up there probably has a roadmap that they have a lot of adjacencies that they have always wanted to do but are probably cost prohibitive, and are now a lot less cost prohibitive for both you and your competitors. We can think about jaws, but how does, strategically, you guys think about the speed of innovation? Because isn't now the time to go hard on your roadmap if you have anything that's commercial?
Yeah, no, I think that's a really valid point, and I will let Steve answer in a second as well. But clearly, FlowLabs enables us to accelerate through our engineering processes. There is upstream and downstream that we also need to make sure is accelerating at the same speed, otherwise we end up with a blockage or a bubble in the process. I think as we work through that and get that to a place where we want it to be, this business, one of the things I love about this business is there is no shortage of ideas. We have far more ideas than we can stick on a product roadmap, and our product roadmap is long. For us, it's about how do we make sure that upstream and downstream matches the pace at which engineering can go.
If we can get that aligned, then my view is if we can get more ideas into our product pipeline, then we should be investing more too, to get more value from that. I do not know, Steve, do you want to add anything?
Yeah, look, I would just add that you hear a lot of people in market talk about writing code faster, and we certainly are doing that. We are seeing speeds of up to 10 plus times that a human can write, and we think that can go further. But that's useless if you are not getting the products and features out to customers and consumers. That's what FlowLab's about. It's about, as Cam said, unblocking what's downstream of that and what's upstream of that so we can create a really slippery delivery path. This year we are scaling to a number of teams to really build that playbook out, and then we will roll it out across all of our squads. But it's something where we have great results on in terms of experiments, but we are being very careful because quality matters to us.
The risk around that is pretty high if you don't go about it in the way that we are. I think what's exciting is once we clear that out, and we're progressively getting through that, we want to be able to test ideas very quickly. You heard me talk about prototyping. We can do that in a couple of days now. The future means that we'll replace specifications altogether with prototypes. There's nothing better than seeing the future rather than talking about it. Then the downstream of how we can test those ideas at scale, then we'll be in the position that you're talking about. But we're already seeing capacity being unlocked today. But again, we're being very methodical to make sure we do that safely.
Great question. Thank you so much. Look, we've covered a hell of a lot of ground today. I hope you've all enjoyed hearing from the team and about the longer-term vision that we have for the company and how we're going to get there as a business. Look, I just want to remind you the four key takeaways I hope you've taken away. We've discussed these a few times today, but takeaway number one is our core resi business is number one, with a clear runway to grow. Number two is that we've got a great portfolio of businesses and plans to capture further value. We're a proven innovator, and our relationships, data, and outcomes, that's our unique edge, positions us well in an era of AI.
Finally, we've got the financial strength, the strong cash generation, and the balance sheet to continue to fund our growth. With that, I just want to thank you for taking the time to all be here with us today. It's gone really quickly. Looking forward to having lunch with you all. But thanks also to the REA team, the broader team, for pulling today together. There's been a lot of people involved, and the ELT haven't been around a lot because we've been traveling and so on. Everyone's done a fantastic job. I just want to say thank you to everyone in the REA team as well that's made today possible. But with that, I'll let you have lunch, and thank you for your attendance. Thank you.