I am very happy to welcome you to our CMD 2021. We are here today in our Berlin office with a fantastic 360-degree view of Berlin. It's a pity that you can't be here personally. In spite of that, we will ensure that you get a 360-degree view of our strategy, how we are moving Scout24 to the next level. We already provided a glimpse of that in the news we just sent out. This includes a clear financial outlook for the year 2022, and mentions our five value drivers, which we will detail over the course of this presentation. Now, who will explain our strategy to you?
Today's speakers are our Chief Executive Officer, Tobias Hartmann; Rowena Patrao, our Chief Technology Officer; Thomas Schroeter, our Chief Product Officer; Ralf Weitz, our Chief Commercial Officer, and Dirk Schmelzer, our Chief Financial Officer. Please note that we are all vaccinated and tested, complying with our internal COVID-19 protocols. Speaking about compliance, let's have a quick look at the disclaimer. I would like to draw your attention to the forward-looking statements, especially the fact that potential further effects of the COVID-19 pandemic cannot be reliably planned at present. I also want to remind you that all quarterly figures mentioned in our presentation are unaudited. As already mentioned in our press release, from next year onwards, we want to change our segment structure. Dirk will elaborate on that later, and you will understand in the course of the presentation why we are doing this.
Anyhow, please note that all numbers we present in this new segment structure are preliminary and for orientation only. Let's turn to today's agenda. Toby will kick it off by speaking about the group's operating model. He will be followed by Rowena, who will share insights about how our technology supports it. Next, Ralf and Thomas will move deeper into the five value drivers, which will be key for our future growth. Last but not least, Dirk will translate all of this into numbers. One important point to note is the Q&A session at the end. Given COVID protocols, we can only have limited people on the stage at the same time. Therefore, we will bundle your questions into groups with two management members on stage at a time.
I highly encourage you to please send in your questions during the course of the presentation using the chat function in Zoom. Now, if you were here in our office, you would feel the energy of the Scout DNA. You would see how our new office promotes creativity and motivates our people. Before we start with our presentation, we want to send some of this energy through to you with a short video.
It's not only enough to know you're good, but it is important to show you're good.
I like working at Scout24 a lot.
We are solving problems for people in a very important phase of their lives.
We have a very good working atmosphere together.
Because I can make different people happy.
I always connect different departments together.
It's simply fun to communicate on eye level.
In the Preisatlas, homeowners can see whether it's a good time for selling their property. Home seekers can already browse their future neighborhood, and they can see what people are living there at the moment, what properties in the neighborhood are costing, and what properties are available for rent or for sale. The Preisatlas is a tool that creates a lot of transparency over the market.
With Tenant Plus, we offer being more visible for the landlord. Tenant Plus also offers for the seekers a digital application package which includes all the documents they need. We wanted to create a carefree package for our Tenant Plus users. Tenant Plus makes searching for an apartment easy, efficient, and digital, just as online shopping.
At the moment, most landlords manage their properties with huge Excel sheets. With vermietet.de, we want to offer landlords digital tools to really simplify their life. For example, automatic rent income checks, utility cost calculations, individual legal documents. In the future, we will offer features also throughout the tenancy phase.
With our Basic Edition, Image Edition, and Acquisition Edition, real estate agents now can enhance their image as local experts, win and acquire new mandates and new objects, stay in touch with their customers at the same time. Also a big plus is that you don't need to be a tech expert. All these features are connected within the editions, which make them the most innovative models of all time.
Finding a new home is not just about finding the right number of rooms and the right size. We're bringing this emotional aspect to our search experience and allowing users to define exactly what they need to find around their new home. If I'm a young family, for example, I wanna find a new home in a place where I can access schools and playgrounds easily. We want to better reflect the vibes of areas on our platform to better include the lifestyles of the seekers when we find the right homes for them.
With the Realtor Lead Engine, we help people to find the best realtor in their region. With over 20,000 agents, we definitely find the best realtor for every home seller. On the other side, we help our realtors to generate valuable mandates and grow their business in a challenging market. Okay, cut.
Do you wanna note more specifically?
To speak more specifically, I want to invite Tobias Hartmann to the stage now. Toby, the floor is yours.
Thank you, Ursula, and welcome. Good afternoon. Good morning for those of you who are joining from a different time zone. It's a great pleasure having you all listen in and view what we have to tell you, what we want to demonstrate where we're taking this company to. It's this title that leads us through this afternoon, which is from classifieds to transactions. It's our next level operating model, and it's also an underlying promise that we are shifting gears to accelerate growth. Let's take a quick look at where we came from as a company, what we've done, and what's the DNA of this company that leads us to this next chapter. We've always had an innovative role. We always set new trends. As you can see over the past 23 years, ImmoScout24 and Scout24 have been at the forefront.
We had a developing market leading position because we defined early on the industry trends, increasing digitization, increasing real estate prices with even decreasing transactions, or the changing role of agents and professionals, and the evolving homeowners and consumers. We actually made it happen. How it all started was we came from a simple listings business, took us to a media and advertising to a network marketplace. We've been driving these changes. We went from web to app. We introduced property valuations, launching a new wave of consumer services and the provision of leads to agents. Now, growth and innovation are a part of our DNA. It's our intrinsic belief to always create value for all of our users. In doing so, we have managed to grow steadily throughout the past 23 years. There is one important thing, though, that we want you to note.
For over two decades, the listing was the key to success. We drove the shift from offline listings to online listings. We used the listing to create a network for parties to come together, but letting them, the parties, transact on their own behalf. Today, we will share with you how we are creating the next growth era for Scout24 by focusing on the transaction as part of the sale, rental, or mortgage transaction. You get a glimpse of that because we're not building this from the grounds up. We've delivered record numbers in the nine-month publications. We showed a 9.4% overall growth with a 12.8% revenue growth in the residential segment, which is a record growth.
This is not an accident, but this is the result of hard work of all the teams and our employees where you just saw a brief video. Before we get into that, let's go back to Capital Markets Day 2019, where we outlined what we wanted to achieve. Let's take stock in terms of what we've accomplished. Reflecting on the objectives, we've come quite far. What exactly did we accomplish? Well, first of all, there is a meaningful shift of a 9 percentage point of our revenue generation towards subscription and leads. This is a huge step forward as it represents the strategic shift that we have undertaken as a group. We pushed hard to build and to monetize the relationships with our customers, and you see this reflected in an 8.2% growth in terms of agent community, agent customers over 2019.
You also see that we've positioned ourselves as a true business partner and not just as a perceived advertising platform or cost center for agents. As opposed to being just a listings platform. You see this because we improved our ARPU by 8.1% despite COVID. This is no mean feat, given the challenges posed by COVID throughout the vast majority of that time. You also see that we increased dramatically our OTP revenues by 41%, which was a key pillar of our strategy and our objectives that we had shared back at the time. Yes, with immoverkauf24, we were able to complement our offerings and grow that OTP. Last but not least, we actually returned EUR 1.8 billion to you, to our shareholders, through dividends and share buybacks.
We believe we delivered on our commitments, and now it's about to think about what's ahead of us, what are the new opportunities, and this is a new beginning because the market continues to evolve. This evolution brings new opportunities for value creation. What are these market opportunities ahead of us? More importantly, how do we as Scout24 create value from these opportunities? Let's talk quickly about the real estate market in Germany and what that means for our positioning and the opportunities ahead. Most of you already are aware that real estate as an asset class has seen significant value increase over the past years, not only in Germany, but in most countries around the world. Now, we have continued to reshape our offerings in light of that, because there's a significant demand spike, obviously, in Germany.
Now, early on, as Scout24, we have seen consumers having trouble, actually struggling, finding new homes due to a lack of supply. We have developed consumer products to support them. Early on, we have seen agents having trouble sourcing new sale mandates. We have accelerated our lead gen products all the way, including mandate provision. In the past year and a half, we've seen how COVID has impacted digitization. What did we do? We've pushed new product launches on the back of these tailwinds to help seekers, owners, and agents transact more conveniently. We have seen the agents need to digitize their own business, become more efficient, drive productivity, and we have invested to provide them a more powerful CRM suite to drive and support their business.
What's important for you to know, since 2017 all the way to 2021, we have improved our overall agents monetization to actually outpace the market price development. What does that mean? While overall house prices, as you can see on the slide, in Germany have increased by 8%. In peak cities like we are here in Berlin, have seen an increase even of 11% year-on-year. We improved our monetization through different offers by over 12% for the residential segment. This puts us at the forefront of leading network players in the real estate industry in the world. This also indicates the direction where we're headed. We are getting ready to unlock new addressable markets with a complete new set of products and solutions. However, to do this, we first needed to reflect and change our operational paradigm.
Let's take a step back. What is an operational paradigm? For us, it's what we view as our framework for defining our top priorities and aligning our company efforts around that. It includes operating principles, it includes resource allocation, and of course, execution. Historically, and you know this formula, classifieds relied on the very basic principle of listings, traffic, money. The entire paradigm was built on one-off listings revenue. It was, in a way, one-directional. What does it mean? It relied on a third-party content, such as a listing. It was generating traffic interested in that particular content and getting paid for connecting the two sides, ideally at the appropriate right time. Classifieds, however, did not partake in the transaction itself. By missing out on the transaction, classifieds needed to rely on more listings to generate more traffic for further monetization.
Like I said, it's a one directional logic. To be able to get closer, though, to the transaction, we needed to evolve. We needed a new way of thinking, and we needed a new paradigm, which is objects, customers, transactions. What is that specifically? An object, in our view, in our world now, is an identifiable and addressable real estate unit that is enriched with all relevant data for transacting. As I mentioned earlier, listings are third-party content. They're effectively a snapshot of a real estate unit at a certain time, serving a very specific function, such as marketing the property for a transaction with the basic aim of connecting buyers and sellers, tenants, and landlords. An object, however, encompasses the life cycle of a real estate unit.
By establishing objects, we establish relationships with our customers, and through these relationships, we identify their needs and develop products to address their needs, both for the professional and the private customers. It is these customers that eventually transact the sale or rental of a property. It is these same customers that transact with our platform through our wide array of products. While of course, listings remain at the heart of our business, we will shift towards objects more and more. With this new paradigm, we wanted to grow on objects and have the right product set for both the private and the professional customers at every stage of the life cycle of the object, be it for sale or rent. With that, we will be able to facilitate every transaction and detach our future revenue streams even more so from pure listings.
Our new paradigm therefore allows us to tap into new addressable markets. We are massively expanding our total addressable market. Today, we are targeting the agent's marketing spend. Yes, step by step, we went further, and we moved to the agent's acquisition spend. Now with our commission share transactions, we are getting closer and closer to the overall commission pool. We will take that further to commercial, to rent. As you will hear from Ralf and Thomas, they will outline later what it means that we also take it to the mortgage market. These are the key ingredients to address a 10 x bigger market than we have today. That's what we want to share with you, how we are going to market.
This slide here is a very important slide that captures the logic of what you will hear throughout the rest of this conversation and afternoon. In real estate, it all starts with the owner, and any owner has three decision frameworks. It's either selling, renting, and managing a property or living unit. The owners do this either through professional intermediaries or they do it by themselves. By the way, there could also be one or two decisions at the same time, of course. By focusing on the owner, we have developed products for the whole life cycle. Let's start with the decision around selling. If you are a professional, if you wish to sell, then for professional customers, through ImmoScout24 we have our traditional membership products and now also seller leads. We've enhanced the membership editions. You'll hear more about that later.
Of course, we've also enhanced our seller leads. Now, through Immoverkauf24, we also offer them pre-qualified leads on a commission share basis, effectively fueling the agent's success and then participating in their success. Through FLOWFACT and Propstack, our latest addition, we offer them a complete CRM suite to help enhance their operations, their productivity, and their own visibility and transparency into the business. Now, on the other hand, if you're selling as a private person, if you are the owner, you want to sell, you go to ImmoScout24 as well, and we offer the traditional listing opportunities, but with a focus on our free-to-list initiative, because we changed that starting in 2020, right in midst of the beginning of the pandemic. At the same time also, through Immoverkauf24, we offer advisory services to individuals, to homeowners to help cater to their specific needs.
Now, moving on, if you scroll down, let's say you focus on the rental phase. You see that there's a similar pattern on the rental side. Now, this is the big news. For professionals, obviously, we offer marketing capabilities with our subscription products while our CRM suite also enhances the agent's productivity. If you want to do it on your own as an owner on the rental part, then through ImmoScout24, we offer not only the listing power and the tenant selection through our new acquisition, we also now with Vermietet.de, we offer a personalized CRM capability. Then on the last part, on the managing part, which is not the last part in terms of interest, but it's an important part of the whole life cycle. It's the management of owners' properties.
We again cater to the professional customers with our ImmoScout24 Rental management subscriptions, which includes the digital rental contract that didn't exist in 2019. Another one of our innovations in the market. For owners who wish to manage rather themselves, such as landlords, we now offer a state-of-the-art platform with Vermietet.de for end-to-end tenancy management. This slide depicts our two customer segments, the private and the professional. Digging a little deeper into these two segments, of course, there are subcategories which we all are trying to address with our product suite and go-to-market strategy. Within the professional segment, of course, we have the agents be it on the residential or on the commercial side. We have the property managers, we have the developers and new home builders, and we have financial institutions and brokerage.
Within the private segment, we have the home sellers, we have the buyers, we have the landlords, we have the tenants. If you do the math and add up what's behind those segments, you see that we are massively increasing our TAM. The new TAM is 10 x bigger than where we used to come from and what we used to be focused on. This is what this company is focused on. This is where this company has built the products and solutions for, and this is the underlying foundation for growing the company into the future to become more transactional. We've also asked ourselves, how can we do better? How can we be faster to make sure that we can execute our strategy in the best possible way? Of course, we have fantastic developers. Of course, we have fantastic product managers. Can we be faster?
On our path to do that, we decided that there are important bolt-on strategic assets that we'd like to take on. Yes, we acquired a couple assets because we felt they fit perfectly into our network. These assets play a vital role for the next few years and for the growth plan that you will hear about, and also the numbers that you will hear later on from Dirk. The acquisition of immoverkauf24 brings us closer to the sale transaction. In a nutshell, immoverkauf24 helps homeowners and assesses their needs. It delivers these pre-qualified seller leads to partner agents, allowing agents to spend more time on mandate acquisition and transaction. It's a win-win for both the agents and us. The question, "Aren't you going against the agents?" is no question.
The agents love the service because it's additional business we are bringing to the table. We fuel the agents with hot leads. That bundled and coupled with our Realtor Lead Engine, we accelerate the owner lead generation. It is flexibility to optimize the split between the direct leads, the sales, and the commission share transactions. In essence, we maximize the monetization potential of a particular seller lead. Effectively, it allows us to directly participate in the EUR 6.5 billion residential sale agent commission pool as it's outlined here. On the other hand, and similarly, same pattern, same execution, we acquired Vermietet.de, which brings us closer to the rental transaction. It's a state-of-the-art platform that helps landlords manage their rentals. Ralf and Thomas will cover that, and they'll give you insights into how it works and what it means.
Do you think you would like to register your units on multiple platforms? We don't think so. You register them once with the market leader. Together with ImmoScout24, we have end-to-end rental management from listing and tenant selection to digital rental contract and full tenancy management, as the rental market is so vitally important to the German real estate market. The combination of Vermietet.de together with ImmoScout24 creates a network effect that allows us to participate in the combined EUR 7.8 billion residential rent and sale commission pool. That's the logic behind shifting gears, setting up a new operational paradigm, enlarging and multiplying the TAM, and adding strategic bolt-on assets, fully integrating them, and taking advantage of a fantastic brand and the traffic machine that we have. Now, growth does come from two sources when we are talking about our company.
The people are such an important ingredient, and we need the technology foundation also. As a digital business, obviously, we are focused on developing both, allowing us to scale faster in the future. Our investments into people and tech foundations help us to develop our digital network further. Within tech, we develop strong lead gen capabilities to fuel the industry and participate in the transaction. You'll hear more about that in a second from Rowena. Our platforms are now fully fledged cloud-based, so gives us more flexibility. We developed our agent CRM FLOWFACT further and are now integrating it into the ImmoScout24 platform together with the recent acquisition of Propstack. These digital tools really help the agents to process more effectively and enhance their own productivity. At the same time, of course, we are creating stickiness.
As I mentioned before, with the integration of Vermietet.de and ImmoScout24, we deliver seamless experience for landlords to manage their rentals. Likewise, we've also invested into our other core foundational pillars. People. We increased diversity by +9 percentage points for women in leadership roles since 2019. It's hard to do it, and it's especially hard also if you're not a multinational global company. We took this on, and it's a core pillar of our people strategy. Our employees are more engaged than ever before, with a 13 percentage point increase in the employee engagement score compared to 2019. Last but not least, which is really very important to me, we have finally completed our leadership team by bringing in two fantastic additional partners with hiring a Chief Technology Officer and with hiring a Chief Human Resource Officer to complete our team.
With that, I would like to summarize what we call the recipe for sustainable double-digit revenue growth going into the future. It's the first part, which is really and truly understanding and delivering against our customers' needs as a fundamental precondition. We've improved our focus on these two customer groups. We've organized ourselves around these two customer groups. We need to understand them before we're talking about how we can go to market and build the right products. We've developed and implemented a new operational paradigm, as I just walked you through in a very brief snapshot, which is fundamental to a company that has for more than 20 years operated according to the former paradigm, which was listing traffic money. We've built a leading product suite to facilitate transactions for all stakeholders, seekers, agents, and owners. We have executed highly strategic acquisitions to complement our strategy.
We have a product suite and a go-to-market approach that is clearly defined, and these two companies are either already fully integrated or are on their path to be fully integrated. With that, it's a great pleasure for me now to introduce you to our new CTO, Rowena Patrao, who joined us earlier this summer, 2021. Thank you.
Thank you, Toby. Hello, good morning, and good afternoon, everyone. It's really great to be here. I know it's a virtual event, and I would have loved the opportunity to meet all of you in person, but hopefully we'll get that chance soon. As Toby mentioned, I recently joined the group, and I'm really excited to be a part of the team here at Scout24. When Toby and the rest of the ELT spoke to me about this opportunity at the company, I was very interested. The work that we are doing here overlaps very nicely with my own experiences in my career. The products that we're building here have a focus on various different elements, B2B, B2C, the consumer, and of course, we're developing a scalable architecture. These are all things that I have worked on at various companies in my career, Microsoft, Amazon, VMware, and more.
Personally, there was a really good intersection between my own experiences and what Scout24 was looking for. Also, the real estate industry in Germany is at a very interesting turning point right now, where demand for real estate is high. With Scout24 being the leader in this real estate market space, we are in a unique position to continue being successful through digital transformation that is in progress right now. Personally, I'm very happy to be a part of this journey that takes us to that next level. As Toby mentioned, I've been here since July this year, but obviously even before I got here, the team has been busy working on the digital ecosystem. Let's take a closer look at what's in place today. First and foremost, we have moved from listings to objects. Listings are temporary.
They give us a one-time opportunity to monetize on the transaction. With objects, we have a lot more data about the property that is mapped to a very specific address. We have structural information about the property, the number of floors, the rooms, and so on. But we also have transactional data, and now we can capture the transactional history. What this means is, no matter who is working with that property object, we now have multiple opportunities to monetize on the transaction over the lifetime of the object. This is huge. This gives us leverage. This is our currency. The next thing we've done is we've implemented account logic. This allows us to get a deeper understanding of our users' requirements, and it helps us personalize their experiences on our platform for different user groups. For our private customers, we have seekers.
We have made it easy to search for a property to buy or rent and then act on it. For our landlords who have one or more properties that they have to manage, rent to track, contracts to follow up on, the whole set of things to do, we have given them a rich feature set through our subsidiary integration with vermietet.de. For our professional customers, we have automated the back-office operations. We have removed the heavy processing work and given them a platform that allows them to be efficient. Also, we have integrated with another subsidiary, FLOWFACT. Thereby, we have provided a powerful CRM. This not only handles their day-to-day operations, but also provides data and analytics to take action quickly and close on those mandates. Our transactions are powered by a strong Realtor Lead Engine. This qualifies leads before they are distributed to the customers.
Essentially, the information that we give our customers has already been filtered to meet their requirements. Again, this is an efficiency gain. We've also invested in APIs. For example, we have a contact API. No matter how our users are using our system and our platform, they can communicate with each other in a consistent way using this API, and they stay connected. When you take a look at all these different pieces and you put them together, voila, you have a transactional ecosystem. The potential here is huge. We know now what our users want. We can track our objects and our transactions. What this means is we can use this data to build experiences and products to match exactly what our users need. This is key. The question is, how is this helping us today? Let's take a look at some numbers.
I personally believe that these numbers speak for themselves. Just to be very clear here, these are numbers from this year, 2021. We have an average of over 100 million monthly sessions on our platform. 100 million monthly sessions. These translate to 4.7 million contact requests for search results that have been made on our platform. Again, that's 4.7 million contact requests for searches executed on our platform. These numbers show us that we have a very strong position in Germany's real estate industry today. Also, every month, we are seeing 4.6 million unique users accessing the platform through mobile apps. There's a significant increase in mobile usage, and we are definitely paying attention to this trend. With our work on objects, we now have 1.5 million objects in our database and counting. That's a good number.
In the nine months that we've had of 2021, we've generated almost 500,000 seller and mortgage leads and distributed them to various monetization channels. Last but not least, we have over 20,000 residential and business customers that we are working with closely to meet their requirements. We are clearly doing well, and we are successful. Now, where do we go from here? As I mentioned earlier, with the ecosystem that we've put in place, we now have access to a lot of data about our users as well as our objects. What we are going to do now is use this data to add more precision and accuracy to our products. First, we're gonna invest in a lead distribution algorithm.
We will distribute qualified leads to agents based on the market demand in their region, along with expectations for that specific property and the probability of conversion. We want to be able to act on insights. What does this mean? Since we are monitoring what's happening with an object, we can now act on changes quickly and get ahead of our competitors. For example, if someone's selling a property, chances are they might be interested in buying a new one. Let's engage with them quickly and actively before our competitors do. We want to intelligently match demand to supply. Here, we wanna understand the interests of our seekers and personalize the results that we give them to meet these requirements. We can then match these qualified seekers to the sellers and landlords. This will only increase the likelihood of conversion.
Last but not least, we wanna make sure that the platform is accessible on any device, anywhere, at any time. We are investing in efforts to make sure that this is secure, reliable, and performant, so that everyone comes to our platform to meet their real estate needs. As you can see, the data that we get from our digital ecosystem will power some very compelling experiences on our platform going forward and help create value. All this technology will only come to light through products and features that we design and present to our customers. To tell you more about what's in store, I'll now hand it over to my colleagues in product and sales, Thomas and Ralf. Thank you very much.
Hello, everyone. Hello, Thomas.
Hello, Ralf. Thank you very much, Rowena.
What have we learned so far? I mean, we have learned that we built strong foundations since the last capital markets day, and that there is a great and significant opportunity ahead of us. Now, Thomas, we need to bring it home, right?
That's right. In order to talk about value creation, we focus on our customers and of course, on the needs of the customers, because only by addressing their needs and building and selling the right product, we can generate value for them and for our shareholders. If there is one thing you should remember and you need to remember from this for this session that is coming up now, it is that we have five key value drivers of value creation. Let us be very clear, these are not plans, but this is in full swing. We are in execution mode. We are full steam ahead in order to deliver against these five value drivers. Let's get started.
Yeah. Thomas, before we go into the value driver in more detail, let's start with our customers. We have two groups of customers at Scout. One, we have the professional customers, and we have the private customers. Of course, the organization is also organized along the customer groups here. We have journeys in place, and we follow the journeys of our customers. I would like to start with the professional customer side. What we are seeing there is that those customers are also more and more digitized. That means they're using all the technology which is available and which we are offering more and more intensively. Of course, Corona was a boost for the usage of the technology we are offering. For instance, the communication is completely digitized now.
Our customers, the real estate agents, are used to the technology of communicating with their customers via app, video calls, whatever. Private customers, Thomas.
Yeah. The same development is actually true for the private side. You all know that consumers have been driving the shift to online. That is no news. We have been driving the shift to online real estate classifieds by empowering the consumer in the last 20 years. What we have been starting to see and what we're increasingly seeing is that also homeowners, so both sellers and landlords, they are going online, and they are doing either parts or the entire transaction online. For our customer groups, we have to provide the right set of digital tools and products and features to make them successful in this, in this new and this changing digital world. Let's have a closer look at that, Ralf.
Yeah, of course. What is the environment and what has changed over the last, let's say, two years or from the last capital markets day? I mean, the audience we have. We have audience, we have the market, and we have also the technology which kicked in. Let's start with the audience. The audience is becoming younger, so we have younger buyers on the portal. We see that, of course, the expectation of those buyers or those users of our portal is then becoming different. We see that also the homeowners, they can imagine to sell the property more and more online. More than 70% of the homeowners tell us, "Okay, why not selling my property online completely?" The market environment is also really favorable.
What we see is that the mortgage rates, for instance, are still low here, means the interest rates are low, and that this is also driving the house prices and the demand for real estate. This is, of course, helpful for us here. What makes technology now with the market is the question here. What we see is that for small agents in the current market situation, it's getting harder to gain their business because they need new mandates. We see also that agents who are using all the technical tools and agents who are more digitized than others, that those agents are more successful in the market. Thomas.
Yeah. One key takeaway. We need to provide the right product set to make our customers succeed in this changing environment. That's a perfect segue to actually talk about the product set in greater detail. You have seen a version of this slide before. It's in the very beginning when Toby did the introduction. Toby has talked about our customers. What we'd like to do now is we'd like to add a product perspective to this customer group. If you have a look at every customer group. For every group, we have a product suite which is designed and which is tailored to address the specific needs in a more and more digital environment. Let me walk you through the product suite in a bit more detail.
If you look at our professional customer group, we do have the subscription product, and that is the good old membership that you probably all have heard of before. We also have an old world product, a listing product, a PPA pay-per-ad product. Toby was also talking about that. Lastly, we have a set of other products, including mortgages. Now, what we are trying to do, and what we're effectively doing, and what we are speeding up to do, is to shift our revenues from the old legacy products into the new recurring and transactional product suites and revenue streams.
This means that we are moving from a listing into a customer lifetime value model. Our interest is to participate on the customer lifetime value and not so much on the one-time effect of a product we are offering. We have value drivers for driving revenue in the future. We have three key value driver for the professional customers, and we have two for the private customers. Now we go in more detail through every value driver. The big picture is that we have the memberships, as Thomas described that. On the professional customer group, the first value driver is here, the memberships and the OTP products we're having. Of course, the membership is our core product. Every customer who wants to buy, for instance, on top product later on needs to have a membership here.
It's our entry product. We have different tiers here, and we come to that a bit later. Important to understand, the membership product is the core product for our professional customers. The OTP product, the on top products, are products where our customers can boost their success. This is one of the main drivers for our revenue here. Revenue goals comes out of the memberships and comes out of the on top products.
Let's talk about memberships first.
We do. What the customer really needs at the moment, Thomas, in a market where we have much more demand than supply?
Tell me.
They need visibility. They get visibility via their listings, of course, but also they can add to it. They can add to it more visibility if they spend more marketing money into visibility products we are also offering. Could be media on the side, could be placements you can buy in order to boost your acquisition power on our website. Customer needs really visibility. Visibility gives you brand power, gives you acquisition power, and this acquisition power leads into more business for you as an agent. This is important to understand. What we did over the last two years, we brought every customer into our membership logic. Our product set is really, really easy. It was not always the case in the past. You know that, Thomas. Now we have three memberships here in place.
We have our Basic Edition, our Image Edition, and our Acquisition Edition. The higher you get on the membership ladder, the more acquisition power, the more visibility you are getting. Thomas, tell me now how the product really works in detail, please.
If you have a look at the three-tiered membership, you have a very basic entry product, which is called the Base Edition. You can list all your properties. It's a list-all model. And then you get regular or you profit from our regular marketing machine that we do have, being the number one in Germany. That is not good enough these days, right? Because it is not that hard to market your property, but it's really hard to get the next mandate. We encourage and upgrade our agents to move up the ladder, to move up to the Image Edition, which gives you additional visibility, a so-called ImageBoost, which helps you build your local brand in your local community where you're active as an agent.
On top of that, we have the highest tier membership, which we call Acquisition Edition because that is what it does. It gives you, next to the full marketing power of Scout, also full acquisition power because it connects you with homeowners directly so that it's easier for you to get the next mandate in a changing digital environment.
The question now is a bit how to grow in this membership model with our customer base. We have different opportunities here, and you can see it on the right-hand side there, some levers how we can drive the success of our customers and how we can drive revenue at the end. For instance, we established a rate card, and of course, we can increase rate card prices. Every contract has a discount, so we can reduce the discount level of the contracts. We can, of course, upgrade the memberships. Customers, we can bring customers from the Basic Edition into the Image Edition as Thomas already mentioned. We have different elements and options here in order to grow the revenue. Of course, on top of it, we have a lot of pricing power.
At the end, that brings us to 4%-6% revenue growth, the CAGR side here. This is not all. Now, later on, we come then to the on top products, which will drive this much further here. Before we do that, Thomas, let's have a look on the product.
Absolutely. Again, just to be very clear, this is value driver number one. For this value driver, we're standing here with confidence to say we're targeting a revenue CAGR of 4%-6%, which is the beginning, but not the end of the value drivers. As I am the product person, I love to talk about products. I have one product slide for you to make that very tangible, because we are always talking as in abstract forms about the three tiers, and then you move up the ladder, et cetera. What does it actually mean? Yeah. This is how the feature set of the Acquisition Edition looks like. This is what you see as a consumer, as a seeker. This is our search results page. It's one of the most visited pages, of course, of our core funnel.
As an Acquisition Edition customer, you get your placements on top, and you get them with the highest visibility. They have bigger pictures, et cetera. You don't only benefit in terms of your marketing effort, but also you get that visibility. You have a second row where you have an additional product, which we call the ImageBoost, which gives you as an agent, Ralf Weitz Immobilien in Berlin-Tiergarten, the opportunity to show yourself and say, "Hey, I'm the local hero. If you want to sell or if you're interested in valuation or a first consult, give me a call." That is the entry point for homeowners to directly connect with Ralf. Finally, you have a set of acquisition toolkits that actually help you, like the Profi-Report, et cetera, that help you win the next mandate because you go with that report.
It's an ImmoScout24 branded report. You go to the homeowner and say, "Look, this is what I've done on ImmoScout24. This is how successful I am. Please give me your mandate.
The good thing also is, and therefore it's really, I would say, maybe not easy, but it's simple to push that product in front of the customer because more visibility is something you can also measure, and we are doing it. We have a lot of reports in place where we show customers, okay, if you invest more marketing on our platform, you get more visibility, you get more acquisition power, you get more mandates. This is what we can measure. Therefore, it's a really clear sales go-to-market approach we are having here. As Thomas mentioned, we have a high confidence level that we are here really successful.
So far we are really, really successful bringing customers from a Basic Edition into the Image Edition and from the Image Edition into the Acquisition Edition. We talked about the membership.
Correct. Just to wrap it up on the membership side, value driver one, this is the access product, as you were mentioning, right? It's a strong product. You need it in order to be successful on ImmoScout24, but that's not the end of it, yeah. Because Toby has talked about the market, we are talking about the market. The way to grow in this market is through acquisition products, through OTPs, on-top products. Ralf, let's talk about on-top products next, Ralf.
Correct, Thomas, you said you need to buy the access product first, and then you can buy the on-top products. We see that more and more customers buying memberships. We could grow the number of customers in the memberships here, and that's really a good sign. On top of the memberships, if you want to boost your acquisition further, you can buy leads and more or less mandates from us. We are really flexible here in HR to our customers. We are offering acquisition power, and with that, we are really at the beginning of the transaction.
What Toby mentioned, we want to go deeper into the value chain, deeper into the transaction, and that means we need to initiate the transaction and we need to know what's happening with the object here. We're offering to customers different models. We have the lead model, you can buy a seller lead from us. That's the entry product here. Yeah. We are selling those leads to customers, and then you need to qualify on your own the leads.
What we are also doing, of course, if a customer says, "Okay, no, I don't have the capacity to qualify here," we are offering qualified leads, and we are also offering the model where we qualify the leads as long as is needed in order to initiate the mandate, and then we hand over the mandate and get the commission out of it. We are really agile, and we are oriented on the needs of our customers here because we have small customers, medium-sized customers, we have really big ones, and they are in different stages of their business, and we're trying to support them with the right product. How does it work in detail, Thomas?
Let me walk you through the basic funnel. It's essential to understand how this 100%, this black bar, which roughly corresponds to 430,000 submissions, how that actually comes together. You were saying earlier, homeowners and consumers, everyone is going online. Where do people go? They go to the number one. They go to the top brand, and that is ImmoScout24. That's how we are bringing homeowners, how we're bringing consumers into the funnel. Then with these homeowners and the objects in that funnel, what we're doing next is we are verifying and we are qualifying those submissions. By doing that, we are actually landing at roughly a third of so-called seller leads. Owners who actually have an intention or are relevant in terms of selling their property over a certain period of time.
Out of these, let's say 100,000-120,000, we are applying these two business models that Ralf was mentioning. The business model one is we're selling leads. There are lots of customers of ours who want to convert the lead themselves. They want leads, but they want to do the final sales pitch, they want to win the mandate. Roughly 80,000 leads now we are bringing into that model. Yeah. We're selling it directly through ImmoScout24. Then there are also other customers who are more interested in a ready-made mandate. These leads we're actually bringing to immoverkauf24. That is roughly 25,000-30,000. These leads are then converted into actual sales, that means sales that we are participating as ImmoScout24 through a commission share.
We have a set of associated and partner agents who are selling these properties, and we're doing a split of the commission. There are two call-outs. Call-out number 1, if you're starting to do the math on the numbers that I shared with you, there is a big time lag between submitting a lead through, let's say, immoverkauf24, and then selling the actual property. That time lag is between six and 18 months. That means all the leads that we are bringing to immoverkauf24 this year, they will actually materialize the next year and the year after. Yeah. Then call out number 2, there are also a number of other leads that we are bundling into the Acquisition Edition in order to give acquisition power. What are the results? The results are what you're seeing at the bottom of this chart.
On the one hand, we are selling the realtor leads with the revenue per lead of roughly EUR 200, and that is generating roughly EUR 60 million in the first nine months. We are already at more than 1,000 transactions with immoverkauf24. Yeah. Here you also see that the revenue per transaction is a completely different level with more than EUR 6,000 than on a lead level. To wrap it up, that's how the funnel works. That's what we are optimizing. Now, of course, the question is what's next? What's the road ahead? The road ahead is that we are striving for, and we are executing against a revenue CAGR of 30%-40% with this on top product set. How will we do it? We continue to improve top of the funnel on platform, but also off platform through marketing.
We are improving in the funnel itself. Rowena was talking about the algorithm that we are optimizing in order to distribute leads in the most effective and efficient way, and then finding the right balance between short-term revenue with realtor leads and long-term revenue through immoverkauf24. That is value driver number two. Let's continue.
Another value driver, Thomas, of course, is the mortgage business. We started the mortgage business quite some time ago, and we started this business also as a classic lead business. Now the question for us, what's next with the mortgage business? Because we are by far number one in lead generation for mortgages here already. We are sitting on the consumer. The question is now how to monetize this product better or what are the opportunities? We want to follow the same path, like what we did on the Realtor Lead Engine side, on the seller lead side. Let's go to the next slide and explain a bit the market and also how the product and the business works here. First of all, the market is really fragmented.
We have here in Germany more than 50,000 mortgage brokers. They are acting between the consumers who are buying the mortgage at the end and the banks who are signing the mortgage. The broker in the middle is often our partner because we are selling leads to those brokers. Now the question is how to go deeper here in the value chain and how to unlock additional revenue pots. The total addressable market, of course, is getting bigger as deeper you go into the value chain here. Therefore, what we said is we want to help consumers to get the right mortgage and to get the best mortgage. In order to do so, we need to qualify those consumers better. We need to know more about them.
The next step for us, of course, is also that we are pre-qualifying those leads. We are strong in the lead generation, and we need to become better in lead qualification, and therefore, we building and investing a lot here in technology. We will add another element here to the business, and that's the advisory. We want to partner with the brokers. We want to create a kind of affiliate partner network, and we want, together with them, give the best service to the consumers. That means in addition to the mortgage lead engine, we will offer the pre-qualified leads, and we will offer a kind of mortgage advisory together with partners here. Then we are able to unlock an additional market here. You can see it on the right-hand side.
The total addressable market here is EUR 2.3 billion. That's the commission pool in the mortgage business.
Good.
Is that exciting, Thomas?
That is exciting. The question is how do we get to EUR 2.3 billion? Now, as Ralf was saying earlier, the market is very fragmented. The fascinating thing is that means the power is with the consumers. Who sits on top of the consumers has actually the right to win this market. Now, let me walk you through the basic funnel, and it's a similar funnel to the funnel we've shown you earlier when it came to seller leads. As Ralf was saying, what we are doing, not what we will be doing, but we are already doing is we are executing the RLE and immoverkauf24 playbook to the mortgage business. Yeah. How does the funnel look like? The funnel again starts with a black bar, which writes 100%.
If we translate that into absolute numbers, we have around 300,000 mortgage requests per year. As Ralf was mentioning, we have by far the number one consumer platform on this site, yeah. That is the good news. We're getting lots of requests in. The opportunity here for us is all of these requests, and that's what you see in the middle bar, are actually directly distributed and sold to brokers with a revenue per lead of EUR 27. Now, we're sending the leads away immediately, and that is the opportunity because what we will do and what we have already started to do is we start to verify and qualify the leads. The effect will be similar to the Realtor Lead Engine on the OTP world. We will be able to lift up the revenue per lead for these types of leads.
That's only the one piece. You know from the playbook that the other piece is moving into the transaction. That's what you see on the right-hand side. We have already sold, co-sold the first mortgage, I think last week, and we want to expand that, and we are expanding that aggressively. What does it mean? In the next year, about 4,500 requests, the most qualified, the hottest requests and leads, will be given to our affiliate network of brokers, and we will actually be able to convert about 450 mortgages out of that. Just to give you a sense of the opportunity, the revenue per transaction is roughly EUR 2,500.
By applying this playbook, we can actually swing the mortgage business on a similar path as we have done with the OTP product world.
Thomas, maybe just one comment I would like to add here is that, I mean, at the end, the mortgage product is a kind of attachment to a real estate transaction. The more real estate transactions we are initiating, the more likely it will be that we are able to attach here a mortgage as well, if we have the mortgage broker partner network here in place. Therefore, there's not just an opportunity we're bringing more consumers into the mortgage directly. There's also an opportunity that we attach the mortgage product on the real estate transactions we are initiating.
Great. We can piggyback on that. Exactly. Which will translate, again, value driver number three, into about 18%-20% CAGR, revenue CAGR, within the next five years. We'll do that by opening up top of the funnel, by using the playbook we've just outlined, and by also leveraging our transactional model from the object side. Good. That is the professional part. Now let's talk about the private part. We don't only have professional customers, but also private customers. Please don't forget, private customers, they are a key of our strategy. They're a key pillar. Only with private customers, a real estate ecosystem in Germany is complete. Why is that? It is because we don't only have lots of private seekers, but also lots of private sellers and private landlords.
They're essential for us in order to also create networks effects, which are so important for our business. The very first value driver on the private side is Plus. Plus, you have seen it in the video probably or maybe not know what it is exactly. Let me start with explaining it and, Ralf, then you transfer that into numbers. Good. Plus. Plus is our so-called consumer subscription product. We're very proud here to state that we are probably the only real estate classified in the world who has built and scaled a consumer business and a consumer revenue stream. This consumer business and this consumer revenue stream has actually helped us a lot to initiate that transition from the old PPA world, the old listing world, and then also the free listing world into a sustainable and subscription-based consumer private revenue stream.
This Plus product is a prime example of us executing on our strategy. What it is concretely, what is it about? On the left-hand side, you have MieterPlus, so Tenant Plus. You have a big tenancy market in Germany. More than 3 million transactions happening. More than 300,000 or around 300,000 seekers every month, and every seeker seeks for three to six to nine months. There is a big opportunity. What Plus does, it actually gives you a booster. It gives you a booster to bring you into new home. As you were, you know, seeing in the video, it's a bit like e-commerce. It's safe, it's efficient, it's completely digital, and it's the speedway for you into new home. The same holds actually true for the second product, Buyer Plus or KaufPlus.
Again, it's this best way into your new house, but your newly bought house or apartment. There's a very important additional element here. If you're buying a new house, this is your single most important financial decision of your life. You need safety and certainty and confidence. With free valuation and additional services, we are actually providing you with that safety and confidence that you're making the right choice for you.
There's one element I would like to add, Thomas, is that there's also benefit for professional customers, right? Because as a tenant, you get faster your new flat, your new apartment, yeah. Or as a potential buyer, you get faster your new property. But you are also pre-qualified because you've put in a lot of data into the system, so your application form is there and so on. So you are pre-qualified. The lead quality we are giving to professional customers in this perspective is better, and this is actually what they appreciate. I mean, remember, we have more demand than supply. So to produce a lead for a listing or for an object is not the problem today, yeah. The question is it the right lead we are handing over to our professional customers? And actually quality sells here, right?
I mean, if we can say our lead quality is better than with the competition, this is obviously an advantage for us.
Absolutely. That means it's a win for the consumer side, it's a win for the agent side.
Right.
A classic win-win. I mean, let's talk about numbers that we're associating with this product. It's for you.
Thomas, you said this is a subscription product. That's again important to understand, we are moving here into customer lifetime value. Instead of asking for, let's say, EUR 80 for a listing, we're saying, "Oh, you get the listing for free." With this listing power, we are generating subscriptions on the consumer side here. Those subscriptions, they stay for longer than four months at the moment here. You can see in the numbers, we were able to grow the number of subscriptions on the consumer side really significantly. Now we have more than 240,000 subscribers here for our MieterPlus, Tenant Plus product. We believe in the next years, we can grow this number over 400,000 subscriptions.
This gives us really revenue power, Thomas, and also power on the consumer side.
Yeah. Just to add on that, you're seeing the ARPU here, and you're seeing the CLV. You should not be worried that the ARPU is going down. This is by intention. The reason is very simple. We have changed our pricing model that we are offering longer term subscriptions. Yeah, two, six, and 12 months. Of course, the monthly revenue per subscription is going down, but the overall lifetime value is going up, and it's going up nicely.
At the end, we want to keep every customer in the system as long as possible, right?
Right.
Because the longer customers are with us, the more opportunities we have to monetize them.
Just to bring that to a close, this is land grab mode, right? We're investing heavily here in product and marketing. We're going for market share. As you've seen on the chart, with the trend, we're going all in in land grab mode. Good. This is value driver number four. Now there's one more to go. Ralf.
Yeah. You mentioned land grab mode, right, Thomas? We are running a marketplace, as you know, and therefore you have always two sides here. You have the tenants, and of course, on the other side, you have the landlords. The landlords are also important because they have the objects. Therefore, we need to keep them in the system as well. Instead of offering to landlords the service of, "Oh, you can publish your listing," and then we know for the next eight years for this unit, they don't need our service anymore. Instead of that, we want to bring them into the system. We want to keep them in the system, and therefore, we need to offer additional services here. That actually was the reason why we acquired vermietet.de.
With this company, we are able to keep the people in the system. I want to give one example, Thomas, and then you can explain the product a bit more. I mean, a digital rent contract, it's easy, yeah. You sign a contract digital, but that means also it's not that easy, you know. You provide this product, and then this contract is in place for the whole period of the relationship between the tenant and the landlord. That's one product, how we want to keep the people in the system. Of course, along this journey, you can sell additional product, and that's actually the strategy behind that.
Yeah.
How does the product work?
How does the product work? Let's have a look. You might recall the product suite, you know, we showed you at the very beginning of our section. You hopefully remember that we said we are transforming from that old PPA, that legacy product, into the transactional product set. Exactly this is what you see here and what is happening here. Before we talk about the product, maybe just a couple of sentences on the market. Let's start with the market, and that's what you see on the upper right of the chart. We have about 42 million residential real estate units in Germany. About 50%-55% are being rented out, so let's say 24-25 million.
What's important to know is the vast majority of these units are actually not owned by big property management companies. They are owned by private landlords, more than 50 million units, and these units need to be managed. I can give you a prime example, because I'm a private landlord, yeah? How did I manage my properties with my millions of fellow private landlords? You use an Excel sheet, yeah? You're writing letters to your tenants. You look on your bank account to see if you actually get the rent, yeah. You have a rental contract that you send around. You're starting to fill in your tax statement, et cetera, et cetera. To sum it up, this is a mess.
It's really not a good experience, neither for me as a landlord, nor for Ralf, who is the tenant, hypothetically. What does vermietet.de do? Yeah. It all brings this into one platform. In the end, vermietet.de is a digital property management platform for private landlords. It is efficient, it is fully digital, and it's completely tailored to the needs of the private landlords. Why is this so cool? Why are we so excited about it? What we are doing with vermietet.de is we are taking this platform, and we are plugging it into our private PPA business, our listing business. Every listing, and we have thousands of listings every day. They will actually automatically come with a vermietet.de subscription. Yeah. Every day, we bring in thousands of listings and owners to vermietet.de. Once they are on vermietet.de, we make them stay.
We make them stay because as Toby was saying in the beginning, you once register your property. The product is very sticky. Once you're signed up, you use it, you don't leave the platform until you don't start using a second or a third platform, because then the mess starts again. Yeah. We don't only make them stay, we also make them pay. Yeah. We have started to charge a monthly subscription. It's a subscription fee that is per unit. It starts with EUR 5, so it's actually relatively low, and it goes up, depending on the number of units, to EUR 15 per month. Now, EUR 5 is not a lot, but if you add up EUR 5, let's say into a year, it's EUR 60.
If you add that up to six years or eight years as the average tenancy, it's actually way higher than what we can charge with the EUR 80 or EUR 90 listing. This model has two major implications. The first implication is a revenue shift. We'll be able, and we are able to shift revenues from the old legacy PPA to a recurring subscription product. This will increase the CLV that Ralf always talks about. The CLV of the landlords over time. That's implication number 1. Implication number 2 is the landlords, the tenants and the objects, they stay on the platform. Over time, they will no longer appear anywhere else, and we create a network for us where the objects stay with us and are renewed with pre-qualified buyers or pre-qualified tenants.
In other words, what we're doing and what we will be doing in the next five years, we're building out the biggest property manager in Germany without owning an asset. We'll have 4.5 million units on the platform within the next five years.
Thomas, how many units do we have so far?
400,000. That's already almost the biggest property manager to start with, but we're tuning that up factor 10.
Yeah. We are also so excited about it because we have now the 400,000 units on our platform, and we also know about those units a lot, right? We know, for instance, if the tenant is moving out and we need to provide a new tenant here. We are creating exclusive content for ImmoScout24 as well. Therefore, we are plugging in different technologies here. In the end, this helps us to monetize within our own ecosystem. This is really the beauty of this model here.
One more slide. Let's bring it home.
Let's bring it home, Thomas. We talked about subscription, we talked about value drivers, and let's go through the value drivers again. Membership, really our core product. We are able to grow in number of memberships. We are able to grow here the revenue because we are bringing existing customers into higher tiered memberships. We have a lot of tools in place here in order to have pricing power and also to bring it to make it happen at the end, right? We can avoid discounts. We have the rate card in place now. We onboard every customer into this new model, and this gives us a lot of power and pricing power and also uplift for the next years.
This other value driver we talked about was the OTP product, the seller lead product, which is quite new for the company, but so powerful and it's growing so heavily at the moment. This will really drive the ARPU, of course, but also the overall revenue for the company, which is great. We have a new product, at least in this version. This is our mortgage product, where we go deeper into the value chain and where we partner up with mortgage brokers and in order to get more out of the commission pool for mortgages here in Germany. We have the Plus+ products. Also subscriptions again, right?
We are moving away from our one-time product, the old PPA product, into our subscription model here, and we are able to participate on the customer lifetime value much more than it was in the past the case. We are here in this, you call that land grab mode, right? There's a lot of growth ahead of us. As I said before, we want to hit the 400,000 as soon as possible here. 400,000 subscribers for the Plus products. We have the new family member, Vermietet.de, and this product and technology helps us to keep the rental landlords in the system to create this exclusive content. We want to become here the biggest property management company, as you said, without owning an asset here, and that's really great.
That, at the end, brings us really to secure and sustainable double-digit revenue growth for the company. If you would ask me if I'm confident, yes, I am.
Fully agreed. Just to wrap that up, what you're seeing here from us is an ambitious plan. It's not only a plan, it's us moving to the next level. It's us moving into the transaction. It's us delivering double-digit growth. It's not only a plan that is on paper, but it's a plan that is in execution. It's in full swing. In order to succeed, we have a couple of investment areas. We are deliberately investing in a number of areas. On the first value driver, it needs heavy lifting on the product and sales side, but we are in full swing in execution mode. On the second value driver, OTPs, this is also strongly marketing driven. We want to win the homeowner. We want to be at the beginning of their journey.
For that, we have to build out our brands for the homeowners. We have to invest in marketing. We're tuning up our marketing investment here in order to deliver the promised growth. Value driver number three, mortgages. It's product driven. As we are applying the OTP playbook, we are investing on the product side in order to enable a similar growth pattern as we have seen for OTPs. Value driver number four and value driver number five, we are in land grab mode, which means we are investing on the product side to build out that product suite. As an example, value driver number five, if you wanna have 4.5 million units, there has to be a robust and scalable platform. Also we are investing in marketing. As an example, value driver number four, consumer subscription. We're heavily going after that.
We're going for market share, market share, market share. That is the summary of the value drivers of the growth targets leading to double-digit growth. How that translates into exact numbers, Dirk will show you, but only in a couple of minutes because now we're handing over to a 15-minute coffee break. Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Welcome back, everybody, also from my side. Thanks to Ralf and Thomas for the concise summary on how we are delivering on our strategy. Growth put into numbers. We are guiding towards continued double-digit growth. I think that summarizes it adequately. Over the past two hours, you've gotten familiar with our strategic approach. You've seen how we developed it, the foundations we laid, and how we continue to execute it. Where we are strong already, we grow slowly in volume and strong in price. Membership upgrades will generate 4%-6% CAGR. In our key investment areas, we will grow double-digit with new business models. On top products and seller leads will contribute a 30%-40% CAGR over the next years. Where we want to get stronger, we focus on volume and less on pricing growth.
Mortgage will grow with a 20% CAGR, and our consumer products will grow strong on subscriptions and units. 400,000 subscribers and 4.5 million units until 2026. That's what we're targeting. That comes along with a CAGR of 26%-28%. Against that background, it is only consequent to get more transparent on segmentation. Hence, we will reflect our strategy and focus in the segmentation going forward. As you have seen in Ralf's and Thomas' presentation, we focus on the private and on the professional customers. In both segments, digitization is the driver for change. Professional customers need to digitize to improve productivity. Private customers get more and more tech-savvy, and they expect a digital journey in all areas of their lives, also in real estate transactions.
To give you an overview of the changes, we have displayed both segmentations on this slide. While group numbers in the media and other segment certainly don't change, residential and business customers and products will be reshuffled in the following logic. The new professional segment in the future includes all revenues with professional customers. That means residential agents, property managers, finance partners, commercial agents and developers, and also include new home builders. It includes subscription revenues. On top products like the Realtor Lead Engine and immoverkauf24. It includes pay-per-ad revenues, and it also includes other revenues, like mortgage. The new private segment, on the other hand, will include all revenues with private customers. That is home seekers, private listers and landlords, and not to forget, home buyers. It therefore includes subscription revenues from our Plus products and from the Vermietet.de product.
It will, in the future, also contain pay-per-ad revenues we are delivering with private customers. The scope of the media and other segment remains unchanged. It therefore continues to include our CRM platforms, FLOWFACT and Propstack, ImmoScout24 in Austria, and third-party media revenues. All in all, we believe this is a more balanced segmentation than you have seen previously, and the balance will even increase in the future when we grow our private segment. To give you a much better overview, you'll find the Professional segment and our future disclosure on the next slide. As stated, it contains parts of the Residential and the Business segment. Membership today reflects around 80% of those subscription revenues. Together with on-top products, it separately states the growth drivers on pricing and on-top products. In other revenues, under professional, we have reflected the mortgage business.
Pay-per-ad business contains the business with one-time listings, mostly from smaller agents. To revert back to what you learned earlier in this session, the growth drivers, membership upgrades, and pricing of 4%-6% CAGR on top products with seller leads of 30%-40% CAGR and enhancements in the mortgage business with a CAGR of 18%-20% will be reflected in the professional segment in the future. On those professional customers, we chose to simplify our ARPU calculation going forward. We have decided to disclose the example based on the Q3 figures because Q3 was the first quarter which fully reflected immoverkauf24. This ARPU will contain revenue from all professional customers, residential and business. It will contain membership revenues and on-top product revenues, like seller leads. We will add immoverkauf24 revenues on top of that.
It is a better reflection of our growth strategy, and it creates a higher transparency for our investors and analysts. The increasing size of the buckets on top products and commission-based sales via immoverkauf24 reflect our monetization mode. Keep in mind that in the customer numbers might slightly vary, as we can only take the deduplicated customers into account that also created revenues with immoverkauf24 in that specific period. On the private segment, we choose the same disclosure. It has the same subline structure as professionals. We differentiate between subscriptions, pay per ad, and other revenues. Mainly, it includes what we, in the past, published under consumer with residential. What you see reflected in here is our main value drivers increase Plus subscribers and increase Vermietet units and landlords. Both will contribute a CAGR of 26%-28% over the next years.
Besides the professional ARPU, we will also provide you with a private ARPU going forward. Similarly to the previous slide on professional, we chose to compare on the basis of Q3. As we are gaining customers month-on-month, don't expect this ARPU to grow in the next years. The decreasing size of this KPI is reflecting our value drivers four and five, land grabbing for consumer subscriptions. We will focus on increasing the customer numbers. Customer growth has been 70% in Q3 year-over-year. Only on top of that, we believe it helps to display sign-ups for Vermietet.de. Those sign-ups are not paying and hence are not reflected in the ARPU, but those are the customers that we want to translate into paying subscribers in the future. This is the way we display our private segment in the future.
We believe it creates a much higher transparency for you. The land grab mode that we are deploying here is reflected in that, and the ARPU might go slightly down. Don't forget, as you learned in Ralf's and Thomas' presentation, we are looking at the customer lifetime value, which is going up in this segment. Now, you will ask yourself, what's happening on the cost side? To accelerate our transactional ecosystem, we will invest into five value drivers, as Thomas and Ralf mentioned before. At the same time, we believe we will keep structural cost under control. On this slide, you see a very strong investment mode during the next year, reflected in the orange bar above. While cost intensity will go down the years after. Most important cost position for the investment mode will be marketing and selling cost.
Personnel cost will be affected, as, for example, the immoverkauf24 business is much more personnel intensive than our co-agent business. In the years to come, the overall growth in cost will significantly decrease compared to revenue increase, and that's why we will return to a higher margin 2026 going forward. Own work capitalized is not included in the graph here. It has peaked this year while we have implemented Vermietet.de into our portfolio. As I told you already in the Q3 results call, we aim to keep this at a level of below 6% of total revenue in the future, and you will see the first effects of that already in the next year when we are going significantly down in the second half of 2022. Now you have seen the revenue numbers.
You have seen our plans to support that with cost, mainly in marketing and sales, and very high cost discipline on structural cost. Of course, that then translates into the following numbers. On the professional side, we believe we can grow the business 10%-12% over the years to come. Especially in 2022, we believe we can deliver that growth at a higher level in the private segment. 12%-14% overall growth is what you will be seeing in that segment. On media and other, we're ramping up again. ImmoScout24 in Austria is growing heavily. The media business will roughly stay constant. FLOWFACT and Propstack will continue to support our existing ImmoScout24 business model. Here we will see 12%-14% growth. For the overall group, that translates into a growth figure of 2022 of 11%-12%.
In 2023, we continue with that, slightly going up to around 12%. Looking at a CAGR for the period of 2022 to 2026 of 12% revenue growth for the next years to come. As I told you earlier, 2022 will be a period where we are investing into Vermietet.de and our new acquisitions, where we will invest into marketing and we will invest into ramping up the machine to grow even further. We will lay those foundations in 2022. Starting 2023, we will accelerate our margin growth again, where we believe that in 2023, margin will grow 13%-15%. In a time period between 2022 and 2026, the overall CAGR in margin will be 13%. Besides that operational strategy, we have also redefined our capital allocation strategy.
We will continue to reinvest into growth as a first priority. As we continue to have a very attractive cash conversion in our business model, this will be done through our cash flow from operations. Any potential M&A activities will be undertaken in a very disciplined manner with a focus on the five value drivers we presented today. We are at the moment discussing with our financing banks about debt refinancing. We will make sure that we have sufficient M&A firepower of more than EUR 1 billion, assuming a leverage of up to 3.5. As we are operating in a highly cash-generating business, we will also continue to return cash to shareholders. That means we stick to our existing dividend policy to pay out 30%-50% of adjusted net income in the form of recurring dividends.
We are planning to continue to return any excess cash to our shareholders through share buybacks, targeting an overall leverage without M&A of around zero. Talking about share buybacks, since Capital Markets Day 2019, we have repurchased EUR 1.6 billion worth of shares. Let's have a look at how our share count developed in this context. From 107.6 million shares to 83.6 million shares. With the share buybacks that came in three capital reductions that brought us to where we are today. With the ongoing share buyback program, we have already built up a new treasury share position of 630,000 shares. This brings us to a number of outstanding shares of 83 million shares. The outstanding number of shares is relevant for the EPS calculation, hence value creating for our investors.
To come to the next slide, I would like to point out that this doesn't need explanation as our strategy needed explanation. For us, environmental, social and governance targets are daily business. We believe that any company in our size and our importance in the German market should take close care of that. I mentioned in our upcoming refinancing before, and I know that some of our debt bankers are dialed in as well. We are planning to include ESG goals in our upcoming refinancing. One of these goals will be on reducing our carbon footprint going forward. We have already communicated before that we intend to be carbon neutral by 2025. Another goal will be on increasing the ratio of women in leadership positions. We have already made great progress here over the last years.
As of September, we stood at 38% of women in leadership positions in Scout24. Our aim is to become even better. There are two more operational goals we are working on. First of all, we are taking efforts to align all our suppliers with our culture reflected on our code of conduct. Secondly, we want to bring information security to the next level and receive an ISO 27001 certification until 2025. With that, I would like to hand over to Toby before we dive into Q&A. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Dirk, and thank you to all my colleagues for walking you through our strategy, our update, our product strategy, our tech stack, and why we are confident about our future growth plan. What I'd like to share with you before we get into the Q&A session is what are the things that we wanted to bring across. Firstly, we do understand our customers' needs in a very challenging and even changing market environment. Our organization is fully focused on the private and the professional customers. We run a very unique business model. We run a consumer business, a B2B business, and powered by a leading brand with massive traffic and trust. The network is led by the consumer's direction, which is an important point. They have the choice, any choice, how to interact and transact for their real estate transactions.
The future is about creating a network around the object beyond the mere listing, and we have already embarked on creating just that foundation. We do have the leading product suite to move our company and business to the next level, which is the transaction level. The products and solutions you saw, you heard us talk about today, they are in place. There is no ambiguity about whether it will work since we can refer to tangible results and a track record. We've invested to get here, and we will continue to invest to capitalize on it in the future. As Dirk just pointed out, of course, we will see scaling effects in the future. We have demonstrated in the past, and we will continue to do so in the future, that we can innovate, that we can launch, and that we can execute.
We are, as a team of Scout24 employees and the management board and the executive leadership team, fully committed to this growth plan. To creating value for all stakeholders and, of course, for you. Thank you for being with us so far. We will now take a five-minute break, only five minutes, and then we'll turn it over to Q&A.
Welcome back to the Q&A session. The sun is going down in Berlin. Let me send you over the last sunbeams into your home offices. As I said earlier, we will run the Q&A session in groups of questions. First, I invite Toby and Ralf back to the stage. Welcome back.
Thank you.
Let's turn to the first question, which is for you, Toby. We received several questions around this. The new coalition agreement in Germany is in place. What are the likely effects for the real estate industry in Scout24?
Yeah, it's a very actual question. Thank you for that. What we know by now is that the new government, the future government, has announced they will have a new ministry of construction that will be established. That didn't exist before. There's also a number around their commitment to have 400,000 new residential units built per year, of which there are about a 100,000 publicly subsidized, which is more than the prior government. There is a promotion for energetic refurbishments and new construction. There's also a discussion about an extended tenant protection limiting rent increase from 15% - 11%. I think the most important piece is, for all of us, is that there's no talk or discussion about a commission cap. That is off the table.
Thank you. Toby, you spoke about immoverkauf24 and pre-qualifying leads, which was also detailed by Ralf and Thomas. This sounds like you're moving deeper into the value chain. Do you plan to become an agent yourself someday?
Before I begin to answer that question, let me just reiterate how committed we are and how close we are to the agents out there. It's a core pillar of the strategy, and we spent a huge marketing campaign this year and also the prior year to just promote that. We also have the highest number of agents in our network, which is a testament to our partnership with them. At the same time, we must be cognizant that we are a consumer-led company, and we need to continue to address whatever the consumers are looking for. Having demonstrated the value of immoverkauf24, it's a natural extension of our product suite and what we can offer to those agents as a go-to ready-made mandate.
We will start adding growth towards that, which is in partnership also with the agents. The participating agents don't see us going as against them, but rather as a help and support to create more business. This is a natural extension, and we'll build on growth on top of that.
Thank you. The next question is for you, Ralf. Various factors support a more aggressive use of the price lever, and thus an increase in ARPU. Why do you only guide to a targeted growth of 4%-6% for membership revenues? A price lead strategy could lead to higher growth and operating leverage.
Yeah. Thank you, Ursula. As we presented today, I mean, we have the memberships, and we have the on-top products. At the end, even the on-top products are bought by the customers who are buying also the membership. It's coming out of the same pocket. Therefore, of course, we want to grow prices further on the membership because we're putting also more value into it. We want to bring the customers up on the ladder as we described before. This will push revenue here 4%-6% CAGR as we showed today.
On top of that's much more important because, as Toby mentioned already, we are acting in the interest of our customers, and we want to keep the customers in the system as we showed today. We want to make them happy, and we want to deliver products they need. Therefore, we see higher potential here on the seller lead side at the moment. We are focusing here, but as I said before, membership is an important part of it. There might be a bit more pricing power, but well, there is a lot of pricing power. There might be maybe more revenue growth in it, but you need to see it together, both on-top products and memberships.
Okay, thank you. Another one for you, Ralf. You spoke about the customer growth. How long and how much can this go on?
Actually, I don't know. I mean, what we know is we have 35,000 real estate agencies in Germany, Ursula. There's still a bit of room for us to grow business. Therefore, I'm really optimistic here. At the moment, we have more than 20,000 agents under contract, and we're growing every year, which is a good sign because the customers perceiving our product as helpful. Therefore, I expect that this can continue for a while. But as I said, it's not the only way to grow revenue here. We want to grow revenue within the memberships, bringing customers from the Basic Edition into the Acquisition Edition. That's our target.
Toby, could you comment on possible M&A targets or Scout24 strategy in this regard?
Sure thing. We've demonstrated over the past, let's say two years already, that we take careful picks for feasible targets that are perceived as bolt-on assets and that help us to accelerate the ecosystem strategy. Again, we talked about immoverkauf24, and we talked about Vermietet.de. Future targets should also contribute to one of the five or more of the five value drivers that we laid out, which is just to recall the membership, the leads gen, the enhanced mortgage business, and the consumer plus products.
Another factor I would share is the general acceleration of our product strategy or adding further value to our users. That would be another criterion.
Okay. The last question in this session would be for you, Ralf. You spoke about the migration into the three membership tiers. With Acquisition Edition, you currently stand at 19%. Where do you think this can grow in the future?
As I said before, I'm really optimistic. What we did last year and the year before is bringing every customer into the membership framework. That's what we achieved. Now we are bringing customers, if this product is for them, the right one, we're bringing them up in the ladder. What we see is that customers need the acquisition power at the moment. For this product, we have the Acquisition Edition. Putting two things together, I will say there's a lot of need in the market for this product, and therefore, I expect that we can bring at least 30% of the customers into that product.
Okay. Thank you. Thank you, Toby and Ralf. For the next session, I'd like to invite Dirk and Thomas to the stage. Welcome back.
Thank you.
First one is for you, Dirk. Will you give ARPU details in the future for different customer groups?
Yes. As I said before, we are changing the way how we report on ARPU. We will give a total ARPU for professional customers, including residential and commercial agents, and subscription ARPU for private customers. These are representing our new core segments, but certainly we will explain in the future the composition of the changes that we see in ARPU.
Okay. I think this will make life much easier for the analysts in the future.
This is partly our intention.
Okay. Another question for you, Dirk. It's on marketing. You obviously intend to increase. Yeah, maybe it's for both of you.
No, no, you answer it.
I start.
You obviously intend.
Read the question first, then.
You obviously intend to increase spending in this area. Is it right to think about this as being focused on growing the leads business rather than general brand awareness? What do you think marketing might peak at as a percentage of revenue?
Please.
I wanted Thomas to start off with our aided and unaided brand awareness, but I'll leave that for following the answer from my side. So the question basically refers to the cost slide I showed you earlier on. Marketing is definitely one part of the investment mode cost portion that I outlaid. It will peak in 2022 at about 11% of our overall revenues, and this includes spend for general brand awareness on the one hand and spend for performance marketing to generate seller leads and mortgage leads. From 2023 onwards, we expect a stable marketing spend of up to 10% of revenue, but certainly significantly below our overall revenue growth.
Nothing to add from you, Thomas.
Nothing to add, thank you.
Oh, okay. I have another one.
The brand awareness.
The brand awareness.
The brand awareness is already very high. Yeah? Our aided brand awareness is in the high 90s, 98%-99%, so people know us. That is why we're investing especially and with a heavy focus in the areas where we are in land grab mode. That means on the consumer Plus side, but also on the seller lead side, making us as aware with homeowners as consumers are already aware with us.
I have a nice, interesting question for you, Thomas, now. It's a quite mathematical question. It's on the leads business. If you get EUR 200 per lead and you had EUR 16.1 million of revenue, it implies you sold over 80,000 leads for the nine months. In theory, it implies well over 100,000 direct leads sold in 2021. If that's from a conversion rate of 30%, it implies that you originally had over 300,000 submissions, but there are only 375,000 homes sold via agents in Germany each year. This implies you have nearly all those houses via submissions. How can you grow submissions and thus leads?
Thank you for that question. I think here's my answer. It is right and correct to assume we have roughly 100,000 leads that we are selling throughout this year, seller leads. With all respect, it is not correct to assume that we are already covering the entirety of the market, and the reason is very simple. Yes, we have about 400,000 agent-enabled sale transactions, but we have millions of homeowners who are considering to sell. They're looking at valuation, they might be selling. They wanna know what their house is worth, and then they will be selling over time. The funnel is actually much larger than the 400,000 agent-enabled transactions that you're seeing, and that is why you cannot bring the 80,000 to the 400,000.
You should bring the 80,000 into a funnel of a couple of million. What is relevant for the 400,000 agent-enabled transaction is what you're seeing on immoverkauf24. The 1,200 transactions that we enabled. Yeah, and that is just a tiny fraction of these 400,000. We have a big opportunity to grow top of the funnel as well as bottom of the funnel.
Okay. We are now moving to the consumer side of the business.
Is it numbers again?
No.
Okay.
Yeah, there's one number in it.
Okay.
How sticky are the consumer subscriptions? Why would the consumer keep paying EUR 16 after home is found?
What we're building out with the consumer subscription product is a product set that's supposed to create value in the entire real estate journey. As of today, we're providing lots of value in the search phase and in the application phase. That is why the duration is six-seven months on average for MieterPlus. But what we are also building on is to provide more and more value in the living phase. That the consumers actually stay with us throughout their tenancy, which is not a couple of months, but a couple of years. Again, if we achieve that, we are on a really good trajectory.
What we will also see, if we're achieving that, is that the lifetime will increase, but the ARPU in the living phase, so the revenue per month, will go down, but the overall lifetime will actually increase.
This quite well leads to the next question. Dirk, by when will you be able to get into monetization mode for your private customers business and show an increasing ARPU?
I mean, first of all, I hope it became clear from the presentation we've been giving. For the Plus products and the landlord subscriptions, we believe it is the right strategy to deploy a land grab mode to bring as many private customers as possible to our platform very quickly. We have the right products in place, and there is a first mover advantage with a very attractive total addressable market opportunity. The Plus products and landlord subscriptions strengthen our network effect by creating leads and further monetization potential with our ecosystem. For Vermietet.de, it allows us to get closer to the renter transaction and to become the number one property manager without owning a single asset.
Reflecting on that and based on the traction and customer feedback we get, we target to achieve 400,000 Plus subscribers by 2026 and 4.5 million registered units. That implies already a 26-28% revenue CAGR for private subscription revenues. I believe it is absolutely the right thing to do to invest in 2022, continue to invest 2023 and 2024, and in parallel, deploy a better monetization model on the already existing customers. Then move into revenue growth. That's what we're gonna see, and that's reflected in the guidance we just outlined.
Okay. Last question is for you, Thomas. It's about the mortgage business. You said you wanted to enhance the mortgage business. On mortgage leads, you already get a lot of requests given the number of homes sold per year via agents. Do you think you can get more requests, or is growth in this business more about better verification and qualification, and thus a higher price per lead? On mortgage advisory, you talk about in-house advisory. What does this mean in practice? Do you need to be registered, et cetera? And what is the timescale for moving into this area?
Thank you. On question number one, we already in a good position when it comes to the consumer side of things. Three hundred thousand consumer requests are a lot. Again, similar to the Realtor Lead Engine, not every single consumer request is actually a sale transaction. There are consumers who are wanting to test, you know, their opportunity and their ability to finance to even afford a home. Yeah? You have to keep that in mind. The second thing you have to keep in mind is the 300,000 you should put against the overall number of sale transactions per year, because every single sale transaction, irrespective if it's private or agent-brokered, will need a mortgage, so that is 600,000. There are about 600,000 mortgages that are being renewed every year.
If you put that into perspective, top of the funnel, we actually have opportunity to grow. Then the second opportunity to grow for us is enhancing the quality of the leads, which will lead into higher revenue per lead, but then also into transaction revenue. That's question number one. Now question number two, there is regulation around a mortgage broker, brokerage in Germany. ImmoScout24 has the required regulation in place and the licenses in place. We already have started to build that set of associated brokers because we already brokered couple of mortgages this year. This is in place. It's not a plan. It's happening, and all the regulatory elements are there.
Okay. Thank you. Thank you, Dirk and Thomas.
Thank you.
In the meantime, we have been able to process some more of your questions. I'd like to invite Toby and Ralf back to the stage. Welcome back.
Hi, Ursula. Thanks.
Yeah, there's only one question for you, Toby, here. You talked about every listing ad sold to private landlords, including a free from Vermietet.de. As you shift to monetizing Vermietet.de with a higher CLV, should we expect PPA revenues to fall?
As we explained throughout the session, we believe in the life cycle management. While the PPA for privates is for free, there's a paywall product also that's taking place. You shouldn't assume that this goes down to zero. We are shifting parts of that which will be recycled in a more valuable path as part of our CLV view, as Thomas also pointed out in the prior session with Ralf, i.e., we were replacing a one-time listing with a much more valuable CLV pathway where consumers, owners, landlords, and tenants and so forth are engaged with each other, and we sit on top of it.
Thank you. Ralf, if you have pricing power, why are you providing agents discounts?
I mean, first of all, agents are also salespersons, right? They like to negotiate, which is completely okay. Therefore it's often in the nature of the contract that there is a kind of discount in there. That's new that we have a rate card behind. We know exactly, okay, how far is the price in the contract away from the rate card price. The rate card prices are connected in the contract. That was what I'm trying to explain, how the contracts are structured here. There is a discount in there. We have two tools in order to optimize the contracts.
We can say, "Okay, there is a new rate card price," or we can start to renegotiate discount prices with our customers. Of course, I mean, sometimes we have to give a discount in order to bring the customers from a lower tiered membership version into a higher tiered membership version. Then if the customer feels, "Oh, this product was successful for me," you have a better pricing power next year and if you need to renew the contract, then, of course, you reduce your discounts. That's normal negotiation between contract partners. Nothing to do really with the pricing power. The pricing power of this company and this product is really strong, I have to say.
Thank you, Ralf. I do understand it. I hope our audience also does understand this. Next question: What do you expect to be the impact from the market share of smaller agents decreasing?
I mean, so far we don't see it, right? What we see is we are able to increase the number of customers, but we expect that there will be a market consolidation. Means maybe the market share of smaller agents is getting smaller, which is what we have seen in other markets as well, or already. What we then know is that what agents really need, in particular agents who are not that big, they need more support, and that's actually what we are offering to them, right? We are offering to every customer group, smaller agents, midsize agent, big agents, different product sets.
For those who need more acquisition power, in particular the smaller agents, because they don't have the marketing power of a big agent or larger agent, we are offering support to them. I expect that there is more demand from those agents for our acquisition products, which is positive for us.
Okay. I'm processing more questions. That's why I can only listen to you with half an ear. Next question I have here for you: When you talk about submissions on the Realtor Lead Engine side, do you effectively mean requests for property valuations, or are there other ways to get submissions? For example, please have an agent contact me.
What we built over the last two years is we call it Homeowner Hub. We want to register homeowners, and not only for the purpose of getting evaluation for their properties, also for, I need additional information here and there. There are other services. Because we know it takes time until an homeowner really is sure, "Okay, I want to sell my property," for instance. Therefore, we want to onboard every homeowner in Germany. That's actually our objective here. Therefore, we move the system into objects, transactions, and also customers here, the new paradigm, and that helps us to onboard hopefully every homeowner here in Germany.
There are different ways to generate submissions for our seller lead product here, because we can go to the registered homeowners and say, "Hello. Where are you? Where do you stand at the moment? Are you considering to sell your property?" That's actually what we want to do. At the moment, we are spending a lot of marketing money to onboard homeowners but also to acquire seller leads outside of the portal. In the future, it will be much more coming from the portal. That's what we expect, and therefore we are building the products for the Homeowner Hub at the moment.
Okay.
Toby, is that correct? Or anything to add here?
No? No.
Good.
Thank you.
Quite comprehensive.
I would say we can move to the next session, and it appears that there are a lot of questions for Dirk. Let me invite Thomas and Dirk back to the stage. Okay. Let's start, however, with Thomas' questions. I might mix Dirk's in between. How ambitious is the 400k subscriber target given you are already over halfway there and growing at a very fast rate?
It's a very fair question. It is an ambitious target. Please keep in mind these 440,000 subscribers we have today, they're not granted, right? We have to earn them, because today they are with us through the search and application phase, but then they leave us after three, five, six, seven months. So what we are building out is we are building out more value in the tenancy, in the living phase. By the end of 2026, we will have 400,000 subscribers, and they stay with us. They don't go away after three months, but we make them stay. That's why also the asset of Vermietet.de is so important because we can connect the landlords and the privates on this platform and really have them in our ecosystem.
Okay. Next one for you because they're so-
Okay.
To be clear, the figure you gave for ImmoScout24 leads of 25,000-30,000, was that a number for 2021? Should we think about that as proxy for transactions through ImmoScout24 in, say, 2023? Or is there some leakage there?
That's a very good question. There is some leakage. In every lead business, and also if it's a hot lead business, there is leakage. You can roughly assume a 10% conversion. That means out of the, let's say, 25,000-30,000, about 10% is really ending up in a transaction. That is because of many reasons. People might still decide not to sell, do something else, et cetera. There is leakage. Of course, we are trying to bring up that number, but it will translate into about 10% sales within the next six-18 months.
Okay. Let's move to Dirk, and I'll reserve two questions for you for later.
Thank you.
Dirk, based on your guidance, OpEx in fiscal year 2022 will be EUR 200 million and nearly EUR 300 million by 2026. Meanwhile, Rightmove operates their property vertical in the U.K. for GBP 80 million. What is driving the difference in cost base? Do you think you could be more efficient in your operating model?
No. Otherwise, we would have found those efficiencies. I think the comparison to Rightmove is a very fair one here. If you take our new segmentation and you take the professional segment, and within that professional segment, you take the membership revenues and the PPA revenues, and you associate the cost with that is about the profitability I would expect for us to be very comparable to Rightmove, with margins of 70% something. What we put on top of that, and why we believe our strategy is the right one, is we put a private segment on it, and we invest for our agents. This is where we spend our money, sales cost, marketing cost, product cost, tech cost, just because we want to accelerate.
If I look at the growth rates that we just outlined to you, double-digit, 12%, 13%, I think these growth rates really show that in order to grow at an attractive rate, you need to find new addressable markets. We found them. We wrote a strategy for it. We defined measures. We are executing on them. That's how we take the business forward.
Talking about growth rates, at your 2019 CMD, you guided to ImmoScout24, Scout24 growing low- to mid-teens% in 2022, a proxy for your view of medium-term growth at the time. Now you are saying circa 12% CAGR in the next few years. It is a small difference, but this sounds more cautious. Of course, there has been a pandemic, but global peers haven't seen medium-term growth prospects slow. What is your take here? How have medium-term expectations changed in those two years?
Not at all. I think, first of all, comparing us to global peers, I would like to point out that within the classified segment, be it real estate, be it auto, I've seen no other businesses growing at 12% in the consensus over the next years. I think we're at least ahead or on top of the crowd. Coming back to the CMD 2019, I think it just displays the consistency of our guidance going forward. Yes, at Capital Markets Day, we guided low to mid-tens, and that's what we're delivering. We can deliver that until 2026. I think we're very consistent with what we said before.
Yeah. I have another guidance question here for you. When we look at the new guidance, you are guiding for fiscal year 2023 to return to historical profit drop-through of revenue growth of 60%. After much lower levels in fiscal year 2020, 2021, and 2022, why should we expect that drop-through to accelerate again?
Yeah. You just need to look at the reasons. 2020, we are in the middle of COVID. 2021 we acquired Vermietet.de, with drop-through to margin of roughly one percentage point. We invested into immoverkauf24. Of course, like every good businessman, we are awaiting that the investments we are making, and we are expecting that the investments we are making will return profit in the future. I think the plan we laid out is very clear on that. 2023, 2024, 2025, 2026, you will see margin improvements. Is it conservative? I leave it up for some analysts to build their opinion on. It's a commitment from our side, that's what I can say.
I think the next question is a good one even for both of you. It's again on guidance. The guidance implies that by 2026, Realtor Lead Engine could contribute close to EUR 150 million, probably EUR 150 million revenue.
The question is?
No, that's.
Oh, that's the question.
Is that true that it could contribute EUR 150 million in revenues in 2026? The Realtor Lead Engine.
I mean, we've shown you in this session the revenues we are currently having with the different models. We have shown you the CAGR, and that's our commitment to it.
I can only add to that. Yes, certainly, we believe that there's a huge market out there for the Realtor Lead Engine, and we have tested that over the past quarters. That's why we came out with a guidance. We're not coming out with something we haven't seen in the market before, we haven't tested in the market before, we haven't seen agents' reactions, consumer reactions to. Anything we bake into our guidance has been tested and tested all over again. The numbers we've been giving you are based on the experience we made with our product set in the market. That's why we stick to them. Yes, there is a huge revenue opportunity out there.
Some more questions on guidance. When we look at the new guidance, you are guiding for fiscal year 2023.
Yes
Can you discuss the evolution of investment beyond fiscal year 2022? Should we consider profit growth comparable to revenues in fiscal year 2023?
Exactly as you can see on our guidance slide. 2023 onwards, we're at a CAGR of revenue of 12%, and at a CAGR of ordinary operating EBITDA of 13%. Obviously we are improving guidance year-on-year as we come toward 2026. There, I believe you can do the math, margin will be somewhere between 58%, 59%, 60%. That's our return to profitability on a growth path.
Okay, so I don't need to ask the next question. You just answered it. I will read it out, but it's answered. Doing the math, it looks like by 2026 you would be at 58% margins on the trajectory you have given. Is that a fair assumption? Does that seem conservative? I think it's answered.
I can repeat my answer from the first question if you want to.
No, I'll go to Thomas.
I think I was pretty clear on that.
Let's go back to Thomas. If average time to find a rental property is three - six months, we have a lot of mathematical questions.
Yeah. Thank you for testing my analytical skills here.
Okay. Again, if average time to find a rental property is three-six months, and 90% of subscribers are MieterPlus, I'm surprised the average lifetime value is seven months.
Yes.
Why is this? You said you believe you can increase customer lifetime value further. Is this driven by increasing share of Buyer Plus in the mix? Or do you think there is scope to increase lifetime value of MieterPlus as well? If so, how?
My answer will probably be a bit of a repetition of what I said earlier. Yes, the average time to find a property is three-six months, and yes, we have Buyer Plus subscriptions, which bring up the average duration, because it takes longer to find a property to buy. Or we will grow our subscription base both for Mieter Plus and for Buyer Plus, which brings the overall CLV up. As I said before, we are building out a stronger value proposition also in the tenancy phase, so that our Tenant Plus, our Mieter Plus subscribers stay with us not only three-six months , but years and years throughout the tenancy phase.
Mm-hmm. Last one for you.
Just, and to a-
Yeah.
To add on that.
Mm-hmm.
I mean, if you've seen the slides, overall subscriber growth was 73%, right? Although the output dropped. That shows you, as Thomas has outlined, the subscribers stay longer on our platform, and instead of doing a three month revenue, we migrated them up to 7 months right now. That is improving the customer lifetime value.
Yeah, this is a question on vermietet.de. You're guiding to 4.5 million registered units by 2026, but you spoke about EUR 5-EUR 15 per month. That gets to a very big number. Again, calculating.
I'm just calculating.
Yeah. Can you help us understand what the disconnect is?
I would love to get a non-financial question at some point, but maybe at the very end. Yes, that is right. Here's the reason. We are managing these 4.5 million units, but we are monetizing per landlord. Every landlord with a set of units gets a certain monetization level. And we are starting very low with EUR 5, and then it goes up to EUR 15. That's number one. Number two, not every landlord will be monetized. There is a basic free version of vermietet.de in place, and then there is a monetized version which has more features. Yeah? Only a quarter, maybe a third of our private landlord population will be monetized, which is a regular model that we are applying by design. We are applying it because of two reasons.
First, we want to build out the number of objects as much as possible. Secondly, also we are testing our way into the right monetization levels because as for the consumer business, this has not been done before. Yeah. This is new waters, and so we are assuming 25%-30% of landlords will be monetized and the rest will be not.
Okay.
Mm-hmm.
Thank you.
Thank you.
By the way, it's dark outside now, so we are really coming to the end. As we have also received questions on tech, for the last Q&A session, I would like to ask Rowena together with Toby back to the stage. Thank you, Thomas and Dirk.
Thank you.
Thanks, Rowena. Thanks, everybody.
Thank you.
Welcome back.
Thank you.
Rowena, first one for you.
Mm-hmm.
Tech talents in Europe are really hard to find. How do you plan on tackling this?
A very relevant question right now. I know. Well, one thing is that we do have tech hubs located in different locations, like in Berlin, Cologne, Vienna and Spain, and this does allow us to attract strong talent in all these different locations. The other thing that we're doing is we're developing strong leadership, and this is something that we know that new talent is always focused on, as well as existing folks in the company. Everyone wants to join a company that has a clear vision and has leaders who can deliver on that vision. As part of our hiring process, we also have a lot of focus on diversity, which is another key driver that everyone is interested in. The other thing that we are, like, also focusing on is participation in tech events like conferences such as Droidcon and so on.
We wanna make sure that we represent ourselves effectively as citizens of the tech community. One of the things we're gonna be doing is also increasing the number of tech recruiters so that we can actively engage with talent on a continuous basis. Of course, also one point is being number one in the industry is a really good way to attract talent. That always helps.
Thank you.
I would agree.
Another one for you, Rowena. With all your plans for product development.
Mm-hmm.
Can you comment on the scalability of the platform?
Yeah, when it comes to scalability, the way our architecture is written and the code is written is modularized. We have a lot of microservices in place, which by nature can be scaled as needed, you know, to meet the business needs. That's definitely there. On top of this, we're also built on a cloud platform, so that gives us very critical infrastructure that helps us meet our scaling needs. The other thing that we're doing is we're also investing in failover strategies, and this is required to help us meet our reliability and performance requirement. With all of these items in place, we are more than ready to meet the demands of our increasing customers in the future.
Okay. Toby, I have the first final question. The perfect final question for you.
Okay.
We've heard you speak in detail about your exciting plans for the future. How confident are you in delivering these?
The precondition for delivering a plan like that and sharing this with you is you need to be confident that there's a market. We've tested that. We do know and understand the customer's needs. Check there. The second one is you need to be confident that you do have a right to play because you have the trust in the brand and the traffic to attract the audience. Check. The third one is you need to be able to have the right products. We didn't just come up with these products a month prior to Capital Markets Day. We've been working behind the scenes since literally after the last Capital Markets Day. Check. You need to be able to have the confidence to scale, which Rowena just answered a few questions.
My personal confidence level is very high, and the entire team's confidence level is very high. We are committed to delivering that.
Thank you. Thank you is actually how I would like to end this. Well, before we turn it off, let me say thank you to everyone, and I'm sure I can also say this in the name of the whole management team. Thank you, our analysts and investors, for listening and actively participating through your questions. Thank you everyone internally at Scout24 for making this happen. Very specifically, I want to mention the wider IR team, including our chief of staff and assistant of the CFO. The communications team who took care of the video. The product teams who gave so much valuable input for Thomas and Ralf's slides. The brand team who gave a perfect look to the slides. The controlling team for all the financial numbers. Last but not least, the event team. You can't see them, but they're all here.
This was a perfect one team effort. With this, I would like to say goodbye and speak to you soon.
Thank you.
Thank you.