Turn the conference over to Ursula Corette. Please go ahead.
Welcome, everyone, to Scout24's Q2 and Half Year twenty twenty one Earnings Call. My name is Ursula Keret, and I am Head of Investor Relations and Treasury at Scout24. I have Tobias Hartmann, our CEO and Dirk Schnelzer, our CFO, with me on this call. Tobias will kick off the presentation with a summary of the H1 2021 key events. Dirk will then cover our Q2 and H1 financial performance in detail.
We will then have time for your questions. As usual, you can find today's presentation on our website under Financial Reports and Presentations. There, you can also find our half year twenty twenty one report. If you are using the web link we provided beforehand, you can follow the presentation live. This session will be recorded, and a replay will be made available as quickly as possible after the event.
Please be aware of the disclaimer on Page 2, and let us now turn to Page 3, where I hand it over to Toby.
Thank you, Orsula, and welcome, everyone. Let me start on Page 3 with a short recap. From classifieds to ecosystem, that is the goal we set ourselves after the sale of the car classifieds business. How do we define ecosystem for real estate? It is where all participants of a real estate transaction come together, operate and interact.
And there are multiple interaction and multiple transaction events. Therefore, we also speak of a market network. Although it had a temporary dampening effect on our revenues, the introduction of free to list acted like a catalyst to our ecosystem strategy. And as we were in the middle of a pandemic, we used the time to pursue our strategy more forcefully. I will show you later that the traditional classifieds revenues, I.
E, the share of one off listings, is now lower than the revenue share generated by each subscription and leads. This is the proof that the ecosystem strategy is working with an increasing momentum in the first half of this year, especially Q2. What are the most notable initiatives which spurred this development? On the agent side, we pushed the real elite engine product further, both the IMOS COW 24 and the IMO for COW 24 offerings. We continued to migrate our residential real estate customers into our new membership additions.
Here, we intentionally decelerated the process to focus more directly on pricing discussions. In Q2, we felt an increasing demand and willingness to pay on the agent side, so took a very agile approach on price increases. You will see on the next slide how this helped our ARPU development. On top of that, the sales force managed to again win new customers and increase our core customer base. Initiatives on the homeowner side comprised a dedicated campaign to market our valuation tool, which ultimately led to increased homeowner registrations for the homeowner hub.
And with the acquisition of Vermitte DE, we are building out our offering for private landlords. For consumers or better said, seekers, we comprehensively rework our price atlas. You should take a look at it on IMOSCOW 24 under search and real estate prices. The atlas comprises object data from 43,000,000 properties. Here, you can see sale and rent prices for archived and active listings, including information on price developments.
Against the background of the tense market situation, we were able to accelerate Tenen Plus and Via Plus subscriptions, and we launched a dedicated multichannel marketing campaign in Lower Saxony to increase awareness of seekers in that region. Page 4 shows you how the increasing momentum translates into numbers. Our revenue growth of almost 10% was mainly driven by residential real estate, while the business segment is still suffering from the pandemic. Within the residential segment, the real lead engine was the strongest growth driver. This is fully in line with our intended strategy.
We want to help agents drive their business by providing them with unique and valuable leads for winning new mandates. Onethree of the real lead engine revenues came from IMOFR CAF 24, which we acquired in July 2020. The reduced EBITDA margin is mainly a result of investments linked to our ecosystem strategy, including acquisitions. Without the acquisitions, the organic ordinary operating EBITDA would have been higher at 60.1%. Another important contributor to our revenue growth was the residential partner ARPU.
While in Q1, it only increased by 1.1%, the Q2 increase was 9.0%. Of course, part of this comes from lapsed corona discounts, another part from the growing Real Salt Lead engine revenues. But the larger portion, approximately 5% to 6% increase, is driven by pricing. The growing agent base also had a positive revenue effect. Compared to last year, it increased by 3.4%.
On the residential side alone, we managed to win approximately 650 new partners over the last 12 months. Homeowners, the 2nd group in our triangle, grew by impressive 88% year on year. So we now have 640,000 homeowners registered at Imhotel 24. All of these are potential sellers or landlords entering into a transaction with or without an agent at some point in time. The number of subscribed consumers also grew very strongly by 62%.
At the end of June, we counted 198,000 Tenen Plus and Buyer Plus subscribers. By the way, in July, we passed the 200,000 subscriber mark. I hope all these growth rates on this slide demonstrate the strength of our company's strategy and the ability to execute against it. And I can assure you, there is more to come. At the CMD in December, I would like to share more insights with you where and how we are planning to navigate the company over the next couple of years.
While our financials are very strong, we must be aware of the current market conditions. We have devoted a separate page, Slide 5, to the topic. The German real estate market is a seller's market. While there is strong demand both on the buy and rent side, there's a meaningful supply gap. And the housing initiative of the German government has not yet led to a noticeable relief.
Therefore, rent and sale prices continue to rise. On top of that comes a shortage of building materials, which was spurred by the COVID-nineteen crisis. Consequently, we continue to see listings decrease. This is a result of the supply gap and shorter standing times. There might even be a minor Bechteler Princehip effect since 5 more federal states introduced the fifty-fifty commission split in January 2021.
Our competition is affected the same way. Therefore, we were able to maintain our listings advantage at 1.9x. As a consequence of the high demand, we are seeing usage and hence relevance significantly increasing. Mobile traffic went up by 20%, overcompensating the decrease in desktop usage on a year on year basis. Next to improved mobile usage, we believe this trend is due to the changed cookie consent, which leads to a reduced measurability of traffic.
By the way, we have changed the provider for the tracking of user traffic, hence the new split between desktop and app. For the year on year developments, we used like for like data. Monthly sessions on Imus COW 24 were only slightly down by 3% to $107,200,000 and therefore, almost back at previous year's level. So taking into account the cookie content, the number of sessions on desktop and app together actually implies a significant increase in demand, especially since the lockdown 2 in November. So let us now look at the bright side of the equation.
Bright because we have exactly the right products for this contracted market situation. And our customers are willing to pay for these products because we help them to cope with the market as it is. Proof points for this are: the increased ARPU the increased customer base some agents having committed themselves to list more inventory on IMOS Cal 24. Agent satisfaction scores are at highest levels, especially amongst acquisition edition customers. By the way, with the migration continue, we had 2,040 agents or 15% in the acquisition addition at the end of June.
This represents an increase of 130% since December 2020. Acquiring new mandates is the biggest pain point for agents in the current sellers market. Our acquisition addition and also our realtor lead engine are exactly addressing that pain point. Let me give you some more facts on the Realta LEAD engine. Revenues from that product came in at €15,700,000 in H1 2021.
This represents an increase by 162 percent year on year. IMOS Cal 24 referred approximately 53,400 homeowner contacts to agents from January till June this year. And IMOFR CARF 24 sold 840 commission share leads to agents in the first half of the year. Let me give you one more proof point for our high customer and consumer satisfaction. The demand for Tenant Plus and Buyer Plus products is increasing.
These products help seekers to find their dream property despite the contracted market situation. Revenues from these products reached €25,100,000 in H1 2021, an increase of 30% year on year. Let us turn to Slide 7 to have a closer look at this specific revenue portion. The consumer subscriptions are depicted in teal on this slide. Their revenues exceeded the one off listing or paid per ad revenues for the first time.
The same holds true for the leads revenues, the yellow portion of the graph. The consequence, as intended, we are becoming less and less dependent on our traditional classifieds business. From classifieds to ecosystem, that is our stated strategy. Listings are a commodity nowadays. The monetization is shifting towards other revenues, which are linked to a sale or rent real estate transaction.
And these revenue streams have a greater recurring character. Through our enhanced membership additions, the largest and orange portion of the graph, we continue to value the partnership with our agent customers. We want to be perceived as a business and transaction enabler. The acquisition of Evofacauf 24 pays 100% just into that. And I could share with you that the integration of the acquisition is completed.
Immofacaf24 has been part of the SCAL24 family for a year now. With the sale of roughly 840 commission share leads, they generated EUR 5,200,000 of revenue in H1 2021 at an increasing rate. These leads led to 8.40 completed real estate transactions in Germany, corresponding to a property transaction value of more than €500,000,000 on a full year basis. To put that into perspective and give you an idea of the growth potential, The total market value of residential sale transactions was estimated at €215,000,000,000 for the year 2020. For Vermita.
De, we are following a similar, I. E, fast integration playbook as for IMO for CAF 24. Step 1 of the platform integration has already started. The plan is that after the private landlord has found a tenant through IMO's CAF 24, the customer relationship is shifted to Vermita. De, where the rental contract is automatically populated with the necessary data, ready to be signed.
Vermita. De then offers the landlord a comprehensive cloud based toolkit to manage all tenancy related processes such as tenant relationship management, preparation of utility bills, assembling tax declaration data or obtaining information on the market value of the units under management. At this point in time, the sole focus of Vermita. De is still on customer acquisition. There is no material revenue generation yet.
With the integration of Vermitte DA, we will substantially extend our product offering in a rental market that is key in Germany. The acquisition allows us to accelerate our product development efforts in this space by approximately 3 years. With this, I'm handing it over to Dirk, who will dive deeper into our H1 financials.
Thank you, Toby, and a warm welcome also from my side. Toby already dipped into our key financials at group level. Slide 9 now presents the segment view with a strong performance of our largest segment, Residential Real Estate. Here, revenue increased by 13.6% to €140,000,000 in half year 1 and 19% to €71,200,000 in Q2. This growth was mainly driven by the revenue from our professional customers, which grew by 15.3%.
As Toby already mentioned, we saw a very strong performance of the Real Estate engine product, which showed a revenue increase of 162 percent to €15,700,000 including the €5,200,000 from Immofacau24. At the same time, the ARPU increased by 5.1 percent from 709 to 745 in half year 1, 2021. Revenue from consumers also performed very well, increasing by 9.9% for the first half year and 18% for the Q2. Our Plus product subscription revenue was up by 30.5 percent to €25,100,000 and thus clearly overcompensated foregone revenues due to free to list. Moreover, consumer subscriptions exceeded total listing PPA revenues for the first time underlining the transition of our revenue mix from listings to transactions.
While we are accelerating our ecosystem strategy through selected bolt on acquisitions such as Immofacauf24 or Famita. De, we are also growing the core. As you can see, our organic revenue growth in half year 1 was 9.7% to €135,200,000 The ordinary operating EBITDA margin of the Residential Real Estate segment came in at 60.1 percent, which is 3.4 percentage points below the previous year. On the one hand, this has to do with higher operating costs, for example, resulting from the acquisitions. On the other hand, the margin development reflects the changed revenue mix associated with our market network strategy with the recent acquisitions strongly contributing to this strategy.
Organically, the ordinary operating EBITDA margin would have been at 62.9%. The Business Real Estate segment revenue is still affected by the consequences of the pandemic, but was doing quite well in the 2nd quarter where segment revenues increased by 2.4 percent to €17,000,000 This is due to stronger growth in revenues with project developers and new homebuilders, while revenue with business real estate agents showed signs of stabilization. Overall, first half year twenty twenty one revenues were still down 0.8 percent to €34,300,000 with a slightly improved ordinary operating EBITDA margin of 72.3%. The Media and Other segment revenue increased by 1.1% to €15,200,000 in the first half year and by 4.2% to €7,600,000 in the Q2 2021. This is mainly attributable to our fast growing business at Immoscout24 Austria, while the 3rd party media business and Flofect are still showing decreasing revenues.
The ordinary operating EBITDA margin of the Media and Other segment fell by 4.2 percentage points to 36.2 percent in the first half year twenty twenty one. All segments combined, we achieved a revenue growth of 9.6% to €189,500,000 and an even stronger plus of 14.4 percent to €95,800,000 in the Q2 of 2021, the latter being against the pandemic affected prior year quarter. Organically, our half year one revenue growth was 7% to €184,700,000 The change in revenue mix combined with a lower increase in absolute ordinary operating EBITDA resulted in a margin of 60.4% in half year 1, 2021. Again, organically, this would have been significantly higher at 62.4%. We already mentioned the continued customer growth and the ARPU increase.
Slide 10 gives you the customary quarterly and half yearly overview by segment. Looking at the residential real estate partner ARPU increased by 9% in Q2, you need to take into account the following effects. Part of the increase comes from corona discounts running out. The increase is spurred by the growing realty lead engine revenues. The growing agent base, however, creates downward pressure on the ARPU as it mostly applies to smaller agents.
Therefore, approximately 5% to 6% of the increase is purely driven by pricing. Looking at the membership alone, the like for like ARPU increase is even higher. Turning to Page 11, let us go through the main ordinary operating items affecting our margin development. The respective cost base effects reflect mainly the ongoing implementation of our market network strategy. Own work capitalized increased to €12,300,000 in the first half year with a growing capitalization ratio of 6.5%.
This ratio reflects our continued product enhancement activities. Examples of product investments we made in the quarter include further developments of the Home Seller Hub, the Plus products, the membership additions and the price atlas Toby mentioned before. The total ordinary operating costs increased by 17.1% year on year to €91,800,000 outpacing revenue. This increase is mainly related to the change in revenue mix. It includes the additional cost of Immofacau24, which was not yet part of the Scout24 group the year before and Vermitte DE.
For example, the 16% increase in personnel cost is mainly due to the integration of Immuferka of 24 employees. Additional costs were incurred due to an increase in personnel at Immoskout 24 and this synergies after the carve out of Autoskout 24. You will also note the strong increase in marketing costs both in quarter 2 and over the first half year. In quarter 2, we increased our investments in marketing through targeted regional and national multichannel campaigns. These were placed via TV, radio, billboard advertising and online and served to increase the awareness for Immoscout24 on a regional level, revised the vibrancy of the marketplace and to generate new homeowner contacts.
The cost also include additional marketing activities of Immuferkauf24 and Pharmigatee. The growth in other operating costs by 16.4% can be broken down as follows: Additional online marketing costs, which are primarily acquisition costs for the Real Estate engine increasing selling costs for the growing Plus products rising external personnel costs to accelerate product developments and investments in Flofek. At the same time, reduced travel expenses had an opposite effect. As the operating effects grew more strongly in percentage terms than revenue and owned were capitalized, our ordinary operating EBITDA increased at a lower rate of 4.5% year on year to €110,200,000 and the margin decreased by 2.9 percentage points to 58.1%. Again, organically, the margin would have been 2 percentage points higher.
Looking at profitability on Page 12, you see the items below the ordinary operating EBITDA and a highly accretive development in earnings per share. Non operating costs decreased by 1.2%, mainly due to lower reorganization costs, while share based compensation increased year on year. As a result, the reported EBITDA was up 5.1 percent to 101 €300,000 in half year 1, 2021. Depreciation and amortization were driven by higher depreciation of rights of use from leases resulting from the move to the new Berlin office as well as depreciation of own work capitalized resulting from our increased focus on product innovation since 2020. We saw a year on year improvement in the financial result, reflecting the investments of the proceeds from the AutoScout transaction in special security funds, but we also saw rising tax expenses.
Profit after tax from continuing operations was up 2% to €46,800,000 in the first half of twenty twenty one. Based on a sharply reduced volume weighted average number of shares of 92,900,000, this results in a 13.6% higher EPS for the continuing operations. The declining number of shares reflects our share buybacks, including the April 2021 tender offer, affected over the last year as part of our capital return roadmap, which brings me to the next page. With Page 13, let me update you on where we stand with our capital return roadmap. The key pillar of our capital return roadmap was the €794,000,000 buyback tender transaction with a corresponding capital decrease, which we successfully completed in April.
Right after settlement of the tender transaction, we started another ordinary share buyback tranche, which was completed on June 30 at a total volume of 2,920,000 shares or €200,000,000 At the AGM on 8th July, we proposed a dividend for 2020 in the amount of €68,500,000 corresponding to an amount of €0.82 per share. However, this is not yet reflected in our net cash position as of balance sheet date 30th June 2021. Thus, excluding treasury shares, we ended up with a total of 83,500,000 shares and a net cash position of €414,000,000 as of June 30, 2021. Post the most recent share buyback program and the 2021 dividend, we have returned the majority of the AutoScout proceeds to our shareholders as part of a massive capital return program. At the AGM in July, we received shareholder approval for potential additional share buybacks in the amount of up to 10% of the existing share capital.
Now let us turn to Page 14 and our outlook. Based on the ongoing successful implementation of our ecosystem strategy and the growth dynamics we have seen in the first half year twenty twenty one, we confirm our group revenue outlook for the year of a mid to high single digit percentage growth rate. This translates into low double digit revenue growth for our Residential Real Estate segment, a low single digit revenue growth rate for our Business Real Estate segment, which is still impacted by the consequences of the COVID-nineteen pandemic and the declining to flat revenue development for our Media and Other segment. Assuming an improved margin, especially in the 4th quarter and excluding the cost effects of Farmita D. E, we also confirm our earnings forecast.
This assumes a group ordinary operating EBITDA margin of up to 60 percent. The acquisition of Famita D. E. Fits perfectly into our market network strategy and it gives us a significant head start in product development for the tenant market, which is so important in Germany and Austria. However, in the short term, the revenue contribution will still be low and necessary growth investments will be initially taken and have a negative impact on the EBITDA margin.
From next year onwards, however, we expect a positive effect on group revenue and in the medium term also on the group margin. But to be clear, the respective margin effects are not yet reflected in the above outlook. Before we open the call for your questions, let me sum it up very quickly on Page 15. I think we made it very clear what we understand on the ecosystem strategy and how we are shifting from a traditional classifieds business towards a more sustainable networked marketplace model. This comes with a stronger revenue diversification and an expanding addressable market.
With Immophakau 24 and Famicl DA, we have shown that targeted add on acquisition accelerate our strategic agenda. For example, the Immuphakau 24 offering enhances our realtor lead engine product, accelerates the respective revenue growth and opens new markets for us. And this is only one example for our market leading product suite. The membership additions and Consumer Plus products are adding to that. At our Capital Markets Day, which we are planning for December, we want to make it even clearer how we are creating long term shareholder value with our strategic agenda.
In the first half of this year, we created shareholder value through massive capital returns also leading to 14% EPS growth. And now we are happy to take your questions. Operator, over
to We'll take our first question from Christopher Johnen with HSBC.
Yes. Thanks guys for taking my questions. First on the Familia De acquisition. I'm just trying to understand the integration of the asset or better the lack thereof. It seems that you want to keep this as why that decision was made.
I mean, I understand they why that decision was made. I mean, I understand they have a couple 100,000 units under management. But compared to the total market, that isn't large enough, why you couldn't just integrate this and absorb everything that they have completely onto your platform, which arguably would make it easier. So I just don't understand why you decided to keep this as a separate brand and why it wasn't integrated. Is there like I don't know, is there an earn out reason, something that's hard to track?
Or I'll be interested in that because I think it's quite an important acquisition. That's the first question. The second, on the competitive landscape, we've had Adevindsa disclose quite a bit more information on Ewek Kleinenzweigen. We've had significant, I would say, management changes at Immuvelte. Yet there seem to be very few product changes, at least none that I can really observe from the outside.
So I'm just curious, I mean, is Immelstaedt still very much active or they're only really significant in the northern part of Germany? Is there something that we should focus on from the information Adevinta has disclosed? Anything you would point to? And then the last question on the guidance. Why did you decide to keep the guidance without the impact from Fermi today?
Wouldn't it just been easier to give an EBITDA guidance including that? Yes, that's it. Thanks.
Hi, Chris, it's Toby. Thank you for your question. So regarding your first question with regards to the brand of Formita D. A, we believe that it's an established brand attracting landlords and hence we will integrate everything right after that, I. E.
There will be a single sign on. There will be a full integration in terms of the journey for the rental journey. And of course, there will also be a full integration if you started your journey on Immoz account and then obviously came in through, let's say, a Tenant Plus or any other product like that. But we do not believe that it would be advantageous right now to sunset the brand because we're not spending so much on brand advertising. Obviously, this is very targeted performance and growth advertising that we would also do in case we would funnel it directly through IMO's Cowen.
On the competitive landscape, your second question, we do know that we have smart competitors out there. So we are trying to really focus on what we need to do. With regards to management changes, I can talk maybe a little bit about our own company. I think it's fantastic that we've also broadened our EOT. We've hired a new CTO, which is a key position.
She just recently started. This is a key position for us as we're integrating the different companies. And obviously, as you know, we are a product and tech driven company. We also have a new people leader who recently joined. So we believe that the talent is a key issue here and a key ingredient for being successful in the future.
So that's what we focused on. There's nothing at this point that we see out there that at this point in time is noteworthy that would lend us to believe that there is a significant change in product landscape, competitive landscape or anything. But of course, we are watching it and monitoring it very, very closely. In guidance, maybe Dirk, I'll pass this on to you.
Thanks very much, Toby. Yes, Chris, it might also be a relief for you to hear that we are rather focusing on product changes than management changes. With regards to guidance, we deliberately said that we wanted to give all our investors and analysts an update on Adevinta sorry on Famicity Zen Homes into our product portfolio at the Capital Markets Day. Until then, you can just assume that for the second half of this year, we will have a stable cost base for the business going forward of around €3,000,000 That's a run rate of €500,000 per month. And once integration is partly finished, which we anticipate for October, November when you have an integrated user funded as Toby just outlined, We will give you a bit more flavor on our strategy going forward.
So all in all, I would think slightly less than a margin point that we are spending on for me to pay for this year.
Okay. Very clear. Thanks guys.
We'll take our next question from Nisela Neyser with Deutsche Bank.
Great. Thank you. I have 3 from my end. The first is on the comment you've made about the migration to the new membership for agents, but intentionally slowed. Could you give us some color there as to why that was the case and whether you intend to accelerate it in the second half?
The second is on Immophacalve. Could you give us some color as to how profitable it is at the moment? And how long would it be before it reaches your sort of ideal profit margin for the business? And what sort of investments are you making? Are you hiring more agents, including Wabakhouse?
Is that really what's holding the profitability back? Some color there would be great. And related to that as well, I guess, is how do your agents feel about sharing the commission with you through the model you've built in Immu for Health? Again, how much of the commission do you actually share? And how large do you think this revenue pool could be given it's 800 plus sort of leads sold now on a commission sharing basis, but could it be twice, thrice that amount on a first half sort of basis if you think of the potential?
Some color there would be great. Thank you.
Basically from a value perspective, the biggest customers are migrated. Some strategic key accounts need to be migrated. And you can imagine that these are longer discussions with them. But I can also assure you that what Toby also has said on other occasions, what is really, really good and what we are seeing here is that the customers in the highest rate card, it is the acquisition addition, are the most satisfied customers. And that is something which we are also taking forward when we are continuing with the migration of our customers into the different rate cards.
On Imofacauf, I can assure you the business is running at the moment an overall EBITDA margin of 1 single digit, because we are investing in the company and we are investing in also buying leads for our agent base. But certainly that will change. And that also has to do with our strategy of buying more and more listings sorry, leads for our customer base and transforming them into commission based leads, where we find a very high acceptance in the market at the moment. As of today, I think we have commission based sold leads of more than 800 and that trend is continuing and growing. And with that, I would hand over to Toby for the remainder of the question.
Yes. Thank you. On thank you for the question because this is a very strategic question you asked with regards to the share of commission and the growth potential we see. So currently, we are anywhere between, let's say, 38% to 45%, 47% share of the commission that we get paid for some of those transaction led deals through Immokercalf 24. We've actually increased that number as we've also increased the quality and the reputation in the market with the agents that we're working with.
In terms of growth potential, we don't think the key growth driver is so is that we are actually increasing that share rather than the sheer number of agents, I. E, the sheer number of transactions that we are processing. As you know, there's approximately 600,000 plus sale transactions in Germany per year. So Dirk mentioned, we currently completed, let's say, 890 or so. So on an annual basis, that would be, let's say, dollars 1800,000,000 or so.
So that's a very, very small number compared to the total market out there. And we absolutely think that we are off to something here with that approach, which is a blend of a very, very specific consulting approach and support for people who are homeowners and do not really know yet what to do. And then at the appropriate time, trust a party, a third party, which is not in that case to funnel them through and link them and connect them with the right agent. So we do think that there is a niche there that can be expanded. And we also think that we are in a good position to do definitely more.
Thanks, Tobey. And how do your agents actually feel about sharing the commission with you? Do they feel threatened in any way? Or is it something that they're happy to do because you bring them more leads? Some color there would be great.
Excellent question. So a year ago or slightly more than a year ago when we looked into doing this acquisition and asked these questions. We weren't 100% sure, but we can state now that these agents are actually are very, very close friends. We are not in a competitive situation with them. They have totally understood that those are leads that they only get through the hard work that we did upfront and that we then act as a partner, as a business partner.
So we're not competing for something that they could have gotten on their own. We're not competing with other agents and put them up against each other. We have a very clear set of rules of lead allocation and of qualification criteria for those agents. So that's why we are in a very good relationship with them. And now the key question is how can we expand that system by also adapting that playbook and not changing that and threatening to reverse roles as you pointed out.
So that's actually absolutely right. But so far, we feel very confident that we can do that.
Understood. Thank you very much.
We'll take our next question from Adam Berlin with UBS.
Hi, good afternoon everyone. I've got 3 questions if I can. The first question is on real estate partner trends. Q2 ARPU was 9% growth. Should we expect that growth to accelerate in the second half as more discount expire?
Or is that the right run rate to be thinking about in H2? And are agent trends can you comment on agent trends going into Q3 so far? That's the first question on Real Estate Partners. The second question is on ImmoverCal24. You talked about how you've invested in that business during H1.
Do you think that business needs more investment now? Or is the revenue growth that's going to come going to just drop through now when the margin starts to improve or will second half OpEx in the Nova Gulf 24 be higher than in H1? And the third question is, given your permission from the AGM to buy back more shares, should we expect more buybacks during H2? Thanks very much.
Yes. Hi, Adam. Thanks very much for the questions. I'll start with the last one. Yes, certainly, there will be additional buybacks in the second half of this year.
As I outlined on another occasion, we are in talks with our banks with regards to refinancing, but also with regards to the use of proceeds and cash. And therefore, we'll continue in the second half of this year. On your first question with regards to real estate ARPU, I think that for the remainder of the year, you can assume what we have been communicating earlier and what we have shown with our numbers now. There will be a mid single digit growth continuing for the second half. And that is exactly on strategy and is exactly on where we wanted to go with that rate card migration and our ability to increase price is based on terms and conditions.
On IMOFRICAL24, thanks for raising that topic again, Because when Niza asked earlier in the call around that, I didn't elaborate on the fact that we are looking at a combined business of a retail lead engine. Don't forget that with Imofakau, we are only processing 900 sales in the first half year. With regards to our overall lead engine product, that is where we are also selling non commission based leads. We sell a few 1,000 leads. And both businesses are optimized amongst themselves.
So a lead that is has a lower conversion ability and has a lower ability to lead into a commission share is done and handled via Immoscout and a lead that has a high likelihood of converting into a commission based lead is handled via Immofacau. And that is the way we look at the business and therefore the overall business needs marketing spend. But I can assure you that regarding a return on investment here and a customer lifetime value that we are generating, this is very well invested money.
We'll take our next question from William
3 on MoverCal, please. So firstly, I imagine you've got some pretty good visibility on trends due to the long lead time of revenues. Are there any leading indicators you could share for how the business is trading and how that momentum is? Secondly, could you comment on the type of agents that are interested in using that product? Is it right to think of it as the small longer tail agents who perhaps have less bandwidth to acquire vendors themselves?
Or is it a pretty broad subset of your agent clients? And could you confirm how many different agents are using the IV24 products? And then finally, could we have some color on the competing products in the market within the commission share lead generation space? Axle Springer obviously have some pretty interesting vendor lead assets in their wider portfolio. Have they bought anything to the German market yet?
Hey, Will. It's Toby. Let me start with the type of agents and the number of agents that are using that product. Again, as Dirk pointed out, if we solely focus on the commission based lead business where we receive a share of the commission for IV24, we've currently established a basis of call it over 600 agents. So yes, your assumption in terms of are these predominantly really large agents or smaller agents, I would say these are usually smaller agents.
These are not the large and biggest chains because they are not the core segment that we are tackling because they have their own lead gen mechanisms and own sites and so forth. So
if you
do the math, in other words, let's assume someone does an average 1.5 or 2 or maybe 2.5 or 3 transactions in the future using our ID24, you see that doesn't make a living yet. But depending on which segment you're tackling, we are becoming a more and more important partner. So these are typical agents that have a deeper partnership with us where we are a grown partner and that have some major business going with us. Could we expand that to other segments? We do think so.
So we're pivoting around that. There's different go to market strategy. There's different lease quality and there's different volumes that we're talking about. But yes, we are actively looking into that. In terms of lead gen mechanisms and other instruments that competitors have, Absolutely, you're right.
There's other portfolios out there. And they do have, let's say, in the case you mentioned, I guess, you referred to the hybrid agents also and to their platforms. So we're absolutely aware of that. And I think you're pointing towards something which is key in that discussion, which is the leads business is obviously a key here in Germany. And it is particularly a key because the supply and demand check is not in balance right now.
And there is a lack still a major gap in supply. So it's getting harder and it takes more work to get the right leads out of any kind of system. And we do believe that this is also a part of our multi brand, multi platform strategy to create different leads from different angles to then repurpose them as Dirk pointed out. Maybe on some visibility in terms of long term trends. I don't know if Dirk would have comment on that.
Will's first question?
Basically, Will, your first question was based on long term trends with regards to the development of the business. I can only add to what Toby has just said. What we're seeing here is a very positive trend. We're adding customers. We're adding more and more objects that we are putting in the funnel.
And what we are seeing is as you can also see it within our platform, what we are seeing is that the turnover of objects has significantly decreased. So whereas in the past, we were talking about rather 6 to 9 months, we're not talking 3 to 6 months and faster. And therefore, your hypothesis is right, the turnover has increased, yes.
And Will, maybe to add this, Toby, maybe to add in terms of long term trend, what we are doing here with the company, there is a trend that we are pushing hard for and we mentioned it obviously during the call, but I want to iterate on that. So if you take, let's say, full year 2019, you saw that our revenue generation was predominantly driven by the listings and subscription revenues from our membership additions. And then you would add the listings PPA business and that would have represented 78% of our revenue base. Now that is now down to 69% and instead what have done is we have grown the consumer subscription business and the leads business. Why?
Because we do believe that we need to create these sub proofs, I. E, by tackling the consumer subscriptions to have a plateau that we can use for selling, renting and transacting with the different parties. But in order to do so, you need the leads business going. And that's why we also push the leads business. So that is the trend that we are seeing.
So you should expect that portion to grow.
Thanks, Dirk and Tobias. Just a
quick follow-up. So that was all very helpful color. I suppose my final question was more getting to the point that I imagine that you give an agent a lead and then it takes a few months for the lead to just state into a transaction. And at that point, you get paid the revenue. So my expectation would be that you would have pretty good visibility on Q3 trends and perhaps even Q4 trends already based upon the pipeline of leads, which are forthcoming.
Is that a fair assessment? And how does that pipeline look?
It is a fair assessment and the pipeline looks promising.
Thanks.
Thank you.
And we'll take our next question from Craig Abbott with Kepler Cheuvreux.
Yes. Good afternoon, everyone. I wanted to try to follow-up on Fermita DE. I realize you're probably going to say we need to wait until the CMD in December for more detail. But I would just like to understand, first of all, I know you're not generating any meaningful revenues yet, but how are the KPIs developing, I.
E. How many landlords are you seeing coming onto the model and signing up for longer term subscriptions? And secondly, I just wondered if you could already
at this stage give us some kind
of indication on kind of timeline for that sort of nearly 300 basis point margin impact to be reversed over the next couple of years? And along those lines, are you able to capitalize any of these development costs? Thank you.
Thank you, Craig. This is Toby. With regards to the key drivers for the business, you're absolutely right. The number of landlords or as you said, the number of units is a key indicator. We are really focused right now on integrating the business, bring the journeys together, bringing the leaders together, putting the infrastructure together.
And all we can say at this point, it's a very early journey that we're still in, so it's a couple of weeks that we acquired the company. But yes, we are growing the base of number of units that are subscribed and are registered on the platform. So we are talking about still a couple of 100,000 that has grown already since we acquired the company. And this is the exact focus for our entire integration path. We need to make it as easy and convenient as possible to register your unit on the platform, be it coming through Imos Cloud or coming through Formitas and then also the journey what happens thereafter.
That's what the teams are focused on right now. And with regards to the financial questions maybe Dirk can state a few things.
Yes. Greg, hi. On your last question, we certainly can capitalize some of the development costs here, especially as they are linked towards an integration of the platform into ImmoScout as Christian was asking at the beginning of this call as well. And secondly, on the margin impacts that we are seeing, certainly, we're going to see a sort of a height of impact until middle of next year. And then we expect the company to grow additionally on revenues and hence reduce the margin impact.
And that's going to be leaned towards 2023 and 2024 when we then see accelerated growth. Now when we would display KPIs that we measure the success of this transaction on, you can certainly and should certainly look at the number of units that this asset has sort of indirectly under management on the platform. And we're now talking about roundabout 400,000 units, which are quickly growing and will continue to grow over the next years.
Okay. Thank you very much.
Thank you.
We'll take our next question from Andrew Ross with Barclays.
Great. Thanks and hope everyone's well. First one is a clarification on Adam's question earlier around your expectation for residential after the second half. Did you say you expect it to grow by mid single digit? Or did I misunderstand that?
If you could clarify that would be great. 2nd one is to follow-up on the 600 or so agents who are using your commission share and lead generation products. Can you talk a bit about that cohort of agents and their overall ARPU development with you? So when you look across the blend of what they're paying for lead gen, the price increases, package migration, etcetera, do they actually have a materially different growth profile in ARPU the rest of your agent base? Thanks.
I start off with the first question, Andrew. As I outlined earlier on and that was absolutely clear, ARPU growth as you have seen it right now will continue until the end of this year compared to last year, right? So we're going to see continuous growth of roundabout mid single digit that is 5% roughly. Then on the second part of the question, You were elaborating on a customer base of 600. Can you repeat that second part of the question, please again for me, Andrew?
Yes. One of the challenges that we have in modeling lead generation is trying to understand if an agent pays more for lead generation, are they paying you less elsewhere because you get price discounts or whatever to get them to deliver packages? So in aggregate, are those 600 agents actually showing a much better ARPU profile than those who are not using your degeneration products?
Okay. So first answer to that question is the lead price is sort of a market price. And in this context, we are setting the price here with a commission split. And therefore, those agents that are customers of Imofakau and Imofscout are as your hypothesis is leading to higher engaged with us and have a higher customer satisfaction and across the board also have a slightly higher ARPU than their peers in the same customer group. That's what I can say.
And that is roughly in line what Toby has outlined earlier on. On the question of the Imu Fakau from Niza and Adam.
All right. That's helpful. And just a follow-up on the ARPU point. If I take 5% growth in the second half on residential ARPU, it leaves me with a number that isn't that different to what you should have done in Q2. So are you saying that ARPU is not going to grow sequentially from here or have I got that wrong?
No, I think you got it right. Q2 ARPU was specifically high because in Q2 last year, we had some lead generation products, which we pulled out for free. So the comparison is not right. So if you take the half year one comparison versus last year, you see a 5% growth. And my answer to your question was simply you're going to see that in the second half as well.
Okay. So in absolute terms from the 752 in Q2, it's not going to grow in the second half. Is that correct or?
To be honest, it's slight alpha growth, but certainly not 5% compared to half year 1 to be very clear on that. Okay. Thank you.
We'll go to our next question from Eric Carlson with
Yes. Hi, this is Erik Karlsson for KeyBView. Thanks for taking my question. I think you touched on this earlier, but it was just a little bit unclear to me. Can you just please repeat the reasons for the slowing move to the new pricing model?
What was behind that? That would be very helpful to understand. And then I had one question on the margins as well. Just on your guidance, you say it's up to 60%. If we take out from EBITDA to PE, which of course, it could be anything from 0% to 60%, how much below 60% is that?
Is it 1%, 2%, 5%? That would be helpful to just understand a little bit more the magnitude there. Thank you.
Thanks for asking for the clarification. As I said, the impact of Formica DA on the second half year will be around €3,000,000 I also said that you can assume a negative run rate of €500,000 per month on that asset. And that corresponds to a margin impact of 1 percentage points 1 percentage point, sorry.
That's very helpful. I was more asking about the margin excluding fermented DE. It's so up to 60%. How much below 60% could that be excluding that company?
Yes. I mean, that was exactly the reason why we gave it in order to have some wiggle room with regards to growth spend. It's certainly 55 limit downwards. I would say that anything beyond 56%, 57% in our language, including Familiar DA will be up to 60%.
Okay. Thank you. And again, just on the slowing of the move to the new pricing model, could you just help me understand that again? I think you touched on it, but I didn't quite understand it.
My answer was in the direction that we have mid of summer and we have migrated 3 quarters of our customer cohorts and we are continuing to migrate our customer cohorts until late summer, early autumn this year. And that is 1 or 2 cohorts. So we're talking about 1 or 2 months that we are delaying at the moment. And that doesn't have an impact on the comments I just made on ARPU development, customer development and revenue development or profitability.
And this is Toby, if I may add. These are purely tactical reasons. So there's nothing structure really behind it, because we saw that a couple of cohorts and customers we talked to were actually willing to accept, let's say, rather price increase instead of a full migration. So we basically said, look, let's not force fit everyone onto something that may not be the absolute right thing to do at this point. So that's why you could look at it and say, okay, there's a delay.
You could also look at it and say, well, they're pretty pragmatic because this is the right thing to do. Let's not forget, we're still in a specific situation here at Germany where things are pretty uncertain about what COVID will do and so forth. So we felt this was a pragmatic approach that has a higher reward than sticking to the plan and force fitting everyone into a bucket.
Makes a lot of sense. Thanks.
And thanks for doing a great work for our shareholders.
Thank you very much. You're absolutely welcome. Thanks for being our shareholder.
Our last question is from Miriam Adisa with Morgan Stanley.
Good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for taking my Just one left for me. Apologies if you did color this at the beginning, but just on the business and the commercial segment, if you could just sort of comment on what you're seeing there in the market in terms of the recovery? Then also, I think there was a slight sequential decline in ARPU there. So just wondering if you comment on that as well and sort of talk about your expectations for the second half for the ARPU there.
Thank
Thanks, Miriam. I'll start. On the pure business side, where we talk about smaller offices, objects on the high street and so on, we are expecting slightly better trading for the towards the end of this year. When it comes to developers, which we also have under the umbrella of our business segment here. So when it comes to developing developer customers, what we are seeing is that the any German government, we're talking August and September we have votes here, any German government needs to accelerate building of new objects in Germany.
And that's why we believe in the mid to long term this will be a continue to be a very interesting segment. What we're seeing at the moment is that a lot of developers, although the demand is very high, have difficulties in getting their developments allowed from the state agencies and then really starting their business. So we are optimistic on that segment where we see it is more towards Q4 or half year 1 next year. And then when it comes to new homebuilders, the business is quite intact. We're seeing slight single digit growth here and we believe that this will continue in the future.
A small effect that we are also seeing is we saw a 14% increase in building cost in Germany. That's not real estate prices, that is building cost. And that might have an effect in the near term and we're going to have to watch that very closely. But in total, I would say commercial working better towards the end of the second half. Developers, certainly very positive outlook, really much depending on government activities here and new homebuilders.
Let's see how they will develop, but at least slight growth here and maybe a continuation of growth towards the next year.
Great. Thank you. And then just on the ARPU in the second quarter versus
Q1? The ARPU in the second quarter, I mean, we recommended already. There was an ARPU growth of 9%. You saw an ARPU growth in the Q1 of 1%. Blended half year one ARPU growth was 5%.
What were you referring to, Miriam? Help me.
Yes. The ARPU in the second quarter was slightly lower than Q1 in the business specifically.
Okay. Yes, that had to do with some technical effects with regards to developers and customers we were seeing there. We are working on pricing mechanisms with regards to those customers and we believe that the ARPU will roughly be flat to what we've seen in the 1st and second quarter. These are more technical effects than anything else.
Got it. Thanks a lot.
There are no further questions at this time. We'll turn the conference back for any additional or closing remarks.
Yes. I'll take over for closing remarks. Thank you all for dialing in. If there's any further questions, please send me an e mail or call me. I'll be still there until tomorrow and then on holiday for 2 weeks.
So thank you all and speak to you in September.
Bye bye.
Thank you very