Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Scout24 Q1 2026 Results Conference Call. I'm Matilde, the conference call operator. I would like to remind you that all participants will be in listen-only mode, and the conference is being recorded. The presentation will be followed by a Q&A session. You can register for questions at any time by pressing star one on your telephone. For operator assistance, please press star zero. The conference must not be recorded for publication or broadcast. At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to Filip Lindvall, Vice President, Group Strategy and Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Scout24's earnings call for the first quarter of 2026. My name is Filip Lindvall, and I'm Vice President, Group Strategy and Investor Relations at Scout24. With me on the call today are Ralf Weitz, our Chief Executive Officer, and Martin Mildner, our Chief Financial Officer. Ralf will start the presentation with key business highlights, and Martin will provide a detailed overview of our financial results. As always, we will conclude the call with a Q&A session. You can find today's presentation on our website under Financial Reports and Presentations. This session will be recorded, and a replay will be available shortly after the event. Please take note of the disclaimer on page two. Ralf, now over to you.
Thank you, Filip, and welcome everyone. Let's turn to page 4. Q1 marks a good start to the year for Scout24. We delivered double-digit organic revenue growth, mid-teens growth in ordinary operating EBITDA, and 20% adjusted EPS growth. This performance was driven by continued strength in our professional business and a solid contribution from private. In professional, B2B subscriptions continue to drive strong revenue growth, supported by positive customer development and very high retention. Agents value our comprehensive and continuously evolving product suite, as well as our role as a trusted partner. In private, PPA is developing well as our platform gains further trust amongst private sellers and landlords. At the same time, our B2C subscriber base continued to expand despite the rollout of the new tiering model. Our ecosystem is becoming increasingly interconnected. All customer groups are growing.
We see an increased share of logged-in users, and customers are buying more products across the platform. The pace of product innovation remains high. In Q1, we launched the Tenant Network and Waiting List, as well as Scout the Street and further enhanced our AI-powered search. These innovations further strengthen the ecosystem and enhance the user experience. This ultimately reinforces Scout24's position as a leading real estate platform in Germany. AI continues to play a central role of Scout24. Wherever we deploy AI, we see higher engagement, increased usage, and improved monetization. We are also leveraging AI internally to drive efficiency. We will share more details on our product and AI roadmap at our Capital Markets Day in two weeks. We completed the Spain acquisition at the end of February and consolidated first revenues in March.
As communicated yesterday, we are also upsizing our share buyback volume in 2026, a step that reflects the confidence we have in the business and future performance. Martin will explain on this further in his part. Overall, Q1 shows that Scout24 is continuing to deliver double-digit organic growth, accelerating innovation, and expanding margins. Based on this strong start, we are confirming our full year 2026 guidance. Let's review our customer development for the first quarter. We reached 24.4 thousand professional customers in Germany, an increase of 3.7% year-on-year. This growth is broad-based across sectors. We are adding customers across residential, commercial, and developer segments. Professionals choose Scout24 because we bring together agent software, data, valuation, and marketing in a very structured membership logic with the possibility for customers to purchase ecosystem products using our digital currency, ImmoPoints.
Our relationships with professionals continue to deepen, and Scout24 is increasingly being seen as a trusted partner that delivers value year after year. Our B2C subscription business reached an average of around 508,000 customers, up 2.5% year-over-year. Momentum improved toward the end of the quarter, with March increasing to around 516,000. We are making good progress with the rollout of our new tiering and pricing model. Our recently launched Tenant Network product, which is a core part of the additional product features offered in the upper tiers, is scaling quickly. We now have close to 20,000 listings after just a few months. This additional inventory is already contributing 50-100 B2C subscription signups per day to our higher value pro membership. This goes on top of our existing funnel.
Now, let's turn to page 6 for an update on the dynamics of the German real estate market. The market remains fundamentally stable and healthy. This is reflected in our Scout24 Transaction Momentum Index. This stands at 92 in Q1. Although this is slightly lower than last quarter, it still indicates a stable overall environment. On the supply side, listings are increasing. Inventory reached around 640,000 in March, up around 15% year-over-year. This development is driven by the strength of our platform and brand, as well as longer standing times in the sale and rent market. On the demand side, requests for rental contracts remain at healthy level. Although they are below previous peaks, mainly due to affordability constraints and reduced mobility. Buyer interest has also moderated from earlier highs due to recent macroeconomic uncertainty, interest rate movements, and geopolitical developments.
Despite these trends, the underlying fundamentals of the sales market remain intact. Turning to page 7. You can see how AI is already delivering tangible growth and monetization across our platform. At our 2024 Capital Markets Day, we established AI as a core part of our roadmap. Since then, we have rolled it out across our products, and we now see clear impact. On the consumer side, take Immo. In just a few months, it reached around 650,000 monthly users, with close to 1 million conversations taking place in April alone. This shows that effectively integrating AI can drive engagement and loyalty on our platform. At the same time, traffic from external LLMs remains very low at around 0.3%-0.4%. This suggests that users do not perceive any added value in using external LLMs for real estate searches.
On the agent side, PropTech shows how this translates into monetization. Features include automated listing, exposé, video and floor plan creation, saving time and increasing productivity. Agents can manage more clients and hence are willing to pay more. Customers using these AI features generate around EUR 340 in monthly ARPU, compared to around EUR 220 without, more than 50% higher. A win for agents and for Scout24. The use of AI strengthens our platform, accelerates revenue growth, and increases ARPU. This is just the beginning. At our upcoming CMD, we will demonstrate further integrations across our B2B memberships. Now, I will hand over to Martin, who will talk you through our financial performance as he joins us for his first earnings call with Scout24.
Thank you, Ralf. Good afternoon, everyone. It's a pleasure to be on my first earnings call at Scout24. Having spent my first two months with the team, what really stands out is the quality of the business model we described earlier, combining innovation, strong growth dynamics, structural operating leverage, and much more than robust cash generation, which is clearly reflected in our Q1 performance. On page 9, you can see our strong performance in the first quarter of 2026 compared to the first quarter of 2025. First of all, as Ralf already stated at the beginning, we delivered another quarter of double-digit revenue growth combined with further operating leverage. This reflects both good execution and a disciplined cost base while we continue to invest in technology, AI, and acquisitions.
Our revenues were up by 13.9% to EUR 179.6 million, with particularly strong momentum in the professional segment. Our ordinary operating EBITDA increased by 15.1% to EUR 107.9 million, leading to an ordinary operating EBITDA margin of 60.1%. This represents an improvement on the margin achieved in the first quarter of 2025. AI is increasingly supporting our products, helping us to monetize more effectively and to run the business more efficiently. This also translated into healthy earnings growth. Our adjusted EPS increased by 20.1% to EUR 0.95. Operating cash flow remained strong, up 10% to EUR 64.2 million. Excluding cash outflows related to share-based compensation, the increase would have been even stronger.
If you are turning to page 10, you can see our development in the professional segment. Before I will come to the respective numbers, I like to mention that we have updated our reporting structure in the professional segment as a result of the integration of our Spain business. Spain's revenues are now included in subscription revenues, and the regional breakdown has been adjusted. Germany, as our main and most important market, is now shown separately, while the subscription business of Austria and Spain are combined under Rest of Europe. Additionally, as a small cleanup, third-party advertising revenues from Spain and Austria have been reclassified under Other Revenue, where German advertising revenues were already reported.
Having said this, on page 10, you will see that our professional business continued to perform strongly in Q1 2026, reaching EUR 133.6 million in revenues, corresponding to a growth rate of 15.8% with subscriptions as a key growth driver. The German subscription business delivered industry-leading mid-teens revenue growth driven by strong ARPU expansion and customer growth. Migration to our new membership continues. Subscription revenue Rest of Europe totaled EUR 9.6 million for the first quarter, including the isolated revenues for Spain for the month March. Transaction enablement developed positively as well, supported by CRM as well as data and valuation services. Consumer leads remained subdued, while seller leads developed positively. The combination of strong subscription momentum, continued customer expansion, and disciplined execution drove further margin expansion.
Compared to the first quarter 2025, the ordinary operating EBITDA margin of the professional segment increased by 0.8 percentage points to 60.5%. Let's have a look on page 11, where you can see the development of our private segment. Revenues were up 8.8% and continued to benefit from solid demand across both subscription and pay-per-ad products. We ended the quarter with an average customer base of 507.6 thousand, up 2.5% year-on-year, while ARPU increased 2.7%, supported by upselling and product mix effects. We are progressing with the rollout of our new product tiering model. There's a transition phase as customers adapt to the new structure, and we are already seeing encouraging early indicators, including strong demand for higher-value memberships.
Pay-per-ad in private remains strong, growing at 13.5%. This was driven by high market activity, strong brand and product positioning, and rising marketing needs from landlords, which increased demand for our PPA offering as the rental market slowed. The ordinary operating EBITDA margin of the private segment remained stable at 58.9% as we continued to invest in brand and marketing for the new B2C offering. Coming to page 12, where we highlighted our main cost positions. You can see, efficiency remains at the core of how we run Scout24 with automation, and AI is driving our workflows. This is reflected in our Q1 cost development with organic cost growth in the mid-single-digit range. Even on a reported basis, operating costs increased by around 12%, remaining below revenue growth. Let me provide you with some color on the various lines.
Personnel costs declined organically by around 5%, driven by our AI initiatives and workflow automation. Organic FTEs continue to trend down, even with a growing business. Marketing expenses increased mid-teens on an organic basis as we supported targeted campaigns, including the rollout of our new B2C subscriptions. IT costs increased, driven by Spain as well as tech and AI investments, while organic cost growth remained disciplined. Purchasing and other operating costs rose in line with higher demand and an increased use of external services. This combination of efficiency on the one hand and targeted investment on the other hand continues to drive our operating leverage, resulting in an improvement of our ordinary operating EBITDA margin to 60.1% and therefore 0.6 percentage points better than the first quarter of 2025.
Turning to page 13, where we show the items which are below ordinary operating EBITDA. Non-operating effects were positive overall. I will comment on these positions on the next page. Depreciation and amortization increased moderately, reflecting the continued amortization of acquisition-related assets. The financial result improved significantly compared to the same period last year, primarily driven by foreign exchange gains. This translated into a very strong net income of EUR 68.5 million and basic EPS of EUR 0.97. Adjusted net income and adjusted EPS also developed very positively, with adjusted EPS increasing by 20.1% to EUR 0.95. This is highlighting the strengths and quality of our earnings. Finally, and due to our share buyback programs, the lower weighted average share count further supported EPS growth.
Let's turn to page 14, where you can see the bridge from reported net income to adjusted net income. I like to focus your attention only on the non-operating costs and facts that our non-operating items improved significantly and made a positive contribution to the net income in this quarter. This positive contribution was mainly driven by the reversal of the provisions for the share-based compensation due to a lower share price. As a consequence, the reversal led to a non-cash-related reduction of the provisions and to a higher net income. Compared to the 1st quarter of 2025, reduced reorganization costs influenced the improvement of lower non-operating costs, which were partly offset by some higher M&A-related expenses in connection with the closing and post-closing activities of Fotocasa.
As a result, adjusted net income was broadly in line with reported net income at EUR 67.1 million on an adjusted basis compared to EUR 68.5 million on a reported basis. If you turn to page 15, you will find another bridge. This time from our adjusted net income to our free cash flow. Our free cash flow in Q1 2026 increased by 11% year-over-year to EUR 56.3 million. Please note that our cash flow was mainly impacted by working capital changes related to cash outs in the first quarter of 2026, which have become due in connection with our long-term incentive programs for previous financial years. Even considering these cash outs, our free cash flow conversion remains strong at 84% of adjusted net income and 52% of ordinary operating EBITDA, highlighting our strong cash generation.
The next page is on our financial leverage and our capital allocation. In Q1, we continued our disciplined capital allocation. We are balancing shareholder returns with targeted investments. Our free cash flow was mainly deployed on the one hand into share buybacks and strategic acquisitions, especially in Spain on the other hand, both supporting our long-term growth strategy. As a result, the cash outs in the first quarter of 2026 for share buybacks and the payout of the purchase price for the business in Spain led to an increase of our net debt. Consequently, our financial leverage rose to 0.76 times. Building on the announcement from yesterday evening, I am pleased to confirm that we are increasing the buyback volume for 2026 to a total of up to EUR 350 million.
This represents a material increase from the previous expected EUR 200 million based on the natural allocation of the EUR 500 million until mid-2028. Based on the upsized plan for 2026, this means about EUR 250 million for the second half. We took this decision together with the Supervisory Board, as we feel highly confident in delivering our full year 2026 guidance and continuing to execute beyond that, both on the revenue and cost efficiency side, which we will detail during our Capital Markets Day in two weeks. Combined with the historically low valuation of Scout24, we view this as a great opportunity to increase the buyback and create value for long-term shareholders. Moving on to our guidance. This is where we will share our view on the guidance provided so far for the entire 2026 financial year.
For the 2026 financial year, we continue in confirming again to expect group revenue growth in the range of 16%-18%, with six to seven percentage points coming from Spain. In Q1, Spain contributed for one month only, with a full contribution from Q2 onwards. In terms of profitability, we continue to expect the group ordinary operating EBITDA margin to be up to 61% or up to 64% on an organic basis, reflecting the continued operating leverage in our core German business. A few phasing comments for 2026. As outlined in our full year call, we expected a strong start in our B2B membership business, which was confirmed in Q1 and should continue for the remainder of the year.
In B2C, we expect growth to build throughout the year as customers adapt to the new tiering and pricing and the new product features are increasingly recognized. Therefore, I'd like to close my part of this earnings call that we are confident in our 2026 guidance. Before we move to the Q&A session, I would like to hand back to Ralf again, who will summarize the key takeaways from this call for you.
Let me close with a few key takeaways. We started the year with strong momentum. We delivered growth, continued margin expansion, and launched product innovations at pace. Our B2B business remains the core driver. At the same time, AI is clearly translating into results. We see higher engagement, stronger usage, and improving monetization. In Private, we are taking the next step with our new tiering model. It is still early, but the first signals are encouraging. Overall, this quarter shows that we can combine growth, innovation, and profitability. This is supported by a stronger platform and disciplined execution. With that, we confirm our outlook for the year. We look forward to sharing more at our Capital Markets Day. With that, let's open the line. Please limit to two questions per speaker. Operator, over to you.
We will now begin the question-and-answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star and one on their touchtone telephone. You will hear a tone to confirm that you have entered the queue. If you wish to remove yourself from the question queue, you may press star and two. Participants are requested to use only handsets while asking a question. In the interest of time, please limit yourself to two questions. Anyone who has a question may press star and one at this time. The first question comes from the line of Andrew Ross from Barclays. Please go ahead.
Great. Good afternoon, everyone. My first question is about the Private subscription revenue, which was around 5% growth in Q4. In Q1, apologies. I know you wouldn't normally give kind of monthly trends, but obviously this quarter there's been some noise going on with launch of the new tiers. Could you give us a bit more color in terms of how that trended in January and February, and then what you've seen coming out of Q1 and into April to kind of give us some comfort of when are starting to get back to better revenue growth in that line? That is the first question. The second question is, maybe this is something for the CMD, can you give us an update in terms of how Spain is trading?
You know, what we've seen today is one month of revenue, but it would be helpful to get any color as to more broadly what's happened in that business in Q1. Thank you.
Yes. Happy to take your questions, Andrew Ross. This is Ralf. Let me start with the private subscription business. I think I mentioned in the last call already that we did some testings in the last couple of months and that led also to the fact that the subscription growth, the subscription stock in particular, was slowing down a bit. This is all what we planned. What I can share is that we finished the pricing test, so it's as expected. We are on track then what we planned. That means also that the number of subscribers are going up again. We will see in April higher number already where we will be above 530,000 subscribers already.
With the tiering, we can continue the subscriber stock growth. We think maybe not on the level we saw in the past. But also, as you know, we did it because we have to differentiate the different packages because the product is too much commodity now here. We are really positive on the tiering we made, and we're looking forward here, and that we can deliver what we promised for this year and that we can continue the growth even in subscriber stock. That was number one. Number two was regarding Spain. I think, yeah. I mean, we are not guiding Spain separately. I mean, it's in this bucket. What I can share is that it is also as expected, we are quite happy making progress.
As you know, we just got the keys here. It will take some time also to do restructuring, also integration, but we are on track here and we see first progress, which is quite promising. Also positive here on this side.
Thank you.
The next question comes from the line of Will Parker from BNP Paribas. Please go ahead.
Hi there, and thanks for taking my questions. Firstly, thanks for the detail around your own conversational search and the LLM traffic and, you know, it looks pretty reassuring, your in-house conversational search is strongly outperforming. That said, as we look forward, it feels like the next focus on AI will be around agentic search. Could you give us a bit of color on how you're prepping the business for the use of agentic agents by consumers, and any initial perspectives around the speed at which you think they'll be adopted and where Scout needs to build resilience? Secondly, web traffic was down on the quarter, and you talked to kind of macro re-weakness as the driver. Could you give us a bit of color on your confidence that it's macro-related? Has this happened before?
Typically, you know, in the past you could have just said the other peers are weak, and we would have moved on. I suppose in the context of changing consumer habits, probably a little more scrutiny today than in the past. Any extra color there could be helpful. Thank you.
Yeah. Let me start with the agentic topic. The CMD is upcoming. I think giving you a detailed answer to this, Will, I know you will be there anyway. What I can say is we are making progress in this AI development, in particular as it comes to search. As you know, we started with our conversational search. It's called HeyImmo, which is actually level one if it comes to agentic experiences. Claude Code, for instance, is level three, which is also not agentic 100%. The next level four will be much more agentic. We are not there yet. Even the LLMs are not there yet. We are moving with the trend.
We are testing already some first agentic features. And you can see it already in the traffic and also in the engagement we have in HeyImmo. Number of prompts, for instance, number of revisiting users, for instance. That the engagement is always higher if we are offering those features to the consumers. They are more engaged with our product. This is really positive. What we also see is that we have additional opportunities to monetize. We did some testing and there is also quite promising. Now imagine that the agentic features are now also kicking in, then of course that will have some impact if it comes to monetization and pricing strategy.
All what we did so far, what I can say is it's more an opportunity than a threat and therefore we are really positive here. I will share more details, and we will also share some prototypes and tests we made; we will share it on this Capital Markets Day. This was question number 1. Question number 2, the traffic. I think good question. I think this, I think here it's also I think important to understand what's impacting traffic at the moment. I mean, we have the macroeconomic facts. I mean, we have a war, a new war. We could immediately see as the Iran war was starting that this was having an impact on the traffic side. There's much more uncertainty in the market.
And also, the situation here in Germany in particular when it comes to e-economy and so on, there are a lot of layoffs and so on. This is creating more uncertainty, and this is what we see already. We had this in the past; there were different macroeconomic events where we saw traffic impact. This is actually no surprise for us. What's good for our business, first of all, the business is not dependent on traffic volatility actually. I mean, because we are not paid along the traffic we deliver. It's what we see in the core business if it comes to search engagement. This is more or less stable. The engaged users are still using the search product more intensively.
The traffic we are losing, it's more left and right of the search. A bit like the, how to say, the window shopper, yeah? Therefore, we see it not negative, to be honest. The other thing I would like to mention in particular if AI is now becoming more and more relevant for classifieds, that I mean, the importance of traffic will go a bit down here. I mean, the old flywheel, as you know, is traffic listing money. The question a bit is how the new flywheel will look like. We have a belief here. I will share my belief on the Capital Markets Day and also some evidence on this. You have to wait.
Thanks for the color.
Thank you.
We now have a question from the line of Joseph Barnett-Lamb from UBS. Please go ahead.
Excellent. Thank you very much for taking my two questions. Firstly, on private subscription, there's a reference to increasing demand for the higher value packages. Can you give any early indication of the sell-through rates of the higher value packages, Pro and Unlimited? What are you hoping for here? What would success look like? Secondly, marketing expenses increased by, I think, 27% year on year in 1Q. I'd imagine that was impacted by marketing for the new consumer subscription packages. Can you give some thoughts on both marketing going forward, but also what that means for private margins through the year? Should 1Q be a proxy going forward? Thank you.
I mean, I can share some early indicators we have. How does success look like for private subscription business? Obviously, success would be if we would be able to grow the subscriber stock further. Of course, we want to deliver at least double-digit revenue growth. We are quite confident that we are able to do it. I mean, the March numbers. That was actually the first full month where we had the tiering in place. We hit all the targets we had here internally. We are therefore quite confident. Success is having more subscribers ideally and also more revenue.
I mean, the tiering gives us the opportunity to also introduce more and more agentic services to the, to the seekers, and I think that's important. I mean, the Plus product, which is at the moment, a bit like where the seekers can push themselves up the, up the Waiting List more or less, or up the, up the queue. This will, might change a bit more into agentic services. As more the users are used to those agentic services and, as more they expect those things, we will see more conversions in the higher packages for our Plus subscription products. Therefore, we are adding agentic services more and more in the higher tiers. We believe there is a willingness to pay as it is for agentic services.
What I meant before with the level 1 and level 2 services we see in the market. The first indicators here for the higher tiers are also quite positive, I have to say. We are on plan. It's also may be fair to mention that nobody else has this product. It will still take some time to balance out a bit what is the right value for each package and what do we need additional in terms of product features. We are working on it. As I said, on track. As it comes to marketing, I can share a bit. I mean, we are not steering, first of all, we're not guiding the private margins.
If it comes to marketing spend, I think that was the question, right? How much marketing did the marketing spend increase? You have to see that we are integrated our Spanish business here. That was the main driver for the marketing spend. It's also true that we did a bit more marketing, performance marketing on the private side, but this is really, it's more a strategic thing we did here. We believe that the margin for the private business, even if we are not guiding it separately, will not be much different than it is today or was in the past.
Excellent. Thank you very much, Ralf.
The next question comes from the line of Doyinsola Sanyaolu from Citi. Please go ahead.
Hi, thanks for the presentation. I’ve just got one question. The disclosure changed in the Professional segment for Germany. Can we get any additional color on how your customer numbers are developing for the business in Australia, just to help us get a steer on how the rest of Europe will progress?
Should I do? Okay, I can take it. Thanks for the question. I mean, yeah, we changed the disclosure. It's, I mean, if it comes to the Austrian business, it's moving in line with the performance of the business here in Germany. Even on the customer side, we are growing in number of customers. We are growing double-digit of revenue. This is all as planned. I think for Spain, I made my comments earlier. I think it's as we expected. Yeah. I mean, we don't want to disclose anything too much to our competition as well. Please understand that.
The performance of the business in Spain, and keep in mind that the business is really, really small compared to all the other activities, in particular the core business we have. We are on track, but, I mean, it's not the number one business in terms of revenue and so on. We made here an strategic acquisition, and it's paying off already. I will also share some details here on the Capital Markets Day. Thank you.
We now have a question from the line of Annick Maas from Bernstein. Please go ahead.
Good afternoon. Thank you for taking my questions. The first one is, you've mentioned some organic personnel cuts due to AI efficiencies. Can you comment on what types of roles have been impacted here, and how much more opportunity to cut further roles due to AI? The second one is on the listing number. You disclosed it was up 14.5%. I was wondering how many of these listings were from the newly introduced, the soon available category, and if that 14.5% is a like for like number or not? Thank you.
Okay. I will start with the first question. Sorry, the second one, I didn't get it fully. On the AI side, I mean. Of course, I mean, we are using AI for enhancing the product experience for our customers, and we are using it also to become more efficient internally. I mean, we introduced company-wide AI, I think, early last year. We started that everyone got an agent and so on. Now we are moving deeper into it, where we automate more and more of our internal processes. We are using also more optimization, in particular if it comes to coding, so tech and product and design as well.
Just to give you an example here, I mean, if a normal, let's say, e-engineer can do a couple of thousand lines of code. I mean, I know this is not fair because it's not just coding. But in agentic, let's say, kind of agentic service, so our Copilot service, an engineer can do more than 40,000 lines of code in a month. It gives you a bit of a feeling of an idea of what's possible. We are using AI really heavily internally, and that's actually the reason why we can use the built-in capacity we have differently, and why we can also use, from the cost perspective, why we can use the attrition rate we have.
I mean, every tech business has an attrition. Our ambition is that we are not replacing people who are leaving. It's more like we want to use technology better. Yeah, that's working good and it's paying off already. The second question I need to ask again. Maybe you can.
Yeah
repeat it. Yeah.
Yes. You introduced in March, I think, this new capability which allows you to show houses that are coming soon online. I was wondering, of the listings that you have on there, how many of the growth that you've seen, how many are these new coming soon properties, I guess?
I don't have the exact number here. I mean, this coming soon listings. We have an earlier version of it alive for a couple of months already. It was roughly 6%, 7% of the listings, the new listings. I mean, we call it also tenant-to-tenant listing. There are different categories of those coming soon listings. I don't have the exact numbers. I mean, if happy to share. What we see, and that was actually the hypothesis, is that this, we call it gray market or this hidden market, that this is still a really relevant market because those listings, the coming soon listings, are highly attractive for the seekers.
And this is actually also driving the Plus subscription, in particular in the higher tiers. I mean, in order to create extra value for the higher tiers and the Plus subscriptions, it's important that we give access to this gray market. Actually, what we see that this is really working well. I mean, we have 2,000 new consumers for our Waiting List product. Waiting List is actually the other side for those coming soon listings. We can match in live mode actually the demand and supply side and the product, and that's really attractive.
Not just for the seekers, also for the landlords, because they produce the coming soon listings, but they see immediately the demand for their property. Maybe they don't need to put the listing even live on the platform or visible on the platform. They can pick and choose their future tenant from the Waiting List. This is actually what we are creating at the moment. This actually gray market where we do a kind of offline matching, even if it's digital and online, but it's not visible. That's actually working well. Again, here on CMD, there will be a new feature we're going to launch soon. Share, and we will give also more insights here. Thank you.
Great. Thank you.
The next question comes from the line of Nizla Naizer from Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead.
Great. Thank you. I have two questions as well. The first is on the professional ARPU growth in Q1. Ralf, could you maybe dive into the drivers of how the 10% came about? Because it's quite a nice number. Based on that, is that the sort of run rate you expect for the rest of the year in the professional segment? My second question connected to that is you spoke about the health of the consumer in Germany. Could you maybe give us some color on the health of the agent base? Because you have been adding agents over the last few quarters. Would you expect to continue to add agents or are some sort of leaving the market with the current economic climate?
Any color you can give us on the health of the agent base would be great. Thank you.
Yeah. Let me start with the ARPU growth. The ARPU growth is also a bit impacted by the resegmentation we made, which is now the Austrian business is in a different bucket here. Even despite this, I mean, we are happy with the ARPU growth, and this is not just driven by price increases, it's in particular driven by more use of the product. Agents, instead of just using the memberships for listing a property, they use more and more products out of the ecosystem. As you know, we have this interconnected ecosystem, and the plan is that we increase the number of multi-product use.
This number is going up, and we have our 1 system product as well. We are really happy here. In particular, the AI features in PropTech we have are highly attractive. Customers starting now to use PropTech and the listing product we have, and they're actively asking for this. If it comes to customer numbers on PropTech, we are really, really happy. Even without growing on total number of customers, we can grow in the number of customers who are using not just one product. This is important to understand.
This is in different growth lever, and we are unlocking this potential at the moment, in particular with AI, because we can use AI also to connect the different products much better in our ecosystem, and that's working really well. If it comes to customer growth potential overall, I will say, I mean, we are working with the hypothesis that there are still fish in the sea. Every morning somebody's getting up and wants to be an agent. As long we believe that it should be possible to grow customer numbers. Is it 6% as we did last year? I don't think so. You see in the first quarter three point something.
We are really, really good on this pipeline management we do. You need a lot of customer insights to understand better who's joining the market, who's leaving, who's splitting up. Many, many new businesses are starting from a, let's say, from a franchise group business perspective. Agents, they start to work for franchises, for franchise companies, and then they want to have their own business, and they're splitting up with them. It is quite important to have this customer insight. We are, we are here, I would say, ahead of the, of the market a bit, and therefore we should be able to grow customer numbers further, particular this year.
Thank you.
As a reminder, if you wish to register for a question, please press star and 1 on your telephone. We now have a question from the line of Giles Thorne from Jefferies. Please go ahead.
Thank you. The first question was on market share trends. It's quite rare that we get disclosure out of Kleinanzeigen on their property vertical. We recently had some metrics around performance in 2025, and the particularly eye-catching number was 40% revenue growth. Now, I appreciate comparing it like to like with Scouts is not completely sensible, but it is suggestive of market share gains. Are you donating to them or is this mostly coming from Immowelt or any color that you think is useful here? The second question is back on Spain. Just to push you, Ralf or maybe Martin, a bit harder on potential for cost cuts. Ideally, you'd give us a number for the amount that you could remove in time.
Perhaps we have to wait for the CMD for that. Maybe any color instead on how inefficiently the operations were run or the organizational structure that could illuminate how much you think you could impact the cost base there. That would be very useful. Thanks.
Yeah. I mean, what should I say about the link post from Simon? I mean, he was posting 40%. I mean, what I know is that they're doing a lot of price increases at the moment. I mean, they convince customers who paid EUR 3,000 with the competition, Immowelt, and mainly in this case, they convince them to join for EUR 150. Now they're bringing those customers up from EUR 150 to EUR 300. Okay, nice. I mean, this is actually how they run the business. Of course, you should be able then to grow double digits. Yeah. Is it impacting us? No, it's not as you see.
We are still able to grow on customer numbers, and we are executing on our pricing strategy and value strategy. Therefore, it's hard, I would say, to compare like for like. I mean, you have a quite mature business, we have and also from the value perspective. Then you have a follower business, Kleinanzeigen. They are catching up with low-cost pricing and eating up the market share of the number two. The impact is actually we don't see it at the moment. At least to the customers I talk to, they really appreciate the value we deliver. It's not that they say, "Look, I can replace you," or they deliver better service here.
This is how I see it. I don't also I don't have access to the full numbers of Kleinanzeigen. I just rely on what Simon is texting. Yeah, this is what I can say to that. About Spain, again, I don't. To be honest, I don't like to. Because, I mean, I think we disclosed a bit here. I mean, we acquired a business. This business is a classified business, so it contains marketing, it contains personal costs, it contains also revenue. The revenue is divided by membership revenue or what they call as membership. It's not really a membership; it's also containing advertising revenues. As we acquired the business, we are not so much interested in the third-party media revenue.
And that's also a reason we would like to rebalance a bit the way how they run the business. Less advertisement on the website, more user experience and better user experience in, in particular for the, for the seekers, but also for the, for the real estate agents. Because we would like to replace the third-party media revenue with agent media revenue, so, as we have it here in Germany. If you take the percentage of third-party media we are doing here in Germany and what we are doing in Spain, it's completely different. We would like to repair the structure how we would like to run a classified in Spain. Means we would like to introduce memberships here. We would like to reduce the third-party media revenues.
This will also take time, so please don't expect that we will be able to double, triple the revenue soon here. What the business also contains is marketing, and it's also personal cost, tech cost and so on. Of course, you can expect that there will be efficiency synergies if we are integrating the platform deeper into our, let's say, tech ecosystem at Scout. As we delivered on Sprengnetter and all the other M&As we did, right? This will also take a bit of time, but we are quite confident that we will deliver the margin expectations.
We also disclosed where we said, "Look, I mean, it should be possible as a number 2 to run a business which is delivering 40% margin." This is still our target here. By the way, it's easy to achieve that. I just need to cut off marketing because the marketing spend they do, and you can see it in our numbers a bit, because we consolidated the business, so the marketing increase is mainly coming from Spain. If you just take the marketing spend in percentage what we spending here in Germany, and the traffic is not so much dependent on marketing spend, to be honest, in Spain. Then you would easily achieve 40% margin there. It's a more theoretical thing. That's what I would like to express. We would like to strengthen the business.
We said, "Look, we have time for that." We are not guiding separately Spain; we are guiding the margin of Scout. We have many opportunities within our own, let's say, Scout universe to optimize the margin and to deliver what we promised. We don't need necessarily to optimize the margin only on Spain separately in order to achieve that. That's maybe the message. Yeah. Thank you.
Ladies and gentlemen, that was the last question. I would now like to turn the conference back over to Filip Lindvall for any closing remarks.
This concludes today's call. Thank you for your joining and your interest in Scout24.
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