Scout24 SE (ETR:G24)
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Sep 18, 2026, 5:35 PM CET
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Earnings Call: Q2 2026

Aug 6, 2026

Summary

Q2 2026 saw 20% revenue growth, double-digit organic gains, and margin expansion, driven by AI innovation and strong subscription momentum. Spain integration is progressing, with margin improvements expected, and full-year guidance is confirmed.

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Scout24 H1 Q2 2026 results conference call. I am Moritz, the host call operator. I would like to remind you that all participants will be in a listen-only mode, and the conference is being recorded. The presentation will be followed by a question and answer session. You can register for questions at any time by pressing star and one on your telephone. For operator assistance, please press star and zero. The conference must not be recorded for publication or broadcast. At this time, it is my pleasure to hand over to Filip Lindvall, Vice President, Group Strategy and Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.

Filip Lindvall
VP of Group Strategy and Investor Relations, Scout24

Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Scout24 second quarter and first half 2026 earnings call. My name is Filip Lindvall, and I am 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 made available shortly after the event. Please take note of the disclaimer on page two. Ralf, over to you.

Ralf Weitz
CEO, Scout24

Thank you, Filip. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us. The second quarter of 2026 shows that Scout24 continues to combine strong financial performance with leadership in AI and innovation. In the second quarter, we delivered 20% revenue growth, continued double-digit organic growth, and further organic margin expansion. Less than three months after our CMD, we are already making strong progress on the strategic priorities we set out there. Our B2B subscription business continues to deliver industry-leading growth. On the consumer side, our B2C subscriptions are gaining momentum in a challenging market, with more seekers choosing higher value memberships that include our recently launched AI features. immo.ai is increasingly becoming part of every customer journey across our platform. We are seeing exponential growth in AI usage, new products, and new revenue streams. I will come back to this in more detail later.

At the same time, AI is changing how we work internally. Since our CMD, the use of AI agents across the company has continued to grow, and we are making good progress building our Agent Factory. This is accelerating how we develop products, automate workflows, and innovate across Scout24. We also continue to strengthen one of our biggest competitive advantages, exclusive content. Our platform, brand, and product innovation continue to attract unique inventory, giving customers access to more properties than any competitor in Germany. Beyond Germany, Spain is developing in line with our expectations. Integration is progressing well, while our German business continues to expand margins and demonstrate the scalability of our operating model. These results reinforce our confidence in the year ahead, and we are confirming our full year guidance.

Let's take a closer look at customer growth, which remains one of the clearest indicators of the strengths of our business. In professional, we continue to add customers across all major customer groups, while customer migration to our membership offering continues to progress well. We now have migrated more than 16,000 customers, and most of them are still on bronze memberships. That gives us significant potential for future migration and ARPU growth. Delivering this level of customer growth quarter after quarter in an already highly penetrated market is exceptional. On the consumer side, we said at our Q1 earnings call that customer growth would accelerate during the second quarter. That is exactly what we delivered. Our subscription strategy continues to gain momentum, driven by the updated Search Plus membership tiering and Living Plus.

We are continuously expanding the value we offer our private customers, and I will show you some of these innovations in just a few minutes. There's much more to come in the second half of the year. Turning to page six, I will give you an update on the German real estate market. What we are seeing here is a clear proof that our platform is becoming more relevant. As our brand strength and product initiatives continue to gain traction, active listings increased by almost 18% year-on-year. Our tenant network now includes more than 50,000 listings, up from around 25,000 at the time of our Capital Markets Day. Today, the Scout24 property network gives seekers access to more than 6.5 million properties across Germany. Something no competitor in Germany can offer.

The sales market remained healthy throughout the first half of 2026, despite a more challenging macroeconomic environment and higher interest rate expectations. Contact request volumes remained at healthy levels. The rental market continues to suffer from a structural undersupply of affordable housing after years of underinvestment in new construction. At the same time, higher rents and continued macroeconomics uncertainty are reducing overall search activity. Even in this environment, ImmoScout24 continues to gain market share, with search volumes proving more resilient than the broader German market. Continuing on the topic of the real estate market, conditions and new build remain very challenging. As the chart shows, housing completions declined from around 300,000 in 2021 to around 200,000 in 2025, with a further decline expected in 2026. That leaves the market around 40% below peak levels. High interest rates, elevated construction costs, and regulatory hurdles continue to weigh on new build activity.

Even so, our membership business continues to grow strongly. We continue to add customers, grow revenues, and deepen customer relationships through broader product adoption. Our developer and new home builder businesses are both growing by around 15% year-to-date, despite one of the weakest new build markets in years. The reason is simple. We are no longer just offering marketing products. We are becoming part of our customers' daily workflows through solutions such as Propstack, bulwiengesa, and neubau kompass. That makes our products more relevant, strengthens customer relationships, and makes our business more resilient across market cycles. At our CMD, we showed how AI search had already become part of the ImmoScout24 experience and was beginning to take off. We also explained how combining natural language search with our unique data assets would create a new intelligence flywheel. Just a few months later, data is already validating that strategy.

AI search actions on ImmoScout24 are up 47 times year-on-year, reaching 3.3 million in June alone. More importantly, AI users are more engaged, spend more time on the platform, and generate higher quality leads. This is exactly how the intelligence flywheel starts to work. Every customer interaction makes our intelligence better. Better intelligence creates a better product. Better product drives more engagement, stronger monetization, and even more customer interaction. There's another very interesting insight. One year into the debate about AI disruption search, we still see virtually no meaningful traffic coming from external LLMs. The data leads us to a clear conclusion. Consumers want to use AI at the source of truth on ImmoScout24. Continuing on AI, this time on consumer subscriptions. At our CMD, we said we would integrate premium AI services into our B2C subscriptions. Less than three months later, we have done exactly that.

We have launched the AI application assistant as part of our top-tier Unlimited package, which has an ARPU of EUR 30, 100% higher than our standard product. The assistant helps customers manage their property search by continuously monitoring the market, automatically submitting applications, and keeping searches up to date, making the whole experience easier and more valuable. Since the launch, we have already seen strong uptake of the Unlimited tier, with signups doubling. This reinforces the message from our CMD. When AI is integrated into the product in the right way, it creates real consumer value and increases engagement. The same pattern we are seeing on the consumer side is now clearly visible in professional. AI is now integrated into our silver and gold memberships. It helps customers create better content, improve relevance, and generate better leads.

We can now offer relevance and visibility products for AI-powered search alongside our existing search and listing products. We are also seeing strong momentum in Propstack. AI customer usage has almost doubled during the first half, while Propstack continues to grow revenues by around 20% year- to- date. Finally, ImmoPoints are becoming the digital currency of our professional ecosystem. More than 9,000 customers are already actively using them, generating EUR 3.2 million of MRR. As we continue to launch new AI capabilities, we expect ImmoPoints revenues to grow even further. The message is simple. AI is already driving customer growth, stronger customer value, and new monetization opportunities across our professional business. Let me close by putting today's progress into the broader context of our Capital Markets Day. At CMD 2024, our focus was on interconnectivity. We had completed the investment phase and built the leading digital real estate platform.

The next step was to connect our products, our customers, and our ecosystem to create a much stronger business. We also laid the groundwork for our AI roadmap well ahead of the curve. Over the last three years, we have consistently delivered on that strategy. Quarter- after- quarter, we have strengthened our products, expanded our ecosystem, and continued to deliver outstanding financial results. At the same time, we have become the innovation leader in our industry. Today, Agentic OS is the next step in our journey. Powered by immo.ai and our Agent Factory, it extends our interconnectivity strategy by embedding AI across products, workflows, and transactions, accelerating innovation across the platform. We started our AI journey early, That is now becoming a real competitive advantage. Our AI product suite is already helping our customers find properties faster, more efficiently, and make better decisions.

At the same time, it is helping us to automate more processes and become a more AI-native organization. We are now starting to see those benefits translate into financial results. On the revenue side, AI is creating new recurring revenue streams. On the cost side, it is improving productivity and strengthening our operating leverage. We are ready on the technology side. We are seeing the first benefits come through, and we are still only at the beginning of that journey. With that, let me hand over to Martin, who will show you how this translates into an even stronger financial model.

Martin Mildner
CFO, Scout24

Thanks, Ralf, and welcome also from my side. Before I will start with the presentation of our numbers, I like to summarize my first five months at Scout24. After the preparation of our Capital Markets Day in May and seeing how fast we are able to implement our Agentic OS strategy to life, I am even more convinced than at the beginning of my role that this is a truly special company. We combine a product innovation first mindset with leading pricing power and a relentless focus on execution. That combination allow us to deliver consistent growth quarter- after- quarter while continuing to invest in the future. In the current market environment, that is a rare combination. Our second quarter once again demonstrates the quality of the business model. We delivered 20% revenue growth, continued double-digit organic growth, and further organic margin expansion.

This operating leverage translate directly into earnings with adjusted EPS increasing by 19% in the first half of 2026. Underlying cash generation also remains strong. Excluding the temporary LTIP cash outs, our operating cash flow increased broadly in line with organic revenue growth. I will now take you through the financial performance in more detail. Let me start on page 14 with our professional segment, which continues to demonstrate why it is our highest quality business. The German subscription business remains exceptionally strong, delivering industry-leading mid-teen growth supported by high retention, customer growth, pricing power, and double-digit ARPU growth. This reflects the success of our membership strategy and the growing contribution of AI capabilities.

As Ralf already explained, the introduction of our digital currency, our ImmoPoints, clearly shows that our new AI-driven products are not only highly valued by our customers, but that we are also able to monetize these new features. At the same time, we continue to reshape transaction enablement towards more scalable digital businesses. Software-as-a-Service and digital valuation products are growing at double-digit rates while we are becoming increasingly selective in less scalable parts of the portfolio. Moreover, Spain also continues to develop in line with our expectations, contributing EUR 50 million of revenue in the quarter. On the cost side, we remain in the integration phase. We continue to incur transitional service costs as we complete to carve out from the former owner. These costs will gradually decline over the next six to nine months as integration progresses. What I find most encouraging is the profitability.

Our organic operating EBITDA margin in the professional segment exceeded 65% in the second quarter. This reflects not only pricing power, but also our ability to successfully integrate acquisitions while improving margins. Just one year after closing all three acquisitions, in particular, the acquisition of Sprengnetter and bulwiengesa, are already contributing to margin expansion. That gives us a proven blueprint for Spain and reinforces our confidence that we will continue to improve margins through the second half of 2026, with the full benefits becoming increasingly visible as we enter 2027. Let's come to page 15 and take a look at our private business where we continue to see encouraging momentum. Overall growth remains strong at 8.4% in the second quarter, broadly in line with the first quarter. The most encouraging development is our subscription business.

Search Plus, Living Plus, and our new AI capabilities are driving accelerated subscription growth with momentum improving both sequentially and year-over-year. This gives us confidence that our product strategy is working, and as I said at the Capital Markets Day, with further product launches still to come later this year. Our pay-per-ad business also continued to perform well. It is benefiting from our growing content base and a more demanding rental market. While growth naturally moderated in the second quarter against a stronger comparison, it remained close to double digits. More importantly, it demonstrates that our content strategy is working. We are increasingly able to monetize different market environments, making the business more resilient as conditions evolve.

Finally, the slightly lower margin reflects targeted marketing investments, supporting the rollout of our new B2C products, especially with the so-called gray market initiatives, which already lead to an impressive number of increasing listings of rental offerings on our platform, as you can read from our press release. These are deliberate investments that support the accelerating subscription momentum we are seeing today. With page 16, I will now switch from the revenues to our cost development. The development of our cost once again highlights the strengths of our operating model. Three months after our Capital Markets Day, we continue to invest behind exactly the priorities we outlined: AI, product innovation, brand, and the integration of Spain. Yet our organic cost base increased by only 6.4% compared with 10.5% organic revenue growth.

Please note that you will find in the appendix to this presentation a detailed breakdown of our reported and our organic cost developments, separating the costs which are allocated to Spain and to our organic core business. Let me highlight three examples that demonstrate the strengths of our operating model and why we are confident that we can apply the same approach in Spain with the effect of an improving overall margin within the next two and a half years, as we demonstrated it within our CMD. First, personnel cost. Of course, our largest cost bucket declined by 3.5% organically in the first half. Exactly what we outlined, reflecting our higher organization effectiveness, productivity improvements, and our continued transition towards a more AI-native organization. Second, organic IT costs grow by only 8.4%, way below organic revenue growth, despite continued investments in technology, automation, and our AI roadmap.

At a time when many companies are experiencing AI-related cost inflation, we continue to fund innovation while keeping technology costs well under control. Third, marketing costs increased by 18.9% organically, exactly as planned, reflecting targeted investments behind our brand, new B2C products and in addition, marketing costs were also impacted by the integration of Spain. Taken together, this demonstrates the scalability of our operating model. We continue to invest behind innovation while at the same time keeping organic cost growth way below revenue growth. Our organic ordinary operating EBITDA margin reached 64% in the second quarter. Please let me make one additional point on Spain. We are very confident in our ability to optimize the cost base over the coming quarters, and we complete the carve-out and integration into Scout24.

We have successfully applied the Scout24 playbook across multiple acquisitions, and we are already doing exactly the same in Spain. That gives us strong confidence that we will deliver a steadily improving margin trajectory over the coming quarters and years, creating significant long-term value from this acquisition. Continuing on the next page, where you can see that the items below our ordinary operating EBITDA developed favorably in the second quarter as well, supporting strong first half earnings growth on both a reported and adjusted EPS basis. The non-operating effects were materially lower year-over-year, mainly reflecting much lower share-based compensation costs. I will come to this item in more detail on the next slide. D&A increased moderately, reflecting the higher amortization of acquisition-related assets following the Spain acquisition. Our adjusted EPS increased by 18.8% to EUR 1.97, outpacing revenue growth despite the expected dilution from Spain.

Basic EPS also increased strongly to EUR 1.87, benefiting from the lower non-operating effects. Overall, our first half earnings growth is another proof point to the scalability and quality of the Scout24 operating model. Strong operating performance remains a primary driver of earnings growth, complemented by our value accretive share buyback program, which further supported EPS through a 3% lower weighted average share count. On page 18, you can see the bridge between our reported and our adjusted net income for the first half of the year 2026. Within these bridge items, there are four key elements I would like to highlight. First, our non-operating effects, excluding share-based compensation, declined significantly, reflecting mostly lower M&A-related costs. Of course, this was partly offset by continued PMI and restructuring costs as we implement the organizational transformation outlined at our CMD and build a more AI-native organization.

Second, share-based compensation was broadly neutral in the first half. The positive effect from the release of the provisions for the LTIP payouts, which we made in the first quarter of 2026, were largely offset by new provisions in the second quarter, covering the new LTIP tranches for 2026 and also by an increased share price. Third, PPA D&A increased as expected, reflecting the higher amortization of acquired intangible assets following the Spain acquisition. Finally, the financial result benefited from around EUR 4 million of fair value gains on our VC fund investments and approximately EUR 2 million from the revaluation for the Springlane call options. Before I will come to our cash flow and our capital structure, please let me first put today's results into the broader context of our CMD.

As I already said, after my first five months at Scout24, I am absolutely convinced about the quality of the business and its long-term potential in the light of our CMD and our presented strategy of the agentic operating system. You go back to our CMD in 2024, we had a clear strategy, a strong operating model, and ambitious financial objectives. Today, I believe the opportunity is even larger. Not because our strategy has changed, but because the business itself has become stronger and supported by continuous important strategic investments in our ecosystem. Over the last two years, we have consistently executed, delivered on our commitments, and proven that our operating model scales. Perhaps the biggest difference today compared with our capital markets day in 2024 is AI. Two years ago, it was a strategic ambition, which we already highlighted as a key pillar of the future development.

Today, it is becoming a major part of how Scout24 operates. AI helps us build better products, deepen customer engagement, and most importantly for a CFO, creates new monetization opportunities. At the same time, it enables us to innovate faster, automate more processes, and significantly shorten the time from an idea to customer impact. In other words, AI is strengthening both sides of our P&L. It supports sustainable revenue growth while making our operating model even more scalable and increasing our operating leverage. Combined with our industry-leading subscription businesses, expanding monetization across the customer journey, and our proven ability to integrate acquisitions while expanding margins, I believe the foundation of the business is stronger than ever. For me, the most important change since our CMD in 2024 is that our growth drivers are no longer developing independently. They are reinforcing one another. Better products drive stronger customer engagement.

AI accelerates innovation and efficiency. A scalable operating model translates those advantages into consistent financial delivery. That is why I believe Scout24 is becoming an even stronger compounding model for shareholders than we have seen two years ago, and why I am so confident in the opportunities that lie ahead of us. Turning now to page 20 and our free cash flow development. Starting from a net income of EUR 132 million at the end of the first half of last year, free cash flow amounted to EUR 101 million in the first half of this year. The main driver of the year-on-year decline was around EUR 25 million of LTIP cash outflows, reflected in working capital and provisions relating to incentive programs from previous financial years. Excluding this effect, free cash flow would have increased year-on-year, underlying the strength of our cash generation.

Cash conversion remains strong at 73% of adjusted net income and 45% of ordinary operating EBITDA. Turning to leverage and capital allocation. During the first half of this year, we deployed almost EUR 400 million of capital across strategic M&A, share buybacks, and dividends. To remind you, we paid a dividend of EUR 105 million in the second quarter, and we already bought back more than 1.7 million of shares in the first half of the year with a cash consideration of EUR 123 million. By the end of the first half of the year, we had more than 3.8 million treasury shares, representing 5.25% of our share capital. As you know, we are currently running another share buyback tranche in the second half of the year with an outstanding buyback volume of around EUR 220 million today.

In addition to the free cash flow generated during the period, these investments were funded through a EUR 300 million Schuldschein or in English, promissory note, issued at attractive terms and additional debt. As a result of our investments in M&A, share buybacks, and the dividend payout, our financial leverage increased to just 0.99 times at the end of the second quarter, leaving us with significant financial flexibility. Let me conclude on page 22 with our guidance. Based on our strong first half-year performance, we are of course confirming our full-year guidance for 2026 with a very high level of confidence. We continue to expect revenue growth of 16%-18%, including around six to seven percentage points from Spain, and an ordinary operating EBITDA margin of up to 61% or up to 64% on an organic basis. Let me make a few comments on phasing.

Based on our first half revenue performance and the outlook for the second half, we are currently tracking toward the upper end of our revenue growth range. As always, we will provide a more specific update with our third quarter results when we have even greater visibility for the remainder of the year. On profitability, the second quarter already demonstrates the strength of our operating model with a group-level organic operating EBITDA margin of 64%. This reflects the efficiency of our German business and our proven ability to expand margins following acquisitions. The path towards our guidance of up to 61% reported operating EBITDA margin will continue to build through the second half of this year. This will be supported by lower TSA costs in Spain, continued optimization of the Spain cost base, and further efficiency gains in our German business as we continue the transition towards an AI-native organization.

Based on our track record of integrating acquisitions and executing PMI programs, we are highly confident in our ability to deliver the same outcome in Spain. Consistently delivering on our commitments while improving profitability has become a hallmark of the Scout24 business model, and we are confident that 2026 will be another example of that. Thank you for your continued interest in Scout24. Ralf and I are now happy to take your questions. Please limit your questions to two questions per speaker. I will now hand over to the operator again, and thank you for your interest.

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, 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. One moment for the first question, please. The first question comes from Edward Young from Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.

Edward Young
Analyst, Morgan Stanley

Good afternoon. My first question's on private subscriptions. Could you give a bit of color on the churn during Q2? You obviously entered and exited at a higher number than the average during the quarter. What has caused that? Was it concentrated in any particular packages or cohorts? How should we think about growth in private subs coming out of the period? The second question is on AI. You mentioned on the consumer side, you are seeing search interactions increasing nearly 50x year-over-year. I just wondered if you could give some color on whether you are seeing any change in the consumer behavior or any associated increase in engagement or paid conversion or leads being sent to agents. Thanks.

Ralf Weitz
CEO, Scout24

Hi, Ralf here. Happy to take your questions. On the private business, what we can say is that we exited the Q2. The numbers in June are 522,000 subscribers on the consumer side. Plus subscriptions. This is actually a positive development. We are accelerating our subscriber growth compared to Q1, and something we see it is possible to continue in July already. We see higher numbers here as well. If you sum it up and you take the run rate, the current one we have, then we would land double-digit revenue growth. We are quite happy with the progress we are making. I mentioned it last time. Maybe to give a bit of context of the number I mentioned in the last call, where I said 530,000 in April.

That was the test we did, where we did a win-back campaign in April. The campaign actually was quite successful and led to subscriptions of over 530,000 in April. We decided in May to take the campaign down and not to count the customers from that campaign into the subscriber numbers. As I said, 522,000 end of June. This is really sustainable growth and we are making progress, as I said, and can accelerate the revenue growth for the private business. That was question number one. Question number two was regarding the AI usage of the audience. I have to say we are quite happy. We see that the people are more engaged if they are using our AI features. That is true for both, for consumers as well for professional customers.

If they are more engaged, actually what they experience as a consumer or as a user of it, they experience a better matching experience. That means their search experience becomes more efficient and we are more relevant to them because we can provide a better matching than our competition can do at the moment. That means also that the quality of leads those consumers generating, so contact requests to real estate agents, they have a better quality. The consumers, they gain some efficiency on the search experience and our professional customers, they get a better quality in terms of leads and contact requests.

Edward Young
Analyst, Morgan Stanley

Okay, thank you.

Operator

The next question comes from Adam Berlin from Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.

Adam Berlin
Analyst, Goldman Sachs

Hi, good afternoon. My first question is on ARPA in the professional business, which grew 10% in the first half and in the second quarter. Can you give us any color on the drivers of that 10% ARPA growth? How much of it is coming from upgrades to these new AI-powered tiers? Is there any kind of diminution of ARPA because of the new subscribers? How much is just price? Any color you can give us on the kind of drivers of that 10%? That's the first question. Second question is, can you give us an underlying growth rate for the Spain business, please? Revenue growth.

Ralf Weitz
CEO, Scout24

I can start and maybe for Spain, if possible, Martin, you can put some color on. If it comes to ARPA growth, it's always a mix on value in the packages. We see customers upgrading their memberships into a higher tier. We are also migrating customers from the old membership world into the new one. Still, we do upsell with ImmoPoints for AI features. What we see actually is that we see higher perception or higher usage of AI features on the V side, and we see that we are able to monetize those AI usage or intelligence usage via ImmoPoints. I think we disclosed the revenue we do with the ImmoPoints, and it's a strong growth here. This is actually driven by AI features. This is what I can share. Other than that, we are not disclosing actually.

ARPA is not just talking about price increases. This is not the approach we follow. As you know, we have here a different approach. We call it responsible pricing. Most of the ARPA growth has to come from membership upgrades and multi- product usage.

Adam Berlin
Analyst, Goldman Sachs

Spain?

Martin Mildner
CFO, Scout24

Adam, maybe from my side, it's Martin speaking. Regarding the underlying growth rates in Spain, I think currently, and to have a broader view, more from a 30,000 feet perspective on Spain, you know that we took over Spain in March, and we are now really working on the integration of Spain and putting, as I said in the call or in our script, putting the playbook of Scout24 on Spain, and there are some homework to do. Therefore, currently you see that we are roughly having EUR 5 million per month, on the revenue side in Spain, if you count it up from March onwards.

We said over the entire year for 12 months, and you know that we have only 10 months in our books for this year, but for a 12-month period, we said that we like to achieve EUR 60 million of revenues in our press release in September last year. We are, as we said, quite confident that we are reaching these numbers. Currently our focus is really to have the same playbook as here, to have much more longer contracts with our customers, which lead then also to more subscription safe revenue model where you have an increase month-over-month. As we said in other calls, currently Spain is structured in a much different way than we are doing our business. The contracts are much shorter.

You have sometimes the dip in the month over the summer where the contracts are canceled, and we are now turning this into our model where you really have more long-term contracts. Therefore, I would say please give us some time for this year to make the transformation and to see then in the next year that the playbook is the same way as in Germany. That we then have also, having not anymore the TSA transition cost, that we have more synergies. Overall, we're clearly focusing on our EUR 60 million run rate for an entire year divided by 12, multiplied with 10 months. I think this is where we are approaching for the full year, and we are really focusing on getting the costs under control and having cost reductions by TSAs, but also by having synergies.

I apologize that I had a broader view on this, maybe this tells you a little bit how we are looking also in the Spain business.

Adam Berlin
Analyst, Goldman Sachs

Yeah, that's helpful. Thank you.

Operator

The next question comes from Adeola Ojo from Citi. Please go ahead.

Adeola Ojo
Analyst, Citi

Hi. Thanks for taking my question. My first question is on ImmoPoints. I think we saw that 60% of customers are now using them. I understand that usage is expected to grow, can you give us a bit of color on where you see penetration reaching? Maybe what AI features are most popular? On Spain, thanks for the underlying color, it would be helpful to understand what's driving growth. Is it more so membership growth or is it pricing? On the share of advertising in Spain, I think the plan was to take down the share of advertising as a share of revenues. Is that still the case? Thank you.

Ralf Weitz
CEO, Scout24

I thought maybe, I start with the ImmoPoints. The way how it works, we presented it at the Capital Market Day that we established ImmoPoints as our currency within our ecosystem where people can consume additional services and AI features are in this perspective, additional services. In the moment where our customers consume more intelligence in the system, because we are creating or we build partially our ImmoAI system. In the moment where people consume intelligence, for instance if they want to create a virtual staging or if they need the floor plans, AI-built and so on, then they have to use ImmoPoints for that. Actually all the AI features in particular, they drive the ImmoPoints consumption. We see that this is working. What it also drives is product usage for our customers.

In our ecosystem, we have many different products here. They are all, in a way, connected to each other, so you can transfer the data from one feature to the other easily. This is actually the big advantage of having one ecosystem here. If you want to use more services within the ecosystem, you also have to spend then the ImmoPoints. For instance, if you want to use our agent software product, for instance, then you can use ImmoPoints for it. Ideally, we will see more usage coming with that customer because you mentioned the number. Hopefully, in the future, more customers will use ImmoPoints. They will also commit to ImmoPoints. It's not that we want to have recurring revenue, even with the ImmoPoints here. We also see that we are able to bring more and more products on this model where we monetize the intelligence.

It's more products we are adding to our ImmoPoints universe, so that we can pay with ImmoPoints as more, let's say, revenue we are going to see in the ImmoPoints revenue line. This is what I can say to ImmoPoints. On Spain, what the driver revenue, Martin just mentioned it a bit. It's actually the normal classified playbook, where you have memberships, where you need to grow in customer numbers, where you have to add some on-top products to it. Hopefully, customers will buy it, but this is actually what we have to establish in Spain. Many of the contracts we have in Spain with our professional customers, they are not long-term, they are short-term contracts. If you move, let's say, the customers into long-term contracts, of course, the volatility for revenue will go down, in particular during the summer.

This is actually what we want to do there. As I said, normal execution of the classified playbook. You asked about the advertising revenues. I think we said it in one of the other calls already. Actually, we want to become more independent from those advertising revenues. I don't know. I don't have the exact numbers, how much it is at the moment from the revenue side. Do we have it?

Filip Lindvall
VP of Group Strategy and Investor Relations, Scout24

The low to mid-single digits here with million numbers.

Ralf Weitz
CEO, Scout24

Yeah. Closing it fully.

Filip Lindvall
VP of Group Strategy and Investor Relations, Scout24

Yeah.

Ralf Weitz
CEO, Scout24

Yeah. We want to focus because it's important, in particular, if you are the number two in the market, that you have a good product experience. The revenues are not that big, so ideally, we can replace those revenue easily if we are doing a good job on the membership side here for professionals, and that's actually the strategy.

Adeola Ojo
Analyst, Citi

Thank you. Maybe just one tiny follow-up. On the ImmoPoints, using the AI features, I think it was asked earlier, can we get any sense of how much that is driving ARPU?

Ralf Weitz
CEO, Scout24

Do we want to disclose this, Dirk?

Filip Lindvall
VP of Group Strategy and Investor Relations, Scout24

No, not yet. What we can say is that ImmoPoints is growing very fast. We started off in 2024. We came out with the concept at the CMD. Today we're doing over 3 million run rates. That obviously gives you a feeling for the growth. It's obviously growing materially faster than the membership line overall. It has a net positive contribution to ARPU.

Adeola Ojo
Analyst, Citi

Thank you very much.

Operator

The next question comes from Craig Abbott from Kepler Cheuvreux. Please go ahead.

Craig Abbott
Analyst, Kepler Cheuvreux

Yes, good afternoon. I'd like to just come back, please, to the private segment. Thank you for sharing some color earlier on how you're thinking about the subscriber growth developing throughout the back half of the year. My first question would be, how do you see those marketing costs developing and the EBITDA margin progression we should be thinking about? The second question, maybe it's not that material, but I would just like to gain some more color, please, on the Landlord Plus product. How is it developing? How material is it? How sticky are those subscribers? If I'm not mistaken, I think the average duration here is longer compared with your other Plus products. Any color you could provide here would be appreciated. Thank you.

Ralf Weitz
CEO, Scout24

Yeah. Hi, Craig. Let me start with the private business. You asked about the marketing costs. As you probably know, we tested a lot in the last couple of months on the product side. Of course, if you're introducing new product here, you have to do some marketing around that. This is actually what we did, and that's what you can see reflected in the marketing here. We had to promote a bit the product features. We had to explain them to consumers, but also to professional customers, that they are receiving a detail what's the difference. What we see already, this is what I didn't mention before, we have in the highest tier at the moment, there's a new AI features in our application assistant.

With this assistant, thus seekers, they can apply automatically for relevant homes for them, and they are faster than others, even faster than other Plus subscribers if they are in the lower tiers. This is actually driving also ARPU on the Plus subscription side. Again, what you see on the professional side with the ImmoPoints is also something we experience on the consumer side with our Plus subscription. I think it was a good decision to tier the product into different tiers and put more value in for those who want to be faster than the others, because that was a bit the issue, that the product became commodity here in Germany. This is what we have changed, and it's good. Of course, we had to do marketing. Other than that, I think we reconfirmed today our margin guidance.

Of course, this is what we will deliver. Yeah. That was number one. Number two was the-

Craig Abbott
Analyst, Kepler Cheuvreux

The landlord product.

Ralf Weitz
CEO, Scout24

The landlord product. Right. I think you said it correctly that the stickiness for homeowners using the product is higher in the paid product. The entry product actually is a free product for homeowners. What we see in this free bucket, we were able to increase the engagement here. This is important because if we want to do upsell into paid products, you need to have engagement on the free product first. We still have to do some work here on the product. It's really in the early stage. It's a bit like what we did with the Plus products 10 years ago, where we had to shape the market. It's a bit the same here on the homeowner side. We are really happy with the content homeowners delivering to the platform.

We have 6.5 million properties in our homeowner product, and this is actually content no other portal can offer to seekers. To give seekers access to this content is really an advantage for the platform. There is not just value in monetizing homeowners, there is also a value for the seeker side and also for Plus subscribers. Therefore, from the content contribution topic or perspective, we are really happy. If it comes to monetization, there is still potential, and as I said before, we have to shape the market here first. Hope that helps.

Craig Abbott
Analyst, Kepler Cheuvreux

Okay. It does, and if I take a step back and look at your overall Plus portfolio, that's like you're developing the subscriber base there. You're already using content also across to your other products. In terms of driving the actual revenue line, and therefore also the EBITDA line, it's the other Plus products with potential in the future to come from the landlord product. Is that the way we should think about it?

Ralf Weitz
CEO, Scout24

We said from the strategy perspective, we would like to move deeper into the gray market as more markets are regulated, and that's what you can see at the moment here in Germany. The market gets more regulated by the government, and as more content is going into this hidden or gray market. Our Landlord Plus product actually is unlocking this gray market. What we do is we do a kind of matching even, we call it pre-market. We do a kind of matching in the pre-market, and this is accessible in particular for Plus subscribers. They can sign up for a waiting list for every address in Germany in the future. Therefore, you are right, ideally, the landlord or homeowner product is driving Plus subscriptions at the end.

It's not the only, let's say, feature we have in the pipeline to drive Plus subscriptions. There are also other things we can imagine. For instance, we have the product that's called Living Plus, right? Ideally, we have products where people move from the search phase into the living phase, and we stay relevant for those users. If we are successful with that, then we can expand the lifetime from today, six to 12 months, into eight months, because that's the average lifetime of a tenant here in Germany.

Craig Abbott
Analyst, Kepler Cheuvreux

Very helpful. Thank you very much.

Operator

The next question comes from Will Packer from BNP Paribas. Please go ahead.

Will Packer
Analyst, BNP Paribas

Hi there. Many thanks for taking my questions. Two from me, please. Firstly, thanks for the framing on the new home segment. It does sound somewhat familiar from what we've heard in other markets, where eventually the supply crunch feeds through and results in more disappointing classified revenue. Could you remind us what percentage of professional revenue is generated in new homes? Perhaps frame a little bit more on the supply outlook in Germany and perhaps what gives you confidence that that will improve in due course. Secondly, whilst the competitive backdrop has ultimately been pretty stable in the last few years, there's been lots of changes of control. Can you just help us think through any recent developments on the competitive side, or is it all still pretty quiet? Thank you.

Ralf Weitz
CEO, Scout24

Maybe I start with the competition. What we see, let's start maybe with the rent side and then on the new homes. Filip will give you a bit details and background here. As many other markets in Europe, the real estate market at the moment, they are challenging, not just on the new home side, also on the rent side, because there's a lot of uncertainty. The economy is weak. Prices to rent an apartment here in Germany, they are high. This is making something with the overall demand for properties if it comes to properties for rent. The overall demand for rent properties in Germany is going down. We are participating here.

We are gaining market share because the percentage, which is, let's say, where the demand is going down on our website is lower than it is with the competition. That shows us that we are even able in tough markets to grow market share. One reason for that is that we are able to deliver content others cannot deliver. This exclusive content strategy we presented first in 2024, and now we're executing along this, and we updated the strategy on the Capital Markets Day this year as well here. I think it's paying off now. People appreciate that they find content there which they cannot find on other portals, and therefore we can win market share here in this rent space in particular, even if the overall demand for rent properties is going down in Germany.

On new home, maybe Filip, because you have the numbers, you can share it.

Filip Lindvall
VP of Group Strategy and Investor Relations, Scout24

The reason we put in the slide, we wanted to talk about the story is that we want to show that we're able to grow in all the markets across cycles. This was also a topic at the CMD. One of the reasons is that we offer products for the entire transaction flow. It's much more than just marketing. We're deeply integrated into the workflows of these customers, and actually even some products where we just share the transactional upside with the customer. We're not charging anything upfront. We have a flexible approach.

What we wanted to say also on the slide is that our membership business continues to grow through this cycle, and we didn't put the numbers specifically, but our new home builder business and developer business is growing around 15% year to date. That's obviously very strong numbers, and in terms of the total pie, it's slightly less than 20% of the membership business.

Ralf Weitz
CEO, Scout24

There's one effect maybe we can also put into consideration is that the square meter prices to build new homes, they are still increasing here in Germany. That leads to high square meter prices when it comes to sales of new homes. That means also, from the developer perspective, you have to do more marketing in order to sell those properties. This is actually where we step into, right?

Where we say, "Look, here's a product for you to convert your high square meter prices into a sale." With high interest rates we are having here at the moment, I think it's not getting easier for the developer. It's the other way around, and they need more marketing support here as well. They need also more intelligence. Targeting the right buyers and finding them in the ecosystem, that's also what we do now. We are doing specific campaigns for developers, and that's how we can grow the business even in challenging times. Yeah.

Will Packer
Analyst, BNP Paribas

Thanks for the color.

Operator

The next question comes from Annick Maas from Bernstein. Please go ahead.

Annick Maas
Analyst, Bernstein

Good afternoon. My first question is going back to private subs. If you could give us a little bit more granularity in between how many are coming from subs, well, having signed up to the new Search Plus tiers versus Living Plus, given you call out Living Plus as having grown quite strongly in your press release. The second one is on Spain. You keep on repeating that you want to repeat the playbook of Germany, which I guess, as you just highlighted, includes having products for the entire transaction flow. In that context, how shall we think about the Spanish M&A envelope over the next years? Respectively, what type of assets do you think are most relevant owning quite quickly in Spain? Thank you.

Ralf Weitz
CEO, Scout24

I think about how to start. Maybe we start with the M&A in Spain. I think, first of all, from my perspective, there's no pressure to do an acquisition in Spain in order to complete something. First of all, we have to integrate what we acquired. We have to bring it to a situation where we see sustainable growth. That means we see our famous revenue ladder, where we do every month more revenue than the month before. Where we see growing customer numbers, where we also see some innovations on the product side. Those innovations, of course, we can copy those innovations from ImmoScout24 here in Germany. That's actually what we would like to do. Let's say we have an agent software product in Spain as well, so we don't need to acquire it.

We also have access to real estate valuation data in Spain, so we don't need to acquire it. If it comes to audience, I don't know. This is something, of course, we have to watch out always. It's the same what we are doing here, how the audience channels are changing, where they are going, and so on. As I said, there's no pressure to do something here additional. First of all, we would like to show that we are able to integrate the Fotocasa business into our universe and to make it work. That's the most important thing. If it comes to private subscriptions, again, I think we don't want to disclose here any detail, because it's also relevant for competition. What we can see is that the tiering we did, and you see it in the ARPU development for the Plus subscriptions, right?

We see that with a higher tiering, we are able to drive ARPU. We are also in parallel, and that's what we tested a lot in the last couple of months, is that we need to find a path back where we can grow customer numbers. Living Plus is helping here because we are extending lifetime from those who found their apartment, because the biggest complaint of Plus subscriber is, "Oh, I found my apartment. I don't need Plus anymore." Therefore, we're working heavily on this Living Plus product, but it's not easy to find, let's say, a value set for customers that they stay for, what I mentioned before, eight years in this product. It cannot be just insurance product or so what we have today. We need to add more value to this product in order to drive the numbers further.

That's what we're working on. We have a lot of ideas here and also AI, and you see it with the application manager can help us here to enable consumers even in the living phase. For instance, there's a lot of communication between landlord and tenant, and so on. There's something we can cover with the platform. There are many ideas we are having. Yeah. For us, it's important that we are able to show that the subscriber numbers are going up, and at the same time that we have a positive ARPU impact. This is actually what we could deliver for Q2, and now we see that this is accelerating further. Yeah. The times are over where we are growing 40% every year on the private segment.

What we see now is we are able at least to grow double-digit, as we are able to do in other parts of the business. That's important in order to maintain the double-digit revenue goal for the company in sum. Therefore, we are happy with the development.

Annick Maas
Analyst, Bernstein

Thank you. Thanks.

Operator

The next question comes from Joseph Barnet-Lamb from UBS. Please go ahead.

Joseph Barnet-Lamb
Analyst, UBS

Excellent. Thank you very much. Yeah, a couple of follow-ups from me. One follow-up on private membership and this 530,000 in April. You explained that you'd stopped a temporary win-back promotion. Can you just give a bit more color on what happened here? As I think the April number you mentioned last time has led to some uncertainty today. What exactly was that promotion and why did you stop it? The second question, also a follow-up, to the conversation around private margin and the marketing investment. Do you plan to continue these marketing investments in 2H? Do you think that 2H private margin will be down year-over-year driven by those investments? I guess related to that, consensus sits at 61% for the group. With this investment, is that achievable? Thank you.

Ralf Weitz
CEO, Scout24

Thanks, Joe, for your questions. Quite good one. The campaign was regarding keeping customers or winning back customers and do the product some cross-sell. Usually the way how you do it is you offer, let's say an additional month and then you try to convert people from within this month into a different product. That's what we tried. Actually, the first numbers, in sum, they look really positive, but we were not able to convert it in a way that we are happy. We decided it's good enough in order to deliver sustainable growth for the business where I said, look, we need to show every month that we are able to add customers to our subscription model. Sorry. Therefore we decided actively not to continue that.

The numbers in April, if I remember right, it was close to 540,000 with this campaign. It turned out, as I said, that the sustainable growth out of this bucket was not as we expected or wanted to have it, therefore we stopped it. Then maybe, we should have chosen, we exited the quarter with 522,000 subscribers. This number is quite promising because in this bucket, the revenue and also the subscriber growth is sustainable. The quality here is better. Sometimes I understand that there was quite a bit of uncertainty because, also learning from me that I have to be careful with what kind of numbers I sharing in the Q&A session, because this number was not disclosed officially.

Anyway, I can understand that there was a bit of uncertainty, I also said last time, and this is true, we are testing, we are shaping here a new product set into the market, therefore we have to do marketing. Therefore the margin was not as it was before for Q2. We are quite optimistic that we are able to bring the margins back to it, as I said, because if the product is flying and if the product is established, we can deliver the margin profile we had before. Please remember that, now we are talking about margins above 60% for the private business. As we started, there was margin below 20%. You were asking me all the time, are you able to deliver margin profile the core business has?

Now we are dropping a bit because we did a bit of marketing. Everyone gets nervous. I think, it's now on us to bring it to the next wave of revenue growth, that's what we're working on. This will take some investment temporarily, this will also take some marketing spend temporarily.

Joseph Barnet-Lamb
Analyst, UBS

Thanks for the color, Ralf. Cheers.

Operator

The next question comes from Marcus Diebel from JP Morgan. Please go ahead.

Marcus Diebel
Analyst, JPMorgan

Perfect. My question was in the same direction, just to finish with private now. Are you saying with where you stand now, you commented that July is getting better. Is July customer numbers of July already better than the 522 in June. To clarify on this, on the marketing line in the appendix, you show that marketing was up organically by 19%. Is that then, given what you just said, broadly the right number also for H2, or is marketing organic growth coming down in H2? Thank you.

Ralf Weitz
CEO, Scout24

Let me start with the ask for how many subscribers we have in July. We see that the numbers in July are, we have 528,000 subscribers here, it's higher than what we had in June. As I said, the subscriber growth is quite sustainable, and we expect that this is going to continue in August and in the following months as well. What's quite positive here, as I said before, is that if you take the revenue run rate we have, and if you compare this revenue run rate with the Q1 revenue we had this year, there's double-digit revenue growth already. The question is, are you able to grow double digit in private next year? The answer is clear yes, because run rate is already on double digit. Therefore, for me, private is not the issue here.

If it comes to marketing, we don't steer the business in a way that we say, "Look, now we have to tune down marketing here and there." We steer the business in a way that we say, "At the end of the year, we have to deliver the margin we promised to you." This is what we reconfirm today. It could be that we do more marketing in private because we would like to win more market share here and there, or we would like to promote the new product more. This can happen. I cannot really give 100% guarantee for every, let's say, cost line. We need to have a bit of a wiggle room here.

As long we deliver what we promised, that's our main focus as a management team, that you get the certainty that we deliver what we promised, this is what you always got. Even today, I was quite surprised with the share price reaction. Now I understand better why. This is the best result we ever had as a company. We are one of the few and then maybe the only classified out there at the moment who is delivering double-digit revenue growth. We didn't took the guidance down. It's just that we reconfirmed everything. If you just take the results from the first half of the year and you double it, you can see where you land in terms of guidance.

In this perspective, Marcus, I understand the questions on private and a bit the uncertainty with the number I gave in the call earlier this year. Again, I think from the margin profile, there's potential we deliver what we promised this year, I'm quite confident.

Marcus Diebel
Analyst, JPMorgan

Perfect. Fair enough. Thank you.

Operator

The next question comes from Andrew Ross from Barclays. Please go ahead.

Andrew Ross
Analyst, Barclays

Great. Good afternoon, guys. I've got two on private subscription, you'll be pleased to hear. First one, though, is on the ARPU size. Can you update us on what the distribution is between standard Pro and Unlimited in terms of what percentage of subscribers are on each tier, and then what you've learned so far about ability to upsell people as you layer in new features? It sounds like the early understanding of what's happening in Unlimited with the AI features is positive. Also curious on what's happening in Pro given features you added in earlier this year. That's the first question. The second one, I hate to go back to these numbers on private subscribers, but clearly for the average of Q2 to be 517,000, April to be over 530, and the quarter to exit at 522, the low point must have been quite a lot lower.

How low did it go, and when was it? I guess what we're trying to build is a picture where it troughed and now you've seen a period of kind of sequential re-acceleration to get comfortable we're kind of through the worst and when we think about the rest of the year, that this private subscriber number starts going up and to the right again. Anything you can do to help us with that would be useful.

Ralf Weitz
CEO, Scout24

Yeah. Sorry, Andrew, I didn't get the last question fully, but maybe we start with the product split for private since we did the tiering. I hope you understand that, as I said before, we don't want to disclose here the details because it's relevant numbers or it's relevant information for the competition as well. What I can say is that the ARPU in the highest tier, it's double, and if you take the ARPU growth we delivered in Q2, you see there is already some impact coming from the highest tier. The reason why people choose the highest tier is because they perceive that the value is higher than in the lower tiers. Since we implemented in the highest tier the AI application manager, since then, we see an uptick in conversion into this higher tier.

Therefore, our working assumption is if we are able to create this extra value in the highest tier, we can grow this number further. With that, we are able, of course, to drive the ARPU number because we know that this is now more important where we are not growing that fast on the subscription numbers as well. Back to subscription, I think I explained twice the reason why the 530,000 I mentioned in the Q1 call was, what the reason is for that. We expect now with all the products and measures in place, that we are able to deliver sustainable customer growth on the subscriber side month-over-month. That's actually our aim. I cannot promise 100% that this is, but we see all the indicators at the moment are going into the right direction.

You can see if you compare Q2 with Q1, you see already that we are accelerating here. Therefore, we are on a good track, I would say. Give it a bit more time, and hopefully in Q3, then we have also another data point that this is possible to deliver. All what I see at the moment in the forecast and so on, and also in the numbers for July in particular, this is what I shared before, that we see this growth in subscriber numbers. The other question regarding the That was the last one, right? The last question regarding the number of subscribers? Andrew, sorry.

Andrew Ross
Analyst, Barclays

That was the last one. Just to be clear on that point there, Ralf. If I go through Q2, it was a bit over 530,000 in April. It must have dipped closer to 500,000 or so in May, and then it's improved up to 522,000 at the end of June and 528,000 in July. Is that roughly the shape of what's happening in Q2?

Ralf Weitz
CEO, Scout24

The 530,000, that's what I said before. The 530,000 was because we did a campaign for win-back and cross-selling, and this campaign was driving the numbers even above the 530,000. What we did then is we decided actively in May not to count those customers from the win-back and cross-selling campaign into the subscriber numbers, because we saw that the, for instance, revenue and value we are getting from this, let's say, group of people or from this bucket was not as sustainable as we thought. Therefore, we said it makes no sense to continue with this campaign, even if the campaign is delivering more subscribers, because this will not be sustainable. Therefore, the 530,000, we delivered more than 530,000 subscribers, but again, we said, "Look, don't count those customers into it," and then we corrected the numbers then in May. That was actually the reason.

There is no dip in subscriber numbers or so in May or June. It's the other way around. If you look into the details, and as I said, we didn't count the customers in from the campaign. You see an uptick in the numbers from May to June, in particular. Yeah. That's what I can say.

Andrew Ross
Analyst, Barclays

Okay.

Operator

The next question comes from Giles Thorne from Jefferies. Please go ahead.

Giles Thorne
Head of European Internet Research, Jefferies

Thank you. Back on private business. Ralf, did you decide to make the additional marketing spend following the decision to end the win-back campaign? Secondly, you mentioned in the prepared materials that as a result of these initiatives in private, you got 35,000 more listings. Can you explain why these marketing initiatives result in more content, especially if they're focused on the gray market initiative, which as far as I understand, sits within your subscription products, the waiting list, and the tenant network, and those don't actually create private listings. I probably got it wrong. If you can educate me why those marketing initiatives result in more listings. Thank you.

Ralf Weitz
CEO, Scout24

Yeah. The marketing spend was not connected to this cross-sell and win-back campaign. If you do win-back and cross-sell, usually you take customers who terminated their contracts or resigned. Actually, you don't need to spend extra money here for doing a campaign on that. The extra marketing money we did is in order to promote the different tierings we had and to do tests for the different tierings. Because if you launch such a product, you cannot use 100% of the traffic we have on the website. We decided to buy traffic from external in order to test the tiering in a way which is helping us to assess the product. That was actually what we did. The other question was regarding the-

Giles Thorne
Head of European Internet Research, Jefferies

How do you arrive at-

Ralf Weitz
CEO, Scout24

The tenant-to-tenant network is what we launched, right? Tenant-to-tenant means, if you are a seeker looking for a property, you probably live in a current apartment. Hopefully you are not homeless. You have an apartment. This is something people trade in. Tenant-to-tenant means that if you want to get a better position in the market as a seeker, you can trade in your current apartment, and that creates a gray market listing as well. Since we have the tenant-to-tenant network, there is a kind of communication between the two tenant groups here. If you look into the, let's say, local markets here in Germany, let's take Berlin.

The number of apartments where people say, "Look, I have an apartment here and I'm looking for another apartment, but I only give you my apartment if you give me the other apartment." This trade in, trade out model it's expanding here in Germany in the regional markets in particular. Now we have a product. Everything is going via our platform, and we are able to flag those extra listings in the platform, and we give access to those listings and also then access to the landlords which are behind those listings. That's what we do. On the other hand, landlords we have registered in our homeowner hub, right?

There's also, let's say, if they know that the apartment is coming to the market, they are able to use our, let's say, tenant network to collect the right potential tenants they would like to approach for their apartment. What I said before, we're trying to create a situation where we can offer a better matching between the two groups, between the landlords and the tenants. If the tenant, let's say, has an apartment he can trade in, even better then. Yeah.

Giles Thorne
Head of European Internet Research, Jefferies

Things don't become publicly available on the platform for anyone to see, do they?

Ralf Weitz
CEO, Scout24

Yeah. It becomes, but of course you can say, look, even only Plus subscribers, they get access first to the tenant-to-tenant listings because there's also high demand for those listings. You can use our playbook we have on the Plus subscriber side in order to drive more Plus subscriptions and to deliver better lead quality even to those who trade in their apartment they live in.

Giles Thorne
Head of European Internet Research, Jefferies

Okay, thank you. Just to follow up on the marketing, and to come back to a direct question that was asked earlier, do you think private margins will be higher in the second half than the first half?

Ralf Weitz
CEO, Scout24

I'm not steering like that. Sorry. I said that before.

Giles Thorne
Head of European Internet Research, Jefferies

All right.

Ralf Weitz
CEO, Scout24

We gave you a guidance for the company, we gave you here a clear margin profile for, this is what we are going to deliver. I mean, I cannot see a business if I give you 100% guarantee for every cost line. Sorry, this is something I cannot do.

Giles Thorne
Head of European Internet Research, Jefferies

Understood.

Operator

The next question comes from Nizlona Naidu from Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead.

Nizlona Naidu
Analyst, Deutsche Bank

Great, thank you. Moving away from the private business, if that's okay. My question's on Spain. Could you tell us, based on what you've seen in the country thus far, what do you think the optimal margin level could be for Spain in the next few years? Is the improvement in the Spanish margin baked into the midterm margin guidance that you've given us in the last capital markets day? Just to understand what was in the 64% by 2028 EBITDA margin target, that would be great. My second question is on the professional segment. The customer growth was better than we expected in Q2. Could you remind us where are these customers coming from? Do you expect the customer numbers in Germany to continue to increase in H2 as well within professional? Thank you.

Martin Mildner
CFO, Scout24

Hi, Nizlona. This is Martin. Thanks again, first of all, that you are driving from private to Spain, but even Spain is not so big. Regarding the EBITDA margin, the improvement of the EBITDA margin. What is the right margin? I think we will see it, we will improve it. You saw from our presentation where we had in the appendix some kind of separation of our organic costs and our costs in Spain, and that we said also that they are currently burdened by the TSA costs and that we are driving the TSA costs down and that then the margin will improve. With respect to the overall margin within our capital markets day guidance, I think it is clear that the improvement of the Spain business will also have an impact on our margin improvement.

Remember that we also gave you on one chart some indication how we would see the organic margin on the German business and how we will see the overall margin. Maybe I recall that the overall margin was for the entire business, including Spain, back to 64%. We said in November what we achieve or what we like to achieve on the organic side. Therefore, of course, the Spain improvement will also have a huge impact on the improvement of the overall margin over the next two and a half years.

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, this was the last question for today. I would now like to turn the conference back over to Filip Lindvall for any closing remarks.

Filip Lindvall
VP of Group Strategy and Investor Relations, Scout24

This concludes today's call. Thank you for joining and your interest in Scout24.

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, the conference is now over. Thank you for joining and have a pleasant day. Goodbye.