We ended up with a total of EUR 446 million in revenue, new record high, a double-digit growth as we always promised. We outperformed this even on the profitability side is an EBIT plus of 32% to EUR 47 million. 47.7 to be exact. Yeah. We outperformed our guidance, which was EUR 40 million-EUR 45 million, thanks to some additional, let's say, a perfect environment for our corporate finance entity here in the second half of the year. In the first half, we had to do a lot of work. I will come to this in more details later.
Strong numbers in a more or less flat market environment here in Germany. Talking about market environment, I would like to go a little bit more in detail to answer a lot of questions that we received lately from investors, what's going on in the German housing market and our mortgage business. Our credit business is pretty linked to this as well. First, short view to the long-term development on the demand side of housing here in Germany. We highly emphasize that you should look on the long-term trends. Long-term means the last five years and the next five years. These trends are pretty similar.
Because everything what happens on the short-term, on a monthly or a quarterly basis is not as relevant as what's going on on this long-term trends. First of all, we had the net migration to Germany pre-COVID, slowed down during COVID slightly, but will come back. This will keep going, staying like this because Germany is just a very attractive labor market in the European Union.
When you compare the chances for someone in the periphery of Europe and here in the center of Europe to receive an outstanding income, there is a huge incentive to come here. This is driving demand for housing. Next one is driving demand for housing is increasing life expectancy. In the past five years, we added a month every year. I expect this as well for the next five years that we add a month every year. People are getting older in Germany, and together with the fact that they are staying in their living space, which they are used to. We see there are more and more single person households here in Germany.
They increase the number of households needed as well. What changed in the last two years and will affect the next five and will not damage again is that your own four walls, your home, got much more important for especially the other third of the German households. They realized that during the first lockdown already two years ago that let's say private quality space is needed. Now we are for two years in a pandemic environment and everyone learned the hard way that you need a balcony.
It's even better to have a terrace and even better to have some garden-like thing around your house to let's say to feel well. The demand for this kind of space increased rapidly in the beginning of the lockdown, and it keeps staying high. Families are migrating to new apartments with more outdoor space or even buying homes outside of the cities and migrating to work because it is just more interesting and let's say more. It feels better for families and young couples to live that way.
Additional change, which started or let's say, which was actually accelerated, thanks to COVID, is working from home. It was technically for a long time possible, but the society, the acceptance in the society that you work from home by companies changed heavily with the lockdowns. Today we are pretty used to work from home and the bouncing back is still slow. People need a working space at home. They need a remote office. Close to no family had this kind of space at home.
With at-home schooling for the children, there is a lot of infrastructure and space needed and this adds up to much more living space required per household in the upcoming future. This combined with the number of households increasing, we see a huge demand right now and looking forward for the next five years, an increasing demand for housing here in Germany. On the supply side, there are two segments which supply housing. One is the sales of existing properties, the other is new constructions. On the sales side of existing properties, the increasing life expectancies reduce the supply. We have pretty high transaction costs here in Germany. You can say if a broker is included, roughly 15% of the property value is a transaction cost.
This limits especially for elderly people to reduce their living space because even when they stay in the exactly same quality level and it doesn't change quality and location at all, 15% are lost just because of transaction costs. We have a pretty intransparent market as well. This adds another, I would say, 10%. If you decide to downsize, you need to downsize more than 25% just to then you still pay the same in the end. You didn't get any equity release out of selling your home. This is pretty drastic.
Together with the social and emotional link to the current properties, lots of elderly people refuse to downsize their space. There are less properties coming to the market than compared to five or 10 years ago. Another source always there that people who bought an apartment for renting as an investment later sold it up and realized a profit. While they are sitting on huge profits, thanks to the very dynamic increase in prices here in Germany, the alternative investment options are limited. With last year secure investments still with a negative return, it stayed interesting to stay invested in your current rented apartments.
The supply from this side was low as well. Looking forward, this may change actually for the next five years, because when the interest rates slightly rise, you get alternatives and with the pretty low return on equity invested on rented space, this may change and may actually increase the supply side in the next upcoming five years. The other things will not change. Transaction costs will stay high and life expectations will keep increasing. The other thing is supply in new construction is the supply side. Here we have increased regulation in the last five years, and we expect to increase the regulation further, which drives the prices up for construction in Germany.
You can say today it's not possible in this regulatory environment to build living space below EUR 3,000 per sq meter without the cost of the ground. The highly regulated building and this is a core problem for new constructions especially in the highly regulated renting market. It just not pays back with a reasonable return on investment. It's just not being built. On the other side, we have as well as a limiting factor labor and resources with a high price increase especially during the last year which limit as well the supply side.
We increased the supply of new construction in the last five years from roughly 250,000 units per year to 300,000 units per year. When you compare this with the demand of roughly 2 million apartments in the metropolitan areas, you see that there is a huge mismatch, and we are not successful in ramping up new constructions. Looking forward, this will not change. Even when there's a political announcement that our new government will try to increase the supply side with new constructions to 400,000 units, there's actually no master plan behind this, how to achieve this. We see more and more regulation coming. We expect more regulation to come, and the resource side keeps staying limited.
I would expect a stable or slightly even decrease in new construction volume over the next five years. All in all, supply side in best case roughly stable for the housing market. High demand and looking forward even increasing demand in housing on the one side, supply side is stable, means prices rise. Property prices faster than rents because rents are over the last five years highly regulated. This makes it less interesting and less probable that new apartments for renting is built. This leads to a huge pressure in this market. When you, let's say, when you cap the prices in a product, then you increase the waiting period. To get a rented apartment is extremely difficult.
quality of rented apartments is lower than in five years ago, and they will drop in the next five years. We see more and more segregated housing market here, where renting units and quality go down, while owner-occupied apartments in quality stay stable or go up and but with a heavy price tag because this additional pressure out of the renting market, which forces people to buy properties, increases the dynamic in the property price segment even more. Last year, we saw a price increase of 13%, highest ever in the last decades. Yeah, this, let's say, this was shocking for the buyer side.
Because of still low interest rate or stable interest rate environment, people hesitated, especially in the second half of the year, to close transactions. For the future, we expect that linked to the interest rate, the property sales platform will speed up or slow down. Every time when we see an increase in interest rate, it will speed up. When we see a decrease in interest rate, we will see a slowdown of the transaction speed, and this may, on a quarterly basis, change the transaction volume slightly. On the long run, it's just important that a limited amount of properties is coming to the market with increasing prices, so the volume of prices will slightly go up.
This is something we saw the last five years and which we expect for the next five years as well. On a quarterly basis, some fluctuation. On long-term, just a stable trend. This leads, together with an increased amount of equity which is accumulated in this household stock, plus the lack of alternative investment opportunities. More equity is invested in housing that the mortgage volume will just every year slightly go up. We expect for the next five years, even with an inflation rate of something around 5% actually, that the mortgage volume will grow on this speed or slightly slower.
That said, it means it's a pretty stable and attractive market environment for Hypoport, even when there's no dynamic coming from the market. All the talk about whether there is a price bubble here in Germany, or whether a sharp increase in interest rates will deflate these prices, and will the market come down from its current transaction volume? It's from a very far distance, and as outsiders, the reality is that families for the last five years acquired apartments or houses when they needed it because they had another child or they just started to live together, not because of any interest rate or any housing prices.
You as a young family, you will always adjust your demand in quality and location. How far are you willing to drive from the work to your home to your capabilities on the financing side. Means increased interest rates may lead to farther commuting distances, but not to less transactions. Short on what happened last year so influenced our 2021 numbers and what will change in 2022. We saw a slowdown in immigration thanks to the corona environment, the lockdowns and so they had more difficulties to resettling within Europe. It's changed already right now with what's going on as a result of the attack of Russia and in Ukraine.
Yeah, looking forward, we expect a huge dynamic in the European labor market and already in 2022, and lots of people moving here to Germany because we lack workforce and we have a lot of jobs to hand over to people. Yeah. Well-paid jobs. Yeah, the rise of interest rate it started in the beginning of December and had a direct impact on transactions because now it costs you money when you wait. The sales cycles for properties decreased since the beginning of December. Waiting costs you money on the mortgage side. Before this, you just, let's say waiting costed you money only on the increasing prices of properties. Now it costs you money on both sides.
People start to act faster to drive transaction faster through the gate. In general, looking back on 2021, we can say that overall industries acquiring new clients are still affected and lower than in a normal market environment because it's really difficult from a remote distance to convince a client to migrate to your IT infrastructure and drive an important IT project forward. We see that speed of new clients in the different entities could have been higher if we would not have seen this pandemic environment. Last but not least, looking back on 2021, we had a change of government here. Yeah.
While the old government still initiated a pretty well subsidy structure for the transformation of our energy sector, people hesitated to actually make investment decisions on all levels because they wanted to see how does the new government act. You can say the new government is in place now. There are a lot of promises out there for housing, for energy sector. Yeah. They just need to live up to these promises as soon as possible. Now comes some additional promises linked to the change in the geopolitical environment. Part of this is as well energy.
We should expect if politicians walk the talk that we will see huge subsidies for an energy transformation here in Germany, which would be great for 2022 if they are realized as soon as possible. So much about the market environment for 2021. Let's look at the performance of our four segments. We start, as always, with the core Europace and the credit platform. A new record high, close to EUR 100 billion in mortgages transacted last year. Growth coming from all banking sectors. Growth coming from all product areas, excluding building society finances, which was down by 1%. It just didn't make a lot of sense to secure long-term interest rate via this product.
When you just could enhance and prolong your interest duration of your fixed interest rate period with the mortgage. The product was not so needed. All other mortgage products grew even faster. As you can see, there's a pretty high dynamic when you compare the market share gain or the volume gain of Europace with the overall growth of the market of 4%. In the high dynamic of market share gain in all segments for Europace. We gained market share in the core in the mortgage broker market, where we are above every second transaction now and keep growing. Broker markets keep growing, taking market share from all three bank branch networks.
With this, we already created double-digit growth as a base effect here. Commercial banking banks, they are growing as well, because the ones using Europace outperformed the ones not using Europace. For us, no surprise. No black swan was seen in 2021, so no large banking organization decided to migrate and started the process. We are in good talks as always with them. Let's say the dynamic that we deliver in the development of Europace is increasing the pressure. The question stays when they start to act and not if.
Maybe it's a good moment actually for especially the English-speaking community here to focus on our newest initiative here on Europace, the OneClick mortgage. We introduced just a couple of weeks ago to Germany that you have a fully automated underwritten mortgage for the first time in history. Even the confirmation process by the banks is limited to four hours. This got a lot of media attention here and a lot of attention from banks because it's for the first time such an innovation is not driven by a single bank, but by a platform with a couple of banks behind already.
The whole industry is interested in how we are actually doing this because the current processing costs and time for a mortgage is far above what we can achieve with this one-click mortgage. Talking about this private banks here which they hesitate to act this kind of innovations which we are bringing here to the market will drive everyone sooner or later on the Europace system because you just can't otherwise compete anymore with the rest of the market. This is a pretty sad perspective on your future. Yeah. Looking to the richer banking groups we saw some strong performance again in 2021. The cooperative banking sector +57%.
Could have been more, to be honest, if we would have a not so remote environment, let's call it. If there would have been more physical interaction with the client possible. We are still in the rollout process there, so we need to convince clients to do the next step. This is easier in physical meetings than remotely. But I'd say we are happy with 57% growth here. We know that we will keep growing further in 2022 as well here with a high double-digit number. On the savings bank side, +26% as well affected from the COVID environment.
It's, let's say, even within this savings bank organization, we are the growth tech. We're expecting that they lost some market share in 2021 to the other banking groups because of their lack of dynamism. We are there. As you know, we teamed up with their centralized IT service provider, ready to deliver. They just need to act. Who's not going to act is going to lose market share. They are, let's say, 26% is still a growth rate. Here we would expect actually an acceleration after the pandemic environment ends, yeah. Okay. Next, a new for you.
We focus a little bit on the different credit products outside of mortgages as well because they have a substantial impact on our growth track. First is personal loans. 17% in a negative market environment last year. We are growing in personal loans. It's a very attractive product area that's highly competitive. Yeah. Our focus is independent advice on one side and on the other side banks which are limited in their own capabilities to fulfill the risk and pricing interest of their clients. With a dynamic market environment and with a lot of restrictions on banks on their balance sheets, this is a dynamic growing market for us right now.
Banks are able to broker personal loans to other banks in case that there is no product fitted to the demand of the client. We have a high percentage of restructuring in this brokered personal loan portfolio because of the section we are using. We are not so strong as Europace is, not focused on simple personal loan products. For instance, linked to a washing machine or car, sold on the point of sale, on the Internet for someone who just wants a couple of EUR 100 or a couple of EUR 1,000 . We are focused on consumers which are more complex debt structure already.
Meaning, they closed a couple of simple personal loans and realized in some moment that their household cash flow on a monthly basis is stressed by this. Using Europace, you are able to optimize this. It's a more complex technical problem as well to join these loans and restructure this and get a better rate typically than you had previously, a slightly longer duration. This way you save a lot of money on your monthly amount. We are helping consumers to get out of this trouble. Let's hope that they don't use this additionally gained resources on additional loans for simple products.
As what we see is, we're adding a lot of value to the consumer market, after too easy underwritten personal loans on the point of sale. We expanded our sales activities to the savings banks area together with our FINMAS joint venture and founded a new joint venture in the cooperative banking sector with TeamBank, the centralized personal loan provider for the cooperative banks, to reach the whole sector there and enable them next to their balance sheet as well to broker personal loans. Next, corporate finance. Here we have two entities. The REM Capital, after an acquisition three years ago, scaling heavily in the advice process of German Mittelstand.
Corporates with a capital need of a couple of million ero upwards. Our funding platform, the digitalized process between distributors like REM Capital and others and banks to finance this. REM Capital increased their sales force over the last couple of years steadily. This resulted last year in an increase of a sales platform and acquired project of +40%. In combination with the increased availability of subsidies for the energy transformation especially in the second half of the year, this was a huge gain in interaction and profitability.
Looking forward to 2022, it's not certain that we can get again this intensity in this productivity. It is heavily linked to the availability of subsidized offerings from government, which is still not clear in which volume it will be available. It's an organic growth track, capital is on track and it will keep growing the next years, even when 2021 was pretty amazing year. On FundingPort, we are in the beta together with the first third party distributor in IKB Bank. We see the first transaction on the platform.
We signed up a couple of dozen banks to provide loans to German Mittelstand to add this platform here. We expect to go live, enter alpha state, you can say, in the next couple of months. Then you will see here transaction numbers for FundingPort and REM Capital, how they are going forward. As a result of a great performance in all product segments, new record numbers for the segment, more than EUR 200 million revenue. Outperformance of profitability, because as you know, we try to increase our R&D together with our revenue, just the perfect performance of our REM Capital made it impossible this year.
There is a clear outperformance of the profitability that we show even when we increased investments in mortgage in personal loans and in corporate finance within this segment here. Coming to private clients, our Dr. Klein franchise network. Using Europace as a transaction tool, acquiring clients or leads for our franchisees online and organizing the value chain here and being a distribution power here in Germany now. Dr. Klein grew by 9% to a volume of close to EUR 10 billion last year. To sort this a little bit out, we had an amazing performance in 2020. Thanks to our capabilities to advise clients remotely via video.
Yeah, we had great conversion rates, far better than the rest of the market in the early stage of the pandemic. The disadvantage we partially lost in 2021 because competitors learned from us. You can say other Europace users learned from Dr. Klein how to act and it got more competitive. There were some, let's say, base effect in this year. The growth to this EUR 10 billion is already a pretty good development again, in an overall market environment, which is 4% in growth. Expect this to be double-digit in 2022 again, without the base effect. The basis for this are 8% additional advisors in our network.
More head count, because even a fully digital OneClick mortgage needs advice for the consumer. He needs to understand what he is going for, even when it's a faster process. With this additional workforce here on the advice side, we will scale the numbers of advice and with increasing mortgage transaction volume on average, we will see double-digit growth of Dr. Klein in 2022 as well. First, back to 2021. Record numbers, outperformance on the profitability side. You see scaling effect here on such a lead generating franchise system on one side. On the other side, we had as well some cost savings thanks to the remote environment.
I would say roughly EUR 1 million we saved this year. Let's say compared to a normal environment. When we will have to host conferences again, our people have to travel around more to support and train franchisees, then it will get a little bit more costly again to run this business. You see this on the EBIT margin. It's outstanding right now. It may come back slightly after the pandemic environment. Okay. Our two new segments. We started real estate, which is pretty linked to the mortgage market. Just to give you a better understanding which markets we target. Out of living space here in Germany of roughly 40 million residential units.
Half of them are owner-occupied, and we address this market with Europace and with the activities here in the segment. As well here in the segment, we address the social housing activities of the municipal and cooperative-owned housing industry. Roughly 6 million apartments. 15%-60% market share, you can say. What we usually don't address as a market is this renting market of semi-professional and professional private landlords. It's not something which is easily transacted via Europace. As soon as someone has multiple apartments, their credit check gets more complicated. For now, we stick with the really simple ones.
You have one or two units, not the complex ones which do this in some kind of semi-professional business already. In the moment when it gets bigger, when you own a whole house with multiple tenants, this is nothing to be automated for now. There are still a domain of banks out there which is not targeted by Hypoport. As well in our Real Estate segment here, we target the two other market segments. Actually, you remember what I said about the market structure and changes in 2022 forward in the next five years.
We expect this small landlord market to shrink because it gets less and less attractive to own properties because of the rent regulation. We expect the owner-occupied market to increase to grow relative to this landlord market. We feel pretty well with the rent regulation. It is in the end an incentive for German middle class to migrate and become an owner of your apartment. If you want to become an owner of an apartment, you need a mortgage. There we have a dominant role here in the German housing market. Close to every third transaction is touched by our infrastructure already, and we try to transform this power along the value chain to the sales side.
Where we will put a more digital mortgage process directly in front of seller and buyer, and on the other side, on the valuation side. Our touch points here are already significant. 7% of all properties on the market are transacted using our technology and 9% are using our valuation or parts of our valuation services. Within both segments there is a huge chance of growing within this market and achieving higher market share and increasing as well the quality of the services that is rendered by us. The intensity our infrastructure is used. In our perspective, a huge potential for additional growth here for Hypoport. That this is not easy to grow.
We learned in the last three years we always had a programmatic acquisition strategy. We bought smaller companies and integrated them, expecting a better kickoff, putting this existing business together with our strength in the value chain. We had to learn that it takes time to transform existing business models and actually realize the synergies that are laying in front of us by combining our business models. The FIO system and so the property sales platform is a good example for this. We still struggle to sign up as fast, in a fast way, the cooperative banking sector while we are already dominating the savings banks. Bringing together sales forces, bundle our offers is, let's say.
The speed of collecting contractors still below our expectation. We have to do better. Let's say part of this goes to the COVID environment as well, that it's just not so easy to sell something remotely. What is already developing pretty well is the volume which we see within our platform. How many homes are transacted using the FIO system? Still there's a huge potential in efficiency gain for our real estate agents or the real estate agents that use our system, as well as its value in the pricing what we get here.
You see as a result that, revenue grew only by 4%, partially because we didn't do any project business anymore, which was still there in the first quarter of last year. It's a base effect as well. If you exclude this non-continued business, you can say we are growing double-digit in 2021 in this unit here. Still, seeing the power that we have from the mortgage side, we see this a huge potential increase this bit here. We are working heavily and investing heavily in the synergies between mortgage and SS platform. Especially in projects in 2022 as well, expect here a lot of products coming to the market that integrates these two worlds.
Where we see already more traction is property valuation. A pretty good dynamic on the signing up of a new client side and as well a good dynamic on the volume side. Double-digit growth. Let's say somehow we were used to the valuation, but still not everything runs just through Europace and Value AG. Here we see, within the addressed market already of this 511 banks, a lot of potential and within each transaction. How much value we add, how much certainty we give to the bank when valuating a property. This has a price, and we can increase the quality and the value pre-based on a fully automated assessment of Value AG for the property.
This is changing. It's a game changer for the mortgage industry and as well a game changer for the valuation industry here in Germany. Now switching to the other side of the housing market, the social housing. As you know, for a long time, we are financing social housing here in Germany. We saw again double-digit growth here, more than EUR 2 billion for the first time in this market. It's a good result for 2021, especially when you see that building and energy efficiency increase of the housing stock, which is not at a high speed here in Germany.
Thanks to the regulatory environment, it's pretty unattractive right now for the municipal and cooperative housing sector to invest, because they can't increase the rents at all. They wait for subsidies and while the second half of 2021, there was a short timeframe of a good environment. In 2022, we see a lot of promises from the political side that need to be fulfilled to really bring this sector up to speed and heat up the new construction side and the renovation side above.
You look on the demand side in the housing market, the 2 million units which are missing, and then you look on the current development, that hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people from Ukraine are going to live in Germany. You can expect that here needs to be built a lot of infrastructure, a lot of houses. To finance this, we are already there, and our sales force is out and we are just waiting for the politics to deliver the promises. All in all, the segment is growing, as it accelerated compared to last year. It's organic growth, but based on heavy investments. We said this at the beginning of 2021, this will be the segment with the heaviest investment.
It happened. I can tell you for 2022 as well, we will keep heavily investing in the segment to ramp up the transformation from the traditional models to the new models based on culture, based on IT infrastructure based as well on how we're curing the revenue streams in this business models are here. Expect growth here and expect that the growth is accelerating based on this investment that we do. Last segment, insurance. In general, we are here in pretty stable market environment plus 1% in premium generated overall in the industry, more or less a stable situation for private insurance and as well for pension schemes linked to employer.
All in all, let's say a calm sea around us. Unfortunately, this lacks as well impacts to drive digitalization faster. When I said that, COVID environment didn't speed up projects and didn't make it easy to acquire new clients, this accounts especially for this insurance platform environment. We are here with Smart InsurTech for the private insurances and ePension for the employer-linked pension schemes operating in this segment. What is hidden in Smart InsurTech still is, as well some industry insurances which we acquired. I will come back to this later.
When you just look at the market shares that are already going through our systems, then they are, let's call it, solid in the private insurance market, insurance as well, even relatively slightly higher, while we are in the employer-linked pension schemes model and pretty at the start of the digitalization. How we performed in the private insurance with SMART INSUR, plus of 25% on the premium volume migrated to SMART INSUR. This is below expectation, especially in the last quarter, dynamic was low, so not enough IT projects finished. Let's say we see the trouble clients have and how the challenges our organization is facing to drive migration forward.
On this speed, it takes too long to even migrate everything which is in our systems already. This is a concern. We are permanently looking for ways to change our approach and to accelerate the migration speed. We do this with pricing conditions to accelerate and motivate a switch. We do this on the technical side with different features. We still are looking for the silver bullet to heavily increase this process. Parallel, which is as well as important as the migration speed is, because migration speed is measured on the sales side, is the validation speed on the side of the insurers.
We started with 40% this year and ended up with 23%, far below expectation. We have a lot of IT projects running with insurers to validate the data that were migrated by the sales side to make sure that all automated processes act on validated data so that they are actually, if that makes sense, you can't automate an advice process, for instance, if you act on fuzzy data. It's core to the benefit of the platform that we reach 100% validation quota so that every information in the platform is validated against the core system of the insurer.
These delays in this insurance product are really painful for the speed of digitalization here in the market. We as I said already on the distribution side, as well here, we are constantly trying to optimize our approach and find a way, a silver bullet to drive the insurance industry forward. Pretty interesting and pretty new for you. With our acquisitions and historically, it's the part of the Smart InsurTech AG company is an industrial insurance portfolio with a substantial market issue which we are always, you can say, some kind of ballast for their core development in the direction of private clients.
We started to look more detailed in this talk with the clients. We see a potential here as well to create a platform for the industrial insurance world here in Germany. It's a smaller world, as you can see from the total numbers of premium, but it's a world which is looking as well for digitalization and for efficiency gain and a world where we play a significant role already. Let's see. We invest here some R&D right now and expect during 2022 to make a decision how to go forward here and how to monetize on this asset that we have here. Last but not least, pension schemes, employer linked.
We heavily increase the efficiency between the employees, HR, and the insurance company. When you have these kind of schemes, it's a really troublesome issues right now and especially the human resource environment. It's a legal obligation here in Germany for a couple of years to provide these kind of schemes. Every employee can choose from a huge variety in the market. The employer has to handle this and has to make sure actually that every employee is advised on this. With intention, we are just one out of two platforms in the market which offer a digital solution for this complex market.
Either you link yourself and your employees to just one insurance company, and your employees never change the employer. All you need is a platform like ePension. We feel pretty well positioned here in the market for further growth. 2021 was not a perfect year, let's say, for this. It was difficult to sign up new companies and especially execute the necessary procedures within these companies because you need to advise employees. This is still in this complex environment, something that should be done physically. Parallel, there is, let's say, the insurance portfolio in this employee pension schemes are indexed, and the index was for the first time in history negative.
It declined below, because it is linked to the overall income of German employees, which dropped in 2021 because of COVID, or 2020 actually, because of COVID, in 2021, it increased. Next year, we will have some default profit here. We expect a growth here in this digitalization process of this part of the insurance industry. Yeah. All this said, +7% or +10% in gross profit. These are good numbers, if you compare this to, let's say, normal market environment, normal companies. We are not happy with the speed that we grow here. We see a huge potential in this market.
We see there's still this, the need for digitalization, but we see as well how hard it is to get forward. The only good news in this is, all the investments that we do here, driving these projects forward, because it's so difficult to migrate such a complex environment of IT infrastructures to one core platform. It's the future mood around our business, around our business. So it's muddy. Where we are going for, but it will be muddy as well if anyone tries to enter this market in, the near or the farther future. So we keep investing here. We want to realize a digital insurance, built in Germany, and we are on the way, and nobody else is behind us and not in front of us.
Okay, this all said, let's work on the total numbers. Double-digit growth on revenue and gross profit side, even an outperformance of profitability. On the tech side, we had a one-time issue. It will be reversed in the future, so normalize this, please. Everything is fine. Fundamental growth is pretty intact. Not just from 2020 to 2021. We are growing now for more than 20 years at double-digit. Looking forward, we are keep doing this. To make sure it happens, we happily invest out of our P&L. You can say EUR 45 million.
We invest in R&D and additional sales resources and losses in the beginning of developing a new business model out of our P&L. Yeah. Next to the EUR 77 billion, EBITDA, there's EUR 45 million in addition. Which we just realized with the cost already, but will pay back in the future. Pay back in the future means next year forecast, we expect more than EUR 500 million in revenue, so double-digit growth again. Somewhere between EUR 500 million and EUR 540 million in the end. Then EBIT growth to EUR 51 million-EUR 58 million. Yeah. As said, the EUR 47.7 million in 2021 was above expectation.
REM Capital performed better than expected for 2020. We can't expect it to happen again. For now and looking in the geopolitical environment, there are some uncertainties. We feel pretty safe with EUR 51 million-EUR 58 million in EBIT as a prognosis. Let's see how ambitious it was at the end. We are focusing on realizing and scaling our business this year. After the first two months, I can say I feel pretty well with this forecast. Okay. Thanks for an hour of listening now. I hand back to the moderator if there are any questions from your side.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, if you have a question for the speaker, please dial zero and one on your telephone keypad now to enter the queue. Once your name has been announced, you can ask a question. If you're using speaker equipment today, please lift the handset before making your selection. We'll remember, please, for the first question. As a short reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press zero and one on your telephone keypad. We have no questions. I would like to hand back to you, Mr. Slabke.
Yeah. Thank you. Okay, all questions are answered. That's fine. In six weeks, we see you again or hear again, hopefully with a solution and peace in Ukraine again. I expect with some good results for the first quarter from Hypoport side. Wish you all health when you think about Corona and peace for Europace and the rest of the world. Bye-bye.
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your attendance. This conference has been concluded. You may disconnect.