I would now like to turn the conference over to Ronald Slabke. Please go ahead.
Thank you. Yeah, welcome from my side as well. So first half of 2024 is over, and we reported today in the morning our numbers. You are aware that this was a pretty good start in the year 2024. Double-digit growth on top line and gross profit and massive outperformance on the earnings side, thanks to a pretty difficult last year, which we had, as you are aware. The core growth driver is the real estate and mortgage business, with a growth of 32% even. And this is thanks to a recovery of the German mortgage market, plus market share gains across all segments, which we could realize over the last 12 months. Another highlight comes from the financing segment.
Our software as a service offering and open ERP system for the housing associations is growing fast. This is quite a heavy investment we did in the last years, and still we are doing including this year, where we see massive growth on the client side. Challenging, I would say the most important part is the property valuation side, where we are still struggling with the regulatory changes and the market environment over the last two years to adjust to this, to adapt to this, and to gain trust of the clients again. Plus, the financing platform is still in a market environment, which is on the bottom.
There's no recovery visible by now, and this is different than the real estate segment for now. Okay, so let's start with the most important segment and the core of the company, real estate segment. You're aware of this, dominated by our mortgage platform, Europace, and a lot of entities that support this growth or expand our reach along the value chain. We have a first view to the market because the market was this what massively changed over the last 24 months. You can say now, second quarter in a row where we see a recovery. The underlying macroeconomic figures are well on track. We have a net migration to Germany, thanks to a huge demand on the labor side.
Stable other trends like children are the main trigger for Germans to acquire first home and more and more people living alone, which increases the demand for housing even more. A pretty new trend, I would say, over the last three to four quarters is that the typical supply side for lots of people of the middle class to find a new home was the renting market. And this renting market is pretty frozen, thanks to massive regulation over the last 10 years in the end.
Price cap and the price breaks that were initiated, which slowed down the rent dynamics of existing renting contracts to a level that now in metropolitan areas, signing a new contract will cost you double of this, what the existing ones in average are. Means nobody is giving up its renting contract anymore. So the fluctuation is sharply going down and no new renting apartments coming to the market, no existing renting apartments coming to the market because of this, and no new renting apartments coming to the market, thanks to the mismatch of the regulated rents to the interest environment we are in now.
So that the supply side on the renting market is extremely distressed, while the demand is high, which leads in, as a result, in a change in consumer behavior that whoever is able to afford has to buy his home if he wants to move on and change his living situation. Renting is not then a feasible option for most of the people, especially in the metropolitan areas anymore. This meets a normalizing market environment for the affordability of homeownership. You have a pretty stable interest environment. You have increasing incomes on the other side. You have a stable, high supply of condos and homes in the rural areas, and you have a slightly increasing price trend again.
So, something where you could profit lately, that prices were trickling down is not delaying any decisions anymore. Okay, and the last thing what influenced this market heavily over the last years, the regulations. You can say for the first half of this year, not a lot happened, and this is already good news for us, because government tend to do the wrong things lately. And, with their, let's say, with the stable, not very supportive environment, people started to act and keep acting during the first half of this year, as you will see in our numbers. Okay, a little bit more details, these trends, which I just described, the four most important macroeconomic indicators for the, for our market. Interest rates stable.
We saw a short peak for this year in end of the second quarter. After this, the interest rate went down already again, which is helpful. New high level of properties for sale, publicly available. We expect that there's quite similar amount of units that will come to the market as soon as the sellers see that the market is getting more active. So there's a backlog of people who still wants to sell. On the other side, there's a huge amount of people who are desperately looking for their first new home because they delayed this decision already over a period of two years now. Yeah, this leads to tweaking up prices especially in the area of condominiums in metropolitan areas.
So the apartments are faster increasing in prices than houses in metropolitan areas. When you see this, you may think that, or let's say, one thing to understand this as well, that this is the value change of properties on a fair-to-fair comparison basis. People tend to buy smaller apartments, smaller houses, less energy-efficient houses right now. So the average price per property is still for houses still not going up. It's still stable. For condominiums, it's going up as well already, but not in the same dynamic as the value of the properties, which is so shown here in the upper right diagram. Okay, a quick side note here.
Construction costs for new building, stable for the first half of this year, after a long period of fast increase in cost. This has an effect as well, which I will come back to a little bit later. Yeah, and the most important diagram, even when it's not about the home ownership market, but the renting market is the one in the lower right. We see the lowest level of publicly available renting units ever, here in Germany right now, and this is a process ongoing for a long period. As I said, renting regulation makes it very unattractive to give up your renting contract. So, no existing renting apartments come to the market.
If then, the owner may consider to sell it and not to rent again because of the extremely low interest he receives out of the value of the property, which he has to rent. And nobody's building new renting units right now and brings them to the market. This is, it's not paying back in the current interest environment, and we are far from that this is going to normalize again. Yeah, and with this close renting market, transactions are back. We predicted a time of one to two years for a recovery to happen. Now, we have the second quarter in a row where transaction volumes goes up. So we are in a dynamic incremental process of a normalization of this market.
Yeah, but you see there, for now, we are far from the previous level. I will come to this back later. So there's still a lot of upside here in our market environment. So how have we operated in this market? You're aware of this, the Center Europace, specialized marketplaces for regional banks, savings and corporate banks, and a lot of units who support this growth of the transaction marketplace for mortgages. Europace total is up 22% compared to last year. This is above market level, just single digit above market level. And, let's say, before a long time, achieved double-digit growth above market level.
The difference right now is that our largest partner and long-term partner, a large German bank here, struggled with their mortgage operation and massively slowed down their new mortgage productions since May last year. With this, their transaction volume imploded on Europace. Well, some was redistributed to other partners, but some was simply lost. This is suppressing our growth dynamic for the first half of this year. Starting in the second quarter, you should see a normalization because already in the third quarter last year, they were not present anymore. So this current growth comes in a similar way from Dr. Klein, our franchise network for small intermediaries operating on the brand. They are on growth track. They gain market share.
For now, they've focused on bringing all their advisors back to normal in the efficiency. And as soon as they see that this is a stable trend, they will start to hire additional advisors, and we will come back to all old transaction volume records, which we had here. Massive growth driver for the last years and ongoing in the first half of this year, where our expansion to the regional banking sectors, savings banks and corporate banks, see a plus of 50% each. So everything fine there. We outperform their own growth figures by something around 30%-40%, means we are adding market share in both of the sectors.
We migrate the sales structures of the sectors, so winning one after another bank to migrate to us and digitalizing their processes, being more efficient than their in-house IT solution, and with this expanding the reach of Europace farther. So we're pretty well on track, and to be continued. To be continued, it is very interesting when you look on the product mix on Europace right now. So with EUR 12 billion in mortgages for the purchase of existing homes, we had the third highest transaction number ever on Europace for the purchases of homes. So means we are actually pretty back to old record high level, and this with lower average mortgage volumes and lower house prices. Means that the number of transactions is actually already a record level for second quarter.
Yeah, so from this, you could say, "Hey, well, market is fully normalized already." To be fair, we gained roughly 30% market share during this time, so still for the market, it's a way to go up, to normalize even in the purchase area, from the momentum which it originally had. But as I said, renting market is closed. People have to buy if they want to have their own home. So if children are coming and you need to adjust, you can't rent anymore, you need to buy. And with this in mind, I can just predict for you that the red area here, the red columns will keep increasing over the next couple of quarters to a higher level than we previously said.
Higher level in transaction and higher level in average mortgage contract and bringing us to new record high, even for this purchase area. Yeah, and the other three are not distributing right now to the overall volume. So the refinancing part is, of course, stop, we refer to the new building, new constructions. But there are no new houses built in Germany right now. Well, let's say, not no, but less than 50% of this what was usually financed for new home constructions. And thanks to the increasing prices, the amount is still, let's say, more positive than the number of transactions there.
So, the number of new properties financed right now is far from the need of the market, far from what government promised to deliver. So that there is an increasing tension in the market that the massive demand is not met by new housing constructions. You can say that the government prediction of 400,000 units per year would bring us to a stable market environment with only slightly increasing rents. Currently, we are heading in a direction of far below 200,000 units per year finished because we see what is financed. This will stress the market. This will bring, this will keep the tension on the renting side high, will keep the regulation on the renting side high, and will make buying properties expensive.
Yeah, this stable, let's say, this support actually this red area of the market. Next to this product area is refinancing or follow-up financing, I call here. The refinancing is something which is a very stable market here in Germany because of the typical 10-year interest rate, fixed interest rate period. Yeah, thanks to good advice 10 years ago, people started in 2012 already to finance 50% of the mortgages for 15 years or longer, fixed interest rate periods. And this is leading now to a not existing need to refinance fast, so they can wait until 2027, then this market will normalize again, and we will be back on the usual level of a couple of billion refinancing per quarter on Europace.
Actually, it's a market who should grow over the last time or the last periods and as well as Q2. The energy efficiency investments in the existing home ownership stock is still depressed on an extremely low level, less than two years ago. Even then, there is a huge political agenda to invest EUR 20 billion per quarter in the existing household stock to meet our net neutrality target for 2045 in the upcoming 21 years.
So with this in mind, the EUR 1 billion, which we see here right now, is really just a fraction of this is what necessary, and it shows the potential for the near-time future when the regulatory environment and the support of the government for this sector meets the demand of the people. Okay, other perspective, same market, in which areas of clients we are performing? Broker segment, our largest one, increase in market share for us, especially relative to the one and only large mortgage broker, which is not using Europace here in Germany, Interhyp belonging to ING. Brokers altogether gain market share. We profit from this, you see this with the Dr. Klein client number, and this is all for platform development.
In the private commercial bank segment, still roughly 40%, with the our, as I mentioned already, largest client struggling. When he is coming back, they are coming back, then, you will see the increase in our share there. Yeah, and, cooperative banks and savings banks, both at, roughly 20%-25% market share for us right now. With our 50% growth track, we are gaining, fast volume share there and, bringing their internal solutions, of their sector internal IT service providers, to a struggle with their cost per unit left for them. And, this may in, in the near time future, accelerate the decision process, further in our direction.
Okay, there's one area of stress and distress you can say, in the real estate and mortgage business, our property valuation business, you are aware of this. Yeah, the market, the massive market change, plus two massive regulatory changes brought us here in turbulences. We worked out this year, this, let's say, a major part of this, especially our default on the service levels with our clients and adjusted our resources to the new product mix in the market. Still in the second quarter, we miss the necessary increase in orders, in order flow from our clients. We see a certain level of, let's say, that they are hesitating to trust our ability to deliver again.
We do know we need to work on this trust here, and then we will see increasing numbers on the revenue side and with a massive impact on the EBIT side as soon as this happens. But this trust needs to be gained again, and our struggling with the environment over the last one half year destroyed quite an amount in a positive flow and positive sentiment we had in this market. But we will work back to this. Okay, segment summary. Double-digit growth top and gross profit line. The gap between this is actually a new business model where we intensively advertise for pooling the business with us and increasing our buying power and letting other Europace partner participate in this buying power.
This, we have to receive the whole commission in this case and forward most of this commission to our Europe-based partners, but keep a small share of it as a small margin, and more than we, let's say, it costs us to manage this all. So it's a single-digit million of profit distribution this year, just out of this business model, and something which adds a couple of million in revenue every quarter right now to our business model. Yeah, all in all, EUR 50 million in EBIT for the first half year, and this includes still massive investments in new products around Europace and the value chain, and it includes close to EUR 5 million in losses for restructuring and just inefficiency of our valuation business.
So without valuation, we would be close to EUR 20 million in EBIT already for this segment. Something which we outperformed already in the past, but keep in mind, we are roughly at 50% of the normal market level right now when it comes to volume. So there is a lot of potential up from here. Okay, next segment, financing platform. You could say all in all, the different market segments are still in a crisis environment, starting with the housing associations, the social housing here in Germany. I said a lot about that the renting market was regulated. You can say for these guys here, the regulation is one issue, the lack of fluctuations is as well a small issue.
The main issue here is that, out of this hundreds of thousands of social housing units, which are needed across Germany, the interest rate environment, combined with a limitation of subsidies, doesn't make it attractive for them to invest to build new houses. And this is different from the time up until 2022. Plus, as well here, energy and efficiency investment needed for this sector alone, something around EUR 5 billion per quarter should be invested. And for now, the necessary metrics are not there to do so. So this sector is, for now, you can say, in a winter sleep when it comes to investing, and we see this in their mortgage needs.
So EUR 500 million of mortgage financing in the first half year, this is much less than we usually do, and it includes still massive market share gains. So this sector is really not in the mood of investing right now. We have to compensate this with other product lines, which we are ramping up. Positive trend on the side of our deposit management platform, constantly above inflation rate. We are increasing the volume, which goes through it, and then we can get more margin. And even with the higher dynamic, I mentioned this already as a good news part is the rollout of our ERP system for the housing associations. That again a massive plus in sign-ups. We already are struggling with the amount of demand.
All migration slots for 2025 are occupied now. So we really need to increase our current investment in project management resources and onboarding resources to speed this up and ramp this up, that we are not delaying our partners who really want to migrate in our direction. So good, good dynamic there, and let's say, overall, an industry where we feel extremely connected with. Next area is corporate finance, and especially the arranging of subsidies and financing for this subsidized projects here in Germany. Something which saw a peak environment, a great environment at the end of the last government time. With the current government, we struggle like whole corporate Germany.
You can see that the number of active projects where we advise clients and try to achieve optimal financing situations with them increased massively compared to last year. So, it's not just demand, it's execution already of this. But especially when it comes to the government agency who check and underwrite certain subsidies and certain loans, we are struggling. We had a budget freeze here in Germany at the beginning of the year, which delayed a lot of these projects. And we saw in the second quarter a lot of small slowdowns thanks to restrictions coming from the government as well, how they want to fund the subsidies, which they promised.
All in all, the first half year of the, which was under our expectations and, slower than as well, last, first half of the year in 2023. For the second half, we expect a positive dynamic, thanks to all these projects which are, ongoing right now. And, let's hope that, our government gets a little bit on track, to deliver to their promises, because as well here, a lot is about, carbon neutrality and innovation. Something where the German industry struggles with their, distributed resources, compared to the expectation of the speed of change. So last, credit market, in this financing segment, personal loan business. In general, maximum a stable market. There are no quarterly figures, for the whole industry.
Probably even a shrinking market right now as well, thanks to regulation. Here in Germany, to combine insurance products and personal loans, it will be banned to the end of the year, and the credit industry will react to this with increasing credit margin because of the lack of insurance in the future. This in combination with, let's say, for the short-term history, a pretty high interest rate environment leads to pretty high personal loan rates from we are talking now about 10% on the marketplace already, again, in average. This is unusual for the German consumer. He was getting used to more 6% or 7%, and double-digit interest rates slow down this market. So we see a shrinking consumer market here.
We could compensate this on a certain level, + 70% on the platform in general, and our white label for party business, which is very profitable, up 22% in the transaction volumes. But yeah, this is a, let's say it's happening in a struggling market environment, and yeah, consumers even increased their cancellation rate, thanks to this too high interest rates now. So this, which is compensating parts of our transaction volume gain when it comes to revenue at the end. So in general, this whole segment is let's say neutral from the growth perspective, + 4% in revenue, slightly down in profitability because of the additional investments for the first half of this year.
For second half, we expect better figures, a positive, EBIT distribution so that we come back to top and bottom line growth here. It was, let's say, a struggling start, but it's a basis, from which we can expand from here. Now, segment insurance. Three product areas: private insurances, industrial insurances, and, employer-linked, pension schemes. In all three segments, we are focused on migrating existing solutions or markets, to our solution. In the, especially the private, insurance area, we migrate a lot of license-based business to a software-as-a-service, recurring revenue-based business. This cost still dynamic, and this is what you see as a P&L number, but we are progressing.
Smart InsurTech, the personal insurance business is up 40% with their migration and with this, with their recurring revenue base. But parallel, they lost some license business. So the net revenue gain is lower. Corify, our industrial insurance platform, newly launched in 2023, gains traction. More and more clients are underwriting. More and more clients, industrial reinsurance brokers are in the test phase. This Corify so can get a big topic for 2025 and 2026. And where we see that we are having a positive dynamic already is the occupational insurance business, where especially pensions are linked to employers and employees.
With ePension, we are on a clear growth path, coming from a pretty low level in a highly non-digitalized environment, with just a few competitors. We are performing pretty well, especially when it comes to the profitability side, compared to our competitors here. This is actually the highlight on growth, while Smart InsurTech is still struggling with the migration. In general, for this segment, the most important thing right now is to stay profitable. They achieved this in the first half of this year.
So, next to this migration, it is core not to expand our investments here anymore, but to fulfill, and this they are delivering right now, and they achieve a basis for next year, top and bottom line growth from this, what they stabilize here right now on the income side. So for the whole group, it is a good start in the year. We are on track, you can say. When you compare this year with previous years, you see that we are well above the revenue compared to last year. EBITDA last year had some one-off, double-digit million one-off. We will achieve EUR 50 million EBITDA this year without this one-off.
When you compare this with our last record year, you see already that we are getting closer to our last record year, 2021. Let's say our, i t will be interesting when we finish the second half, as expected, if 2025 is already to be expected, the next best year ever, or if we still need another year. We are on track to get to a new record high. So how are we going to get there? Most of all, it's still the market. Our double-digit market share growth will bring us up, but the general mortgage market is still relevant as long as it's not normal. Normal means for us, we expect to come back to something of EUR 75+ billion per quarter.
This, thanks to the closed rental market and the need for people to acquire their home, plus energy efficiency investments, plus starting in 2027, a normalization of the financing market. This all together will bring us even up to EUR 100 billion in a couple of years in this volume in this market. And, up until then, we still will gain another 30% market share. So this, let's say, the near-term future of Hypoport is pretty predictable if nothing super strange happens here in Europe. That said, just a quick view on what's going to happen this year, the rest of the year. Expect a positive development in the market still for this year. In the real estate segment, financing platforms and insurance for now flat.
Revenue will be up in all segments at the end of the year. Yes, the strongest in real estate and mortgage platform. EBIT will be, especially in real estate and mortgage up. This is financing all of our activities right now, you can say. Financing platforms, insurance will improve their profitability level in the second half of this year, but in the end, will, let's say both segments are for the total group revenue, still not really relevant. We are working on this. We stick with our guidance, EUR 100 million-EUR 400 million revenue for this year and EUR 10 million-EUR 20 million in EBIT. What is more important for us, for the next couple of years from there, double-digit growth, top and bottom line.
There's an outperformance on the profitability side, and I was asked this in the general call. Yes, we are focusing on profitability for the next couple of years. We see that our market got more volatile than in the past, and more volatility means in a good year, we need to have a much higher profitability level that when, again, some crisis like the one in 2022, 2023 hit us, that it's not threatening for us, but that we can focus in such an environment then on all opportunities that the crisis brings us. And so to be ready for the next crisis in 2030 ongoing, we want the higher profitability level to be achieved in 2025, 2026, 2027. And there we are going for it.
Stay tuned, I would say. In three months, next update from our side with the Q3 numbers. If you have further questions, contact our investor relations department. Jan is happy to answer any question. Thank you. Bye-bye.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, the conference has now ended. Thank you all for joining. You may all disconnect your lines.