Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the webcast preliminary results full year 2020 of Hypoport SE. At our customers' request, this conference will be recorded. As a reminder, all participants will be in a listen-only mode. After the presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. If any participant has difficulty seeing the conference, please press star key followed by zero on your telephone for further assistance. May I now hand you over to Ronald Slabke, who will lead you through this conference. Please go ahead.
Yeah, welcome from my side as well. Let's talk about Hypoport 2020 results, and I will give you as well a little bit preview on what's going to happen in 2021 and in our coming years. As you know, we are digitalizing the credit, housing, and insurance industry here in Germany. The good news first, even when 2020 was a challenging year in general for the whole world, the German credit, real estate, and insurance industry didn't face a huge impact from the COVID pandemic.
Quite stable market environment in general for our more than a dozen of independent enterprises that integrate along the value chain of these three sectors. Hypoport, in general, delivered strong growth another year. For 20 years now. Double digits again, +1 5% in revenue, EUR 388 million.
If you are aware of this, that we skipped some traditional business models and didn't do so much license and project business anymore and some acquired companies. This growth is even more impressive. To tell you what we didn't do this year in project business, if you would compare it fairly, grew by 20% compared to last year, especially when you look on the gross profit.
Even then, the environment was challenging and our employees had to change how they work, and some things didn't work out as planned. We were able to increase our profitability to EUR 26 million. Even this, you will see when you look on the different results of the segments was based on a strong growth, especially in our Credit Platform unit. Yeah, talking about these units. Our two traditional business models in mortgages.
They are growing pretty well in an overall extended market environment, + 20% for Credit Platform, + 17% for private clients. You can see here that our platform models where we digitalize industries already, performed pretty well in this challenging year, 2020.
While the two growth segments, real estate and insurance, only distributed single digit growth when you look on the top line. Especially here, we were in the transformation from, let's say, skipping license and project business to recurring business models where the revenue is linked to transactions and not to work done by us anymore. If we eliminate this transformation, these are our growth segments. They are growing faster even than this, what you see visibly in the credit and private client platform.
Looking on these overall numbers, we had a pretty good year, 2020, and I thank all employees for what they did in this year and how they were able to handle the, let's say, private challenges they are facing and still keep Hypoport growing and prospering.
About its future, we will talk at the end of this session here. Okay. Let's first talk a little bit more about the market environment here in Germany, especially in these three industries we are operating in. We started our core Credit Platform, and data mortgage site. In the beginning of the pandemic, we learned that as a digital leader, the partners which were using Europace already outperformed the rest of the market. We were growing strongly based on the current client and partner network.
Transaction volume went up fast in the first quarter and pretty well as well in the second quarter. In the third quarter, we learned that we see a slowdown related to COVID because to migrate new partner structures to the Europace system got delayed.
Especially in the traditional part of the credit industry, you could see these organizations were not able to handle big change projects, and migration to the Europace platform is a big change project pretty well. We got lots of delays, small delays, but a lot of delays in migration projects so that we could see our path a little bit slowing down. In the same moment, a strong sentiment of these traditional players that they want to go forward, just that they are not able to.
At the beginning of 2021 now we look on this market, and we see that, well, everyone is heading toward the Europace system. Everyone wants to digitalize this project. We are profiting from this, especially in the corporate finance world as well, where we are just launching fundingport. The projects are still slowed down as long as we are in a lockdown.
As soon as we are back to normal and even traditional organizations are able to handle their way of doing projects as they were before the pandemic, we will go back on track with the speed of migration to the platform and even outperform this pre-COVID environment because of the huge need everyone feels to be fully remote-able for their employees and to, let's say, bridge the gap between traditional and digital workflows finally.
Once again, 2020 was a proof that there is no other way of doing credit business in Germany than with Europace. On the private client side, we had additional profit and gained additional market share thanks to the ability, technically and from the training perspective of our advisors in the Dr. Klein network, to remotely advise clients. Huge market share gains for the franchise system, and this is something that is going to stay.
Maybe it will even accelerate the growth rate of Dr. Klein further because people get more and more used to this, that in the end, all financial services are able to be done remotely, and you don't need to go to any branch anymore. Pretty well environment during the pandemic and post-Corona for this private client division. Quick view on the perspective of how the underlying market is developing in Germany.
During the pandemic, the real estate prices, housing prices were increasing. Our own index shows that last year, the prices in Germany rised by close to 10%, thanks to still high demand and a lack of new constructions finished. The new demand this year didn't come from migration as of the previous years. It came from more need for remote working space or just an adjustment that you want more space for your family to live in the pandemic.
When we look right now in the market, so 2021, looking forward, we expect further increases in prices. Short term, thanks to this higher need, especially of affluent customers and the upper middle class, to adjust their living situation to the new normal of remote work. Midterm, thanks to a new net migration gains the German economy will face.
We expect that Germany, starting in 2022, will highly profit from migration from East and South Europe to the center of Europe because there will be more work to be done because of a faster recovery of the German industry from this shock to our economies. Germany has a higher firepower to, let's say, get us in high speed out of this recession than the periphery of Europe.
That's why we expect a net migration of 200,000 to 300,000 people per year, which will increase the demand for housing once more here in Germany. Together with this, again, rising prices as long as we don't meet the demand with new constructions. Pretty well and good outlook for the new mortgage business here in Germany. When we look at this market environment, a short step back to 2021 one more time.
The same what I said for the traditional parts of the credit industry goes as well for the pretty traditional housing industry here in Germany. We saw a certain slowdown in the transactions, less renting transactions, less sales transactions, but we didn't see any losses or defaults in rents. The industry is pretty stable, just it slowed down everything a little bit.
Let's say here we are an attacker with our platforms. We are new. We need a lot of new clients and to migrate, let's say, to acquire and then migrate these new clients to our platforms. It was tricky during the Corona. It was slowed down because of the ability of these organizations to handle such projects in a remote environment.
That's why real estate and as well insurance, and I will talk about this in a minute, had some effect on the partner side, but not on the business of the partner. When we look forward, 2021 ongoing and 2022, we see that this industry understood that they need to be digital, that they are not rushing to migrate, but that they are willing to migrate, that they see that Hypoport is offering a fully integrated solution for these two industries.
We expect huge market share gains going forward in both industries for us. Huge market share gains. How these segments performed in 2020 in this environment? We start with Credit Platform and then the core of Europace system.
As you know, most of our business is mortgages, some personal loan business linked to this, and as a new entity, this fundingport into REM CAPITAL, our exposure in the corporate finance space, financing Deutsche Mittelstand here. We saw a strong growth in transaction volume last year, +32% to EUR 90 billion on Europace above our long-term growth track. Heavy double-digit market share gain, especially in mortgage finance and building finance.
As well, personal loan performed pretty well when you are aware of this, that we had a high double-digit market decline, thanks to the lack of, or the reduction of credit risks by banks and the lack of demand from the consumer side for personal loans. Pretty good results, especially based on the current installation base of the platform in all four segments. All four segments were growing a net for Hypoport.
Europace gained market share within the broker group, and the brokers gained market share. Private banks, which operated already on Europace, gained market share, and they're growing. In the regional retail banking groups of cooperatives and savings banks, in both we were growing a high double digits. Even when Corona slowed down the new projects, especially here.
We profited from everything who we had migrated already pre-Corona, and we saw a slowdown then in the second half of the year because of the slowdown of this migration project. In both, we feel a strong sentiment going in our direction. Players, partners wants to migrate more structures to us. They understood, thanks to their special needs and the challenges in the Corona pandemic, that only Europace is a solution where their advisors are able to work from every place in the world.
From home as well as from some remote locations. That you gain a lot of flexibility in your business operation when your workforce is online and is able to operate all needed tasks online and not just certain ones, then you always then end up with some tasks which had to be still offline and you fail to close a deal or close a task with the consumer.
In both industries, we expect high growth rates in the near time future as well. Just a temporary slowdown thanks to the inability of these organizations to operate within the current environment. The segment finished the year with record numbers. More than +20% revenue and gross profit growth and even a little outperformance on the EBIT side, +26%.
All this with high investments in acquiring new clients, managing projects for migrations and investments in platforms, which we are doing currently in this segment. Growth segment with a high probability and higher than the group numbers you can say. Especially here you see that operating on group number levels and trying to evaluate Hypoport with typical KPIs on a group level, it doesn't work out pretty well.
You need to look on the four segments and understand how valuable each of them is and how fast each of them is growing. Here you see our core segment growing pretty fast. Second traditional segment is private client, where we operate a network of franchise branches, which are all able to remotely advise their clients in their region.
This was a huge gain in the competition with especially traditional banks, which are not able to offer remote advice to their clients. Private client performed as well, pretty well in the economy + 24% growth rate on the transaction volume above the long-term growth rate, once again. Gaining market share in this 4% total market share, market growth reported by Bundesbank.
What is this? Very good, pretty impressive and shows that near time future looks sunny as well. We gained close to 80 additional advisors this year. In the first half of the year, it was getting pretty difficult because of the lockdown to hire new advisors because nobody wanted to really change their employer in the middle of a crisis.
In the second half, this accelerated because a lot of advisors working in banks or smaller, non-digital intermediaries had to make a choice if they want to sit at home and can't work, or if they want to work with their system and the brand which is known and which is providing clients and technology.
We gained 60% in our advisor network, and this is above the traditional 10% growth track which we had over the last five years. An acceleration here, and this means we are able to advise more clients now than in 2020. This is a promise for future growth for the Dr. Klein network, because the bottleneck is not the amount of clients you are able to generate online. The lead generation online is unlimited.
The bottleneck is the number of advisors you can do parallel, and especially here, Dr. Klein was able to scale pretty well in 2020. This all leads to a record year for this segment as well. Close to 20% growth on the top line and a nice growth to now EUR 80 million EBIT in the profitability. Last year, we had a huge investment in digitalization, especially of the user interface here.
We invested a lot in closing contracts with all the regional banks who lately joined Europace. This paid off now, and we are back to our long-term profitability range of 35%-40%. Pretty amazing recovery in the profitability as well, and this in, let's say, stressed market environment of Corona. Together with the profits of Credit Platform, you can see that the two traditional units are scaling well.
Top line and bottom line, you can see the high efficiency gains that you have here and how value added this kind of businesses are. Now we come to our growth segments. The area we are losing money, when you look on the P&L. Investing in huge markets which are just around us and where we see a similar, if not even higher potential than in the credit market.
First, housing. We are addressing on one side the consumer life cycle of home ownership. On the other side, the rental market. The core for the long time value of the platform will be the homeownership segment, where we have a very important role with Europace. Every fourth mortgage here in Germany is going through the Europace system.
When you look on the customer experience, if you are a seller or a buyer of a property, you understand that in this customer journey, Europace is playing a very important role. It's in the middle. With our heavy investments on the property sales side and on the property valuation side, we are closing this value chain, and we are on the way to fully digitalize this and make a huge integrated offering of a platform to all participants in the market.
Where in the end, there is no way to transact a home anymore without using our marketplaces. FIO system on the seller side reached already 7% market share. VALUE AG on the property valuation side is at 8% market share.
In both, we are investing heavily in digitalizing the processes, integrating the processes with all services needed along this value chain and integrating this onto the mortgage process, which is in the center of this customer experience. First, deep dive in the property sales platform and this development here. This is the one where we got rid most of a traditional business model. We are not selling any license anymore. We are not selling software development resources anymore.
The only thing we are now selling here are platforms. Platforms to sell or to manage housings or apartments. With this shift in the business model, we lost revenue short-term. Long-term, we are gaining a completely different understanding of the relation between our partners and us. The complete shift in alignment between the interest of the consumer, our partner, and us as the platform distributor.
This alignment is important for, let's say, a well-developing strategy between these different needs and where we invest and what we benefit from these investments. That this gain that we provide and the value that we add to the value chain is easier to monetize on an incremental basis as well. In this transformation, we lose revenue or lost revenue.
Now we are fully in securing revenue, and from here, we are just going to grow. We are growing in the client base, which you can see already, even when it got more difficult in 2020, thanks to the pandemic, to migrate savings banks and cooperative banks and their real estate agents. We did it, closing the last open spaces here. In the savings banks industry, there is only 13% left, and on the cooperative banking side, growing by roughly 30% from 8% to 11% market share.
Here's still a huge potential. That's why we have to invest on the sales side, on developing of the platform, on the features of the platform, and on the integration with Europace to make this come through and to get to a fully integrated process. Fully integrated process is the same what we are heading to with VALUE AG and the appraiser business. Even with this current environment, VALUE AG was able to increase the number of partners.
More than half of the partners of Europace are already partnering with VALUE AG, even when they are only doing a fraction of their business with VALUE still. The partnership is there. They are improving it, and VALUE AG was able to grow top line 42% this year, even when it was a challenging environment, especially for the appraising business. During the lockdown, you couldn't inspect the properties of consumers.
A slowdown on the supply side, you can say. On the demand side, banks, especially traditional ones, had some difficulties to manage to pass through their mortgage applications and bring them to our appraisers to evaluate the properties and to finalize the evaluation process. On the demand side as well, a slowdown temporarily with some applications piling up right now in the back offices of the banks. Short term, we expect to keep growing here.
We are well on track by digitalizing these underlying processes, and we'll keep investing here because for the total value chain, for the customer experience, it's very important that from the first touchpoint with the seller, via the buyer, the broker, the advisor, everyone is looking to the same valuation, which is then adjusted during the process and is getting finalized so that all the uncertainties, which right now are here in Germany along the value chain, along the process about the value of a property is gone.
Because in the end, VALUE AG is going to be the largest evaluator for banks, and banks are the ones who determine what the buyer is able to pay, and that this is determining in the end what the property is worth.
This way we want to streamline this area of the housing transaction process. With this, to make sure that even the mortgage transaction in Europace is going to be more smoothly because there are less irritation about the value of the property. Switching to the renting side of the market. Here we are providing financing for housing portfolios and a platform to manage housing portfolios.
The transaction side, so closing mortgages for the housing industry was pretty well stable even in this current environment. Usual volatility throughout the year, but all in all, a good year for this segment. What was slowed down here are the digitalization processes projects, because these companies they were not highly affected by the pandemic, but they are then not able to work remotely.
When you want to fully digitalize your housing association, you need to run a huge change project because every brick of your organization is touched by this and is changed when you fully migrate to our platform. That's all in all a stable environment, especially for the financing platform and a good distributor of revenue for the overall result of the segment.
After all this said, you can see that we are well on track to change the way how houses are transacted or rented here in Germany. We are on a growth track, high double digits, just because of some project business gone and some license business gone. It looks a little bit fuzzy with a 5% revenue growth only.
This is a net result of this strong growth in the return models, but the disinvestment out of the traditional models. We said already in the beginning of the year that we want to invest heavily in this area, we did, - EUR 4 million in EBIT. Let us say, EUR 9 million less than last year in profitability. When you see this, you understand we really mean it, that we want to go forward here.
That when the group is increasing its profitability by EUR 4 million, this means EUR 4 million plus this EUR 9 million here, which we spent. We have a strong commitment to changing the housing market, we are doing this here right now, even with a profit increase on the group level. This is pretty amazing.
Talking about amazing, last growth segment, the insurance world, where we want to do what we did to the mortgage market with Europace, with Smart Insur to the insurance market. As you know, we are working hard on this already for more than five years.
We developed a lot of software, we acquired a lot of small companies. We transformed them and joined the forces and the workforces and the technology in a platform and are offering this now for a couple of years already to the market. Let's say, see that the need is high, the interest is high, but the ability to execute and migrate this huge IT project is sometimes disappointing for an organization like us.
We are used to fast moving and fast changing. We see that the insurance industry is a little bit more traditional and, let's say, well-situated to be able to afford this lack of speed. Corona didn't help us a lot. You can say that it slowed down once more even this migration project. On the technical side, we see a flow of new clients joining the platform.
We see changes on the partner side, that they use the platform more and more, integrate better with it, establish more interfaces. It's all still in a slow motion, you can say, when you think about this, that the efficiency gains for the whole industry and for every participant that we are integrating are so huge. We are talking about 700% efficiency gain when you fully migrate to a platform for most of the market participants.
The good news is, we proceeded with our business model. As well in this segment, we let go from some licensed business and some leftover software development business. We have a clear path to migrate all our partners to the platform, and we are proceeding on the business side with them pretty well. Just for you, it's difficult to track this from the outside world, because what we lose on the one-time revenue side, we first need to compensate on the recurring revenue side.
This takes time. You see a small growth rate here, similar digital growth rate compared to last year. Profitability, getting closer to a break even. Let's say, we are committed to this market. It's a EUR 600 million transaction fee market for us.
We want a relevant share out of this, we are willing to keep going forward for a couple of more years and see this market to finally flip to our side and digitalization to be the core driver of the insurance market here in Germany again. We will drive this forward. We are absolutely sure that we are the right player to do this, and we are, let's say, best on track.
Looking on the total numbers for the group. Sorry, this tool is making here a little bit hassle. You see double-digit growth, top and bottom line, as promised, and as we do this now for the last 20 years, you can say. On the long-time track, in the last seven years, we scaled and expanded the network pretty well. Within seven years, fourth time of the revenue.
Same speed as in the previous seven years from 2006 - 2013. Just the difference this time is that we are scaling much more profitable than we did it during the first period of the financial crisis. Well on track. Double-digit growth. Huge investments in future business models. Roughly EUR 40 million of our P&L went to new business.
Sales agents, project managers who are working on projects for future revenue, software development on new features of the existing platform, which can be monetized, or just fully new platforms like fundingport for the corporate finance space. EUR 40 million going through our P&L, where we developed something for the future. When you look on Hypoport, be aware of this huge investment in all segments that we are doing here right now. With this said, we plan to continue this path.
Double-digit growth like in the last years as well this year. That's why we guide 10%-20% revenue and profit gain, EUR 430 million-EUR 460 million revenue, EUR 40 million-EUR 45 million in EBIT. Expect us to make sure that everything we do this year will pay back in the future years and that we will keep on track for our long-term growth in these three industries. Now I hand back to the moderator to see if there are some questions, and I'm willing to answer as much as possible of this.
Thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, if you have a question for our speaker, please dial zero and one on your telephone keypad now to enter the queue. Once your name has been announced, you can ask your question. If you're using speaker equipment today, please lift the handset before making your selection. One moment 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 in the queue. I will hand back to you, Mr. Slabke.
Yeah, thank you. Okay, I hope I answered all your questions. We are already well into 2021. Two months are done. In two weeks, we are finishing the first quarter. In seven weeks, we are back here in this call and I will present you a good start of 2021. Let's say, me and all my colleagues, we will work on this to make 2021 a new record year for Hypoport. That this is going to happen, I'm pretty certain. Thanks for your attention and hope to see you soon.
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your attendance. This conference has been concluded. You may disconnect.