ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the webcast results Q2 twenty twenty of HyperPod 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. May I now hand you over to mister Slabka, who will lead you through this conference?
Please go ahead.
Yeah. Thank you. And from my side as well, welcome to the half year report of HyperPort. And some deep dives into certain issues. Okay.
As you all know already, we had a pretty good start in 02/2020, plus 20% growth rate in an environment where Germany, like most of the economics around the world, were hit by the coronavirus plus some developing recession after this because of the lockdowns. And compared to this, 20% top line growth is a pretty good start to the year. We start, as always, with an to get few detailed look on the market environment for you to understand better what's going on. And a little bit untypical for us, we will focus on this short term event. So what especially happened during the coronavirus time, the lockdown in April, May, and what you may expect because of this, let's say, significant change in the environment mid to long term from us and the surrounding markets.
Okay. We started our major core business, the platform unit in the private client division. Here, mortgage financing for consumers is a central product that we offer or the market we are in together with the credit industry who as a whole was hit pretty hard by coronavirus both on the risk side as well as on the branch network side. For us, March to May and the lockdown period mean that our market share in both segments were growing fast because of the full digitalization that we offered either to the on the one side to the to the to the advisers of banks and financial intermediaries and on the other side to the consumer directly. So during lockdown, Hyperport directly profited from the environment and could could pretty well monetize on the investments we did in the last years in technology.
Mid term and long term, there will be an significant impact of this COVID pandemic regarding the housing demand in Germany. What we saw after a couple of weeks in the lockdown is that people started to reconsider their previous decision about how they are living. And after already three to four weeks during the lockdown and during the crisis, we reached a precrisis demand on the housing side because everyone learned how important your four walls are when it comes to a pandemic. And so the the old the the own living situation got much more important for a lot of Germans, not to say most of the families, especially. And everyone learned that having a house maybe outside of the city is better than having an apartment plus a balcony inside the city, and having an apartment with balcony is better than to have to have an apartment with out balcony.
And the same goes as well for your home office. An apartment without home office is less valuable than an apartment with home office. So there are lots of triggers in there, which happened during the the lockdown that increased the demand for housing space here in Germany. So what we see that since May, you can say, demand is exceeding the pre crisis level and supply is still low as it always was in Germany because of the the, you know, the crisis time, you know, the lockdown time, even a little bit suppressed. So demand is rising, supply is, let's say, best case stable, you see a price rise.
And this price rise happened during the last month, so the the development of the last years continued. And development in this housing market is not affected by the recessive environment, so people are not nervous about their future income. There are more people who are willing to spend more of their household income on housing than before, and so prices goes up. And because of increasing prices, mortgage lending volume is going up long term, and so we expect a pretty good market environment for the next quarters and next years. Little bit different perspective on corporate financing.
Here, we are more into this market for the last, now, twelve months since the acquisition of Firm Capital last summer. And during the peak of the lockdown, we saw an heavy increase in demand for subsidized loans from k f KFW, a state owned government owned agency which is providing, let's say, special financing vehicles, for instance, for the corona environment. So yeah. And all in all, it was a busy time for banks as well in the in the German Mittelstand financing business. So a lot of uncertainties, a lot of liquidity demand.
It's a lot to do for the banks, including us as an adviser to, let's say, stabilize the relation between banks and and corporates. So mid mid term and mid and large corporates here in this business. Long term, we will see a change in the market because of the coronavirus, because the recession, which is currently, let's say, eating through the economy, is going to hit some of the businesses hard. Banks try to prepare themselves for the losses losses which they expect to come. The, let's say, the equity of the banks will get some damage, some loss.
So we expect that, yeah, bank loans will not be as easily available as it were before for for German businesses. So their structures will get more complex. They will involve not only German bank loans, but capital from third party sources is more and more. So we expect an increase in demand for advisory products and as well a platform in this environment in the near time and long term future. So good for our acquisition of Prime Capital and good for our investment in Funding Port where we are building the platform which will make it possible that German Mittelstand will be financed as good as in the past.
So last segment of the credit business the credit industry where we are in is consumer financing in in short term areas. Here, we saw more restricted lending by the banks. As you can imagine, with an upcoming recession, banks fast reduced their appetite for, let's say, outstanding loans to consumers. So we saw a decline in the market, minus 30% for the first half year of this of 02/2020. Long term, we don't expect any major shift in the appetite of banks in this area.
Consumer financing is a high profitable business, high margin business still in in Germany here with 200 to 300 basis points of net credit margin. So we we expect a fast recovery, especially when we don't expect major losses of banks in this environment because of the, let's say, overall well handled crisis environment by by the government. So we don't expect major losses, and we don't see that banks will change the strategy in the consumer business here. Okay. So just to add, our private side division especially gained market share in the mortgage business because of the ability to remotely advise clients using video interfaces with our clients.
Were well prepared for the situation and could monetize on this. In addition to using the Europase platform for the transaction, the interaction with the client remotely were well established, and doctor Klein advisers outperformed the the market pretty well. We will come back to this in a minute. Okay. Now we are moving on to the real estate platform and our two target groups there.
On one side, it's again the credit industry. They are the largest agents for real estate in Germany. And on the other side, they are the core target group for our valuation offers. On the agency saw solution to sell properties, We saw a huge decline in the usage by our clients. Thanks to the traditional pricing model we are we are still working in.
It it it didn't interfere with our income during this time, but we saw that our clients were hit pretty well pretty let's say, hit a lot during the two months of lockdown or three months of lockdown. From there, we recovered already. And for the mid and long term, we expect that because of the increasing relevance of living space, these agencies of the banks will recover. They will come back to their old transaction volume. And, actually, because of this learning, it may be easier for us to transfer the business model to a transaction based model and go go away from this, let's say, license based software service model which we are running right now.
Yeah. What we will what this industry learned is that more digital license is is good even in this in this part of the value chain because agents who were more digital, who were able to offer digital inspections of the property for their clients or could interact in a more modern way, exchange documents past and so on, outperform the agents, which are very very traditional approach to interacting with clients. So the offerings of Fire here will be more needed mid and long term, and the solution is a nice reminder of how important the digitalization of the selling process of the property is as well. On the valuation side, we saw two slowdowns. One slowdown was that banks who are the major customer group of VeloG slowed down their processes in their back offices because of, let's say, lack of employees or shutdown of the whole operation.
So they started to stockpile their requests for valuations. And on the other side, we we were as well for a couple of weeks uncertain how to deal with the the consumers and our evaluators because of the needed physical inspections and the physical contact which was linked to this. So on both sides, we saw a slowdown, and so this this this business was actually affected by by corona in the HypoPort Group. Midterm, we see little changes here. First, and this is a positive outcome of the corona lockdown, is that the regulator, Bavenir in Germany, allowed remote inspections of properties.
So there is not a physical human based inspection needed anymore. And we started over this over the March, and more and more of the banks are switching to this product. On the other side, bank stockpiled their needed valuations. So we have to, let's say, start working this out and reducing the backlog banks that we have now. So midterm, no major changes in the evaluation process because of this episode of epidemic.
So second target group of the real estate platform is the housing industry. The large landlords here in Germany specialized in the social housing sector. I think normally you could expect that some such a pandemic leads to some losses for their landlords. But because of the government backed subsidies for social, let's say, or the social net that we provide here in in Germany, you don't see significant losses in rents on the landlord side, especially this municipal owned and cooperative owned that we serve. So this it's this industry actually was not affected in their core business by corona.
The only thing very very affected were building on modernization projects where some supplier failed to deliver product or services. So we they started with some delays in their construction processes projects, and this a little bit affects their financing pipeline with us because when you're when when all your processes slow down a little bit, you you are not so fast in financing the next project. But it's really it's a minor issue. Sean, it was a minor issue, and this is a minor issue from this lockdown. Yeah.
When we look on the long term period, then we expect this industry to go for more digitalization as well. It's yeah. Let's say it's it's it's not a need they feel when they look back on the corona crisis, but somehow to not be able to control what's going on in your in your business, it feels a little bit strange. And with more digitalization, you may have more control over this the the whole value chain. And for such a housing company.
It it they felt a little bit uncertain, especially when when they had to close their their headquarter and they're not available and and the data is not accessible for employees and management. So there there is some expectation from our side that digitalization is more needed here and more accepted in the near term future, even when it's in traditional industry. So talking about traditional industry, the insurance world. Here in Germany, yeah, let's say, yeah, selling new insurance policies were hit by corona crisis, especially insurances who need to be sold like life or health insurances. Insurances where there's a demand, a trigger event slowed down slightly in the new selling process because when when less cars are sold, less car insurance are sold as well.
Yeah. So new business slowed down. The the management of the existing business of the huge stockpile of outstanding insurance portfolios was not affected by coronavirus. And this is actually core for SmartIntra Tech and our insurance platform that we focus on this management processes, not so much on on the selling of new product process as, let's say, our pricing model is not affected by this. So we saw a slowdown in the industry in in the new business and in their ability to generate new business.
In the core process, they were they were not affected. As well, we don't ex expect any losses which are relevant for this industry on because of claims or something like this. Long term, it was one a one more time event to convince every mention in the insurance industry that the digitalization is necessary, that a complete digitalization is necessary. If you digitalize only parts of your value chain, this it doesn't secure you in in case of such an event. As long as there is one offline process needed, your whole operation gets to a halt when you're have a pandemic like this coronavirus.
And because of this, at any any time in any moment, another local shutdown can appear again or you will have to just shut down your office again. The need for a fully digitalized process in insurance on the new business side, on the underwriting side, and on the management side of the whole portfolio if needed. And let's say, this this may help us in our process of convincing the whole industry that the solution is there. It's ready. We are the one to provide us.
You just need to migrate. About this in a couple of minutes more as well. So all in all, corona was a major event for us as well. The corona crisis offers a lot of opportunities for us. It is strengthening our positions regarding the digitalization digitalization of the workflows in in all three industries, and all three industries needs more of our services in the near time future than before.
So now we look back again. What happened in the first half year? As always, we started the credit platform. As you know, in the center is the U PACE platform, which provides three core products. The mortgage product for consumers were up 36% in the February.
New new record time. No question. Just as a comparison one more time, the total market volume grew by 8% in the first half year, so we outperformed the market by 28% and gained a lot of market share. We gained market share in all four target groups, private banks, mortgage brokers, the regional banks as well. Yeah.
It's that pretty strong where the growth in the box buffer trading, building financing here, plus 21%. So long term interest rate securing products. They are linked to the mortgage business and the VAT even when total market was negative here. And as well as personal loan business, we were able to grow by 2% even when the total markets were were down double digit. So major gain in all product areas and in all target groups.
When we look on the target groups, what gets more and more clear is there is no successful mortgage brokerage business out there which is not using Europase. More and more of the mortgage brokerage business is going through Europase. Private banks keep keep handling or keep using Europase and keep checking out which parts of their Salesforce, their branch network they may have to migrate. We expect that the corona crisis gives some additional impulses for banks because they learned that their current infrastructure is able to power their branch network but is not capable of powering remote work for employees. And you need to be able to work remotely in in the next couple of quarters to be safe to operate in the mortgage business.
So we we expect some positive impulses in this sector even when this will be, let's say, black swans because there are not so many private banks left to decide for your place. Where you can see already that they are made a lot of small positive decisions regarding Europase is the cooperative banking and savings bank sector. More than thousand banks in in these sectors with a lot of small decisions in our directions. We reached 10% market share in both groups now. In the co operative banking sector, we were growing more than 100% compared to last year.
New records high, 2,200,000. And then the second quarter, the cooperative banks were even on a close run with the savings banks, which they're growing for a longer time in a steady basis, and the co ops now accelerated in the last two years. But even during corona crisis and even when there were a lot of branches closed of local banks, you see that our growth record stays intact, and even the savings banks were growing an additional 40% compared with last year. In both sectors, we expect this grow this growth to continue because, again, the corona crisis showed that if you are able to work remotely, you are dealing much better with such an environment than when you are only able to work in your branches. Okay.
And another small positive signal is that in the savings bank sector, the major IT service provider, Kinant Informatic, acquired the joint venture share of FINMA, which was hold by now by the Society of East German Savings Bank. So now we are we are in the team to make FINMA successful together with decentralized IT service provider, and we expect here some positive impulses from this new joint venture partner as well. So with this strong growth of the U PACE world, let's and say, the the other businesses, so our servicing businesses to small intermediaries, our corporate loan business on the advisory side with Time Capital, they were growing as well and distributing as well some growth, but not as far as much as the Europase platform itself. So in average, the segment was growing by 21% to $8,080,000,000 euro in the first half year, new record high. And let's say, so closing on a on a new volume level here, distributing 60,000,000 in profit to the group.
When you're taking into consideration that we are investing here right now, still a lot in key account resources for these local banks, There's still a lot in developing Europace. And now even the funding port development is in the segment, we are happy that we show some profitability gains here as well. It is in the current environment. Okay. Next slide not next segment, private client business as well.
Mortgage financing in the core here, the doctor client franchise network with lead generation on the Internet using your place in in the branches at FCA franchisees to advise clients and close mortgages on behalf of Hyperport. Mortgage volume closed is up 30% to a new record, 4,600,000,000.0. And this even with adjusted increase in advisers by 7%, which is a slowdown compared to the last years. So the productivity of the doctor client franchise network grew massively in the first half year. I would say half of this is half of this productivity gain is thanks to increasing property prices and mortgage volumes, and the other half is because of the astonishing quality of the way how doctor was remotely treating and advising their clients.
So the the well trained approach of video advice made doctor Klein a very successful advice organization during this time, while a lot of banks or even smaller mortgage brokers struggled to handle this environment. We were in and and we may be again in from time to time. So, yeah, doctor Klein, strong growth on the revenue side. This slowdown on the adviser side is linked to the fact that it is a little bit more tricky to convince people to sign up a new employment contract with the franchisees leading a a local bank and getting an independent adviser in in such an, let's say, crisis environment, people stay on the security on the secure side and keep their current job and not switch to a new one. And so during the pandemic, we saw the slowdown.
On the other side, we expect these people to see as well who's operating well in the market and who's offering the right technical solutions to to deal with clients so that after this environment is over, that we will be able to close the skip again and increase the pace of hiring new people to the network, and we get back to double digit growth rates on the head count of our our advisory network as well. So as a result of this growth in sales, doctor Klein was able to achieve new record highs on revenue and gross profit side as well with a similar growth speed. Because of the huge investments we capitalized last year capitalized, sorry, dragged through our p and l last year, we see amazing increase in profitability. This is not a little bit it's not fearfully. It's a little bit overstated when you compare with the 2017 or 2018 profitability level.
You understand that we are back to normal situation, that EBIT margins above 35% on on gross profit is normal in this kind of business, and we are back to normal. We had a good run-in the first half year, and doctor Klein was contributing a pretty good share of profitability to the group and is because of this one of the core business units which we are running. So after these two core segments, now we are coming to the two growth segments. First, the real estate platform. As you know, we are serving two client groups, four platforms, and, let's say, trying to get as fast as possible market share in all these four segments of the housing market here.
We are doing pretty well on the consumer side using our stronghold in the mortgage platform with a market share of 25% to, let's say, gain control of markets along the value chain. If you look from the mortgage financing to the front, to the property transaction with the acquisition of FiO, we service now 7% of all private housing transactions in Germany in the first half year. Yeah. Let's say a lot of potential, as you can see here, with the steady growth of the importance of Europace and then combined offering between the property and the mortgage, are pretty sure that we are able to help the agency of the credit industries the credit industry to gain market share and regaining with them and in a world where we join our with our pricing model, their interest, fast revenue growth for us as well. And if you look for the value chain from a process side, then with every mortgage, there's evaluation necessary.
In the world of evaluations, We as well reached already a market share of 7%, so only 93 to gain still. So first, a a more detailed look on the agency side. The while FiO was already strong when we acquired this two years ago, we steadily increased the market share of FiO within the savings banks industry by a combined offering with Europase and Finmas. We reached now 85% of all savings banks, which are under contract with FiRE. On the cooperative banking side, FiRE was virgin when when we acquired it.
And over the last three years, we could increase the market share now to 10. And with the increased growth of Genopase in the cooperative banking sector, we see as well a huge potential to accelerate the growth speed of FIRE in the corporate banking industry. So so the growth rate continues, and FIRE was able to gain 33% in revenue to a new record of 10,000,000 for the first half year. On the valuation side, Value AG gained another 80 contractual partners compared with the half year 02/2019. So the relative share in to the group of all Europase partners is steadily increasing.
We hired a lot of people. We invest a lot in the digital valuation process and in the in in an underlying software platform to fully automate the valuation process or depending on the regulatory requirements and the size of the property, automate as much as possible. And as a result, even within this crisis environment, we were able to increase revenue by 53%. This is a major slowdown when you compare to this this first quarter. There, we still had an increase in revenue from more than 90%.
Here, you see the impact of the coronavirus and the slowdown on the dental side to request evaluations and hassle with the consumers to inspect the properties, which we saw in in April and May. Since June, you can say it's normalizing again, and we expect an increase in growth rate again for the second half of the year, so not continuing this slow growth that we saw in the second quarter. So second target group, housing associations. Here, the financing platform is a major revenue driver. This social housing companies, yeah, let's say, signed mortgages of a billion.
Euros Again, this first half of the year, it's a plus of just 3% compared to last year. Next to this small slowdown which we saw in the projects caused by the coronavirus, a positive impact had the general interest environment. We we have the lowest interest rates in Germany ever still. This typical mortgage of fifteen ten to fifteen or twenty years duration starting with 01% interest rate for this fixed time period. And the housing associations are, let's say, in need of these finances, especially when they have new project.
Thanks to some volatility in the interest rate, we had as well some trigger moments to close mortgages in the second quarter, so pretty good in interest rate environment. Unfortunately, the political environment for social housing construction is still weak. We have a intensive discussion here in Germany about rising rents and what you can do about this, And a lot of local regulators try to implement rules to slow down this rent increase process. This is making the especially this long term focused housing associations a little bit uncertain about the future prospect of their investments in new housing. So a slowdown in the renting construction or the renting unit construction, which is really not helpful.
So a misunderstanding between government and the economy, which we see over the last years, you can say already in Germany. Yeah. The good news is we are lacking roughly 2,000,000 units in the metropolitan areas. So there's a huge exceeding demand pressure sign on government and housing associations to do something. And this the fact that Germany will recover much faster from this coronavirus linked recession than other European areas, we will see additional migrations in Europe to the center of the economic power here in Germany, and so more people will demand living space and the need for housing, especially social housing, will be even increased more, and we will exceed this this demand of 2,000,000 units soon.
So the pressure will increase, and in some moment, politics will hopefully remember what it has to do to set up an environment where social housing is built and constructions constructions are started. And for this, we this this situation, we are ready for with this unit because then we expect a strong growth in the needed financing of the sector. And and I'm gonna say additional growth for for our real estate segment. Okay. Additional growth, first half year, plus 28% top line.
So we are on on this is the fastest growing sec segment right now within the group even when it's still expensive to grow here. We invested a lot in the last quarters. And plus this impact from the coronavirus, we see a reduction in profitability. Let's say, all in all, it was planned. We we want to grow here.
We want to have a significant double digit growth rate in this sector even when the environment may be a little bit struggling because we see this as a huge opportunity for Hyperport using our stronghold in the mortgage process to build here or to gain your market shares and gain control of market along the value chain next to the mortgage process. Talking about controlling markets and gaining market share, we are entering the top segment, the insurance platform. This offering of smart Intratech as an full full technical solution to cover all insurance processes within the German market. We did two acquisitions in the first half year where we acquired minority shares in two companies, one on the commercial insurance side, one on the corporate pension side. Both helped to make one more time clear to every participant in the market that we are going for the, so it's a full game that we want to digitalize the whole industry and that even in this, let's say, let's say, tight products of commercial or attention attention products, we are going to drive digitalization forward to come to a whole solution for one market one marketplace for all insurances, one technical solution for the whole maintenance process of all insurances.
So on the operational side, we are getting forward with a lot of projects with medium sized clients. We publish on a monthly basis now some medium sized insurance company or insurance sales company or a broker company, which is migrating their Salesforce or decides to migrate their Salesforce or parts of their traditional infrastructure to Smart Intritech. Just the projects the the underlying IT projects, they are tough. They take a lot of time a lot of time. They they, let's say, consume our resources and stretch our I don't know what the English word for Gudult is.
So it it it all is pretty hard work to do here. And let's say, still, are lacking this trigger event where the process itself is accelerating that sales organizations migrate fast to us and drive their their IT projects faster forward. So it what we do in the Venus, we switch the pricing model away from one off fees, license fees, or paid projects to recurring SaaS revenue linked to the transaction volume. And let's say, because of the different speed and impact, So skipping some one offs and onetime revenues and transferring this to recurring leads to a visibly slow growth of only 2% or 3%. This is this is not reflecting the real success we see here in on the client side.
It feels higher. And let's say, with the projects which are ongoing, we know that our growth speed is in reality higher than what you can show here from pure revenue side. Then our investments in the high you see in the our EBIT margin, we increased our loss in the first half year by a couple of €100,000 again, but we stay to our expectation that we will have double digit growth and positive profit to the end of the year here in this segment. So all in all, HUD Board Group is gaining market share in all three industries. The offering is not just competitive.
It's outperforming most of all other businesses in this three sectors right now. So top line growth of 20% to new record high for half year and even profitability growth, including that that we, in certain areas, had to deal with the corona crisis as well. So what you could see on the long term is that our growth record is intact. Growth speed even accelerated in the last two years. We are gaining market share constantly, and our investments are paying back short term.
So the 35,000,000 that which we spent last years in within our p and l are paying back already. So because of this and what we see in recovery in the third quarter already, we stick with our forecast for 02/2020. We expect above 400,000,000 in revenue and something between 35 and 40,000,000 in EBIT. This yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. We keep our long term growth record of double digit growth, and we will grow this year by more than 20%. So I hand back now to the moderator for your questions. Thanks for your attention, Abanhula.
Ladies and gentlemen, if you would like to ask a question, please press 0 and 19. Your telephone keypad now turn to the queue. Once your name has been announced, you can ask a question. If you find your question is answered before it is your turn to speak, you can dial 02 to answer your question. If you're using speaker equipment today, please list the answer before making your selection.
One moment, for the first question. As a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press 01 on your telephone keypad. We have no questions, so I would like to hand back to you, mister Slabka, for some closing words.
Yeah. Thank you. Okay. Hope I answered all your questions already. So let's focus now on the first quarter.
We will do our best to use the chances that we see in the crisis environment and keep growing this company. And we will hear again in three months, and I expect to report to you some another good pretty good third quarter results. Let's gain market share. You. Bye bye.
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your attendance. This conference has been concluded.