Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the webcast results Q2 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 operator assistance. May I now hand you over to Mr. Slabke, who will lead you through this conference. Please go ahead.
Yeah, thank you. From my side as well, welcome to the half year report of Hypoport and some deep dive into certain issues. Okay. As you all know already, we had a pretty good start in 2020, plus 20% growth rate, in an environment where Germany, like most of the economies around the world, were hit by the coronavirus, plus some developing recession after this because of the lockdowns. Compared to this, a 20% top-line growth is a pretty good start in the year. We start, as always, with a detailed look on the market environment, for you to understand better what's going on. A little bit untypical for us, we will focus on this short-term event.
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 start with our major core business, the platform unit and the private client division. Here, mortgage financing for consumers is a centered 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 on the one side to the advisors of banks and financial intermediaries, and on the other side, to the consumer directly.
During lockdown, Hypoport directly profited from the environment, and could pretty well monetize on the investments we did in the last years in technology. Midterm and long-term, there will be a 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. After already three to four weeks during the lockdown and during the crisis, we reached a pre-crisis demand on the housing side, because everyone learned how important your four walls are when it comes to a pandemic. Their own living situation got much more important for a lot of Germans, not to say most of the families, especially.
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 an apartment without balcony. The same goes as well for your home office. An apartment without home office is less valuable than an apartment with home office. There are a lot of triggers which happened during the lockdown that increased the demand for housing space here in Germany. What we see that since May, you can say demand is exceeding the pre-crisis level, and the supply is still low, as it always was in Germany. Because of the crisis time or the lockdown time, even a little bit suppressed. Demand is rising. Supply is, let's say, best case stable. You see a price rise.
This price rise happened during the last month. The development of the last years continued. The development in this housing market is not affected by the recession environment. 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. Prices goes up. Because of increasing prices, mortgage lending volume is going up long-term. We expect a pretty well market environment for the next quarters and the next years. A little bit different perspective on corporate financing. Here we are more into this market for the last now 12 months since the acquisition of REM Capital last summer. During the peak of the lockdown, we saw a heavy increase in demand for subsidized loans from KfW, a state-owned, government-owned agency, which is providing, let's say, special financing vehicles.
For instance, for the COVID environment. All in all, it was a busy time for banks as well in the German Mittelstand financing business. A lot of uncertainties, a lot of liquidity demand. It's a lot to do for the banks, including us as an advisor to, let's say, stabilize the relation between banks and corporates, the mid and the large corporates here in this business. Long term, we will see a change in the market because of the COVID, 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 which they expect to come. The equity of the banks will get some damage, some loss. We expect that bank loans will not be as easily available as it were before for German businesses.
Their structures will get more complex. They will involve not only German bank loans, but capital from third-party sources is more and more. 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. Good for our acquisition of REM Capital and good for our investment in Fundingport, where we are building the platform, which will make it possible that German Mittelstand will be financed as good as in the past. Last segment of the credit industry, where we are in the consumer financing in short-term areas. Here we saw a more restricted lending by the banks. As you can imagine, with an upcoming recession, banks have to reduce their appetite for, let's say, outstanding loans to consumers.
We saw a decline in the market, minus 30% for the first half year of 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, a high margin business still in Germany here with 200 basis points - 300 basis points of net credit margin. We expect a fast recovery, especially when we don't expect major losses of banks in this environment because of the overall well-handled crisis environment by the government. We don't expect major losses, and we don't see that banks will change their strategy in the consumer business here. Okay. 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. We were well prepared for the situation and could monetize on this.
In addition to using the Europace platform for the transaction, the interaction with the client remotely were well-established, and Dr. Klein advisors, outperformed 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 solution to sell properties, we saw a huge decline in the usage by our clients. Thanks to the traditional pricing model we are still working in, it didn't interfere with our income during this time. We saw that our clients were 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. Actually, because of this learning, it may be easier for us to transfer the business model to a transaction-based model and go away from this, let's say, license-based software service model, which we are running right now on. What this industry learned is that more digitalization is good, even 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 fast and so on, outperformed the agents which have a very traditional approach to interacting with clients.
The offerings of FIO will be more needed mid to long term, and the solution is a nice reminder of how important the digitalization of the selling process of a property is as well. On the valuation side, we saw two slowdowns. One slowdown was that banks who are the major customer group of Value AG slowed down their processes in their back offices because of, let's say, lack of employees or shutdown of their whole operation. They started to stockpile their requests for valuations. On the other side, we were as well for a couple of weeks uncertain how to deal with the consumers and our evaluators because of the needed physical inspections and the physical contact which was linked to this. On both sides, we saw a slowdown, and so this business was actually affected by COVID within the Hypoport Group.
Midterm, we see little changes here. First, and this is a positive outcome of the COVID lockdown, is that the regulator BaFin here in Germany allowed remote inspections of properties. There is not a physical human-based inspection needed anymore, and we started to offer this already end of March. More and more of the banks are switching to this product. On the other side, bank stockpiled their needed valuations. We have to, let's say, start working this out and reducing the backlog banks that we have now. Midterm, no major changes in the valuation process because of this episode of epidemic. 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 such a pandemic leads to some losses for the landlords.
Because of the government-backed subsidies for let's say, or the social net that we provide here in Germany, you don't see significant losses in rents on the landlord side, especially this municipal-owned and cooperative-owned debt reserve. This industry actually was not affected in their core business by COVID. The only thing that affected were building on modernization projects where some supplier failed to deliver product or services. They struggled with some delays in their construction processes projects, and this a little bit affects their financing pipeline with us, because when all your processes slow down a little bit, you are not so fast in financing the next project. It's a minor issue. It was a minor issue, and this is a minor issue from this lockdown. When we look on the long-term period, then we expect this industry to go for more digitalization as well.
Let's say, it's not a need they feel when they look back on the COVID crisis, but somehow to not be able to control what's going on in your business, it feels a little bit strange. With more digitalization, you may have more control over the whole value chain. For such a housing company, they felt a little bit uncertain, especially when they had to close their headquarters and they're not available and the data were not accessible for employees and management. There is some expectation from our side that digitalization is more needed here and more accepted in the near-term future, even by this traditional industry. Talking about traditional industry, the insurance world here in Germany. Let's say, selling new insurance policies were hit by COVID 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 less cars are sold, less car insurance are sold as well. New business slowed down. The management of the existing business of the huge stockpile of outstanding insurance portfolios was not affected by coronavirus. This is actually core for Smart InsurTech and our insurance platform that we focus on this management processes, not so much on the selling of new product process as our pricing model is not affected by this. We saw a slowdown in the industry, in their new business and in their ability to generate new business. In the core process, they were not affected. As well, we don't expect any losses which are relevant for this industry because of claims or something like this.
Long term, it was a one more time event to convince every member insurance industry that the digitalization is necessary, that a complete digitalization is necessary. If you digitalize only parts of your value chain, it doesn't secure you in case of such an event. As long as there's one offline process needed, your whole operation gets to a halt when you have a pandemic like this coronavirus. Because of this, at any time, in any moment, another local shutdown can occur 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 is needed. Let's say, 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 this. You just need to migrate. About this in a couple of minutes more as well. 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 of the workflows in all three industries, and all three industries needs more of our services in the near term future than before. Now we look back again. What happened in the first half year? As always, we start with the credit platform. As you know, in the center is the Europace platform, which provides three core products. The mortgage product for consumers were up 36% in the first half year of 2020. New record high, no question.
Just as a comparison one more time, the total market volume grew by 8% in the first half year. 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, and the regional banks as well. As that pretty strong, where the growth in the Bausparverträge building financing here, plus 31%. Long-term interest rate securing products, they are linked to the mortgage business and the web, even when total market was negative here. As well personal loan business, we were able to grow by 2% even when the total markets were down double digits. 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 Europace. More and more of the mortgage brokerage business is going through Europace. Private banks keep handling or keep using Europace, keep checking out which part of their sales force, 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 the employees. You need to be able to work remotely in the next couple of quarters to be safe to operate in the mortgage business. We expected 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 Europace. Where you can see already that they are made a lot of small positive decisions regarding Europace is the cooperative banking and savings bank sector. More than 1,000 banks in this sector with a lot of small decisions in our directions. We reach 10% market share in both groups now. In the cooperative banking sector, we were growing more than 100% compared to last year. New record high, EUR 2.2 million.
In the second quarter, the cooperative banks were even on a close one 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. 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 to last year. In both sectors, we expect this growth to continue because, again, the Corona crisis showed that if you're 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.
Another small positive signal is that in the savings bank sector, the major IT service provider, Finanz Informatik, acquired the joint venture share of Finmas, which was held by now by the Society of East German Savings Banks. Now we are in a team to make Finmas successful together with the centralized IT service provider, and we expect here some positive impulses from this new joint venture partner as well. With the strong growth of the Europace world, let's say the other businesses, so our servicing businesses to small intermediaries, our corporate loan business on the advisory side with REM Capital, they were growing as well and distributing as well some growth, but not as much as the Europace platform itself.
On average, the segment was growing by 31% to EUR 80 million in the first half-year, new record high, and let's say, it's closing on a new volume level here. Distributing EUR 16 million in profit to the group. When you take into consideration that we are investing here right now, still a lot in key account resources for these local banks, still a lot in developing Europace, and now even the Fundingport development is in the segment. We are happy that we show some profitability gains here as well. This in the current environment. Okay. Next segment, private client business as well. Mortgage financing in the core here, the Dr. Klein franchise network with lead generation on the internet using Europace and in the branches as the franchisees to advise clients and close mortgages on behalf of Hypoport.
Mortgage volume closed up 30% to a new record, EUR 4.6 billion. This even with adjusted increase in advisors by 7%, which is a slowdown compared to the last years. The productivity of the Dr. Klein franchise network grew massively in the first half year. I would say 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 Dr. Klein was remotely treating and advising their clients. The well-trained approach of video advice made Dr. 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 we may be again from time to time. Dr. Klein has strong growth on the revenue side.
This slowdown on the advisor 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 leaving a local bank and getting an independent advisor in such an, let's say, crisis environment. People stay on the secure side and keep their current job and not switch to a new one. 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 deal with these clients, so that after this environment is over, that we will be able to close this gap again and increase the pace of hiring new people to the network. We get back to double-digit growth rates on the headcount of our advising network as well.
As a result of this growth in sales, Dr. Klein was able to achieve new record highs on revenue and gross profit side as well. This is a similar growth speed. Because of the huge investments we capitalized last year, or capitalized direct through our P&L last year, we see amazing increase in profitability. It's not fair fully. 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 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 Dr. 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.
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.
Let's say a lot of potential as you can see here with the steady growth of the importance of Europace and a combined offering between the property and the mortgage. We are pretty sure that we are able to help the agency of the credit industry to gain market share and we gaining with them and in a world where we join with our pricing model, their interest, fast revenue growth for us as well. If you look through the value chain from a process side, with every mortgage, there's a valuation necessary. In the world of valuations, we as well reached already a market share of 7%, so only 93 to gain still. First a more detailed look on the agency side. FIO was already strong when we acquired this three years ago.
We steadily increased the market share of FIO within the savings banks industry by a combined offering with Europace and Finmas. We reach now 85% of all savings banks which are under contract with FIO. On the cooperative banking side, FIO was virgin when we acquired it. Over the last three years, we could increase the market share now to 10%. With the increased growth of Genopace in the cooperative banking sector, we see as well a huge potential to accelerate the growth speed of FIO in the cooperative banking industry. The growth rate continues and FIO was able to gain 33% in revenue to a new record of EUR 10 million for the first half year. On the valuation side, Value AG gained another 80 contractual partners compared with the half year 2019. The relative share in the group of all Europace partners is steadily increasing.
We hired a lot of people. We invest a lot in the digital valuation process and 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. As a result, even within this crisis environment, we were able to increase revenue by 53%. This is a major slowdown when you compare this the 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 vendor side to request the valuations and hassle with the consumers to inspect the properties, which we saw 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, not continuing this slow growth which we saw in the second quarter. Second target group, housing associations. Here the financing platform is a major revenue driver. These social housing companies signed mortgages of EUR 1 billion. 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 have the lowest interest rates in Germany ever still. With a typical mortgage of 10 to 15 or 20 years duration, starting with below 1% interest rate for this fixed term period.
The housing associations are, let's say, in need of these finances, especially when they have new projects. 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 intensive discussion here in Germany about rising rents and what you can do about this. A lot of local regulators try to implement rules to slow down this rent increase process. This is making especially these long-term focused housing associations a little bit uncertain about the future prospect of their investments in new housing. A slowdown in the renting unit construction, which is really not helpful. A misunderstanding between government and the economy, which we see over the last years, you can say, already here in Germany.
The good news is, we are lacking roughly 2 million units in the metropolitan areas. There's a huge, exceeding demand. Pressure is high on the government and housing associations to do something. With the fact that Germany will recover much faster from this coronavirus-linked recession than other European areas, we will see additional migration within Europe to the center of the economic power here in Germany. More people will demand living space and the need for housing, especially social housing, will be even increased more, and we will exceed this demand of 2 million units soon. 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 are started.
For this situation, we are ready for with this unit, because then we expect a strong growth in the needed financing of this sector. Let's say, additional growth for our real estate segment. Okay. Additional growth, first half year, plus 28% top line. We are on this fastest-growing segment right now within the group, even when it's still expensive to grow here. We invested a lot in the last quarters. Plus this impact from the coronavirus, we see a reduction in profitability. Let's say, all in all, it was planned. 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 Hypoport, using our stronghold in the mortgage process to gain new market shares and gain control of markets 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, with the offering of Smart InsurTech as a 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, for some full game, that we want to digitalize the whole industry and that even in this, let's say, side products of commercial or pension products, we are going to drive digitalization forward. To come to a whole solution for one marketplace for all insurances, one technical solution for the whole maintenance process of all insurances. 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 broker company which is migrating their sales force or decides to migrate their sales force or parts of their traditional infrastructure to Smart InsurTech. Just the projects, the underlying IT projects, they are tough. They take a lot of time.
They consume our resources and I don't know what the English word for is. Sorry. It all is pretty hard work to do here. Let's say, still we are lacking this trigger event, where the process itself is accelerating, that sales organizations migrate fast to us and drive their IT projects with us faster forward. What we do in between is, we switch the pricing model away from one of these license fees or paid projects to recurring SaaS revenue linked to the transaction volume. Let's say, because of the different speed and impact, skipping some one-offs and one-time revenues and transferring this to recurring leads to a visibly slow growth, only 2% or 3%. This is not reflecting the real success we see here on the client side. It feels higher.
Let's say, with the projects which are ongoing, we know that our growth speed is in reality higher than what we can show here from pure revenue side. You see in our EBIT margin. We increased our loss in the first half year by a couple of EUR 100,000 again. 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. All in all, Hypoport Group is gaining market share in all three industries. The offering is not just competitive, it's outperforming most of all other businesses in these three sectors right now. Top line growth of 20% to a new record high for a half year and even profitability growth, including that we, in certain areas, had to deal with the COVID crisis as well.
What you can see on the long-term is that our growth record is intact. Our growth speed even accelerated in the last two years. We are gaining market share constantly and our investments are paying back short-term. The EUR 35 million which we spent last years within our P&L are paying back already. Because of this and what we see in recovery in the third quarter already, we stick with our forecast for 2020. We expect above EUR 400 million in revenue and something between EUR 35 million and EUR 40 million in EBIT. We keep our long-term growth record of double-digit growth, and we will grow this year by more than 20%. I hand back now to the moderator for your questions. Thanks for your attention up until now.
Ladies and gentlemen, if you would like to ask a question, please press 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 find your question is answered before it is your turn to speak, you can dial zero and two to cancel 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 reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press zero and one on your telephone keypad. We have no questions, so I would like to hand back to you, Mr. Slabke, for some closing words.
Yeah. Thank you. Okay. Hope I answered all your questions already. Let's focus now on the third quarter. We will do our best to use the chances that we see here in the crisis environment and keep growing this company. We will hear again in three months. I expect to report to you some another pretty good third quarter results. Let's gain market share. Thank you. Bye-bye.
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your attendance. This conference has been concluded.