Dear ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the webcast result Q1 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, and after the presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. If any participant has difficulty hearing the conference, please press star key followed by zero on your telephone for operator assistance. I now hand you over to Ronald Slabke, who will lead you through this conference. Please go ahead, sir.
Yeah. Thank you. Welcome from my side as well. In these unusual times, we are presenting our first quarter numbers. As you may know already, we are looking back on a successful start of the year, with revenue and profit increase by 30% compared to the first quarter last year. We sped up our growth process. This, in a market environment, let's say, with some challenges, and especially to the end of last quarter, let's say, serious challenges concerning COVID. Okay. Besides this, that we handled this environment pretty well, let's talk a little bit about the market, because I think this is of huge interest for everyone around the world right now. What we saw in Germany in the beginning of the year, let's say until the end of February, is that prices for real estates are still on the rise.
We saw a plus of roughly 10% compared with last year, again, in the beginning of this year. This because of increasing demands from migration and people getting older and more and more singles occupying metropolitan areas. Let's say, a path on which Germany is now for close to a decade of, let's say, normalization, that properties in Germany are priced similar to similar properties in other developed European countries. Let's say, in the beginning of March, situation got a little bit fuzzy. There were concerns that Corona may arrive here, and we at Hypoport decided quite early to go remote with our employees to protect them and make sure that they stay healthy and that we don't get some issues within the company. Because of our decentralized structure, we were able to then go remote and work from the home office within a couple of days.
You can say in the middle of March, all 2,000 employees in Hypoport, they're working from home or were able to work from home. 95% work from home. Just 5% still go to the office because they prefer this quiet environment in an empty office. For competitor, this was not so easy to go remote. During this time when we went remote and then starting in middle of March, we felt less pressure from competition. Especially banks had trouble to put their branches or close to branches and migrate their advisors in a remote environment because of lack of technical abilities. We could see that we pretty well outperformed the market then in this crisis environment where, let's say, we continue to operate on a highly efficient level from the home office of our employees.
From a market side, roughly in the middle of March, we see a sharp decline in properties offered in Germany here, down something 25%-30%. In the same time as well, a decline in interest of consumers to buy, to acquire a property. Two weeks later, at the end of March and beginning of April, this changed already, especially the demand side. On the supply side, we are still below the pre-crisis environment. Something 15%-20% below, but it recovered already a little bit, the supply side. On the demand side, we are on new highs. The interest of consumers, especially online and this year we are able to judge about. The online interest of consumers about housing, about acquiring apartment or buying a home is higher than pre-crisis level and is well higher than last year at the same time.
Our interpretation of this situation is that after a couple of weeks in the quarantine at home, people realized that this home is more than just a place for sleeping. It's a place where you may, in the near future, have to stay more often, and including things like home office changes what type of home you need. They are starting to look for an optimization of their personal situation. This in an environment where we are in a recession and where the short-term outlook, even for the general economy, is pretty bad. From this perspective, it looks like that these years of waiting for a good situation or a better situation to buy a property, because Germans were not used to this price increase and hoped that the price will come back in some moment.
Suddenly, everyone understand that this waiting was maybe not the best thing to do. With these sharp price increases over the last years and now even in March, we went up 12.7% compared to last year March. With these sharp price increases, it's pretty obvious that it would have been better to buy earlier, pre-crisis and not wait so long. The short-term outlook is difficult. We see still significant numbers of transactions in the market, and the mortgage volume looks pretty stable. We are coming from a + 10% in the first quarter reported by Bundesbank. Even if it drops, it's in a single-digit environment. It doesn't look like a sharp step back from the market side to be expected. Medium-term, it's uncertain how this, let's say, the struggle between supply-demand will continue. We may see a slowdown in the price increase.
We may see a slowdown in transactions, especially in the third quarter. It's pretty difficult to predict this looking on this high demand on the consumer side right now. It would be logic when you think about incomes and uncertainty, but on the same moment, especially online demand is up. Medium-term, let's say last quarter this year and next year. We expect that the migration within the European Union will restart, and more people from the south and east of Europe will want to move to Germany because of a more solid restart of the economy here in Germany compared to the rest of Europe, especially South and East Europe. This is not difficult to predict that Germany will handle the whole crisis better.
We did it already, the firepower of our government spending is much higher than this what Spain, Italy, or East European countries are able to do. It's pretty certain that migration will pace up again, and that we will see a significant increase in migration to Germany, which the demand and the necessary construction and price increases which will follow this. Midterm, especially next year and forward, we expect a very solid environment from the market side for our business models. Market side business models. Let's go already to the first segment, credit platform, Europace in the center, and the integration of especially the mortgage market in Germany. Europace had a record quarter. The 10% market increase, it outperformed in the mortgage business by more than 20%, so 38%+ in the mortgage transaction volume.
Same goes for, or let's say, a pretty well speed as well of growth in building financial contracts, which are typically linked and serve as some kind of interest rate option to secure long-term interest rates with a + 22%. As well, personal loans is back on track for growth with a + 14% compared to last year. Europace did pretty well, outperformed the market faster than the last quarters. We see here that sales structure, sales organizations that are using Europace are performing much better in this crisis environment where you may need to work remotely than organizations which are still working the old way. The relative competitiveness of partners of Europace helped to pace up the growth of Europace in all four segments.
Independent mortgage brokers were growing with Europace massively, and we will talk about the private client division in a minute. Private banks growing with Europace, especially in the structures where they use it. Savings banks and cooperative banks could grow as well if they use already Genopace or Finmas. Talking about the regional cooperative and savings banks, we see a continuation of what we saw last year. With Genopace, we had a pretty strong 2019 already with an acceleration in the growth rate, and this continued as well in the first quarter, bringing us to EUR 1.6 billion in transaction volume from the cooperative banking sector. Let's say, if we would not have seen a small slowdown here because of closed branches of cooperative banks, this could have looked even more impressive. Savings banks with a + 50% continue their incremental growth path.
We are for a longer time already on this roughly 40%- 60% growth speed. Now they are up to 1.8 billion in transaction volume, and our market share is now roughly 9% in the savings bank industry, compared to the 8% of the cooperative banks. This process will continue. We are going to grow in both sectors in any environment given outside. The regional banking sector will be a pretty strong base for Hypoport, for Europace to grow. Within the total numbers of the segments, there's as well then the new acquisition of REM Capital visible now. REM Capital with its corporate advisory services regarding state subsidies, is well-positioned in the current environment. They are serving the German Mittelstand, the German powerhouse for industry. With the current subsidies the government is pumping into this market, REM Capital is pretty busy in advising its client.
We use this as a base for our new Fundingport platform, which we are going to launch within this year. It's not affected by COVID or anything else. The numbers for the whole segments are record, all of them. EUR 40 million revenue, +32%, in line with this, the gross profit. Just the EBIT didn't grow so fast because of our huge investments in future partner structures, so in sales and in technology. These investments we keep up even when we are in a general crisis environment, to use the opportunities this environment is giving us and to gain market share as fast as possible in this environment. Talking about market share gain. Our private client division, Dr. Klein, is operating with 200 franchises with branches all over Germany.
The good news here is that for a long time we advertised already using video conference systems to advise clients and to save time and travel costs. Let's say up until the Corona crisis, this was a pretty niche product, you can say. From the consumer side, it was not favored and as well the advisor preferred to have the consumer in front of him or her to be better in touch. Corona changed this and really within days, the wholesale organization of Dr. Klein went remote and started to use this technology, which was there, and with some additional training even to optimize the sales approach in this environment. We were pretty successful with this change. Dr. Klein grew even faster than the Europace platform with a + 39% in the first quarter.
Especially here you can see the competitive advantage of an independent sales organization, a decentralized structure, plus a high level of digitalization. What a speed, what a pace such an organization is having even in a challenging environment. Even in this challenging environment, we were able to recruit more advisors for the system. We adjusted the way we count advisors. I think that people who are following us for a longer time see this in the numbers. We increased this number by another 12% to close to 530 advisors now. This is the base for future growth. You can see in an, let's say, incremental efficiency gain, 39%+ in volume and just 12% more in people, that this was a pretty productive first quarter for everyone.
As well, new people need to be trained, needs to get more successful, need to get used to the environment. There is a growth path in this 530 advisors in Dr. Klein already included. With this increase in transaction volume, Dr. Klein increased revenue to new record highs as well. Especially on the gross revenue and even more on the profit side, you see that the challenges we had the last 1.5 year, that the fast increase in numbers of banks we are dealing with to roughly 600 now, diluted the margin of Dr. Klein and made it necessary to close new cooperation contracts with a huge number of banks that the investments we did there really paid back and we were able to recover from the profitability level to the base where we have been in the beginning of 2018.
This what you see here is a strong increase in EBIT margin to now a new record of EUR 5 million in the quarter, which Dr. Klein or the segment contributed is a continuation of our EBIT margin level of beginning of 2018, what we had achieved already there. Okay, these were our two traditional segments with a pretty impressive growth speed of 30%+ . Now we are coming to our youngsters. First, the real estate platform, which is linked to the, let's say, housing market and the credit platform with this. Here we expand our position in the value chain. We are trying to get traction on the sales side with FIO and the property sales platform.
We are working on a position in the valuation of properties, with Dr. Klein and the property management platform of FIO as well as serving professional housing companies which are renting and serving the renting market. Just to give you a first impression how the relevance along the value chain of our subsidiaries is right now and what we achieved up until now. In the center, you see the role of Europace in the mortgage market. Roughly every fourth mortgage in Germany is transacted via Europace. On the sales side, with FIO, we achieved already a market share of roughly 7%, growing, as you can imagine. On the valuation side, we are with Value AG at the market share of roughly 8%.
While we expect Europace market share to grow far above 50%, our goal with the segment real estate platform is to achieve similar market shares in the other areas of the value chain as well. A lot of growth to deal with here and to achieve. A more detailed look on the sales side of the real estate platform. The savings banks and cooperative banks are major players in the German real estate agent market. While we are in the savings banks industry already close to a full coverage and closing the last gaps in the cooperative banking industry, we are just starting and we are increasing our pace. Sales went up here and traction is growing, especially because of synergies that we are realizing between Genopace and FIO here. Sales is up for FIO. Good first quarter, but it's still a lot of things to do.
Let's say our incremental margin in real estate transaction is still pretty low when we see what amount of value we add to the value chain here already and what we are able to add in value by integrating every little step along the sales process of that property with the mortgage platform, Europace. A high speed in growth and a fast gain in market share we see right now with Value AG. On one side, we were able to significantly increase the number of contracts with Europace partners so that they are able to directly use our services for business which they are doing within Europace or outside of Europace.
Every second Europace partner is already a contractual partner of Value AG now, and more and more of them use or try Value AG so that the revenue of Value AG is up by 91% to EUR 5 million. To make this clear, this is still an area of massive investments from our side. Still, valuations in Germany are workforce heavy. You need a lot of human labor to do evaluations because the regulator require this, or the lender requires it. There is a lot to do about digitalization, this whole process and automating this whole process. We are investing in our own platform to do this all heavily and working on a fully digitalized approach for this industry while gaining market share with human labor on the other side. We expect that valuation in Germany will look pretty different in a couple of years.
Corona there was some positive impact and some negative here as well. The negative is that people don't like so often anymore visits from externals at home. Some refuse to let people inside. To deal with this tension, the regulator allowed video inspections of properties already. This is something we didn't expect for the next couple of years to come. This part of the digitalization which we wanted to go for in a couple of years, was sped up by COVID. Now we are doing already live inspections via video chat with our, obviously, consumers, and working with banks and the regulators to expand the acceptance of this way of service here. Pretty well on the growth path, even when we still have to invest a lot. Housing industry.
This is the industry which will be, let's say, pretty busy by finally delivering the necessary social housing capacities that we will need to deal with the migration we saw in the last years and the migration which is going to come when Germany recovers faster than rest of Europe. Just to make this clear, this industry is not affected by COVID. We have only a very small fraction of the rents not coming in in this sector. There's no default rates which is impacting the sector. Housing, renting social housing in Germany is often paid by the government, and so it's a quite secure business. What this industry learned is that digitalization is needed more than ever and that they were not ready for this environment. Our offers which we do with FIO to digitalize their technical infrastructure and migrating the cloud is more demanded now.
On the same side, because they are not affected from the changing environment, they stay pretty on track with their project. They are modernizing and they're building homes. Just not in the pace needed and, let's say, a small slowdown in this current environment because of, let's say, delays coming from public sector or the building industry. Because of the low interest environment and as well as some volatility we saw in the first quarter, the transaction volume is up to a solid start in the year, EUR 500 million in new mortgages transacted already via this platform. A good contribution to the overall revenue and the overall results of this segment. This segment was the fastest-growing in the first quarter, 50%+ , new record of EUR 4.5 million. On the EBIT side, you can see that we are investing heavily.
Not to stress this too much, but let's say this is a huge growth opportunity for us. Even when we are in a crisis environment and where we are postponing some investments in this area, we see a huge opportunity and we keep investing and ramping up our workforce and our market position as much as possible in 2020 as well. We are at our fourth segment, the insurance platform. With Smart InsurTech, we try to establish a Europace-like central infrastructure for the insurance market. We get a lot of positive feedback from the whole market. We sign up some new clients. We convince clients which use only one module from us to sign up for more modules. Right now we are even in a pretty well process of convincing them to migrate from a license-based model to a fee-based, transaction fee-based model.
The challenge with this is that when you change from one-time revenues or stable license fees to an transaction-based model, that you need to do some compromises to convince the clients. The long-lasting IT projects for migrating partners module by module to our infrastructure takes a pretty long time and is quite intensive as well in labor. Unfortunately, we saw in the first quarter only a stable revenue, because we had changed a one-time project revenue to a recurring revenue. For you, it's the growth rate and the increase in Sorry, I'm missing the English word here right now. The relevance, the increase in relevance in the sector is not visible for you on the quarterly numbers here right now. Keep the pace here.
We convinced a relevant medium-sized German insurance company to migrate their independent sales force here on the platform. We are in talk with every relevant player. In addition to speed up the process, we did two strategic investments in the first quarter of 2020. We acquired close to 50% of AMEXPool and ePension. ePension is an operator for corporate-linked pension offerings and a platform to handle them between insurer, employee, and company, corporate. This platform is a pretty good addition to our insurance platform. As well, a good acquisition from the past of whom you are serving, how many clients and insurers you are reaching. AMEXPool, on the other side, is focused on insuring small businesses, or serving real estate agents who are insuring small businesses, to be exact.
The small business insurance sector was as well underdeveloped in the Smart InsurTech sector and our own broker pool, Qualitypool. With the investment in AMEXPool, we are on the way to integrate these offerings and enabling the insurance brokers of Qualitypool and AMEXPool to use the additional services of each other. There's a lot of sales synergy possible. With the migration of the technical infrastructure of AMEXPool, we are as well sending a strong signal in the market that Smart InsurTech is growing. Hypoport is serious in this market, and we are going to establish this single sector-wide infrastructure for transacting insurances between brokers and insurance companies. Expect here that in the next quarters, we will see a positive development on the revenue side. We expect double-digit growth rate here for this.
It was a slow start in 2020 for the insurance platform. There we are, the overall figures. You know it already. 30%+ in all major KPIs for the first quarter. Solid start. In the first quarter of 2020, we were more successful than in the full year 2013. You see that our growth path is intact. We are growing even in a crisis environment like COVID. This is based on heavy investments we did last year of roughly EUR 35 million in future projects and resources for key account managers and developers across the whole group. We continue this and we are, let's say, not accelerating, but we are keeping the pace even in this environment, because we see the huge amount of opportunities around us, and we see the competitive advantage a full digitalization of these three industries has. Coming to our guidance.
We still expect for this year revenue to go up to EUR 400 million- EUR 440 million, with this EUR 100 million the first quarter. We are well on track for this guidance. We still expect an EBIT of EUR 35 million- EUR 40 million. With the EUR 10 million, we are well on track for this. We are not magicians. It can be that the second or the third quarter will bring some changes in some moment, that the recession will really bring some slowdown. On the other side, there can be as well a fast recovery of the market, and even a higher demand, and a faster increase of prices if consumers take the housing environment for themselves more serious now than in the past here in Germany. As you know, we have a quite undeveloped home ownership rate here in Germany, with something around 48%-50%.
There's a lot of growth potential when people understand how important these four walls are for them in the future. With this, I'm giving back to our moderator, For more, to handle the Q&A session if anyone has a question.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin our question and answer session. If you have a question for a speaker, please dial zero and one on your telephone keypad now to enter the queue. Once your name has been announced, you can ask a question. If you're using speaker equipment today, please lift the handset before making your selection. 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 now. We haven't received any questions.
Okay. No problem. It's a good feedback as well when there are no questions. Stay healthy. We here at Hypoport focus on the opportunities the environment gives us, and we keep growing. Hope to hear you here in the same chat from you in three months when we present our half-year figures. Thank you. Bye-bye.
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your attendance. This call has been concluded.