Dear ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the webcast results Q1 twenty twenty of Pupacort 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. May I now hand you over to Wilmer 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 the profit increase by 30% compared to a solid first quarter last last year.
We speeded up our growth process. This is in the market environment, let's say, with some challenges and especially to the end of the last quarter. Let's say serious 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 a huge interest for everyone around the world right now. What we what we saw in Germany in the beginning of the year, let's say, the 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 demand from migration and people getting older and more and more singles occupying metropolitan areas. So let's say, a path on which Germany is now for close to a decade often, let's say, normalization that the properties in Germany are priced similar to similar properties in other developed European countries.
Then, let's say, the March, a situation got a little bit fuzzy. There were concerns that corona may arrive here, and we, as HyperBot, decided quite early to go remote with our employees to protect them and makes make sure that they stay stay healthy and that we don't get some issues within the company. Because of our decentralized structure, we were able to vent go remote and work from the home office within a couple of days. And you can say in the March, all 2,000 employees in Hyperport, 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 in an empty office. Yeah. For competitor, this was not so easy to go remote. So during this time when we went remote and then starting in March, we felt less pressure from competition. Especially banks had trouble to put their branches or close the branches and migrate their advisers in a remote environment because of lack of technical abilities.
And so we could see that we pretty well outperformed the market in this crisis environment where, let's say, we continue to operate on a highly efficient level from the from the home office of our employees. From the market side, roughly in the March, we see a a sharp decline in properties offered in Germany here, down something 25 to 30%, And at the same time, as well a decline in interest of consumers to buy to acquire a property. Two weeks later, in the end at the March and April, this changed already, especially the demand side. On the supply side, we are still below the precrisis environment, something 20% below, but it recovered already a little bit, the the the supply side. On the demand side, we are on new highs.
So the the interest of consumers, especially online, and this this year, we are able to judge about. So the online interest of consumers about housing, about acquiring apartment or buying buying a home is higher than pre crisis level and as well higher than last year at the same time. So our interpretation of this situation is that after a couple of weeks in in the quiet time at home, people realize 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 you need what type of home you need. So they are starting to look for an optimization of the person's situation.
It is in an environment where we are in a recession and where the short term outlook, even for the general economy, is pretty bad. So from this perspective, it looks like that this years of waiting for a good situation to or a better situation to buy a property because German were not used to this price increase and hoped that it will price will come back in some moment. So suddenly, everyone understand that this waiting was maybe not the best thing to do. And with this sharp price increases over the last years and now even in in March, we went up 12.7% compared to last last year March. With this sharp price increases, it's pretty obvious that it would have been better to buy earlier, actually, pre pre crisis and not wait so long.
So the the short term outlook is difficult. We see still significant numbers of transactions in the market, and the mortgage volume looks pretty stable. We we are coming from a plus 10% in the first quarter reported by Bundesbank. So even if it drops, it's 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 in the third quarter. But it's it's it's pretty difficult to predict this looking on this high demand on the consumer side right now. So it would be logic when you think about incomes and uncertainty, but on the same moment, especially online demand is up.
Medium term. So let's say last quarter this year and next year, we expect that the migration within the European Union will re 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, and the firepower of our government spending is much higher than this what Spain, Italy, or East European countries are able to do. So 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 the necessary construction and price increases which will follow this.
So so midterm, especially next year and forward, we expect a very solid environment from the market side for our business models. So market side business models, let's go already to the first segment, credit platform, Europase in the center, and the integration of especially the mortgage market in in Germany here. Europase had a quarter. So the 10% market increase, it outperformed in the mortgage business by more than 20%. So 38% plus 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 they serve as some kind of interest rate option to secure long term interest rates with a plus of 22%. And as well, personal loans is back on on track for growth with a plus of 14% compared to last year. So Europace did pretty well, outperformed the market faster than, yeah, the last quarters. We see here that sales structure, sales organizations that they're 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. And so the the relative competitiveness of the purpose of Europace helped to to it it pays up the the growth of Europace in all four segments.
So independent mortgage brokers were growing with Europace massively, and we will talk about the private client division in a minute. Private banks were growing with Europace, especially in the structures where they use it. And savings banks and cooperative banks could grow as well if they use already Gino, Peso, Finmas. Yeah. Talking about the regional cooperative and savings banks, we see a continuation of what we saw last year.
The Skiddorp Pace, we had a pretty strong 2,019 already with an acceleration in the growth rate and discontinued as well in the first quarter, bringing us to 1,600,000,000.0 in transaction volume from the corporate banking sector. And, yeah, let's say, if we would not have seen a a small slowdown because of closed branches of cooperative banks, this could have looked even more impressive. Savings banks with a plus of 50% continued their incremental growth path. We are, for a longer time here already, on this roughly 40 to 60% growth speed. Now they are up to 1,800,000,000.0 in transaction volume, and our market share is now roughly 9% in the savings banks industry compared to the 8% of the corporate banks.
This process will continue. We are going to grow in both sectors in any environment given outside. So the virtual banking sector will be a pretty strong base for Hyperport and for Europace to to grow. So but in the total numbers of the segments, there's as well then the new acquisition of Ram Capital visible now. Ram Capital, this is corporate advisory services regarding subsidies, state subsidies, is well positioned in the current environment.
They are serving the German Mittelstand, a German powerhouse for industry. And with the current subsidies, the government is pumping into this market, Capital is pretty busy advising its client. As a basis, we have used this as a base for our new funding port platform, which we are going to launch within this year. And it's not affected by Goan or anything else. So the numbers for the whole segments are record, all of them, €40,000,000 in revenue, plus 32%, in line with just 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. And these investments, we keep up. Even then 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 market share gain, our private client division, doctor Klein, is operating with 200 franchisees with branches in all over Germany. The good news here is that for a long time, we advertised already using the video conference conference systems to advise clients and to save time and travel costs.
And let's say up under the corona crisis, this was a pretty niche product, you can say, Because from the consumer side, it was not favored, and as well the adviser preferred to have the consumer in front of him or her to to be better in touch. Corona changed this, and really within days, the whole sales organization of doctor Klein went remote and started to use this technology, which was there, and with some additional training even to optimize the the sales approach in this environment. So we were pretty successful with this change. Doctor Klein grew even faster than the Europase platform with a plus of 39% in the first quarter. So especially here, you can see the competitive advantage of an independent sales organization, a decent structure, plus high level of digitalization, what what the speed, what the pace such an organization's having even in a challenging environment.
And even in this challenging environment, we were able to recruit more advisers for the system. We adjusted the way we count advisers here. I think that people are following us for a longer time. See this in the numbers. But we increased this number by another 12% to close to 530 advisers now, and this is the base for future growth.
You can sue you can see in the let's say, incremental efficiency gain, 39% plus in volume and just 30% more people, that this was a pretty productive first quarter for everyone. But as well, new people need to be trained, needs to be get more successful, need to get used to the environment. So there there is a growth path in this 500 study advising doctor Klein already included. So with this increase in protection volume, Doctor Klein increased revenue to new record size as well. Yeah.
Especially on the on the gross revenue and even more on the profit side, you see that the challenges we had the last one and a half year that the fast increase in numbers of banks we are dealing with to roughly 600 now diluted the margin of doctor Klein and made it necessary to close new cooperation contracts with a huge number of banks that 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 02/2018. So we this what you see here is a strong increase in EBIT margin to now a new record of 5,000,000 in the the quarter, which doctor Klein or the the segment contributed. It's an yeah. It's a continuation of our EBIT margin level of 2000 beginning of 02/2018, what we had achieved already there. Okay.
These were our two traditional segments with a pretty impressive growth speed of 30% plus. 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 Fire and the property sales platform.
We are working on a position in the valuation of properties and with Doctor Klein and the property management platform of FIRE as well as serving professional housing companies which are renting, which are in the renting market. Just to give you an first impression how the 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 Europase in the mortgage market roughly every fourth. Mortgage in Germany is transacted via Europece. On the sales side, with Spiral, we achieved already a market share of roughly 7%, growing as you can imagine.
And on the evaluation side, we are with the with the Value AG at the market share of roughly 8%. While we expect Europase 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. So a lot of growth to deal with here and to achieve. More detailed look on the sales side of the platform of of the real real estate platform. The savings banks and corporate banks are major players in the German real real estate agent market.
And 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. So sales went up here, and traction is growing, especially because of synergies that we are realizing between Guinnesspace and Thyria. Sales is up Profile, good first quarter, but it's still a lot of things to do. And let's say our incremental margin in an real estate transaction is still pretty low when we compare 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 Europase. A high speed in growth and a fast gain in market share, we see right now this value hedging.
On one side, we were able to significantly increase the number of contracts with your PACE partners so that they are able to directly use our services for business which they are doing within Europeyes or outside of Europeyes. So every second Europeyes partner is already a contractual partner of ValueAgino. More of more and more of them use or try Value AG so that the revenue of Value AG is up by 91% to 5,000,000. To make this clear, this is still an an an area of massive investments from our side. Still, valuations in Germany are heavy, workforce heavy.
You need a lot of human labor to do evaluations because the regulator requires this or the the lender requires it. And there is a lot to do about digitalization, this whole process, and automating this whole process. We are investing in in our own platform to do this all heavily and working on fully digitalized approach for this industry while gaining market share with human labor on the other side. We expect that regulation in Germany will look pretty different in a couple of years. And corona was got gave us some positive impact and some negatives here as well.
The negative is that people don't like so often anymore visits from externals at home. So some refused to let people inside. And to deal with this tension, the regulator allowed video inspectors of properties already. And this is something we didn't expect for the next couple of years to come. So this part of the digitalization we which we wanted to go for in a couple of years was speeded up by Kona.
And now we are doing already life 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. So pretty well on the growth path even when we still have to invest a lot. So housing industry, this is 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 corona. We have only a very small fraction of the rents not coming in in this sector, so there's no default rates which is impacting the sector.
Housing, preventing 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. So our office, which you do with file, to digitalize their technical infrastructure and migrate in the cloud is more demanded now. And on the same side, because they are not affected from the the changing environment, they stay pretty on track with their project. So they are modernizing and building homes, just not in the space 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 in the 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, half a billion in new mortgages transacted already via this platform. So 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% plus, new record of 40,500,000. And on the EBIT side, you can see that we are investing heavily. And not to stress too much, but let's say this is a huge growth opportunity for us.
And even when we are in a crisis environment and where where we are postponing some investments in this area, we see a huge opportunity, and we keep investing and ramping up our our workforce and our market position as much as possible in 2020 as well. So we are at our fourth segment, the insurance platform. With SmartIntrotech, 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. And, yeah, 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 onetime revenues or stable license fees to a transaction based model that you need to do some compromises to convince the clients. And 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. And so, unfortunately, we saw in the first quarter only a stable revenue because we exchanged one time project revenue to recurring revenue.
And so for you, it's the the growth rate and the increase in Sorry. I'm missing the English version right now. The the relevance the increase in the relevances 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, and we are in talk with every relevant player.
In addition to speed up the process, we did two strategic investments in 2000 and in the first quarter of two thousand twenty, we acquired close to 50% of Amex, Poole, and Epension. Epension is an operator for corporate linked pension offerings and a platform to handle them between insurer, employee, and company This platform is a pretty good addition to our insurance platform and as well a good acquisition from the past of whom you are whom you are serving, how many clients and insurers you are reaching. Amex Pool 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 insurance sector and our own broker pool, quality pool. And with the investment in Amex pool, we are on the on the way to integrate these offerings and enabling the insurance brokers of Quality Pool and Amex Pool to use the additional services of each other.
So there's a lot of sales synergy possible. And there's a migration of the technical infrastructure of Amex Pool. We are as well sending a strong signal in the market that smart InsureTech is growing. High report is serious in this market, and we are going to establish this single sector wide infrastructure for transacting insurances between brokers and insurance companies. So 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. So it was a slow start in 2020 for the insurance platform. So there we are at the overall figures. You're now now already 20% plus in all major KPIs for the first quarter. So solid start.
In 02/2020, we we are more in the in the first quarter of two thousand twenty, we were more successful than in the full year 02/2013. So you see that our growth path is impact intact. We are growing even in a crisis environment like Corona. This is based on heavy investments we did last year of roughly 35,000,000 in future projects and resources for key account managers and developers across the whole group. And 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.
So coming to our guidance, we still expect for this year revenue to go up to 400 to 440,000,000. With this 100,000,000 in the first quarter, we are well on track for this guidance, and we still expect EBIT of 35 to 40,000,000. With the 10,000,000, we are well on track for this. So 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 further.
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. And as you know, we have an quite undeveloped home ownership rate here in Germany with something around 48 to 50%. So there's a lot of growth potential when people understand how important these four awards are for them in the future. So with this, I'm giving back to our moderator for more to handle a q and 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 0 and 1 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, for the first question. As a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press 0 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. Then stay healthy. We, at Hyperforce, focus on the opportunities the environment gives us, and we keep growing.
So hope to hear you here and send the 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.