Dear ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the webcast results Q3 2021 of Hypoport SE. At our customer's 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 hearing the conference, please press star two followed by zero on your telephone's operating system. I now hand you over to Ronald Slabke, who will lead you through this conference. Go ahead.
Yeah. Welcome from my side as well. Presentation of the Q3 results of Hypoport SE. As you know, we're digitizing the Credit, Real Estate, and Insurance industry in Germany. For another three months, another quarter, we succeeded with this. We were successful that we increased our market share in all four segments. All four segments are on growth. The traditional property mortgage market-linked ones, they're growing the strongest. The Credit Platform and Private Client division, both with new record numbers. It's Insurance and the Real Estate Platform increasing the pace. They keep growing from lower smaller numbers, but we are on track to progress as last year. We have reported our numbers already earlier. You know them already.
Double-digit growth on top line and outperformance on the profitability side. Here we have the increase in recurring profit from here right now, and where we show how high our incremental margins are and how powerful the business models of Hypoport in general is. It's all in a let's say more or less stable market environment. I will come to this in a moment. Especially mortgage markets. I'd say, especially this first quarter, we saw there some slowdown and we keep growing in this environment. For now we are pretty certain that we will meet our guidance, and we'll have another record year in a row. Let's talk about market environment.
The general drivers of the German housing market and German mortgage markets are intact. We still see a net migration. We see that Germany is recovering pretty well from corona environment. That we profit from, let's say, a lot of firepower from the government side. We have good things in the first quarter and turn out with a pretty model that, let's say, hopefully addresses new government. We expect as soon as the net migration leads to a huge demand on the housing side, building restart in the European Union. Within Germany, we see that people still move to metropolitan areas.
There is still an ongoing process that rural areas are exchanged to metropolitan areas. Within the metropolitan areas, we see that the surroundings of German cities profit more than the centers right now because of the lack of available housing in the centers. All in all, in our metropolitan areas, we lack 2 million houses, and we can't keep the pace of building enough buildings from a physical construction of new houses this year. With a few things to go with it, that especially in the upper segment of the market, households increase their need for space. Too, people needs their home office now. Their children need some space.
You solve this issue by moving into the suburbs and buying a house, or you buy a bigger apartment if you are able to afford it in any city where you are living. This creates additional demand, especially in the upper third of the market, which leads as well to an additional increase in prices. When talking about prices, rents are up from a low level still and will keep going up in Germany for a long time still because of a higher regulation of the renting market. This is pretty easy for the next years. We will have increasing rents here. Purchase prices, they are sharply up in the first quarter by 13%.
The highest increase ever in the market and we are on an all-time high. This looks a little bit overheated now. We see already in the first quarter that there are still coming a stable number of approaches to the market, so still not an increasing number. The same amount of houses which come to the market, it takes them much longer to be marketed to buyer. Let's say the pricing, the exclusivity of the pricing of the sellers, the demands are a little bit too high right now to meet at the buyer side. This slows down the numbers of transactions right now.
With this, even with multiple of higher property prices, it slows down the transaction volume in the market. We see additional activity is used right now because German banks, in the last month, really started to execute the negative interest policy of ECB. You can say later at the end of the year, everyone with a balance of more than EUR 50,000 will have to pay a negative interest of 0.5%. Some of this money is already redistributed to the housing market because nobody likes to pay negative interest. This is a very, let's say, reducing especially the transaction volume of their mortgage business in the summer.
Plus, people were happy that after this long lockdowns and this depressive time of corona, they had a pretty good summer, so people really used this for vacation. The combination of high prices, longer transaction times, plus holiday season slowed down the mortgage market. We expect that it was a small double-digit decline compared to the second quarter, which was on a new record high from the volume perspective. In this targeted segment, the different Platforms of Hypoport performed all pretty well. Let's start with the Credit Platform. As you know, we combine here multiple business. The core is residential mortgages. Besides this we have a personal loan business as well in this segment.
Developed over the last three years corporate finance business with a newly established corporate finance platform fundingport, which is in beta right now. Let's start with the mortgage business and the Europace marketplace as the center of the whole segment here. We are at +30% in mortgage finances. The link to this has led to the building finance volume, which is an interest security product. Total market is slightly down there. Especially with the links to mortgages, we are pretty safe that we could keep it neutral considering the strong last year. We are 30% in personal loans, where the market is down 15%-30% compared to last year.
We are keeping the market share in personal loans aggressively. We see the most progress from the fact that professional advice organizations more and more focused as well on the loan side. The pandemic environment and general need of the consumers is higher there. Especially in the restructuring of the loan portfolios of consumers, independent advice adds a lot of value. Behind independent advice, there is usually the Europace marketplace. It's a sector we are growing. The second growth track is we provide the personal loan business for banks where banks not only sell personal loans to the consumers when they fit their own credit criteria, but they match as well everyone against the Europace marketplace.
It distributes the personal loans of other lenders as well in case that their loan offering is not feasible or is too expensive for the consumer. This loan brokerage for banks is the second growth path for the personal loan business. In mortgages we are growing in all four market segments. For a long time we keep increasing our market share in the mortgage broker business, where we replace still some tax-based transactions. The mortgage brokers are taking market share from bank branches. This is another small growth rate for us. In the private commercial banking area, who's working with us keeps outperforming who's not working with us.
The ones who are not working with us are constantly challenged by their other market participants and seeking out easy super solutions that are not feasible anymore if they are competing with Europace around them. There's a, let's say, a lot of thoughts are going on in everyone who's still based on some on-premise solutions which are 20 years or older. Where we see a permanent growth track is cooperative and savings banks. Hundreds of small banks which makes a couple of decisions that each of them to migrate the shares and channels of their sales organizations to Europace. In the cooperative banking industry, we saw a growth of 71% in the first nine months.
It is lower compared to last year where we were close to 100%. But it's still a massive increase and a great track record. You can see here pretty well how our joint initiatives with, especially here, [audio distortion] , still keep a high pace and help the cooperative banks to digitalize this business and help us to grow in their area. We reached now 60% market share. We expect that when we reach something around 70%, that there is some type of tipping point where we start a discussion if it makes sense to have some competing in-house solutions still being maintained and what the other 70% of the cooperative banking sector should do.
Let's say, in how fast we should migrate to Europace. Savings banks, a certain level of slowdown, only 29% growth for the first nine months. We see here that corona takes a toll on the speed of projects that we can do. Actually with the centralized IT service provider, the message to the savings banks were here, execution excellent, because we have a clear path together with Finanz Informatik that for much more than current existing volume use should be used within the savings bank sector.
We expect with a slower speed in the current strength that will accelerate the migration path in terms of current levels of just 26%. This seems to require some kind of a bottom for now. We'll keep an eye on this development, especially next year. All in all, we are heading to a market share of 80% in all segments. For now, third quarter was in line with our intentions to gain market share in this mortgage business. Besides the good performance of Europace in the market environment, we had a very strong quarter in corporate finance, which I will get to especially.
The reason was that, as announced already in the first and the second quarter, a lot of state-subsidized programs that we shaped and we started on first of July. A lot of financing projects, which are the typical area of activity for REM Capital, which are linked to this state subsidies, were on hold until the new structure were in place. We executed a lot of these applications and financing projects in the third quarter, so that we got a strong revenue and a profit impact from REM Capital for the third quarter. The Credit Platform overall finished nine months with record numbers on the top and bottom line.
This especially strong performance on profitability. You know that we try to achieve let's say a growth rate where we grow double- digits on top and bottom line in an equal manner. Also obviously we were not able to hire as fast new sales people and new engineering people as the system is growing. Especially corona kind of made it tricky to hire fast people. You see the incremental profitability of the Platform business here where we usually come up to 100% incremental each quarter. A lot of this is now shown in the profitability increase in the nine months figures. Good base for the whole group.
Coming to the next segment, which is linked to the mortgage business, the Advisory Private Client of Dr. Klein with the franchise system, where our franchisees deploy the advisors and we power the whole system from banking experience, lead generation via the Europace system to in the end close mortgages with lenders with which we negotiated supply contracts. Transaction volume was up 9% over the Dr. Klein in the first nine months. The Dr. Klein was as well growing above market, slightly compared to last year, where they had a high double-digit growth above market. The reason that we had a lot of headwind because of the huge digitalization of the business last year.
Dr. Klein was outperforming everyone, the bank customers and the other mortgage brokers. This year it was a little bit more difficult again, especially other mortgage brokers learned from us and got more digital itself besides using Europace. In that case we had to digest this strong growth of last year as well. Our franchisees had to digest this to adapt their process, had to get used to this new volume, the new size. This causes energy cost. Plus, last year it was difficult to hire new people. You saw this in the slowdown in number of advisors that we could support.
Because of the, let's say, the particular economic environment, it was really hard to hire people, especially advisors from bank branches to advise us. This changed. We are now at + 13% at headcount, so a double-digit growth on the number of advisors. This is a promise for the near-term future that the pace on the top line of the sold mortgage volumes will go up again because it's based in this business, we generate leads. The core bottleneck is the number of human advisory resources, the number of advisors.
Usually we are growing a faster number of accounts because of additional productivity gains by the Europace system, plus an increased average loan volume because of rising prices. Both is pretty certain in for the near-term future, the rising prices. Even when this increase will slow down slightly, people will still be paying the. So looking forward, even the record numbers of the first nine months of Dr. Klein are just the first point on the path. We keep growing here. Independent advice has a high demand. It's still underdeveloped when you compare this with other such markets. There's a lot of place to go for Dr. Klein.
Together with the other intermediaries, they are outperforming them because of the higher levels of profitability. Besides the 8% growth rate, this is in line with the driving goals. We saw an increased profitability because of, let's say, lower costs, primarily linked to events and travel, but as well, scaling a franchise system very heavily invested, especially in 2018 and 2019. It's a scaling effort. We are the first of the new acquisitions and new segments. We start with Real Estate. An area where we address both markets, the home ownership and the rental market.
Core focus is the home ownership market, where we see that with the Europace system, we have an asset which gives us some kind of upfront advantage in this value chain, where the transaction is initiated between buyer, Real Estate agent, and seller, where lately the bank needs an evaluation by an appraiser. Within the Real Estate segment, we offer a transaction platform for the broker side, the Real Estate agent side. We are creating a digital evaluation platform where right now a lot of people on our payroll are doing appraisals for banks in an increasing number. We see that the core process of home ownership needs to be fully digitalized, needs to be fully integrated.
It can't be these three decoupled, detached processes in the market with different level of automation and digitalization. This is what we are doing for the mortgage market. We take that together with two approaches here and business segments to do for the whole home ownership market in the next couple of years. Our investments here right now are heavy, and they are just to create a necessary basis along the value chain to make sure that this now let's say EUR 200 billion-EUR 300 billion transaction market. This is a EUR 200 billion-EUR 300 billion market right now. That's why we say EUR 200 billion. It is step-by-step formed into one highly integrated ecosystem in our control. How did the business units perform within the first nine months?
First sales Platform. We are strong, especially with the large sales agents in savings banks and other banks here in Germany. The savings banks, we reached a market share of 89% already. Still there is a lot of digitalization necessary. We have the market reach, and most of the transactions going for a Real Estate agent of a savings bank goes through our system already. Just the automation part still needs to be sorted. On the private banking side, we power a major part. On the corporate banking side, we have a huge potential. When we acquired it five years ago, it was zero.
Now we reached a 12% market share here with corporate banks under contract. It's as good as the increase is, it's still slow, and part of this is linked to the corona environment. To gain new clients for a new offering is a challenge in this environment of physical distance. Plus, we still need to get better at integrating and using our existing proposition and client relations on the Credit side. This is still underdeveloped, and right now there are a lot of projects ongoing within Hypoport to optimize this and to do better here. As a result, for the Real Estate side or acquisition Platform, selling Platform, we saw a growth of 1% in the first nine months.
Please keep in mind that at the beginning of the last year, we still had some project business here, which we discontinued to focus with all our especially IT development resources on recurring revenue. Second quarter, first quarter, we were growing 30%-60%. The transformation is ongoing, and we are gaining traction that this business really starts to profit from our role in the mortgage business. Still a lot to come here, and there's still a lot to integrate and take forward together. This worked out a little bit better already in the agency side of the business. With Value AG, we have a huge client base already within the Europace context apartment base.
Close to 500 banks have a relation with Value AG and use their services. Just probably some of them use it for all of their business. Probably 90% just use it for, let's say, the first part. They try it, how it works, how it is, how it fits to their processes. There's still a lot of work ongoing, and so the resulting growth rate of 70% to EUR 18 million in first nine months, still a good result, for a business which we acquired a few years ago, started to scale with a lot of human labor. Now for the last 12 months, just scaled by automation and getting better with what we are doing.
The goal here is an integrated valuation system that starts at higher. Over the last couple of months, we created the best automated valuation model, AVM, in the market. We have the highest accuracy of predicting the value of a property by an algorithm. We just launched and marketed this in our Platform. This is what it's all about. We think that by providing the market transparency and an integrated process back in the direction of our B2B ecosystem with high velocity, we are able to promise faster and more reliable transactions for our consumers and participants from Real Estate agent to mortgage broker to mortgage banker.
High investments here, on both sides, Property Sales Platform and Property Valuation Platform, from our perspective. Now we switch to the renting market. We have a very strong relationship with the housing industry in Germany. We finance via our Platform and assist in investment in professional investment into a renting space. We are up 10% here to close to EUR 5 billion in transaction volume for the large property owners here in Germany. There we have a positive impact from an interest side. In the first quarter, interest went up slightly.
These professional e-players here, they tend to close their pre-prepared applications and financing projects when the interest rate is qualified to secure it. We could close more than last year, and last year was already a good number for nine months. Another relevant part for you is discussing the rollout of existing Platform for this business. While it was very advisors-based and human-based up until now, we step by step replace the human labor and the exchange of information with traditional methods by a Platform here. WOWIFIN is launched and is now introduced to our clients.
That, besides using as advisor of Dr. Klein, as a professional housing association, you are well able to use this tool, run a tender and find the best offer for your needed mortgage as well, without the advice process of Dr. Klein. We see that this will increase our market reach and the volume that we can drive to our Platform. We don't expect to lose on the advice side because of the increased complexity in the financing market and the, let's say, lack of competencies, especially for medium-sized housing associations here. On top, as a result of this valuation, and another investment here, as you can imagine.
All in all, the whole Real Estate Platform is growing slower than Credit Platform still, but with a huge potential and it's a huge investment that we do here. You see the -2.6% in profitability. We expect it to be a growth driver in the next decades of Hypoport. Here's a lot ongoing in this business. It's a core focus this year, and quite sure a core focus as well next year to develop this to a growth driver of Hypoport. Coming to cross-sales, our second Insurance Platform. As you know, we are digitalizing here the Household Insurance side.
From life, health, liability insurances for every family in Germany with an integration of all participants along the value chain. Plus, via acquisition of ePension a year ago, we are digitalizing as well the employer linked Insurance portfolio, pension and health, which is distributed and subsidized by employers. They are next to a consumer and insurance broker and insurance company, the employer is another participant in the complexity of the information exchange and exchange and if you think the management long-term future. A similar complex product area like Smart InsurTech is covered, just a bit smaller market. Both are growing and focusing on Smart InsurTech.
Our migration path of acquired on-premise solutions to a cloud business to a single fully automatic platform is going forward. We could increase volume of Smart InsurTech, which is hosted in the cloud. I think it's been EUR 3.3 billion for this year. There's still a huge potential in the market on-premise solutions. There's still EUR 5 trillion of premiums with our clients. The quarterly numbers, you see that it's slightly increasing now, the speed of migration. In parallel, we validate the data against more and more interfaces which we have to the core systems of the insurance companies.
With the validated numbers, we create a base for all types of automation which you can imagine along the value chain. Everything what an insurance broker may automate with the direct client or the sales agent, the advisor. It's only possible when you base this on validated data. Otherwise you risk a lot of hassle with misguide, misadvises and misleading processes. This integration number went up from 40% in the beginning of the year now to 71% of the total premium volume in the Platform. Let's say we expected a faster increase during the year already. You see here the slowdown of complex processes in the current corona environment.
Let's say the general issue in the insurance market is you have a huge complexity of these systems and, let's say, traditional organizations. We are coming forward here, and also the segment delivers slowly some growth rate. +8% on the revenue side, 30% on gross profits. It slightly compensates growth already. This together we increase our investments to increase the pace of migration and adoption in the market. Let's say, here right now an investment of EUR 2.1 million in Q2 for the first nine months. Looking forward, this is a huge opportunity for Hypoport to digitalize as well as ensure the market. We still don't see anyone who's trying to do something similar.
We see a lot of pieces in the market that such institutions understand that the market is changing and they need to open up. Banks try to monetize on their client relation and start insurance offerings. For this you need a complex infrastructure. Instead insurance companies start to open up their tied agent networks for tele sales. For this you need a very complex infrastructure. All that is going on, and there is a lot of noise in the market right now. It's a process which will lead to a market environment where everyone needs smart insurance tech to succeed.
Otherwise, you have a huge hassle in your, in, let's say, in your back office, because of the lack of automation or under licensed data, and non-existing automation process. These are the four segments. This all sums up to record numbers for Hypoport. EUR 250 million+ in revenue, EUR 65 million in EBITDA. The outcome on earnings side, because we couldn't hire as fast as we may would have done outside of the corona environment. You can see the pretty impressive incremental profitability of our business here. We continue scaling and developing Hypoport along the path of double-digit growth and double-digit margin. On long-term trend, you can see that we are getting closer already to the last year's numbers with our nine-month numbers.
It will be a new record year for Hypoport. We have kept this in mind with our guidance. Even if we heavily invest again this year after the EUR 14 million last year, EUR 14 million +, something EUR 40 million-EUR 45 million, we will have a better EBITDA approx EUR 31 million in future growth on the sales or engineering side. This leads us to the question, what's going in the rest of this year going forward. To our forecast, we feel pretty well with our guidance now. It will be a record year. We will bring this home in the last two months which are now left.
We will set the basis and the direction already for next year to be again a year of growth for Hypoport with double-digit numbers. Thanks for your attention. I give back to Mrs. Sanders for moderation if there are any questions today.
Thank you very much. If you have a question for our speaker, please dial zero and one on your telephony keypad now to enter the queue. If you're using speaker equipment today, please lift the handset before making your selection. One moment, please, for the first question. So far we have no questions, so I would like to hand back to you, Mr. Slabke.
Thank you. It's questions in English always in advance. I had to German translate it a little bit. Hope you are happy and satisfied with all what you hear. We will get back to our operational business. See this here and see you again in four months, beginning of March, with great numbers for Hypoport in 2022. With the amazing outlook, I'm sure. See you soon. Bye-bye.
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your attendance. This conference has been concluded. You may disconnect.