Dear ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the webcast results Q1 2021 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 hearing the conference, please press star key followed by zero on your telephone for operator assistance. May I now hand you over to Ronald Slabke, who will lead you through this conference. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Welcome from my side to the presentation of our results of the first quarter of 2021. As you know, you are part of the journey of digitalizing the credit, housing, and insurance industry here in Germany. As you may know already, we had a pretty good start in the year. We were growing by 7% to EUR 108 million in revenue and by 50% to above EUR 12 million in EBIT. Record quarter for Hypoport, a good start in the year 2021. Even when you're used to double-digit growth, top and bottom line from us, this 7% top-line growth is well on track.
There are a number of issues, which I will introduce to you why this 7% is a solid start in this year, and why we are going to stick with our forecast and feel pretty well with our forecast for this year based on the first quarter numbers. As always, we start to look in the market environment. What is the German housing market doing? What is the COVID environment doing to this, to our markets and to our business model? Let's have a look on the credit industry here in Germany. COVID and the response to the third wave here in Germany are still a significant, let's say, pain for the society in general. For the credit industry, it's not a big challenge. The banks are working. You're able to get a mortgage. You're able to get a personal loan. You are able to finance your business.
It all works on an operational level. The ability of especially the regional banks to adapt to this current environment, and to digitalize their processes already during this environmental change is limited. We see a significant slowdown in IT projects and change projects in the credit industry, which slows down our growth track slightly. Besides this, especially on the mortgage market side, you can say that your own four walls were never more important here in Germany than right now. People are looking to adjust to the new reality. They are looking for houses outside of cities to have more playgrounds for their children. They are looking for larger apartments with home office space, to adjust to the fact that in the future, home offices will be more normal than in the past. There's a lot of demand in the market.
We see a slightly increasing number of transactions when you compare this with summer and autumn last year. We see rising prices still here in Germany. It's now more than 10 years in a row that we see, from a pricing perspective, a very attractive market. It's a reaction of increasing demand and still a limited amount of supply, what happens here. Okay. The corporate finance market, you can say that banks in the first quarter realized that P&Ls and balance sheets are not as strong anymore as they were pre-pandemic. Because they get the 2020 results now from their clients. The appetite of banks to fund businesses is lower right now. With the uncertainty how long this current situation will still last, the appetite of additional risk is limited. Plus, thanks to more subsidies our government wants to put, especially in innovation and ecological investments.
We see an increase in subsidies for corporations, which will be effective 1st of July 2021. For corporates, it makes sense to postpone the financing of projects right now to the second half of this year, to get higher subsidies than in the first half of this year. All in all, a pretty weak environment for corporate financing the first quarter. Consumer finance. Consumer credits are down double digits from the pre-corona level because it's just difficult for a consumer right now to spend money. If you can't travel, it's difficult to make consumption at all right now. Demand is lower than pre-crisis or last year, the beginning of last year. As well the appetite of banks and other lending companies for personal loans is limited right now because of the uncertainty of the current situation.
In this market, we see a small decline, and looking forward, we expect a sharp rebound after the economy is fully reopened and consumer are able to fill up what the demand which they had to save during the last quarter. All in all, the German housing market is, and all the mega trends we saw here pre-COVID are well intact. We see that the net migration to Germany on a lower level is ongoing still, and we expect with the reopening of the economy and the reopening of the borders here in Europe that we will see a massive net migration from Eastern and Southern Europe to Germany, thanks to the huge demand for skilled workers in Germany and the faster recovery of our economy compared to the Eastern and Southern Europe area. Life expectation is increasing systematically and will increase after pandemic as well.
We will even be better in managing our health long term. With this people will live longer, we need more living space for them. The fact that more and more people live in single-person households is an ongoing trend during pandemic as well, will not change. The demand for housing, which is already close to 2 million units here in Germany, will keep growing. Our construction site is still weak and slightly dropped in 2020. We see as well in the first quarter that there is no acceleration in constructions approvals or construction permission here in Germany. From this, we can expect increasing rent, increasing property prices. With this increasing property prices, an ongoing process of higher mortgage volumes and increased volume of mortgage transactions. Even when the number of transactions stays the same, we are looking on a growing market.
For the first quarter this year, Bundesbank reported a 7% increase in new mortgages underwritten by banks. This is in line with what we saw on the platform. Later I will show you the gain in market share Europace could actually achieve in this market environment. When we look on the different perspective of the real estate market, and our propositions here, on the sales side, we see a stable volume of transactions. Our clients, usually they're real estate agent of banks because of the less active branch networks lost some market share, pretty sure, but all in all, are stable in their business model and we have a stable relationship with them. We are on the way to help them to be more digital and approach consumers more digital and have a higher market share based on their strong brand in the online business as well.
In the valuation business, we see that banks are busy. This +7% for the first quarter, which was reported by Bundesbank is showing pretty well that there is business, there is valuations to be done. On the other side, we see a slowdown in the processes within the bank. There's piling up some valuations that needs to be done. Not everything what was underwritten by banks ended up to be in valuation in the first quarter already because of their, let's say, troubling back offices in the current environment. Something to fill up the pile and increase the flow as soon as we get to more normal business environment again here in Germany. On the housing association side, good news is that we still don't see any defaults on rents thanks to the social system here in Germany.
Housing associations are pretty strong, don't feel any pressure from the risk side of their business. Unfortunately, we are the aggressor in this market, to convince banks to migrate their digital solution to a new player is let's say the industry is not used to do this remotely, and it slows down our sales funnel that we are still in a pretty remote environment when you look on the business side. We use this time, but let's say it's not a lack from our perspective that this industry doesn't feel any pressure from the income and risk side. On the other side, it's such a stable environment that they don't need to act fast. As banks, this will change as soon as we reopen our economy. Same goes, you can say for the insurance industry where we operate with Smart InsurTech.
There's just a little impact on the new insurances underwritten in Germany here. The main contractual volume and value is slightly increasing thanks to inflation-based incremental increases in the premiums. Healthy business, no defaults, no losses, no special losses during this pandemic for the insurance industry. Need for digitalization keeps to stay high. Execution excellence is, like in banks and housing associations, low. We prepared with them the digital future, but need to wait for the execution after the lockdown is over. How our four business segments performed in this general environment. As always, we start with the credit platform. In the center, the Europace system. Maybe this is a good point to recognize Fundingport, which did their first transaction in the first quarter. We are live in the corporate finance space as well as the platform.
Even then, corporate finance in general was weak, as I said, thanks to changes in subsidies and risk appetite of banks. All this is credit platform. We start with Europace to understand how we performed overall. Europace mortgages, personal loans, building finances, grew by 30% in the first quarter, which is a really strong growth track. When you compare this with the overall market environment, a double-digit gain in market share again. In mortgages, we grew by 34% compared to 7% total market increase. We outperformed the rest of the market by 27%. A great dynamic. This within the pandemic environment.
What you see is that partners of us which are using Europace already in their sales force or they are far with their project already pre-pandemic and launched it during the pandemic, are now outperforming the rest of the market, which is still offline or in traditional IT systems, which are not as well automated and digitalized and integrated as Europace is. Without pandemic environment, we would have been growing faster even because of the ability to bring IT project and change projects forward in banks. This plus 34% in the mortgage business just shows how much work we did pre-crisis and how well Europace partners outperform the rest of the market. As a contrast to this, you can say personal loans, just a flat 0% growth.
This is happening in a market environment with a high double-digit loss in market volume thanks to the less demand of consumers for personal loans. Here as well, it's a double-digit growth. Just you can't see it because it happens in a stressed market environment. Looking forward, latest in Q3, we expect a reopening here in Germany of the economy and a sharp increase in demand from personal loan side, and we expect to participate from this. Getting not only on a relative growth track, but as well on an absolute growth track with the transaction volume, what we deliver here on Europace with personal loan growth. Building finance, often linked with the mortgage financing. You see here that the risk appetite of consumers changed slightly. Especially long interest security is right now not as important as financing projects.
This is as well in line with the fact that the average duration of a mortgage declined from 14.1 to 13.2 years here in Germany. I will come back to this later. Looking on the four segments of Europace, you can say that all of the four segments were growing in the first quarter. Mortgage broker, again, took market share from banks. They're growing pretty well. We are impressed by the growth track the mortgage brokers are here on in Germany. In addition, especially in the regional retail banks, we see that our long-term investments in key account resources and politics in these two sectors helps to stay on the growth track. In the cooperative banking sector, we grew by 85% to EUR 3 billion. First time really outperforming the savings bank by more than EUR 600 million in volume. This is a huge success.
When you consider that it's really difficult right now to onboard new cooperative banks and to bring the projects within the cooperative banks forward because of the pandemic environment, this 85% is even more impressive. Without the pandemic, we would see a three-digit growth track here. This is, let's say it's just a little bit postponed. We will get this volume on the platform as well. On the savings bank side, +36% growth rate. This is slightly above the total growth track on Europace side. You see here that we have still a very good sentiment and the savings banks honor the new cooperation, this Finanz Informatik, their centralized IT service provider. The execution in this environment is lagging behind. It's only 36%, but it could be slightly higher as well without the stress in the environment which we have right now.
Well on track, you can say. In all sectors, we are gaining traction. All banks are very well aware that the loss of market share which they see right now to brokers and to Europace partners is an incentive for them. It's a pressure for them to digitalize as well. We see a very well-filled pipeline on both sectors, FINMAS and Geno pace, and in these private banks to go forward and get on the train of digitalization with Europace as the core infrastructure here for mortgage business in Germany. When you compare the 34% or mortgage growth or 30% transaction volume growth with the total growth number of the segment, then this 12% growth rate is a little bit disappointing. Some events to be explained here. First of all, if you just look on the mortgage business, we would see a 16% mortgage revenue growth.
This compares this 34% transaction volume growth, and the underperformance is linked to the fact that the duration went significantly down. This one year less duration overall costs us roughly 8% in revenue because shorter durations have a lower transaction fee than longer durations. In addition, we see that banks in the first quarter were not able to process everything, all applications they got from brokers via the platform so that they are piling up. Their process duration is increasing, and this means for us a postponing of revenue as well. Both effects lead to a revenue growth of 16%, based on the 34% transaction volume growth.
From the 16% to the 12%, this 4% difference is linked to the fact that personal loan business, especially the white label personal loan outplacement business, where we bring denied or disapproved credit of one bank to other banks is significantly down in this environment. We are losing revenue in this business. Right now in the current environment, this slows down our numbers. The fact that corporate clients postpone their financing projects based on subsidies expected after 1st of July this year declines our revenue in the corporate finance business. These two declines slows down the growth of the overall segment as well. Let's say, nice compensation for this is that we see a strong growth in profitability.
Even with this slowdown in the personal loan and the corporate finance business, you can see here pretty well that as soon as we are slowing down our heavy investment in the future, our profitability and our pretty scalable business models shows up well on EBIT level. Yes, in addition, we saved some costs on travel and hospitality during the current environment. The fast increase in profitability when you don't expand your organization is pretty visible in the first quarter in this segment Credit Platform. Next platform and next segment, Private Clients. Franchise system with online generation under the brand Dr. Klein. Platform as well, pretty well in the first quarter 2021. First, this is pretty important for the near-term future and the growth track there. We are well on track in onboarding new advisors for the network. More than 600 qualified advisors.
First time that we cross this number. A nice double-digit growth here. In the beginning of the pandemic, this was a bottleneck, and we saw a significant slowdown in new advisors entering the franchise system. This changed to the end of the year, and this continues at the beginning of the year. Our franchisees are growing together with us. As a result of this growth track, we see a record number in transaction volume at first in the first quarter. EUR 2.6 billion in mortgages advised here in Germany. + 40%. Let's say it could be higher when we wouldn't have had such a strong first quarter in 2020. Just to remind you, in 2020, Dr. Klein was more or less the only large brand which were able in March already to operate fully digital in a remote approach and advise clients video-based.
We had a great conversion rate at this time and extremely high productivity of our advisors. One year later, other mortgage brokers and even some banks are able to operate in a remote environment as well. They increased their conversion rates, you can say our decrease to a more normal level again. That's why this slowdown that you see here is as well linked to the fact that we had some pretty good outperformance in the first quarter of 2020. We are well on track and we are running a very healthy brand in Germany. The demand of consumers for an independent advice is increasing. This 14% transaction volume growth converted to a 6% revenue growth.
This underperformance is linked to the fact that we are selling more and more regional banks as well in the network. Regional banks still have a lower income level for the Dr. Klein franchise network than specialized mortgage banks. The success of FINMAS and Genopace helps Dr. Klein to be recognized as the more and more independent and the whole market-covering mortgage broker with more than 700 banks available there. On the other side, the average revenue stream for mortgage is slightly going down. Only a revenue increase of 6% right now. Thanks to the investments we did, especially in 2019 or started to do in 2019, in renegotiation, all the business relations that Dr. Klein needs with regional banks. Profitability is up by 23%, new record high, EUR 6.2 million EBIT, which is, you could say, it is slightly above our expectation.
In relation to gross profit, we are above 50% EBIT margin. We expect long-term and a healthy profitability of something around 35%-40%. Please don't expect that this 50% will stay forever. We see that we are saving some cost, which would be usually part of the business model to entertain the franchise partners, to host events for them, German-wide and local. This sales cost will come back and will slightly decrease the EBIT margin of this business long-term again. Good to see how profitable our business model can be when it's necessary and when the environment fits to the way how we do the business. Now of the two traditional segments, we are coming to the growth segments with, let's say, have their challenges in the current environment to deliver the growth track they are expected to have.
First, real estate. You are aware of this. We are targeting here the home ownership market on one side and the rental market on the other side. Core for the long-term strategy of Hypoport is the home ownership market because of the huge synergies that we are able to realize in combination with Europace and our dominant role in the mortgage market here in Germany. We use this position to gain market share on the property sales side with the FIO system and on the property valuation side with Value AG. Yes, during the first quarter, we could see results of this again, especially on the valuation front. Value AG is getting closer to 10% market share in all valuations, let's say, touched by Value AG. Still, even within this 10%, not the whole valuation, not everything is done by Value AG.
There is still a lot of potential for growth here. You see this, how Europace keep growing now at 31% here. There is a huge potential of a very scalable business model here. On the other side, FIO, with the property sales platform, let's say, couldn't show growth and market share gain in the first quarter because of our strong links to banks, bank branches, and their real estate agent in branches. The networks are still partly closed. The activities in the branches is low. The real estate agents of banks right now lag behind the rest of the market. This is short-term negative for the dynamics that we see here.
Midterm, it's positive because they understand more and more how important it is to fully digitalize their approach and to be part of a digital ecosystem where consumers start their journey to find a new home online and not in a branch anymore. We are their partner to enable them in this journey and to be part in the digital transformation and in the world where homes are sold more and more online with some physical touchpoint and contact and trust needed. While short term, we see a negative impact from the COVID environment. Midterm, we expect an acceleration of our growth track in this segment. Talking about it. When you compare this with the end of 2020, we just slightly increased our market share in savings and cooperative banks. We are at 88% in the savings bank world still and 11% in the cooperative bank.
Acquiring new clients for the FIO platform, during this lockdown was not possible in the first quarter. This is the increased revenue, which especially recurring revenue, based on additional services we render to our clients and change in pricing structure. Because of the fact that we stopped doing project business, with one-time revenues, and the decline of this part of the revenue structure, this unit shows right now - 15% year-over-year. If you would take this out, this project business, the recurring business model was growing double digits. This base of additional services, not additional clients, because of the difficulties in acquiring them. Value AG was able to acquire more clients, in the course of thanks to the strong relations with Europace and the fact that they can more easily access this pool of 770 Europace partners, which have a successful business relationship with us.
It's just easier to upsell something which is integrated in the whole mortgage process than selling it, let's say, different solution like the FIO. They went up to 461 contractual partners, starting new business with lots of them. Total growth for the first quarter, 15% from a very strong first quarter 2020. The numbers would have been even higher if not banks would pile up some applications in their back offices because of the inability to process them fully and get the necessary data and documents for the validation to Value AG. Could have been higher, but it's still pretty good that we grow in this environment by 15%. Even more important is we do this with a stable headcount in this year.
While end of 2019 and beginning of 2020, we had to scale, hiring more and more people in this still pretty fragmented, and not very digital business. We are now able to scale based on more and more digitalization of our business here. We are building the future valuation platform for Germany. These efficiency gains that the people who are running more and more business on, is linked to the higher percentage of digitalization that we put into our system. I think you are aware of this, that we started to gain market share first and build the system under it, not to first build the system and later try to gain the market share here. We are still bearing some costs here from the manual work that we still have to do.
Step by step, we see that our vision of getting more and more digital approach to this process and adding more and more value automated is working and paying back. Value AG is well on track to get out of the investment phase and to be a positive contributor of not just revenue growth, but as well profitability growth. Last segment, the financing platform for housing associations and their portfolios. Thanks to some volatility in the interest rates, and even with a lot of postponed building projects because of the pandemic, we see a stable environment. It was a pretty good first quarter for this segment, and we grew by 6% in revenue. This has a nice stabilizing factor.
When you look midterm, this is still a market proposition we are in, that as soon as we finally start to build social housing in Germany again on a scale that will deliver the 2 million missing units, we will see a huge amount of financing needed. We are ready and waiting for this to be financed by Dr. Klein, our real estate platform here. Altogether, all this development together, and especially because of the reduction in project business, we see a slight increase in revenue only. If you take out the project business, we will see a growth rate of roughly 10%, which is still below our expectation for this segment and for the growth track we want to see it on. We say 2020 and 2021 will be heavy investment phase for this segment.
You see this in the probability of the open to a million. This investment will pay back when the pandemic is over and we are getting to a more normal market environment where we are able to acquire new businesses, new business partners here, more efficient, and bring the necessary IT projects with them forward so that they migrate on our platform. Right now, we are progressing on the product side. On this market side, it's still too much affected that we see not enough growth overall yet. To the last segment, as well, a growth segment, insurance market here in Germany. A little bit similar to the housing industry. As I said already earlier in the market environment, they don't feel a hard time. There are no losses in the insurance business right now. A small decline in new business, that's all.
Just a lack of bringing IT projects forward delays our growth track here. We see that we are, especially with Smart InsurTech, gaining traction in the migration of contractual volume out of the, let's say, local IT infrastructure, which is run on licenses of a software company which we acquired to the centralized cloud-based Smart InsurTech platform. This migration path is the core necessary step to establish an insurance platform for the whole industry where insurance brokers and insurance companies share the same data and the same vision, and the processes are fully automated based on validated data for them. The total market in Germany is roughly EUR 200 billion. EUR 8.6 billion of this is in systems which were developed by companies that we acquired. Out of this, we are at EUR 2.8 billion migration volume.
Out of the total volume of the market, you could say we are at 1.4%. Out of the insurance broker market, we are at roughly 5%. Out of the total volume of systems that we control, we are around 30% share now. Out of this EUR 2.8 billion contractual insurance, let's say, contractual portfolio of insurances in our Smart InsurTech system, 15% are validated. It means there is a virtual connection between the data in our system and the data in the core insurance system of the insurance company to make sure that all information, all platforms are accurate and all services that we render in an automated way to the insurance broker and to the consumer are based on two data.
With this, we are able to get in a certain level of execution automated and a certain level of quality, for instance, if you automate advice process. We are struggling to keep this number up now for, you can say, close to two years. We finally now feel that we are gaining traction, that pipelines for the migration of existing partner is well-filled and our conversion rates are stable there. The pipeline for new brokers joining the platform and migrating their data portfolio to Smart InsurTech is well-filled and stable as well. We see that all the investments that we did in the last years in building interfaces and, let's say, establishing additional services that you are able to use only when you are migrated all your data, is slowly start to pay back.
We are having a positive feedback from the market, not just by emphasizing that it's a cool thing what we built, but by migrating volume to the platform. From now on, every quarter, you will see our growth track on both, on the fact how many billions are already migrated to Smart InsurTech and how high is the percentage of validation within this data structure, so that we are really getting from being a software solution for agents to a platform for the total market. The impact on the revenue side is still slow. We are still facing a declining license portfolio and project business and replacing this with recurring revenue out of the platform business. Still the growth, let's say, the gain in additional transaction volumes based on the growth that we saw on the platform is compensated mainly by loss of other revenue streams.
This transformation from one-time revenue to recurring revenue is time-consuming, especially when you're in the middle of a pandemic and projects are not going forward as fast as they could and should. We see that our investments pay back and that we gain this traction, and we are getting slowly forward. It's an investment phase, though. We expect in the next couple of quarters to see an acceleration in the migration volume and the speed of the migration of the volume of the platform, and based on this, an acceleration of revenue growth as well. For Hypoport as a total, first quarter ends with a double-digit growth on the earnings side and profit side, and with new records in the revenue side. We are well on track to scale and expand our business as we did it the last 20 years, more than 20 years.
We feel pretty comfortable with our current estimation for the 2021 figures. Our forecast of the first quarter pays pretty well to the focus of EUR 430 million-EUR 460 million in revenue and EUR 40 million-EUR 45 million in profit. I would now hand back to Mrs. Sander for the Q&A session.
Thank you very much. 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 short reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press zero and one on your telephone keypad. We have no questions, I would like to hand back to you, Mr. Slabke.
Yeah. Thank you. Okay, maybe all questions are answered again. Hope to hear and see you soon here in three months, beginning of August, where we present half-year figures. We feel pretty comfortable about the ongoing year, and let's see if we are able to deliver again a record quarter after this pretty well start in 2021. Hope to see you soon, and bye-bye.
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your attendance. This conference has been concluded. You may disconnect.