Ladies and gentlemen, good day, and welcome to Aurum PropTech Limited earnings conference call. As a reminder, all participant lines will be in listen-only mode, and there will be an opportunity for you to ask questions after the presentation concludes. I now hand the conference over to Ms. Sonia. Thank you, and over to you, ma'am.
Good evening, everyone, and a warm welcome to the Q1 FY 2024/2025 financial results presentation of Aurum PropTech Limited. We appreciate your continued interest and support. Joining us today is Mr. Ashish Deora, the Founder and CEO of Aurum Ventures; Mr. Onkar Shetye, Executive Director; Mr. Kunal Karan, our Chief Financial Officer; and Mr. Hiren Ladva, EVP, Investments. Before we dive into the details, I would like to remind everyone that the forward-looking statements we may discuss are subject to risks and uncertainties. Kindly refer slide number two of investor presentation for detailed disclaimer. I would like to hand over the call to Mr. Ashish Deora for his opening remarks. Over to you, sir.
Thank you, Sonia. Good evening, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. It is my privilege to welcome you to this thirteenth earnings call of Aurum PropTech. I'm thrilled to discuss our latest financial results and share the progress we have made over the past quarter. Let me start with profitability. At Aurum, we have always focused on unit economics, path to profitability, and value creation. We have been articulating these thoughts through our various communications over the last two years. We are starting to see the benefits of our disciplined approach across the ecosystem that we have created. Quarter one of this year has validated our disciplined efforts. In the past quarter, we have seen all-round improvement in performance ratios across our businesses.
Compared to the financial ratios of last year, this quarter delivered improved PBT, improved EBITDA, and improved Adjusted EBITDA by 13%, 8%, and 10% respectively. As we remain extremely focused on costs and run our business, businesses with a frugal mindset, we also need to continuously grow and increase our market share. I will now touch upon how we are endeavoring to achieve these. We have often discussed with all our stakeholders how large and untapped the residential rental opportunity is. HelloWorld and NestAway are showcasing our growing market presence and the effectiveness of our strategies in this space. We believe that we are the leading player in the rental vertical and will continue to dominate this space. We aim to replicate our success of rental vertical across our entire ecosystem.
Real estate housing sector has seen record-breaking transactions over the past few quarters, and our services, in form of Aurum Analytica and Sell.Do, enjoy a commendable trust of the developer community in enabling them to reach to the prospective home buyers. Both these businesses have delivered their best results in Q1 FY 2024/2025. We are now working on a few strategic initiatives to reorganize and lead the real estate sector in the distribution vertical as well over the next few quarters. At Aurum, we strive to grow exponentially, but always in a sensible manner. Moving on from numbers, tech is at the heart of our mission. We have made substantial advancements in our platform, integrating AI and machine learning, to provide smarter and more efficient solutions for our clients.
As the real estate sector across India continues to get organized, the need of tech, especially data analytics, marketing, and sales automation, will be getting stronger. Our roadmap is designed to build on emerging trends and ensure that we remain at the forefront of PropTech industry. Our challenge is to maintain similar efficiency that we demonstrated in the last quarter over the next three quarters. This will enable us to deliver stellar performances in FY 2025 and improved all-round financial metrics on a year-on-year basis. I believe we are learning this balance to trade off between growth and profitability, and we are improving every single day. I am confident that with our dedicated team, innovative solutions, and strategic vision, we are well positioned to set bolder targets and continue to achieve our ambitious goals. I want to reiterate my gratitude for your trust and support.
Together, we are building a future where tech and real estate converge seamlessly to create smarter and more sustainable ecosystem. Thank you very much, and I look forward to your questions. Over to my colleague, Onkar.
Thank you, Mr. Deora. The rental business, comprising of student living, co-living, and family rentals, manages 30,000 rental units across 17 cities in India. This quarter, we had 600,000 tenants searching for rental properties, 90,000 prospective tenants under management, and INR 70 crore rental payments managed on our platforms. We have a major revamp of our rental discovery portal, NestAway. We are aiming to create a better user experience for searching and booking rental properties. We have also spruced up our recommendation engine with AI-enabled matchmaking features. For co-living units, we have continued the strategic supply acquisition in high-demand areas.... To maximize revenue during off-season periods, we are also piloting short stay as a flexible and convenient format for tenants.
With a continued focus on providing right value, right location, and right property for rental consumers, we are aiming to reach 50,000 units under management as our first, first pit stop, followed by 100,000 units under management. We will keep up the momentum to build the India rental real estate opportunity, an opportunity to solution about 20,000,000 individuals and households to be serviced with tech-enabled renting and living experience. Our distribution business, that includes data analytics, marketing, and sales automation, continue to increase enterprise efficiency for real estate developers. This quarter, we had 80,000 buyers actively looking for home purchase at Aurum Analytica. More than 7,500 SaaS licenses were deployed across 180 projects in the country, providing marketing and sales automation to real estate developers. We also facilitated INR 40 crore worth home sales with our broker aggregation offering.
Our data analytics business grew 30% year-on-year, signed up 100 new projects, and commenced operations in new locations, including Ahmedabad, Hyderabad, and Lucknow. Our marketing and sales automation business achieved a key milestone of reaching EBT positive this quarter. With this, our distribution business has now turned profitable across all offerings. This is a segment where real estate developers spend INR 4,000 crore worth of expenditure on marketing and sales automation, a segment that also presents to us a large opportunity for tech-led disruption. The capital segment has engaged further with regulators and commenced on to the SM REIT application. We believe that there is an immense potential in this business, with close to 33 million sq ft office space with over $48 billion value available for SM REIT segment. I will now further hand over to my colleague for financial updates.
Thank you, Onkar. Thank you everyone for taking out time to join us on this call today. The board of directors approved the unaudited results for the quarter ended June 30, 2024, and I will take you through the headline results. The total income for the quarter was INR 69.10 crore, as compared to INR 47.71 crore in Q1 FY 2024, up by 45% year-on-year. EBITDA for quarter one FY 2025 was INR 12.05 crores, as compared to INR 1.80 crores in Q1 FY 2024, marking an improvement of 6.7 times year-on-year. Adjusted EBITDA loss was INR 4 crores for this quarter, compared to a loss of INR 11.77 crores in Q1 FY 2024, a year ago.
This demonstrated an approximate 1,900 basis points improvement in the Adjusted EBITDA to total income ratio. Profit before tax improved approximately 2,000 basis points year-on-year, standing at -INR 13.74 crores, as compared to -INR 18.79 crores in Q1 FY 2024. Now, with this, I will pass on the call to Michelle to open the floor for the question and answer session. Over to you.
Thank you very much, sir. We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, please click on the Raise Hand icon tab available on your toolbar or on the Q&A tab available on your screen. You can also post your text questions on the Q&A tab. Kindly turn on your mic when the operator announces your name. Ladies and gentlemen, we will wait for a moment while the question queue assembles. We have the first question from Vikul Arora from Shadow. Please go ahead.
Thank you everyone for your time. So my question over here is, despite being, we are improving from RaaS model, like real estate and service from INR 50 crore -INR 58 crore. But sir, I want to ask, but the SaaS is, it's bit down for this quarter, like from INR 8.8 crore to, it's close to INR 5 crore, INR 6 crore. Is there any issue that we are facing in terms of SaaS model?
Mr. Arora, thank you for this question. A quick idea on both the models. While RaaS presents largely transaction-led, tech-enabled businesses, SaaS presents pure tech deployment. What we have done is, as a part of a certain restructuring, we have gone on to build transaction platforms on our SaaS technology platform. So, a couple of examples, point in cases, you know, we've built a broker aggregation platform on top of the SaaS business or the marketing and sales automation tech stack. That enabled us get a larger value in terms of revenue, which is demonstrated in the RaaS business.
... there is definitely a certain headwind that we faced in quarter one this year for the SaaS business owing to, I would say, certain election-led lower expenditure by real estate developer segment. We look at increasing this in the future for the quarter. SaaS business will continue to demonstrate a substantial, I would say value, if not revenue, going forward in the ecosystem.
So basically, it's a temporary one?
Sorry, I didn't get... Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Temporary, yeah. So my second question is, could you please throw some light on fractional ownership? If you can, please.
We didn't get your question. Could you please repeat this?
Yes. Sir, I was asking, can you please throw some light on the fractional ownership that earlier Aurum is working on? The fractional ownership.
Yeah. This is Hiren here. I hope I'm audible.
Yes, sir.
Yes, sir, you are audible.
Yeah. So, you know, we have, for the last couple of years, looked very intently at this particular space, much before the regulation has come in, right? As you are aware, we actually, kind of, took up the tech platform of an erstwhile player and onboarded the entire team who has been working with us to build that platform in the name of Aurum WiseX. Right? Thanks to the regulation which, or the notification which started last year and has now come out as a regulation, dated eighth March, we have started preparing for the license application as we speak. We are in consultation with legal advisors, who are helping us in kind of the process to file the application form for that, right?
So the first step in that is to procure the license, and then migrate the existing set of assets that we have, which are roughly around 400 investors, who have a roughly AUM of INR 180 crore with us, right? So that's, that's—those are, those would be the two first and foremost steps as far as we are concerned, given the SEBI notification that has come. In terms of how the market will pan out, mostly we remain positive, in terms of, you know, how the market is going to grow, thanks to the regulation. The initial one or two years might have some, you know, unknowns in the form of how the distribution of these assets happen.
If you are aware, before the regulation came in, all the fractional ownership platforms had their own distribution engines in terms of sales teams, digital platforms, et cetera. But the paradigm now has to change completely, with the introduction of a merchant banker coming in between. On the positive side, in fact, there are many positives to take, the biggest one of them being that all these investments will become more liquid, thanks to all the units being listed on stock exchanges like NSE and BSE, right? So overall, there is positive.
There are a few unknowns, but we are taking the entire approach step by step, which is to first apply for the license, then plan for migration, and in parallel, launch appropriate and lucrative properties that can be fractionalized.
All right, sir. Thank you so much for your elaborate question, answer. Thank you.
Thank you. We have our next next question from Vinay Gupta, from Previse Wealth . The question is, can you please explain the Adjusted EBITDA calculation?
Yeah, this is Hiren here. I'll, I'll again take on that question. If we can refer to the slide which, which we have presented.
I think it's slide 2. The first.
Yeah. Yeah. Right. So, you know, broadly, as you might be aware, we have been following the Ind AS standard of reporting financial statements. And then, we, by nature of our business, predominantly the co-living business, we have certain properties which are taken on long lease, right? And as per the standards, we report them, we capitalize them, and then there are n number of costs which we have to report in the entries. Now, what happens is, both for our own internal tracking as well as investors like you who want to understand how operationally we are, you know, performing, how we are improving, right? It makes sense for us to start tracking, first internally, how the operational EBITDA in the erstwhile domain work.
And hence, we kind of created our own dashboard, saying that if this is the reported number, and if I adjust for the lease-related costs first, right, what would be my operational EBITDA looking like, right? And we benchmark this approach with a number of listed companies, not just in India, but outside India also, who, where similar standards to Ind AS 116 specifically have come into place. So we took learning from them, and we thought, now that we understand how this...
The Adjusted EBITDA calculations were, we thought, let us also for the benefit of our investors, transparently share this so that they are also able to appreciate, given that we have a lease-related business in the form of, co-living, so they are able to appreciate the operating margins, right? So we have put up a table, which is there in the investor presentation, right, which helps you to, you know, kind of, to match the entire PNL with how we look at Adjusted EBITDA, right? So, for example, there are, there is an entry in the, in the income category, which, which is on account of the Ind AS standards, and these are referred to as right-of-use assets, right? So, so there is another income.
So we first, you know, adjust the total income for that entry. Also, if you look at the costs, you know, typically the finance cost and the depreciation cost is where some of this Ind AS 116-related entry is coming, right? So we kind of, we balance for that, from the EBITDA that you would have seen from the financial statements, right? So that, you know, if you look at the table, there is a line item change, which says less lease cost on Ind AS lease assets, right? So that's a INR 35 crore number for FY 2023, 71 for FY 2024, and 17.8 for Q1 FY 2025, right? So we, we kind of adjust that for, from the EBITDA that you would see from the financial statements.
And whatever comes as a result is the Adjusted EBITDA, as we call it. So this, in our mind, is the first full operational EBITDA, which is after the recurring cost from the leases that we have, right? So that's how we are tracking our operational performance as well, right? There is also another item, which is a one-time item, in the form of ESOP expenditure. So we have adjusted for that as well, because we don't see this as a recurring big expenditure coming into our PNL for long. And it's, and more so, it's not a cash expenditure, right? So these are the two main adjustments we have done.
This is more for our own, first, to track our own operational performance, and secondly, for the benefit of our stakeholders and investor community to understand how the business is doing operationally.
To add to what Hiren just said, this is Ashish here. We are also sort of learning this in a much sharper manner. And I think this quarter, we felt that our one learning, and second, looking at how the subsequent quarters are going to be, it'll be good to kind of get this kind of Adjusted EBITDA numbers. And this will be the same policy that will continue for some time to come, without any—without changing this. That was the idea.
Thank you, sir. We'll take the next text question from Virendra Chawla from Aurum, and the question is: When will be the final call PP shares?
So we have just completed one call of INR 30 crore . So the shares are now 20 + 30, paid up by INR 50 crore . There'll be another call of INR 30 crore that we are planning to do in the Q4 of FY of this year. So probably next six to nine months. That is the current requirement. But you know we can always do it later or earlier. But the fact is that the company doesn't require these monies until then. And in our experiences, we saw that when we did the last call, which was for around INR 130 crore, we got INR 123 crore of that within the prescribed window.
The INR 7 crore that we have not received is because some people were traveling and things like that. So, we don't need this capital now, but we, as of now, feel that we intend to call the INR 30 crore in the Q4 of this year.
Sir, Mr. Virendra Chawla is also available on the audio. I'll just promote him. Mr. Chawla, can you please proceed?
Yeah, thank you. So just want to check, apart from this question, just want to see how aggressive we are in the sales promo on the marketing. Because when we see online or news, nowhere we are seeing is, like, advertisement related to NestAway or any other products. So just want to check how aggressively we are moving in this real estate and rental business.
Thank you, Mr. Virendra Chawla, for the follow-up question. Just to give you a quick sense from an operational standpoint, we do have a substantial effort going into marketing and sales, where close to around 300-odd individuals or colleagues are deployed in the marketing and sales effort. Our marketing is more on the targeted side, where we use a lot of data analytics to reach out to the consumers directly, digitally. And that is where we go on to acquire the consumers more smartly and more from a direct standpoint.
... Additionally, NestAway, in the recent quarter, has done substantial rebranding effort. We have started the rebranding effort and initiative in Bangalore, where we went on to relaunch the NestAway brand after post-acquisition. This was the first rebranding effort that we went on to. We did a substantial amount of billboards. We substantially did a substantial amount of direct marketing, and that has started bringing us a good amount of traction in the total uptick in tenants coming and visiting NestAway properties. We will start launching the brand activities city by city once we get control of certain location, and go on to extend our marketing efforts.
One thing that we would definitely want to sort of underline here, NestAway as a brand, pre-acquisition had already spent around INR 450 crore-odd on branding and marketing, where, NestAway as a rental marketplace was established, in the market. And it does remain, in the top five rental PropTech brands in the country, and definitely in one of the largest rental marketplace brand in the country, in the country. Our efforts are, I would say focused more on the recalibration of this brand and bettering the consumer experience of renting and buying properties on NestAway.
Yes. Thank you.
Thank you. We'll take the next text question. I'm sorry. We'll take the next question from Pranav Mashruwala from Dolat Capital. Please go ahead.
Hello. Yeah, hi, am I audible?
Yes, sir. Please proceed.
Yeah, hi. Yeah, thanks for taking the question. Just wanted the makeup of our revenues, please, for HelloWorld, NestAway, and other segments. Thank you.
Thank you, Pranav, for the question. Our revenue breakup remains consistent between these three cohorts. We have got close to 60% of our revenue from the rental cohort, and that comprises of NestAway, that comprises of HelloWorld business. In terms of quantum, the revenue will consistently remain at around 60% going into the future quarters. The second largest cohort for us in terms of revenue and operations is the distribution cohort, where we have garnered close to 35% of the revenue. This comprises of our data analytics business, this comprises of our marketing and sales automation business.
The third cohort, which is the capital cohort, which is still, I know, getting to the scale that we would want ideally to reach, is contributing close to 5%-10% of the revenue.
Thank you. Just one question on one of the news articles I've come across. This is regarding HelloWorld, and one of our key markets that is Kota in HelloWorld. So, I believe the NEET exam cancellation, and because of that, and the deferment, there has been a impact on demand for hostels and in maybe to that extent, co-living segment. So do we expect any impact on that for our segment?
Sure, Pranav, this is Hiren Ladva. You're right. I think, specific to the city of Kota, there is a mild impact, given the couple of trends that you mentioned. Having said that, does it have an impact on the overall student living? We are not seeing that as yet. One, because there is going to be a continuum. Yes, there is going to be a delay in the demand, but we remain positive that, you know, the enrollments will happen. We remain positive that there will be fresh batch of students coming, maybe delayed by a month or so. Yes, that delays our revenue planning to some extent.
Having said that, our dependency on the student living and that within HelloWorld is less than, roughly maybe 25% odd of the overall revenue, right? So there is also a professional, young professional, working in the co-living segment, right? That's also for us, right.
To add to Mr. Hiren, quickly, just to give you a scale of the student housing segment in India for higher education in urban areas in the country. Of which 80 lakh students are non-domiciled students, meaning students who are migrating to a non-domiciled city for studying. And of that, 60 lakh students live in non-captive or non-campus rental housing, typically in PG and rental housing, and this is the larger cohort that we are addressing to. Top cities by demand is Bangalore, Pune, Chennai, Kota, NCR. So the NEET specific challenge that we are facing, that the industry is facing right now, is limited to only that cohort of students, where the opportunity size still remains larger.
... Thank you so much.
Thank you. We'll take the next, next question from Vamshi K from Click Ventures, and the question is: What would be the target EBITDA margin for FY 2025?
25. You go to the EBITDA slide, please. So, Vamshi, I think the way we look at this, and I tried to address it in my earlier discussion as well, that we have improved EBITDA, improved Adjusted EBITDA and improved PBT, which as you can see is visible in the slide as well. Our idea is that if we are able to retain the similar sort of ratios for the next three quarters, then we would have exceeded our internal expectations. That is what we are targeting, that is what we are kind of aiming at.
Without giving you more than what I can, I can give you this indication for sure.
Thank you, sir. We'll take the next question from Faisal Hawa from H.G. Hawa & Company. Please go ahead.
Sir, can you just give an idea as to what are the key resource areas of the top management of NestAway at this point of time? How you have determined their salaries and, you know, compensations?
So, at NestAway, or not just NestAway, but with respect to the entire leadership team that runs our businesses, we have done four segmentations of their compensation. The first segmentation is, of course, the in a way, takes care of their remuneration. The second is linked, is a variable pay, which is linked to the AOP, or the Annual Operating Plan. And then the third and fourth cohort is, a time-linked and a value-linked, I would say, remuneration. The time-linked remuneration is given in form of ESOPs at Aurum PropTech, that vest in four years, over the course of four years, that ties them to the business, and then also, in a way, makes sure that they are also operating in co- in, in concurrence with the PropTech ecosystem, delivering consolidated results.
The value linked, I would say, to, for, for a lack of a better word, remuneration, is linked to the ESOPs that they carry at the individual business that they are running, which is in the ESOP cohort. Which links them then to the value that they can create at the business they are running for. So with these four levers of remuneration, we are able to, in a way, make sure that their energies are focused on delivering value and also our consolidated targets for PropTech. Our founders move also directly into the payroll at NestAway.
So if we specifically talk about the NestAway leadership team, they are getting compensated directly from the NestAway business. In fact, both the founders, co-founders, Jitendra Jagadev and Ismail Khan, both are running the NestAway and HelloWorld business combined together from the NestAway payroll.
So, without naming the competitors, you know, there are one or two competitors which are now going big on advertising, and we did notice that in the World Cup also. And, you know, this could cause us to probably up our spending also. So within your board of directors, what is the thinking? Do we want to do such a thing and burn cash and, you know, really upset our growing the EBITDA plans, or will we, will we not do that?
So marketing and advertising expenditure is a segment where we don't like to compete when there's a competition for expenditure. For two reasons. One is that, if a competitor is spending on lead gen, why do we lead gen? Why do we have to sort of spend on brand and marketing for lead gen? We would rather do a lead purchase from that platform and then make sure that our CAC is under control. The second reason for this is that, our data analytics team and practice is very strong in doing targeted marketing. So we are not required to do, I would say, a carpet bombing exercise for our advertising expenditures, like a competitor would do.
Our advertisements directly reach our consumers on the platform that they are used to and conveniently looking for. So, for example, a late millennial consumer will be targeted on his Times of India app, and a Gen Z consumer will be targeted on its Instagram handle. And that is how we do our targeted delivery through our analytics platform.
Just to add to what Onkar just said, also, as a philosophy, we believe-
... more in the product than in promotion. So if you see most of our initiatives, they are product-centric and not promotion-centric. Having said that, we all understand that running digital B2B products, B2C products require their own marketing capacities and sales and marketing costs, which we incur, but it will always be lesser than our competition as a percentage.
Ajay ji, if you could, you know, see, kind of give us, you know, a glimpse into the future, like five, six years down the line, how do you think the value will be finally created for the shareholder? You feel that all these companies will finally be de-merged when they are of, you know, good size and, you know, or, or will we utilize cash flows from these companies to, you know, further beef up the companies which are needing the cash? Like, you know, the model that probably, you know, Warren Buffett or, you know, even Ray Mursa have. I mean, because stock market does get confused in companies, you know, where there are too many subsidiaries.
You are right, and we are cognizant of that for sure. As a direction, I can tell you that we are moving towards INR 1,000 crore revenue. Two, doing it profitably. Three, integrating it with data coming from various businesses, creating a DaaS platform, Data-as-a-Service platform, for our own internal requirements, so that all data is in one place. And you will, over the next couple quarters, see that how some of the other businesses are getting restructured to one have better business efficiencies, and hopefully that will also turn into value creation for the stock market, as you said. Having said that, as of now, the focus is to quarter on quarter improve the financial metrics and increase the revenue.
That trade-off itself is pretty challenging, because as you know, that if you kind of want to continue to grow in a market where everybody else is losing money, it becomes a bit of a challenge. But I think we are dealing with that, well. We want to continue to focus on that.
So you mean to say that there could be some value creation in the next two-three quarters itself in one or two other companies?
Well, we are... Look, we need to understand the value creation aspect, right? Not, not from a stock market point of view, per se, could be, but we do understand. And, in our real estate business, we did, we did, create value by, selling, two buildings, to CapitaLand in last two or three years. And, because that new, like, because that happened over the weekend and that news is in, public domain today, I can talk about it. We did, we did, monetize our buildings, worth INR 1,000 crore from, from, CapitaLand, right? That has happened in the real estate side, doesn't directly impact PropTech.
So as a company, as management, we do understand the value creation piece, and I think we, you know, at directional level, we are there as well.
Thank you, sir. Just two compliments while leaving. This new, the way that this con call has been done with, you know, with the presentations and all, is a very good step. Second is that, you know, this is only probably the third or the fourth time that, you know, a CEO has revealed the KRAs of, you know, his top management, you know, at absolutely the first, you know, question itself, and without doing any kind of trying to say yes or no about it. Good going, you know, because, you know, you basically empower your people to, you know, answer to each and every question that investors have. Thank you very much.
Thank you, sir.
Thank you. We'll take the next question from Ramesh Shah. This would be a text question, and he's an independent investor. The question is: We see that the company has begun capitalizing the product development cost. Can you throw more light on what we are capitalizing?
Thank you, Ramesh, for the question. This is Hiren here. Let me, let me try to answer that. See, as you know, we are a, you know, PropTech company. All our businesses are run at the back of certain tech products. Onkar has already thrown light on, you know, what we are building. Some of the software. Some of them are software, some of them are platforms, some of them are customer-facing or investor portals. All these products and platforms have a long-term economic impact, right? So this is in the form of either revenue or also in the form of efficiency improvements. I believe the logic and merit of capitalizing such cost is well understood, and hence I will not delve into that, per se. At Aurum PropTech, we had seen...
We were actually in an acquisition mode till the beginning of FY 2024. And then, for every company, we used to spend a couple of quarters to onboard them after the closure has been done. And when they were in their own nascent forms, right, so the product development efforts were far more experimental in nature than they are as of now, when all these businesses are far more mature in terms of their market presence. And then as part of our onboarding process itself, and later on in FY 2024, as part of our three-year strategy planning also, right, we began to assess and plan for our consolidated product and tech capabilities. So we documented and started tracking our product roadmaps.
By the way, all these efforts also added or had the added benefit of helping us to drive cost optimization in this market. So expectedly, you know, there were several products from the, you know, these invested companies or businesses, right, that have a long-term top line or a bottom-line impact on our P&L. And so we have capitalized some of these products, and we have actually also listed some of these products in our investor presentation. So I'll encourage you to have a look at those. Now, we already had a capitalization policy, right? And we, you know, we have been capitalizing some of our costs that were from the products that were getting built in-house under our own product itself, right?
Now, in FY 2024, after we did this entire consolidation, the strategy planning and the product roadmap planning, et cetera, so we started capitalizing some of these costs from the partner companies, right? So we created a bottom-up list of all these products. We put on the criteria from the policy, which is like, you know, what are... Which products are technically feasible, what are the costs which are identifiable, measurable, and also, you know, attributable to this particular project or product. And also, which definitely have a defined, you know, economic value or an economic impact over the future quarters and years, right? More importantly, years.
So from a numbers point of view, in Q1 FY 2025, we capitalized around INR 2.8 crore, which is roughly half of the expenditure that we incur on our tech teams, right? And 3% of the overall expenditure. Like to like, in the entire FY 2024, we had capitalized somewhere close to INR 13 crore, again, which was, I think, 4% of our total expenditure. So, and then on an average, these products will be depreciated over the next two-three years. Right. That's the plan. I'd also like to add that generally, we, while we were doing this exercise, we were also benchmarking ourselves in terms of our cost structure with tech companies in a similar scale.
There also we observed that most of these companies have around 35%-45% of their tech expenditure going towards product development. There is, you know, depending on the maturity, again, 15%-20% of the expenditure going towards R&D, and the remaining is, you know, upgrades, maintenance, and miscellaneous, right? So I think we've, we were, you know, quite content to realize that at this stage, our breakup of the expenditure is also more or less in line with the benchmarks of the best-in-class companies that we see.
Thank you. We have a text question from Guneet Singh from Countercyclical PMS, and the question is: He needs to know the outlook for FY 2025 in terms of top line.
So, we'll give you a quick sense of how we have moved in the last financial year. From a revenue standpoint, we've grown 68% between FY 2023 and FY 2024. This quarter, our year-on-year growth has been at 47%. And we have targeted ourselves to grow at a 45% year-on-year revenue going in the next three years. The North Star for us is to reach an INR 1,000 crore revenue goal sooner the better, faster the better. And we'll keep our efforts onto it. However, our eyes are also always on profitability, and we have always pushed our teams to make sure that there's a balanced approach with respect to revenue growth and profitability.
And that is, that is how we are sort of commencing onto our future journey in terms of business expansion.
Thank you. The next text question is from Aditya Sen, from Robo Capital, and the question is: Can you please throw some light on how the revenue and EBITDA will shape up in FY 2025 and FY 2026? Thank you.
We just covered this question, Mr. Sen. We've given an outlook of our guidance of 45% Y-o-Y growth for in terms of revenue. And in our last quarter call, we have also highlighted that we would like to keep an eye on profitability, ensuring that we are improving our EBITDA by 450 BPS quarter-on-quarter.
Just to add to what Onkar is saying, it's the trade-off again between the revenue growth and discipline in profitability that is a discussion on a regular basis at our end, and we are happy to kind of discuss this in the next quarter call this way.
... Thank you. The next question is from Rahul Jain from Dolat Capital. Please go ahead.
Yeah, hi. Hope my line is audible?
Yes, sir, you're audible. Please proceed.
Yeah, thanks. You know, firstly, I would like to appreciate the clarity shared on the Adjusted EBITDA working and the reconciliation table. Because I think sharing Adjusted EBITDA that reflects a lower EBITDA number than reported EBITDA is an industry-first initiative. Most of the time, Adjusted EBITDA is used to reflect that the EBITDA is better than the reported EBITDA. So I think I appreciate the courage behind sharing that. My question would be like, since you gave some idea on potential call for the last tranche on partly paid in later part of the year, it would be great if you could share that, you know, is this going toward the expanding into current business lines, or is it going toward newer areas as well, which we're not addressing today?
Rahul, this is Ashish here. First of all, thank you for releasing a report from your firm in this quarter. And so we are at Aurum, we are thankful and grateful to you. Your question is around the use of the investor use of the rights proceeds. Is that right?
Yeah, and also towards, you know, the potential call which you are about to make, will it be in the same line of businesses or potential new areas?
So I think with our ecosystem, we have more or less covered all the key value aspects of the real estate value chain. So all this, all the capital, the existing or the new capital, will go through, go to deepen the ecosystem rather than trying to create new new businesses around that. I think I think the three three clusters that we have more or less covers the entire real estate value chain that we like to be present in. So these these these funds, the existing and the and the funds that we raised through rights issue, will continue to deepen the ecosystem rather than any new business lines around that.
Understood. And also, could you share the current occupancy on the 30 or 30,000-odd units that we have on the rental side, and also an ideal timeline to achieve the first milestone for 50K units?
So, I got your first question. The second one I didn't get, which is milestone for?
Yeah, so the 50,000 unit milestone that we mentioned, is there a timeline that we have in our mind?
So at the moment, from a capacity point of view, we are already at around 30,000, which is signed up capacity. And, from an occupancy point of view, in the co-living, we are at 77%, of the units that are there on our platform. It's just 77%-80% is where it keeps on hovering. And then, when we track our competition, we are doing far more better because we have heard is that, 65% is the average for the rest. So, so 77%-80% is what roughly we have seen over the last two-three months, two-three quarters, rather. And, from our 50,000, goal point of view, I think we are a little ahead of our plans.
We had aimed to receive, reach 50,000 units capacity by March of 2027, actually, right? But we have, we are ahead much earlier than the plan that, that we have set for ourselves.
Sure. Sure.
Also-
Also to add to what Hiren is saying, if you take a view that, look, we are putting some growth capital behind Hello World and NestAway in a more aggressive manner, then we can reach this 50,000-bed in a much faster manner. But that kind of takes the unit economics of those particular buildings for a little bit of... So-
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Thank you. We'll take the next question from Pranav Mashruwala, from Dolat Capital, and the question is, "Would 450 BPS improvement in EBITDA would be in adjusted EBITDA terms?"
Yeah. So this is Hiren here. You know, as we have shared the table for the last two years as well as the current quarter, you can see the improvement both in terms of EBITDA as well as adjusted EBITDA. We believe that we'll continue to have, you know, improvements in operational performance altogether, right? Because that's where we start tracking our-
I'm sorry, sir, your audio broke. Ladies and gentlemen, kindly stay connected. Sir, your audio broke. Can you please repeat your last line?
Yeah. So I kept on speaking, but I'll just quickly summarize. So, yes, we expect the improvement in the EBITDA or the Adjusted EBITDA more or less in the same, more or less in the same quantum as we have seen, and it's also demonstrated by the past performance as we have shown in the investor presentation, right? And the reason for this is mainly because the impact or the delta between the EBIT, EBITDA and the Adjusted EBITDA is primarily on account of the lease-related expenditure, which for us is limited to the co-living business and, you know, it will be governed by the similar growth, right?
could be 50, 50 or, you know, so basis points here and there, but more or less should be in line.
Now we are starting to track this for last couple quarters only. We see a direct correlation, as you can see, to add to what Hiren has said, that EBITDA on total income has gone up by 8%, 800 basis points. And similarly, Adjusted EBITDA has gone up 1,000 basis points, if you look at from last year to this quarter. So we see a direct correlation in that. We are also tracking it very closely now since we have learned to kind of do this. And we see. We can safely say that it will be 450 basis points will be transferred to the Adjusted EBITDA as well, ±50 basis points, as Hiren said.
Thank you. The next text question is from Payal Shah, an individual investor, and the question is: How is the journey from a software Majesco company to a property tech company? Is it more lucrative than software business?
I will request Onkar, I will request Kunal, Kunal to take this, because Kunal was, in Majesco and now 12 years in, Aurum, first in Majesco and then Aurum. So I'd like Kunal to, Kunal to take this.
So look, honestly, this, though both of them are tech companies, but the basic nature of the technology is totally different, and the market is also totally different. Like Majesco, it was more a overseas market, mostly in US, where insurance is a very mature product and, but this PropTech, it, currently we are mostly in India, and though we want to venture out of the country, maybe it will take another two years for us to reach that stage.
But definitely it is more lucrative because the competition over there was much higher, because, U.S. is always a very technically, mature, country to operate, and we definitely, have that advantage in now, the PropTech, because it is a very new thing, so we are, very early to enter, and we hope that we can take that benefit at Aurum as, as the PropTech journey continues.
Also, just to add to it, from like-for-like comparison, the India insurance market, by 2030 is to be a $250-odd billion market. Whereas the real estate as a market is poised to be a $1 trillion market, of which PropTech will be a $100 billion. If you see InsurTech, the market is largely contested. It's a mature space with a dime a dozen players wanting to attract the same clientele. Whereas PropTech presents a larger opportunity, where there's limited players who understand this space as well as us. And also it goes beyond just an enterprise business model that Majesco used to run in its earlier avatar.
Our business model covers not just enterprise tech in our distribution vertical, but also consumer tech in form of our rental cohort, and that gives us a larger value creation piece, across the PropTech canvas. So yes, it is a better, for us, it is a better, and natural alignment, to, to our existing, sort of skills.
Thank you. The next text question is from Reuben Mathews , from Equity Intelligence, and the question is: Great presentation. The restructuring of business mentioned earlier in the call for creating value, will it be in the distribution vertical? Also, will we see segmental breakup in the future as rental, distribution, and capital, or will it continue to be RaaS and SaaS?
Thank you, Mr. Matthews, for the, for the compliment on the presentation. The restructuring of business that we mentioned about is targeted to be in the distribution vertical. We believe that we are in a pole position, we are in a pivotal position in rental space already. That has taken us four to six quarters to do that. And now we believe that we are ready to take the rental, sorry, take the distribution vertical and go deeper into that, to see how we can improve our market share in that. So that's definitely the idea.
The RaaS and SaaS, as a term, we have been using RaaS and SaaS when we started thinking about the real estate business, sorry, the PropTech business, some of our presentations were around that. Then from there, we moved to start thinking the business from a tech capital and services, which I thought was our next level of evolution. Now, we feel that if you look at the ecosystem and put it into different value aspects, different value chain, then rental, distribution, and capital are the three segmental breakup, which kind of maps us very well and makes us a unique ecosystem.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we will take that as the last question for today. I would now like to hand the conference over to Miss Sonia for closing comments. Over to you, ma'am.
Thank you, Michelle. Thank you everyone who participated today. We truly appreciate your continued interest in Aurum PropTech, and we look forward to having you all in the next call again. Have a good evening ahead. Thank you.
Thank you, members of the management. Ladies and gentlemen, on behalf of Aurum PropTech Limited, that concludes this conference. Thank you for your participation, and you may exit the meeting now. Thank you.