Good day, and welcome to the Hemnet second quarter 2022 earnings conference call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing star then zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on a touch-tone phone. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Cecilia Beck-Friis. Please go ahead.
Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the presentation of the Hemnet Group's results for the second quarter of 2022. My name is Cecilia Beck-Friis, and I'm joined today for the last time by CFO Carl Johan Åkesson, and for the first time by Interim CFO Jens Melin, who I will introduce later on in this presentation. As usual, we will go through the highlights, followed by an operational and financial update before ending with a Q&A. With that, let's start with the highlights on page four. This is the sixth consecutive quarter that we outperform our financial targets. I've said before that these targets are no limit for us. Instead, we try to meet or exceed these targets each quarter.
For the sixth time since the IPO, a combination of successful execution of our strategy, coupled with tailwinds from an active property market, has resulted in strong growth in net sales and EBITDA. Net sales grew by almost 27%, driven largely by a 34% growth in ARPL, and EBITDA grew by 31%, reaching a margin of almost 54%. CJ will go deeper into the drivers of these numbers later on in this presentation. We have had beneficial tailwinds from an active property market, with listings increasing 3.2% over last year. We have also seen that the proportion of customers upgrading their listing to Plus and Premium continues to increase, driven by a combination of product development, increasing awareness, and changing needs in the new property market. We are once again seeing growth in the business to business segment.
This segment continues to be traffic dependent, but despite the fact that traffic still remains below 2021 levels, our customers continue to see Hemnet as one of their most important marketing channels and continue to invest in our products as a way to build branding and to drive exposure to new potential customers. For the last three to four years, we have seen a strong development in revenue from our business to business customers. This has mainly been a result of us step-by-step building a stronger organization that could realize more of the potential in our advertising business.
For the last couple of quarters, we have presented small decreases for business to business revenue, partly due to high traffic comps from the pandemic, and it is therefore encouraging to see that we have moved back to positive numbers this quarter with adjusted revenue growth of 4.3%. Finally, we have commenced our capital return program with a combined SEK 89 million return to shareholders during Q2 from our dividend and share buybacks. Our target for the buybacks, specifically is to return a total of SEK 450 million up until the next AGM. CJ will provide more color on this later on. Turning now to page six for a business and market update.
This has been another active quarter for the property market, but this time on the back of clear signals that we are entering what is known as a buyer's market. This means that price expectations are falling and listing duration is going up, resulting in increasing difficulty for sellers to get the desired price for their property. Despite this, perhaps because of this, the volume for the quarter is up 3.2%. We believe that some sellers have been accelerating their sale process in order to sell before any further interest rate increases. So far in Q3, volumes are on par with last year's, last year, and it will be interesting to follow the development going forward.
What we see currently is a highly unusual combination of economic factors, and I think it is safe to say that there is some uncertainty around the development for both the economy at large and the property market. We don't want to speculate right now about the development of listing volumes and can just conclude that we are well-positioned with a business model that should be effective both in a seller's market and a buyer's market. On this theme, I want to spend a minute talking about the state of the market, especially the potential risk that Hemnet could be facing in a downturn, turning to page seven. We are seeing a market characterized by a higher level of uncertainty and also a market that we have now not experienced in Hemnet's recent history.
However, the strength of Hemnet's business model is that we are well equipped for this type of market because our revenue is primarily generated by published listings, not from completed transactions. In this market, it also becomes more important for sellers to generate the best possible exposure for what is usually the biggest transaction of their lives, and this is something that Hemnet offers the absolute best conditions for. A decline in transaction volumes would have a direct impact on our revenue. However, Swedish demand for property is driven by organic need. Thus, there is limited speculation, and rental is not an alternative to buying and selling. This means that during the worst recent financial crisis in 2008, transactions in Sweden declined only by 11%, which does not necessarily translate into published listing declining by 11%.
This has been the most significant decline in property volumes that we have seen for any recent year based on data from Statistics Sweden. It is important to underscore that we are somewhat protected from the risk, since Hemnet is paid on attempt to sell rather than close transactions, and that these two are not always correlated. It is clear that we're entering a buyer's market, meaning that it will become increasingly difficult for sellers to achieve the right price for the property. We have already seen this impacting the rate of turnover of property. On the flip side, Hemnet's role and our seller products become increasingly important for sellers looking to maximize price by accessing the largest potential audience for their listing. We believe that there is no better place in Sweden to market a property for sale than on Hemnet.
Declining property prices have a limited impact on our revenue as we price our packages based on the asking price of a property. However, declining asking prices could impact our revenue. With that said, we still see significant pricing headroom remaining, meaning that the price a seller pays for Hemnet today is relatively low compared to the high value we deliver. Perhaps more importantly, property classifieds is not discretionary spending, especially in Sweden. Given Hemnet's reach, we are confident that the property seller looking to maximize their sales price will continue to invest in a Hemnet listing. With regards to interest rates, of course, this may impact the property prices, but with regards to the impact on our business, we see this challenge as limited given that Hemnet currently has virtually zero leverage.
In summary, Hemnet has a strong position in the market and a robust business model. I feel confident that we are well equipped to continue delivery according to our plan, with a focus on developing and broadening our market position and our business. Let's now spend a minute to talk about what products we have launched in the quarter, turning first to page eight and our strategy. The strategy remains unchanged, and I will not go into detail on this page. It is available for you to read online in this and in the past quarterly reports. What I can say is that with the strong momentum in product development and launches across all strategic areas, and I will now go over some of the changes from this quarter, starting with consumers on page nine.
It is imperative that we'll continue to invest in the best-in-class customer experience to continue improving our proposition to property buyers by, for example, making property search more relevant. We have launched two concrete improvements this quarter. Firstly, we have added new search filters for attributes like balcony and ownership type. Secondly, we are testing a product to simplify the process for creating an account at Hemnet, making it easier to save searches and track the value of your property. We expect this to be launched in the near future. Moving now to page 10 and property sellers. Here, we continuously develop our seller products to be as relevant as possible for our consumers. During this quarter, we have made this change specifically linked to a more challenging property market, and that change is to add the free renewal of the property listing to Hemnet Premium.
Renewal of a listing will reset the data associated with the listing and make it appear as new in the search results, allowing sellers to pause and restart a sale in case the property is not sold. We hope that this new attribute will make Hemnet Premium more appealing to property sellers, especially in the current market. Now looking at business to business, and specifically real estate agents on page 11. As we have previously communicated, we have accelerated product development for business to business customers significantly in the spring. During the spring, we first launched a Find a broker product that connects potential property sellers and real estate agents. During Q2, we have expanded this product to include a paid subscription model that gives paying agents more visibility in the result list for reported sales prices.
This subscription is based on the number of listings that the broker office publishes and requires an existing Hemnet Business subscription. Going forward, we will continue expanding this product and its commercialization. We believe that finding a seller is one of, if not the largest pain point for real estate brokers and will become exponentially more important as we enter a more challenging property market, which is why this remains a key development area for Hemnet. Finally, property developers on page 12. Here we have made some small but very important changes to our products and publishing rules. By changing the publishing rules for single new development listing, we ensure that all listings are treated equally on Hemnet. We have also updated our revenue model, so there are no free listings that are included in the property development package.
I will not go into detail into these changes, but the key takeaway for you should be that this increases the fairness on Hemnet while also increasing the revenue potential from the customer group. Furthermore, we are planning on adding a renewed listing product after the summer, similar to what we have included in Hemnet Premium for property sellers, again, to mitigate the challenges from a difficult property market. These changes enable us to continue with product development according to the strategy defined for this customer group. Let's turn to page 13 and talk about our key revenue driver, ARPL. ARPL continues to grow, up almost 34% in Q2.
This is driven by a combination of product, where we have launched both consumer experience improvements and improvements to Hemnet Premium, conversion, where, against the increased demand from property sellers, as well as agents continuing to recommend Plus and Premium more and more. We have also done price adjustments across all products. Now turning to an update on headcount on page 14. We started the quarter with 121 employees and ended it with 122 employees. We had, of course, targeted an increase in the number of employees. However, up until recently, I would say that we have met a highly competitive labor market for product development related roles. This has affected the number of new colleagues coming in during Q2. Another factor has been an elevated number of leavers, which we believe is natural after a very low numbers during the pandemic.
We are continuing to recruit very actively while others are downsizing. We are a profitable growth company. After Q3, where we still expect small net changes, we believe that we can have a stronger finish in Q4. To support this, we have recruited a new member to our management team. Anna Kempe will be joining Hemnet after the summer as Chief People and Culture Officer, with a focus to further strengthen our position as an attractive place to work for both current and new employees. On the topic of recruitment, I wanted to provide you with an update of our management team on page 15. We welcome Jens Melin as Interim CFO of Hemnet.
Jens is currently the head of group accounting at Hemnet and has been with the company for more than three years, playing an important role in the IPO and subsequent financial reporting. Jens is an authorized public accountant and will assume the role as Interim CFO while we continue to look for permanent replacement for CJ. We're also welcoming Peter Frey as the new CTO of Hemnet. Peter has 16 years of experience as CTO and brings a wealth of knowledge from previous companies such as Betsson, Bonnier News, and Aftonbladet. Peter will play a critical role in our organization as we continue scaling our development capacity to meet the high ambitions set out in our company strategy. Finally, I want to welcome Anna Kempe to our team.
Anna brings over 20 years of HR experience, and I'm thrilled to have her join the Hemnet team to continue improving our perception as an attractive employer in Sweden. Anna has extensive experience from roles that have involved both HR and business responsibilities within companies such as Schibsted, Wise Group, and Circle K. This is a new role at Hemnet as the topics of recruitment, culture, and employees are playing an increasingly larger strategic role. This recruitment will allow my current colleague, Jessica Sjöberg, to focus solely on questions around communication and brand, having previously also covered HR issues under her combined title. I am very pleased with these three recruitment as we continue to strengthen our teams to support our growth journey ahead. Turning now to page 16 and a final note from me regarding our marketing initiatives.
Starting with Guldhemmet, the gala that every year celebrates the achievements of the property industry, first initiated by Hemnet in 2019. Since then, the gala has cemented itself as the largest event for the real estate broker and property development industries, providing a platform where individual and team achievements can be highlighted and rewarded. I'm thrilled by the response of the recent gala held in Stockholm this spring and pleased to see a continuously increasing interest for Guldhemmet from the property industry. Our ambition with this gala is to continue holding the gala on an annual basis and to share our data and insight and to continue to recognize the hard work of the industry. Secondly, I wanted to provide an update on our new brand platform.
During the first half of 2022, we have invested in a new brand platform and a new creative concept for Hemnet, both which we expect to launch in September in the largest TV channel in Sweden, as well as other selected media. The purpose of this is to reinforce and remind our users of our position as the top-of-mind property portal in Sweden and the number one preference for those looking to buy, sell, or broker real estate in Sweden. The brand platform will serve as a foundation for future marketing and branding initiatives in future years. On that note, I now want to turn to you, CJ, to provide you with an update on our financial results.
Thank you, Cecilia. Let us turn to slide 18 and the financial highlights for Q2. This is yet another strong quarter from Hemnet, where we see significant growth in both net sales and EBITDA. Starting off on the left-hand side, we have net sales increasing with 27%, continuing in line with our Q1 performance. Our adjusted EBITDA came in at a high number, up 31% from last year. It could be worth mentioning that we don't have any adjustments to EBITDA in this year, and in the historic periods where the vast majority is IPO-related costs. Typically, very few adjustments. The adjusted EBITDA margin came in at a record high 53.9%, up 1.7 percentage points from last year.
That we reached a new record in the second quarter is not a coincidence, as the second and the third quarters have historically been our strongest as market activity is high. Moving to the right-hand side of the slide, we saw ARPL increasing 34%. Cecilia talked about the reasons for that on page 13, which were a combination of product updates, increased uptake of our value-added services, and price adjustments across all seller products. As expected, we continue to see high cash conversion, which was 103% in the quarter. This was more or less the same result as in Q1 this year, as we have favorable working capital dynamics as we grow our seller revenue. Leverage came in at 0.2x rolling 12 months adjusted EBITDA.
The level is on a similar, level to what we saw in Q1 as we have started to return capital to shareholders via a dividend and buybacks. I will come back to that topic in a few slides. If we now turn to page 19 to look at the net sales by customer category, you will see, of course, revenue from property sellers continues to be the growth driver, up 37% in the quarter, mainly due to ARPL increasing 34% and also with a small contribution from positive volumes. Volumes could be worth mentioning constitutes about a tenth of the growth in seller revenue. What is also positive, of course, is that we are back to positive numbers for our three other customer groups with a combined growth of 4.3% in the quarter.
Adjusting for SEK 2 million of items affecting comparability related to marketing campaign with MSF last year, the underlying growth is actually 7.6% for those three customer groups. In this group, we continue to have strong demand from real estate agents. We see we had 31% growth in the quarter. All our established broker products are developing well. Mäklartipset, Hemnet Business, and Broker New Development units. Display revenue from real estate agents are also increasing. Our latest broker product, where we help match brokers and new sellers, is still in an early phase. We don't have any meaningful revenues from this yet, but instead are focusing very much on building awareness to increase adoption over time. Moving to the last two categories, developers and advertisers, the drop is due to low display revenue, especially from programmatic sales.
Looking specifically at display revenues across the three customer groups, the combined revenue is stable compared to last year. We have had a couple of quarters with tougher comps for traffic due to inflated numbers during COVID. While we see some improvements in the traffic for Q2, it is still a significant drop compared to last year's numbers. Despite that, we are generating more or less the same revenue, which is a strength we feel. In summary, I would say that our B2B portfolio is working well, delivering growth even with tough comps on traffic. Let's move to our adjusted EBITDA bridge on page 20. We're a growing company with operating leverage in our business model, leading to us moving from SEK 110.9 million in 2021 to SEK 145.3 million in 2022.
We covered the drivers for the SEK 59.2 million growth in revenue, let's instead look at the cost side. The compensation to real estate agents is now growing at a similar pace to our seller revenue, increasing with 34.6% from last year. As a proportion, this meant that compensation was just below 29% in the quarter. The reason for the similar growth rate is that Q2 is the first quarter with full effect from the new compensation model in both years, both this year and last year. Other external expenses, excluding the compensation to agents, is up SEK 6.9 million, as we have taken in consultants to temporarily fill a few roles while we are doing permanent recruitments.
Personnel costs are up SEK 7.3 million as we increased the team since Q2 last year and also had the normal annual salary review process, of course. Turning now to page 21 and our cash and leverage position. We talked about our cash generative business model, and the cash conversion was 103% in the quarter. One factor contributing to this is that when we grow our seller revenue, we tend to see a positive development for working capital. We have to wait until after each quarter end to sum up and pay compensation to real estate agents, while seller revenue is of course paid continuously. Good working capital dynamics.
Our strong cash conversion led to similar leverage position to what we saw in Q1, and we ended at 0.2x compared to 0.3x in Q1. As we said in our last call, our dividend and buyback program should stabilize leverage, and this is more or less what we see here. The dividend was paid in May and amounted to SEK 56 million, while buybacks totaled SEK 40.3 million. Out of that, 7.5 million was related to our share savings program rather than the SEK 450 million buyback program. We ended the quarter with cash and cash equivalents of SEK 138.2 million. Moving on to page 22 and a few additional words about the buyback. We're targeting SEK 450 million up until the next AGM.
We send weekly press releases about the progress of the buybacks, and by Friday last week, we had totaled SEK 58 million, so adding another SEK 25 million since the end of the quarter and leaving a bit less than SEK 400 million left to buy. We plan to keep a steady pace up until the next AGM, subject of course to any variations in trading volumes as we structure the program to meet the safe harbor regulations. With this, we are following our dividend policy to distribute excess cash back to shareholders. Before handing back to Cecilia to wrap things up, the final slide in this section is our financial targets targets on page 23. Our growth rates measured as an LTM is now at 29%.
Our profitability for the first time came in above our target range of 45%-50%, reaching close to 51% LTM. Leverage, as we said, was 0.2 x. As we said before, the management team is really looking to meet or exceed these targets, as is quite clear from the performance. As an additional comment on targets, we also just want to refer back to what was said during the latest AGM, which is that if the strong delivery continues, the targets are of course something that the board will review and the performance will be reflected in targets as well. That concludes my section for today.
Before handing back to Cecilia, since this is my last quarterly call before moving on to a new company after summer, I also wanted to say a big thank you to everyone listening in today, as well as to all our investors and of course, most of all, to the Hemnet team. This is a truly outstanding company, and it's been a true pleasure to be part of this journey for the last four years. Thank you.
Thank you, CJ. I also wanted to take this moment to thank you for the fantastic work that you have done at Hemnet, including your instrumental role in building a strong and well-functioning finance, legal, and IR team, as well as your work leading up to the IPO. We wish you the best of luck in the future. This was yet another quarter where we demonstrated our exceptional business model, and the result is growth in excess of our financial targets for both net sales and profitability. This despite the fact that we have faced an exceptionally tough comparable quarter, as Q2 2021 was indeed an active quarter, both for the property market and for our business-to-business customers. We are experiencing a lot of uncertainty in the overall market at the moment, but I feel great about our strong position and our ability to deliver.
I believe that the value of our products for our customers will likely go up as it becomes more challenging for property sellers to get the right price for their property and for real estate agents to find new sellers. With that, let us move on to the Q&A.
Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your touch- tone phone. If you are using a speaker phone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. If at any time your question has been addressed and you would like to withdraw your question, please press star then two. At this time, we will pause momentarily to assemble our roster. Our first question will come from Pete Kujala with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.
Hey, thanks for taking my questions. Two from me. Firstly on marketing. You have talked a bit about marketing lately and also again with the Q2 results and presentation. Can you flag a little bit how much the spending was in Q2, and what are you expecting the second half? I'm just trying to get some kind of a ballpark. Then the second question is on revenue from agents that accelerated quite clearly in this quarter. Is the main driver the new visibility product that you have for them, or is there something else that's driving this? Thanks.
All right. Hi, Pete. Thank you for your question. On the marketing, I would say the majority of the spending is gonna be due from September and forward. That's when we start to incur media costs. What we've seen now in the first half of the year is more sort of the preparatory work where we sort of set the concept and build the platform. We have a couple of million in Q2, nothing that's high. On the agent question and the revenue. No, it's not actually the new section that is driving the growth in revenue. It's rather our sort of existing products. Mäklartipset and Hemnet Business are both developing really well, I would say.
The demand for display from agents is also very solid. It's sort of a good portfolio we feel to have as a base and then any new revenue will be on top of that.
Yeah. All right. Very clear. Thanks. Thanks for that. Good luck, CJ, with everything going forward. Thanks.
Thank you.
Again, if you have a question, please press star then one. Our next question will come from Erik Wasson with Carnegie. Please go ahead.
Yes. Hi, team. Thank you for taking my questions. I'll limit myself to three. Just first off, with the kind of cooling underlying market, could you just recap for us the duration of the listings? How long can the seller have the listing on Hemnet before he or she needs to either use the Förmedla Annons service or take down and relist the entire ad?
Okay. When we look at the selling time, what we've seen, if you compare the numbers on the apartments from a year ago, the selling time or the duration has been prolonged with four days, going from 14 to 18 days. As a seller, I mean, you can leave your listing on as long as you want, and if you want to restart the listing, you take it away, and then you wait 23 days, and then you kind of reset all the data, and you will be on top of the list. Of course, we have other value-added services that you can use, I mean, both the Plus and Premium standing out in the result list or Raketen if you want to boost your product.
Okay. Perfect. Thank you. I was also wondering, through the quarter when the market has gradually cooled, have you seen an improving momentum for the value-added services and in Plus and Premium, or has that been a fairly constant share of sales through the quarter?
I think it's hard to say, I would say, because we are still in a growth phase when it comes to our value-added services to Plus and Premium. What we see is a continuous growth in the uptake of those products. I think also to add to that it's fair to say that there might be a momentum and these products might be even more relevant in a tougher market.
Okay. Perfect. Just one last one from me, and I'll jump back in the queue. You know, you've talked about Plus kind of becoming the new boss. You're clearly, you know, growing both Plus and Premium, but could you give a bit more color on the split between those two? You know, if you say that 45%-50% maybe of listings now are Plus or Premium, kind of, what's the split between those two?
Yeah. We continue to stay clear of giving that sort of specific number. The ambition is still the same. What we can say, we haven't reached that. Plus is not a majority of listings. We feel we're progressing as we planned, but there's definitely room to grow.
Okay. Perfect. Thank you for taking my questions, and best of luck today.
Thank you.
There are no more questions from telephone participants at this time.
Okay. Thank you for listening in, and have a great summer. Thank you. Bye-bye.
The conference is now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.