Welcome to the Hemnet Q1 2023 Conference Call. For the first part of the conference call, the participants will be in listen-only mode. During the questions and answer session, participants are able to ask questions by dialing star five on their telephone keypad. I will hand the conference over to the speakers, CEO Cecilia Beck-Friis, CFO Jens Melin, and IR Manager Nick Lundvall. Please go ahead.
Good morning, and welcome to this teleconference of Hemnet Group's presentation of the results for the first quarter of 2023. My name is Cecilia Beck-Friis, and I am the CEO of Hemnet. Before I introduce my colleagues, I want to take a moment to briefly talk about this fantastic picture that decorates the cover of the report. This is a photo from the fourth installment of Guldhemmet Gala that took place in March this year. This is an annual gala that Hemnet organizes to recognize the achievement of the real estate industry and has since its inception, become an essential part of the annual calendar for many agents, franchise owners, and property developers.
It was an entertaining and important evening and a great opportunity both for myself and many colleagues to mingle with some of our most important business partners. Let's turn to page two, so I can introduce my colleagues who participate in this call together with me. With me today, I have for the last time as Interim CFO, Jens Melin, as well as Nick Lundvall, our IR Manager, who will be assisting with the Q&A. Turning to page four for a summary of the quarter. Q1 was a challenging quarter for the Swedish property market. Concerns and uncertainty over interest rates and cost of living have contributed to some consumers choosing to hold off on selling and buying a home.
Despite this, I'm happy to say that Hemnet grew revenue from sellers by 11.7% and total net sales by 5.8%, all while seeing paid published listings decrease almost 20%. This is the greatest decrease in listing volume that we have recorded in our data, which is why I have confidence that demand for our product, especially the seller product and our ability to execute on our strategy, outweigh the macro and economic challenges present before us. This quarterly result is also clear testament that our product remains attractive even in a weaker market. Our ARPL, the average revenue per listing, continues to be the main driver for our growth, with growing demand for our value-added services as well as ongoing pricing work being the main contributors to ARPL growth. EBITDA grew 2%, resulting in a margin of 45.9%.
This modest growth is partially a result of significantly lower listing volumes, as well as our continued investment into product. Overall, I'm pleased with this result, especially given the circumstances in the property market. Turning now to page five and the ARPL development. ARPL grew 38% during Q1, driven by a combination of product conversion and pricing. This growth offsets the 19% decline in listing volumes. The growth in ARPL is a result of increased sales of our larger packages, especially premium, and of the value-added service renewal, as well as continued work on pricing. This shows that our investments in product development are creating the desired demand and added value for our customers. For example, the increased sales of renewal are a direct result of the changes we made to make restarting the listing on Hemnet faster and easier.
By working in an agile and adaptable manner, we can make sure that we meet our customers' needs and build more relevant and impactful products. Moving now to page six and the net sales by customer [inaudible]. Let's dig deeper into where the 5.8% growth in net sales comes from. The predominant driver is revenue from property sellers, which despite the all-time low listing volumes, grew 12% this quarter. Our continued work with product and pricing can be attributed to this growth. Real estate agents' revenue grew 3% despite continued high uncertainty in the real estate market. Agents continue spending on Hemnet in order to secure their next seller, strengthen their branding, and gain an advantage over the competition. This growth is especially encouraging given our many product improvements since last year and specifically as real estate agents.
Property developers continue to struggle as the market uncertainty means that consumers are less willing to buy properties under construction, and material cost increases are impacting project budgets for property developers, leading to necessary reviews of the overall cost base, including marketing investments. Net sales from advertisers declined 11%, partially due to declining traffic as well as widespread reviews of companies cost base due to the uncertain macroeconomic environment. We attribute the traffic loss to fewer listings, fewer visits from our so-called power users, and tough comparables in 2022, when the property market was more active. Banks are a clear exception, with increased demand and marketing spend from this customer group. As Sweden's fifth largest web platform in terms of reach and with high relevance and affinity, we are well-positioned as the best option for companies looking to reach audiences interested in the housing market.
Let's turn to page seven and the quick update on our 2023 roadmap. During the previous quarter report, our CTO and my colleague, Francesca Cortesi, walked us through the key initiatives and product roadmap for this year, 2023. I want to refer back to this roadmap shown here to provide you with a brief update on the most important product launches during Q1. As this is a page we have talked about before, I will not spend more time here, but instead turn to page 9 and our product update. For consumers, we have identified three key initiatives for 2023. These are secure listing content discovery, and deeper personalized experience. During this quarter, we spent most effort working on the first and the last of these.
With regards to securing listing content, this is important to strengthen and maintain Hemnet's position as the go-to property portal with the most comprehensive and relevant inventory. Starting off with an important update on how listings are renewed using our re-renewal product. Previously, a listing would have been taken off Hemnet for 23 days before being able to be renewed. We changed this rule during Q1 2023, so that now any listing older than 30 days can be renewed with reset statistics. For Hemnet Premium, this service is included in the package, whereas VAS and Plus packages pay extra for renewal. We are also testing a pay later feature, allowing sellers to pay for the listing once it has been sold or after a fixed amount of time.
The purpose of this test is predominantly to reduce the entry barriers to Hemnet and reduce the number of reasons for listings to be off-market. This is a test to secure listing content, but if and when launched, such a product will be structured in a way to have a positive impact on ARPU and seller revenue. We are structuring the product to have a minimum impact on our net working capital, cash flow, and credit risk using a payment partner to manage these aspects. Finally, we are working on providing consumers with...[inaudible].
This call is being recorded.
I'm sorry about this hiccup. We've had some technical issues today, unfortunately. Coming back to the presentation, I was talking about our product improvement and development on our consumer side during the quarter. I want to finish off on this slide, also saying that we're working on providing consumers with a more personalized experience by developing our valuation product launched earlier this year. A user will receive a prompt when the valuation for the tracked property changes, giving users more reasons to come back to Hemnet. Now turning to page 10 and seller products. On the left side of this page, you can see our ARPU growth from value-added services.
We are making good progress on this front as a result of increased sales of our larger packages and of the renewal product, as well as continued work on pricing. The continued growth in ARPU is evidence that our investments in product development are creating the desired demand and added value for our consumers. In addition to ARPU growth, a key focus is leveraging the agent VAS recommendation. Today, one in three agents recommend a VAS to their seller, the value-added services to their seller, but two in three sellers follow that recommendation. Here we see potential in growing the number of recommendations.
We have, during this quarter, for example, added a new step in the listing package selection flow that prompts the seller to reconsider if they select another package than the one recommended by their agent. Turning to page 11 and business to business. Demand for Hemnet's products from real estate agents remains consistent, and we are pleased that traffic to our agent search flow launched in 2022 continues to grow. We continue seeing conversion to Syns Mer för Säljare increase as more agents want to stand out in the agent search flow. We continue working with our attractive and diverse product portfolio for agents and are also working on new commercial products that will be launched during the year. The market for property developers remains exceptionally tough. A high hesitance discourage the buyers from buying unfinished products or projects with high leverage.
Despite the challenging market, there is demand for Hemnet product also from this customer category as the need to dispose of existing inventory is stronger than ever. We have updated the terms for our listing package aimed at small and medium developers to be a subscription rather than a one-time fee, we have opened up unsold Mäklartips slot to developers. Turning to page 12 for an overview of our organization. During Q1, we added six employees for a total of 141. This is a year-on-year increase of 20 employees compared to 121 in Q1, 2022. As previously communicated, most of the joiners for Q1 were already signed during Q4 of 2022.
We continue maintaining cost control across the business, an approach we consider central given the current financial climate despite the stable and cash generative nature of our business. I want to reiterate that the recruitment pace for the remainder of the year is expected to be significantly slower than that of last year. On Tuesday next week, I look forward to welcoming Anders Örnulf as our new CFO. He will join earlier than previously communicated and replace Jens Melin, who has served as interim CFO since August 2022, and he will now go on paternity leave before rejoining Hemnet as head of group accounting and control.
I want to take the opportunity to thank Jens for stepping up into this important role and doing a fantastic job during his time as interim CFO. We wish you the best on your leave and look forward to welcome you back during the fall. I want to finish by saying that we are currently looking into how to best organize our commercial operations going forward. This is to optimize the strength of our talent pool and to leverage our investment in future growth. Turning to page 14 and an update on the market. We, of course, receive a lot of questions on the property market, even more so in the past few months, given the development in listing volumes. This is totally understandable as we are faced with a unprecedented drop in listing volumes.
While we do not have a crystal ball for when the situation will turn, we have prepared some slides to provide you with an understanding of some of the drivers behind the current market environment, as well as potential catalysts that could lead to a more normalized market going forward. I think that the words uncertainty and hesitance summarize the current state of the Swedish property market. Uncertainty both around interest rates as well as affordability. Consumers are uncertain around the direction of interest rates and mortgage costs, as well as inflation, cost of living and affordability. This hesitance, in turn, has a direct impact on both buyers and sellers and leads to fewer listings and transactions. We can see that transactions are being done, and there is a balance in the market, but at a lower pace than before.
19% is the largest drop in the new property listings for any quarter for as long as long back as we have comparable data, which is why I'm particularly pleased that Hemnet during this time grew its revenue for property sellers by almost 12% despite the difficult market conditions. Turning now to page 15 for an overview of historical listing data. Looking at historical quarterly data for as far back as we can, we see the fluctuation have varied from approximately -14% to almost +30% for any given quarter. Q1 2023 is clearly an outlier as we have not previously seen any quarter with as sharp a drop in listing volumes. What we can observe, however, is that most periods of uncertainty in recent times had both positive and negative quarters.
Negative quarters are usually followed by some sort of catch-up effect. It is difficult to predict exactly when this effect comes into place. Looking on the right-hand side of this page, we can see that annual listing volumes tend to be stable despite quarterly variances, and we remain confident in the stability of the Swedish housing market driven by need to live. Turning to page 16 and the potential catalysts that could impact the market going forward. We are still in a hesitant market when it comes to listing volumes. We have identified a number of events that are potential catalysts to have to a more fluid and normalized property market.
With regards to interest rates, there is some expectation that rates will peak at some point in the near future, perhaps during this year, 2023. Once the trajectory of interest rates becomes clear, we believe that the decreased uncertainty around affordability and higher willingness to transact could have a positive impact on listing volumes and market sentiment. During 2023, there is a high amount of mortgages up for refinancing according to Finansinspektionen. Refinancing of mortgages may drive homeowners to reconsider their living situation in order to manage living expenses, which could also have a positive impact on listing and transaction volumes. In our internal data, we see that sale prices and asking prices are converging, while sale times are going down from the peak we saw during Q4.
This is evidence that there is greater alignment in the expectations among buyers and sellers and pave the way to a more fluid property market. Our buyer barometer survey, a survey we conduct on a monthly basis to measure price sentiment in the market, is showing the most positive price expectations since May 2022. 62% of respondents expect prices to remain unchanged or increase. This, too, we see as a sign that expectations are aligning and transaction volume may pick up. During 2022, I spoke about the gridlock effect being the greatest threat to the mobility of the Swedish market if buyers and sellers become locked into their property because transactions have frozen. It is therefore positive that expectations are moving closer between buyers and sellers, as this significantly reduces the risk for a gridlock effect.
Turning to page 17 for some closing thoughts on the market chapter. Despite the challenging property market, we remain confident in the long-term outlook of the Swedish property market and of our business. The factors that we'll have control over are progressing well, and we continue to invest in products and in our teams in order to be in the best possible position for when the market normalizes. This includes maintaining Hemnet's position as the number one property portal. It is important here to note that despite the drop in listing volumes, we have not seen a material effect on our market share of transactions. These are not happening off Hemnet, but instead happening at lower volumes. Focus on upselling product and pricing in our seller portfolio and continuing development and commercializing the agent search flow that was launched in 2022.
I will now hand over to Jens, who will provide us with a financial update on page 19 for the last time before handing over to Anders Örnulf.
Thank you, Cecilia. Let's turn to page 19 and the financial highlights for Q1. As Cecilia's talked about, 2023 has seen a historically slow start to the year for the property market. This of course affects Hemnet's financial performance, and especially so since we want to continue investing in our products. That said, I think that this quarter shows the resilience of Hemnet's business model as we have continued to grow despite these challenging market conditions. Starting off on the left-hand side on this page, we have net sales increasing 6% to SEK 190 million. As Cecilia mentioned earlier, this is mainly driven by a strong development for our property seller revenue, which increased by 12% even though listing volumes were down 19%. Our adjusted EBITDA came in at SEK 87.2 million, up 2% from last year.
The adjusted EBITDA margin came in at 45.9%, down 1.7 percentage points from last year. This is, of course, a combined effect of the current challenging market conditions and that we have continued to invest in our product development capacity. Moving to the right-hand side, we saw ARPU increasing 38% in the quarter. Cecilia talked about the drivers for this earlier on page five, which were a combination of product updates, conversion to our more expensive value-added services, and price adjustments. As expected, we continued to see a high cash conversion, which was 98% in the quarter. This was in line with the full year 2022 and follows that we have a favorable working capital dynamic as we grow our seller revenues.
Finally, leverage came in at 0.7 times rolling 12-month adjusted EBITDA, which is a slight increase compared to year-end 2022. This is in part due to our leasing contract for our new head office and partly due to the continued return of capital to shareholders via our share buyback program. I will come back to the topic of buybacks in a few slides. Let's move to our adjusted EBITDA bridge on page 20. We continued to grow our profit in Q1 from SEK 85.5 million in 2022 to SEK 87.2 million in 2023. We have covered the drivers for the SEK 10.5 million growth in revenue earlier in the presentation, let's instead look at the cost side.
The compensation to real estate agents continues to grow at a similar pace to our seller revenue and is up 8% from last year. As a proportion of seller revenue, this meant that the compensation was around 28% for the quarter. Other external expenses, excluding compensation to agents, is up SEK 1.6 million. This mainly following increased costs for our new head office and other costs related to an increased organization. Otherwise, we continue to focus on cost control in order to maintain a controlled growth journey and increase profitability over time. Personnel costs have increased by SEK 5.3 million or 14% as we have continued to invest in product development capacity, which Cecilia talked about earlier in today's presentation. Moving on to page 21 and a few additional words on the buyback program.
As we communicated yesterday, the SEK 450 million buyback program initiated after the 2022 AGM is now completed. During Q1, we bought back 602,000 shares, followed by another 220,000 shares in April. In total, we have bought back almost 3.1 million shares under the buyback program, equal to around 3.1% of total shares. With this, Hemnet has in total distributed approximately SEK 505 million to its shareholders in dividend and buybacks since the 2022 AGM. In doing so, we are following our dividend policy to distribute excess cash back to our shareholders. As mentioned previously, the buybacks have also played a big part in the increased leverage, which has gone from 0.3x at Q1 2022 to the current level of 0.7x.
Pending a decision by the 2023 AGM, Hemnet's intention is to launch a new program in order to continue buying back shares and thereby distributing excess cash to shareholders. Before handing back to Cecilia to wrap things up, the final slide in this section is our financial targets on page 22. Our growth rate measured as an LTM value is now at 18%. Our profitability measured as an LTM adjusted EBITA margin remains at 50%. In conjunction with our year-round report for 2022, we introduced a new long-term profitability target of exceeding 65%. Leverage was 0.7x as previously mentioned. As we have said before, the management team is looking to meet or exceed the set targets. That concludes my section here today.
Before handing it back to Cecilia to wrap up, just wanted to take time to mention that this is my last report as Hemnet's interim CFO. As Cecilia mentioned, next week, our new CFO, Anders, joins the company and will be here for the Q2 report onwards. I myself will after my parental leave instead go back to my usual role in the finance team and look forward to working closely with Anders in the future. With that, over to you, Cecilia.
Thank you, Jens. I will now turn to page 24 for a summary. This has been a challenging quarter for the Swedish property market with an unprecedented 20% decrease in property listings on Hemnet. Despite this, we saw a 12% growth in revenue from property sellers and a 6% net sales growth, a testament to the attractiveness of our product offering. We continue to invest in product development for the future for when the market normalizes to be in the best position we can to capture the opportunities that open up. Thank you for your attention, and we will now move to the Q&A.
If you wish to ask a question, please dial star five on your telephone keypad to enter the queue. If you wish to withdraw your question, please dial star five again on your telephone keypad. The next question comes from Daniel Ovin from Nordea. Please go ahead.
Yes, good morning, Cecilia, Jens, and Nick, thank you for taking my questions. You mentioned that an important contributor to growing ARPL is the value-added service renewals. Can you give some indication of the penetration of this in the quarter and perhaps also how it's come up versus last year? Also follow-on question to that, and that is this mainly purchased by Bas and Plus customers, given that Premium, I think, has a free renewal for the first seven days? Or is it also Premium customers buying that after those seven days? That's the first questions. Thank you.
Hi, Daniel, thank you for your question. We don't disclose the exact numbers, but I can maybe give some color on the renewal product. I think that the changes we've made is to meet the demands from property sellers and brokers as well to be able to restart and get on top of the listing in a quicker way. What I can say is that we've seen a very positive effect on that product change. What we have seen during the course, I would say over the year actually in the changing market is that the trend for this product has changed a bit. It was very clearly before a product that we sold both in January and in after summer.
Now we have seen a bit of a shift where we actually see customers picking up this product throughout the year. We're very happy with the change we made, and we're also very happy with the uptake. That's the only thing I can say. We don't really disclose the exact numbers.
Yeah. Adding to that, I think, what we can also say is that, just to clarify, these renewals are not included in our number of published listings that we disclose.
Okay, perfect. That's great. Thank you very much. Also one question on the relationship here between Plus and the Premium. I know previously that you said that Premium has been stronger, what you had expected perhaps on the expense of Plus listings. Given the price changes that you did here in the beginning of the year where it appears that you raised prices on Premium quite much more, have you seen that relationship change now back to going in the direction that you do wish for, so to speak? That's the second question.
What we have seen during the quarter is a continued high demand for Premium, I would say. I think that the structure and the changes we did to the product last year when we actually added the renewal into that product that has been well received. That is, I would say the key for that product. That has continued doing because throughout this quarter as well. If you look at the overall growth, the main drivers from a product perspective is Premium and renewal.
Yeah. Okay. Perfect. Thank you. A last question here, and that is on personal expenses. You're now taking in seven, eight new employees like you have guided for before. I just wonder on that number then the kind of SEK 43 million in personal expenses, is that a good base to work on going forward with smaller or slightly increases this year? Was it that many of these new employees came in perhaps end of the quarter or something like that? The question is really is the SEK 43 million a good base, or is there any kind of unusual one-offs there or anything? That's my last question. Thank you.
What we can say about the personnel cost is that most of the joiners for Q1 were signed already in Q4. I would say that many of them joined early in the quarter. Of course we have continued to have an inflow during the quarter as well. Basically what we can say is also that what Cecilia mentioned in the presentation that we are expecting to keep a slow recruitment pace going forward in 2023 given the market conditions. I think that's what we can say here now.
Yeah. Okay. Perfect. That's very helpful. Thank you very much for answering my questions.
Thank you.
The next question comes from Andrew Ross from Barclays. Please go ahead.
Great. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for taking my question. My first one is a short-term one around the new listing development. Obviously, it wasn't good in March. It looks like it's been quite volatile in April, and I guess you've had Easter moving around, you know, some weather, etc. What do you think is actually happening in the market right now? Do you think it is getting any better? What, what are you actually observing in terms of underlying new listing trends when you think about Q2? And then as an extension to that, you've given a medium-term growth guidance of 15%-20%. Are you expecting to get into that range in 2023? And if not, could you give us some kind of more precise thinking for your revenue growth for this year, please, given the trajectory in listing volumes?
Hi, Andrew. On, on your first question, I mean, what we can say currently is that we're still in a hesitant market. We continue seeing a hesitant market in the beginning of April. When we're looking forward, I mean, there are a few factors here in the market because we get this question a lot, and it's of course super hard for us to predict the listing volumes going forward. A few factors that I think are important to bring with you is first is the historical data that we have. As you know, the historical data shows that the volume, the listing volume as well as transaction volumes have been very stable over time. You've seen fluctuation of quarter by quarter, but over time it's been very stable.
We still believe that's the case. We believe that the listing volumes will over time stabilize. The second part here is the drivers behind the lower listing volumes. Our belief is that there is, like I said in the presentation, that the uncertainty is a key thing here. I mean, there are transactions being done, so it's not a dead market at all. It is a market, and there are transactions being done, but there are some consumers that are hesitant because it's so hard to the uncertainty, the trend to how the inflation will evolve and the interest rates and so forth. I think once this is once we have a Better picture, more clear picture on the trend going forward.
I think that will put some more certainty, the consumers will be more certain and be more kind of sales, I think that the volumes will kind of normalize. If you look during the quarter, and I have to give some data on what we are seeing as well during the quarter. Last year, we spoke a lot about, and I spoke a lot about, the delta in between the sellers' and buyers' expectations. What happened last year was that we were going from a super hot seller market, suddenly we in just a couple of months actually went from seller market to buyers' market. It's taken some time for sellers and buyers to align on new price levels.
What we've seen during the quarter is that seems to be happening more and more transactions that sellers and buyers are more aligned on price. That is a good signal, I would say. We also from our Buyer Barometer saw that more and more buyers believe that prices will improve over time. There are some, you know, I would say highlights or positive signals. I think it's too early to say what that means from a volume perspective. On your second question on our targets, because we don't have any guidance. What we communicate are targets, not guidance. We still believe in our targets. We haven't changed those targets. Obviously, given among this quarter, it will be a bit more challenging this year.
From our point of view, currently, we don't see any reasons to change the targets.
So just to be clear, do you still think that the target of 15%-20% is doable for 2023? Are you saying that that's a sensible target in the medium term, but you may be below it this year? Just to be clear.
No, I think that we haven't changed the communication we did from beginning of the year when we reiterated our financial targets and we also communicated a new long term, I would say, margin target. The targets remain. It's driven by our belief that, if you will look at the behavioral trends, historical behavioral trends in the market, we can see that volumes will over time normalize.
Okay. You're expecting then some volume recovery in the second half to get to 15%-20% for this year, logically? Is there something else I'm missing just to understand why you're confident in that?
No, I think I mean, we're only in April.
Yeah.
Last quarter, we reiterated our targets. I think that for right now, the targets remain as communicated. We haven't changed anything. We again, looking at the different factors we're seeing. If you look back at the historical data and how the property market behaves normally, we expect over time that the listing volumes will stabilize. We don't have a crystal ball. We don't know exactly when. Our focus, just to come back to our focus, is what we can control.
I think that during Q1, we have succeeded in mitigating a bit of the decrease by actually with the product investments and the product improvements we've done with the pricing work, that we can also mitigate some of the decrease in volumes with things that is within our control. Looking ahead and this year, I think that I am quite excited for some of the things that we're doing right now and what we are is also building a better and more improved product offering. We will, I mean, we adapt it to for this market, but we will also build ready when the market turns.
Perfect. Thank you.
The next question comes from Pete-Veikko Kujala from Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.
Hey, it's Pete from Morgan Stanley. A couple from me. I'll jump back to the queue. Firstly, on intangible asset CapEx, it's now at SEK 9 million in Q1. Can you give any information on your kind of CapEx plans for the year? Is this the level that we should expect to continue, or should it ramp up from here or not? There's a clear trend, an upwards trend. What are your plans for intangible CapEx? Thanks.
Yeah. What we can say is that, as we have invested in product development capacity, it's a natural development that our capitalized development also increases. And as for Q1, we have also initiated a project for modernizing Annonsera tech platform. That is part of the increase year-over-year. And that project is, of course, going to continue throughout the year. But that said, I think, in Q1, we had some projects running from Q4 or from last year as well. I think the Q1 is probably a bit higher than what we'll see in the coming quarters.
Okay. understood. Thanks. Then just like on the tangible CapEx, I guess that's just relating to the new office or is there something else there?
Yes. That is correct.
Cool. All right. The second question on the buy now, pay later, Which I think you referred to as pay after sale in the presentation. Does that mean that you're kind of thinking about that the user could, in theory, remove the listing from the site without it triggering a payment? Or how should we think about this? Also, just making sure that you're not taking credit risk on this, or, like, the credit risk is carried by Klarna, or how does the model work?
Yeah. The test itself is pay when removed, and it's a contained test that we currently run, and we will continue doing so during the spring. The reason why we're doing the test or looking into this is also that we want to make sure that we don't remove all potential hurdles when publishing your listing on Hemnet. What we are testing is a pay when removed, meaning that you will pay. Sold or not, you will pay, but you will pay when you remove it. Most probably, I mean, most listing will be sold, but if not, if you haven't sold it, you will still pay. This is a test again, so it's a bit too early to say what we will do with it.
We'll learn along the way, so to say. It's right, you're absolutely right. We don't take any credit risk. We use Klarna as a provider in this test.
All right, very clear. I'll jump back to the queue. Thanks.
Thanks.
The next question comes from Catherine O'Neill from Citi. Please go ahead.
Hi. Thanks for taking my questions. I just had a couple coming back to actually your thoughts on revenue growth trends this year and your target. I know sort of listing, I guess, is hard to predict, and presumably you're expecting some recovery in the second half. How are you thinking about ARPL growth? Do you see that one key trend as sustainable? Is that what gives you some confidence on the revenue target? Could you also maybe give us a bit more color on the revenue, other revenue lines, so, agents, developers, advertising, and how you see those perhaps developing across the course of the year?
we will not... I mean, it's... We, we don't give guidance, but I think that's important to say. We talk about targets, so we don't want to talk about how we view this exact year. But if I can put some color on how we view both the ARPL development as well as other revenues. If you look at the ARPL development, and again, I think we quite encourage also assuming that in the shifting market, I mean, the relevance of this product has grown, I would say. And also the changes and adjustments that we've made to products have also been very well received. We continue working with product development, improving the products we have. We're adding new products
We're looking into the payments, so how you choose your products, making that as good as possible. We're continuing working with pricing, and we will continue doing so. We're focusing a lot on the things we can control. We haven't changed our view in the potential we have in growing ARPL over time. If you look at other advertisers, obviously it is hard. I mean, from a market environment currently, if you look at investments, again, I think hesitant is a good word, when it comes also to the business-to-business revenue. We do see if we look into dig deeper into the different customer groups is that we continue seeing a consistent, I would say, demand from real estate agents.
That's encouraging as well, given that we put some investment and effort into building a new, I would almost say, ecosystem with finding an agent in place last year. We started to commercialize, and we've continued during the year also to add products into that area. We also see great momentum with banks as advertisers that they're also increasing their marketing spend. Whereas on the other hand, we continue seeing, and we've seen that for some quarters now, property developers holding back on their marketing investments. We saw that Q4, and we continue seeing that during Q1, that other advertisers are also a bit hesitant in their marketing investments.
I think that coming back to, I mean, we don't have a crystal ball. I think that, one key thing here is that, if the consumers and households, will have a clearer view on the trends going forward. Once they have that, I think that, the market will normalize. When that happens, we don't know.
Okay, thanks. Just one other quick question. I'm not sure if I didn't catch it earlier, but you've nearly completed your current buyback. Are you planning to put another buyback in place, and what kind of level or amount are you thinking, if so?
What we can say is that as we communicated yesterday, the previous SEK 450 million buyback program was completed on Monday. It is up to the upcoming AGM here later this week to decide if we get the mandate for another buyback program. If so, the board will have to take a decision on that.
Okay, thanks.
The next question comes from Eirik Rafdal from Carnegie. Please go ahead.
Yes. Hi, team. Thank you for taking my questions. Just a couple last ones here. On the recommendations from agents, it seems to be kind of among the lower hanging fruits to continue to drive all the added services penetration. If I understood it correctly, you sent out kind of an educational package to the agent community earlier this year to kind of boost recommendations. Can you say anything about the percentage of recommendations in Q1 versus Q4 last year and also after you sent out that educational package? That would be my first question. Thank you.
Hi, and thank you. No, we don't disclose the result of tactical efforts doing it that we do in the company. I could say that when it comes to recommendation, as you say, we also see that the potential and potential for low-hanging fruit in improving the recommendation levels. We're doing several things in order to increase the recommendation level. The communication, and we are doing that on an ongoing basis. In the product during Q1, we also added feature within the flow, the publication, the payment flow, where we can prompt the seller to reconsider if a seller hasn't bought the product that the broker recommended, we prompt and ask if they want to reconsider.
That's one example. We also added another feature where actually we can put in Hemnet recommendation if the broker isn't recommending. We're doing a lot of smaller things I would say, but that altogether will have a positive impact on the recommendation level.
Okay, perfect. Thank you. Just one final one for me, I think it's one for Jens Melin. I think it said in the deck, and you mentioned it as well, Cecilia, that the listing durations are going down. Could you just remind us how this impacts revenue recognition now in the quarter, kinda comparable to when it was rising? Is this a headwind and/or a tailwind this quarter?
Yes. What we can say about this duration is that we had an increase in duration during the second half of 2022, peaking in during Q4. After that, we have seen decreasing duration times. What we can say in general about the listing duration and the effect on revenue is that an increase in listing duration, of course, means that more revenue gets pushed into the following period. This then could amplify the seasonal pattern of Hemnet weakening Q1 and Q3, while improving Q2 and Q4. All other things similar.
Okay, perfect. Thank you.
The next question comes from Giles Thorne from Jefferies. Please go ahead.
Thank you. It was a single question, please. I wanted to come back to the Hemnet Buyers' Barometer. If I recall correctly, the March data points saw a big increase in the number of buyers expecting price increases over the next six months and a big reduction in the number of buyers expecting a price reduction. It was mentioned earlier in an earlier response to a question around the barometer as a lead indicator on potential listing developments. My question is, how good a lead indicator has it historically been on how developments, how listings have developed over any upcoming period? Thanks.
I'll say I think that the Buyer Barometer has been historically quite a good barometer on the listing development overall. Of course, we don't know, but it has historically. I think that I would add the Buyer Barometer together also with I would add, yeah, and also to clarify that the Buyer Barometer is on price, so the price expectations. So we don't know. If we follow historically, the Buyer Barometer and the price have been very much aligned. That doesn't mean that the volumes will increase. I think it's a signal together also with the data we have during Q1, where we see that buyers and sellers actually are doing transactions, and that they are aligned more on price. But that is...
I mean, I would say it's some sort of signal at least. I think it's too early to say, anything more, but we are seeing a bit of a shift now, in the beginning of this year, compared to last year, both when it comes to the listing duration, buyers and sellers actually transacting and the Buyer Barometer. All those three data points, I would say, is going in the right direction.
Cecilia, are you happy to put a number of months or a time period between an inflection in the Buyer Barometer and then the impact on listings? Or are you not comfortable with that?
No, I won't.
Okay, fair enough. I tried. Thank you very much.
Yeah.
The next question comes from Pete-Veikko Kujala from Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.
Two questions. On the developer revenue side, it looks to me like developer advertising is probably the main drag, but can you give any comments on that revenue line and maybe also on the impact of the new products would also be helpful. The second question is, I think in the presentation you showed that one in three agents recommend value-added services. Why do you think it's only one in three, or did I misunderstand? Because I think agents are financially incentivized to benefit from upgrades, so why wouldn't basically everyone try to upsell the value-added services? Thanks.
On the first question, I'm not sure I got the full question, but you asked about the effect of the adjustment with the towards the property developers and the uptake, I believe, right, on their investments. I would say that the property developer as a customer segment is the most challenging customer segment, and we've seen that for some quarters now. That affects both their overall, like, I would say, market investments in display, but also their listing investments. We have, as you know, invested in improving our product portfolio, and I think that has been very well received. We've been targeting small and midsize property developers during this quarter to make sure that they have the relevant product offering.
I think it's given the market environment today, we cannot really draw any conclusions on that. I think we have more of a long-term view in this customer segment. We know that at a certain point, they will also to come back and start investing, and then we are ready with our improved product offering. On your second question on recommendations, yes, it's correct that one out of three agents do a recommendation. I think this is a journey, I would say, with the agents. We've done a lot of different things throughout the years, in order to improve our product offering, but also the partnership we have with agents. I think there is...
if you look at the dynamic how it works, we do incentivize the office, but not necessarily the individual agents. It's the office that actually work in driving and kind of owning the work process in the office and for the individual agents. I think that might be one aspect. We've also done a lot of improvements last year in how to recommend and make sure that they know like we talked about earlier on this call also with communication and reminding about the value with these packages. We're doing a lot of different things in order for the brokers to increase their recommendation levels. I think there is a lot of potential in this area as we said.
Just to clarify, when we give this data, this does not mean that two out of three do not recommend. It means that one out of three make a recommendation.
Yeah.
A lot of the communication efforts are around actually getting the brokers to make a recommendation in the first place.
Yeah.
Hey, can you just repeat the last thing that you just said? I understand everything that Cecilia was saying, but what was the clarification that you just made?
The clarification was that when we say one in three make a recommendation, this does not mean that the two in three that don't make a recommendation, they don't recommend a value-added service. It means that they do not make a recommendation at all. They don't enter the flow to make a recommendation. One in three agents actively make a recommendation to their seller, and our job is to of course increase that number so that more recommendations are made. Hopefully, these recommendations will also be for Plus and Premium.
All right. Yeah. Thanks for that. That's all from me. Thank you.
The next question comes from Andrew Ross from Barclays. Please go ahead.
Hi, guys. Sorry, just one more small modeling one.
I think this will be the last one. Sorry, yeah. Go on, Andrew.
I'll be quick. Just on the other external expenses, which I think was SEK 25.6 in Q1, kind of up 6% or so year-on-year. Is that kind of year-on-year increase a good way to think about that line through the rest of the year? Because the absolute spend has come down relative to the second half run rate last year. I know there were some one-off consulting fees and stuff going on in that. When we think about your cost base through the rest of the year, what do we need to know about that line? Thanks.
What we can say basically is that we are keeping a cost-conscious approach to our other external expenses. What we can say also for Q1 is that of course, the capitalization of development of consultants also affects this line, lowering it for Q1. I think going forward, we are not seeing any big increases coming in.
Okay.
Okay. With that.
absolute number. Yeah. Okay. Thanks.
Sorry, Andrew. I also want to apologize for the technical hiccup in this presentation and for running a bit over time. Thank you all for listening in, and see you next time.