Scout24 SE

XETRA:G24

Earnings Call Transcript 2020-Q2

[Operator]

Good day, and welcome to the Scout24 Half Year 2020 Financial Conference Call. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Ms. Ursula Querette. Please go ahead, ma'am.

[Ursula Querette, Head of Investor Relations]

Thank you, Chelsea. Welcome, everyone, to Scout24's Half Year 2020 Earnings Call. I am Ursula Querette, Head of Investor Relations at Scout24. I have Tobias Hartmann, our CEO; and Dirk Schmelzer, our CFO, with me on this call. Our analyst presentation is available for you on our website, and you can follow it live if you have used the web link. Tobias will start the presentation with a summary of the '20 H1 event. Dirk will then cover our H1 financial performance in detail. We are then available for your questions.

[Tobias Hartmann, CEO & Chairman of Management Board]

Thank you, Ursula, and welcome, everyone. We are looking back on an exceptional half year in exceptional times. If you follow me on Slide 3, we summarized the key developments in H1.In a nutshell, we are weathering the COVID-19 headwinds and challenges well. Our business has proven to be resilient, and the growth drivers remain intact. We managed to grow our H1 revenue by 1% year-on-year and increased our H1 EBITDA by 3.6%, with a margin improved by 1.6 percentage points versus H1 2019. Against this background of resilience, we pursue our strategic agenda focused on value-accretive and sustainable growth. As outlined in our Q1 call, we implemented a COVID-19 immediate action program. The 3 key initiatives to support our partners, i.e., the agents, homeowners and consumers in these challenging times, are fully aligned with our strategic objectives. One of the 3 key initiatives was Listings Plus, pre-listings for all private customers for a certain duration. This initiative is in principle still in place and has been very successful. It definitely helped to improve the vibrancy of the marketplace, and with that, consumer experience. In this context, the traffic on ImmoScout24 showed remarkable growth. I will come back to this later. Growth along the sales journey is a key pillar of our growth strategy. Our homeowner platform has been expanding, and we are successfully improving our lead engine product. Effective 1st July, we acquired Immoverkauf24, which further enhances our position and service offering as a leading platform for homeowners. At the same time, we are increasing our relevance to agents via increased lead generation. Innovation remains at the heart of our strategy. In H1, we have continued to improve our existing product suite, thereby enhancing the user experience. And we have invested in new products, one example being a new membership model for landlords. The digitalization of the real estate transaction process is accelerating, and we are driving this. We are front runner when it comes to digital products. Based on our H1 performance, the resilience of our business and stabilization in the overall business environment, we are in a position to resume guidance for the full year 2020. We are expecting full year group revenue at around 2019 level and target a group EBITDA margin of around 60%. This outlook is based on certain assumptions, which Dirk will discuss in more detail later. I will now walk you through our key performance metrics on Slide 4. As already mentioned, our H1 revenues grew by 1%, reaching EUR 173 million. Our group ordinary operating EBITDA margin increased by 1.6 percentage points to 61%. This is due to the continued successful implementation of cost-efficiency measures and certain COVID-19 cost savings. From accumulated half year perspective, we managed to grow both our number of real estate partners and our ARPU. Residential Real Estate ARPU grew by 4.1% versus H1 2019. Business Real Estate ARPU increased by 1.8%. Our total listings are down approximately 5% versus H1 2019, and there are a couple of reasons for this: a decline in the number of sales transactions, while the transaction value increases. By the way, this is an effect we are seeing for several years now; a decreasing relocation activity leading to a lower turnover of houses and apartments; a reduced standing time of listings, especially in the top 7 cities with the highest volume; and not to forget, new players entering the market and a still significant gray market. Having said that, private rental listings were up 4% in H1 on our platform, reflecting our growth strategy in this segment and as mentioned before, also as a result of our Listings Plus initiative. 14.8 million unique visitors per month on average in H1, growing at 12%, underscores our distinct leadership position and a highly relevant supply of listings on our marketplace even during COVID-19 times. Sessions grew by 15% year-on-year to approximately 111 million visits or sessions per month. In summary, we have delivered a resilient performance in a challenging environment and are taking the positive momentum into the second half of the year. Now let's move to Page 5. The framework summarizes our 3 key target groups, again: agents, homeowners and consumers and our key initiatives for each group. H1 initiatives have been focused on supporting our partners to navigate the COVID-19 pandemic. In this context, we had set up 3 key initiatives: Liquidity Plus; Leads Plus; and Listings Plus, which we had outlined in detail in our Q1 call. In summary, these initiatives have proven to be successful in providing tangible support to our partners and contributing to the resilience in the German real estate transaction ecosystem. For agents, we created a comprehensive support program. Firstly, the initiatives Liquidity Plus, an extension of payment for the April and May invoices until December 2020. Initiative was appreciated by our partners as helpful support in difficult times. Nevertheless, it is a good sign of our industry's health that only approximately 1,300 of our partners made, in fact, use of it. We also created the initiative Leads Plus, providing homeowner mandate acquisition leads to agents for free. The second quarter, we focused on customer retention rather than on price and revenue growth. We hence decided not to increase prices and to offer selected discounts to agents while asking them for certain commitments such as to list all their objects first on our platform. This led to a Q2 ARPU at around the same level as in Q2 2019. This has helped, along with our immediate action program, that professional listings are now back to pre-COVID-19 levels.With respect to consumers, i.e. home seekers, we have observed a strong increase in consumer traffic with double-digit growth percentages. This was, amongst others, due to the improved vibrancy of our marketplace following the COVID-19 Listings Plus initiative with rental listings in H1 up by 4% compared to the previous year. Even, and especially during these times, we focus on further expanding our digital product suite such as virtual 360-degree tours and digital contracts. The results speak for themselves. Following Listings Plus, we have also observed increased usage of our premium memberships, MieterPlus and KäuferPlus, which encompass various innovative digital products for consumers who are searching for a property. Homeowners had benefited from our Listings Plus initiative. After the free-to-list initiative that we introduced in January for rental listings below EUR 400 rent value per month, we extended this initiative in light of COVID-19 in March to all sales and rent listings. As a result, private listings were up by a noticeable 30% in April compared to March. Overall, private listings are down 6% year-over-year in H1 as a result of the longer-term reasons mentioned before and a short-term decrease in real estate sales transactions due to COVID-19. In the first half of the year, we have expanded our leads business as we connected more than 11,000 homeowners with agents, representing a 12% growth compared to the previous year. With the acquisition of Immoverkauf24 effective July 1, we grow further along the home-selling journey and strengthened our position as the leading platform for homeowners. And to underscore this leading position, we have launched our all-new subscription model for landlords in April, to which over 4,000 members have already subscribed. As such, we demonstrated that we are able to transfer our revenue model from agents and consumers also to homeowners, which is part of our overall growth strategy. On the following pages, I will guide you through the main developments of our 3 key partner categories: agents, consumers and homeowners. First, let us take a look at agents. We see 4 relevant trends in the German real estate market. Above all, COVID-19 is further accelerating the already ongoing digitalization of the real estate ecosystem. Secondly, we continue to observe increasing prices in Residential Real Estate in Germany, and we see no signs of change in the near future. This points to the undersupply of houses and apartments in the market and an increased need for us to support agents with the acquisition of new mandates. The commercial real estate market was stable overall in H1 2020, with most German hubs still showing rent growth of greater 2% in the first half of the year. However, closer look reveals that after strong growth in the first quarter, the commercial property rental price index shows a stagnating or even slightly decreasing trend in the second quarter. We expect this trend to continue into the next year.Lastly, the Bestellerprinzip regulation has been enacted in the beginning of June. It will now become fully effective in 2021. This topic has been looming for a while, so you're probably familiar with it. What do these developments mean for our agent business? Our COVID-19 support measures have further strengthened the partnership between Scout24 and agents. Compared to the same time in the previous year, we gained approximately 800 or 4% new real estate partners on our platform. Our new membership models are in place since the end of last year, namely: basic edition, image edition and acquisition edition, in the order of increasing features. Our goal is to at all agents who are currently with other legacy membership into the new membership model by mid-next year. As of June, approximately 20% of all agents had been moved to one of our new membership models. While this is good progress, COVID-19 is impacting the migration process as well. Rather than maximizing monetization, our focus in H1 2020 was more on customer retention. This was an important decision to make, and we are convinced it was the right one. Hence, we did not increase our prices, which, for the most part, are fixed on an annual basis. As a result, ARPU did not change in Q2 compared to the previous year, and that will likely remain the case for the next 3 quarters as well. Secondly, in the current environment, we are not pushing agents to move to higher-value memberships. Under normal circumstances, we would probably have observed an even higher growth in the 2 more premium membership tiers. Now moving to consumers on the next page. As you know, private listings from homeowners who want to sell their property or rent it out were largely paid last year at an average ARPU of EUR 80 per month. Pre-trials have been given out only in very limited numbers. At the beginning of 2020, we implemented a free trial offer for specific customer groups to test product market fit. We offered this to new customers and those with rental listings below EUR 400 rent value per month. The COVID-19 context, we reacted with our immediate action program Listings Plus at the end of March and expanded the free trial offer to all private sale and rent listing customers in order to maintain listing vibrancy. There were certain limits to the free trials, such as the maximum number of inquiries per listing and a maximum 4-week duration. While Listings Plus was created as a reaction to COVID-19, it is nevertheless fully in line with our growth strategy, and as such, proved to be successful with private listings up by 30% in April compared to March. We continued to keep Listings Plus in place. Since May, it included a reduced duration of maximum 2 weeks instead of 4. There are a couple of interesting observations we have made following the introduction of Listings Plus. Consumer traffic has significantly increased year-over-year by 2-digit percentages despite total listings being down 5%, showcasing the increased relevance of ImmoScout24 for the private consumer market.Secondly, we observed an increased usage of premium membership, MieterPlus and KäuferPlus. It appears that our free listings initiative has drawn more private consumers to our platform, which we could then convince of our innovative, additional product, and hence, to make use of our premium memberships even during COVID-19. Revenue of these 2 memberships increased by approximately EUR 500,000 from April to June, and therefore, partly compensated for the forgone revenue due to free listings, a testament of the resilience of Scout24. As the Listings Plus initiative was fenced, that is limited to a number of inquiries and with a limited duration, we still ended up with EUR 7.1 million in private listings revenue in the second quarter compared to EUR 9.5 million in the first quarter. On Slide 8, we let me give you an update on the main developments with respect to homeowners. You might remember the homeowner journey we are showing on the top half of the page. We also used this at our Capital Markets Day in November 2019. We attract homeowners to our platform with a price atlas offering valuation indication and comparisons, and we retain them and maintain engagement via their registration on our home seller hub. When the home seller gives marketing consent and agrees to be contacted by an agent, the Realtor Lead Engine comes into play. We provide homeowner leads to relevant agents for a certain price per lead. That way, we connected over 11,000 home sellers with agents in H1 2020, which is a 12% increase compared to the first half of 2019. Our lead engine generated revenues of EUR 6 million in the first half, a growth of more than 40% year-over-year. This is despite our 3 lead immediate action initiative, Lead Plus, which resulted in approximately 900 leases being offered to agents for free in June. The acquisition of Immoverkauf24 further enhances our leading position in homeowner-related traffic and leads. So in summary, we are executing our strategic agenda for our 3 key target groups: agents, consumers and homeowners. While COVID-19 has resulted in many full challenges for our partners and our own operations, we have proven to be resilient and our growth drivers are intact. With that, I'd like to hand it over to Dirk to guide you through our H1 financial performance.

[Dirk Schmelzer, CFO & Member of Executive Board]

Thank you, Tobi, and welcome, everybody. On Slide 9, we summarized our half year 1 and Q2 financial performance. With EUR 173 million in group revenues, we achieved a growth of 1%. This comes mostly from a stronger quarter 1, whereas the second quarter was more affected by COVID-19 and our support programs for agents and consumers. It hence came out lower at EUR 83.9 million, which translates into a 3.5% decrease versus the previous year. The beginning of the year marked a strong momentum where the first successes of our membership migration became visible. The economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic materialized towards the end of Q1 and then especially during the first month of Q2. The physical distancing measures and policies in Germany were the strictest during these months and hence, also affected the real estate market. Then also our programs to support our agents and consumers who enjoyed free listings implied lower revenues during this time. On top of that came the declining media revenues reflecting the overall advertising market developments. However, thanks to various short-term cost measures, the ordinary operating group margin still came out at 60% in the second quarter of 2020 after 61.7% in Q2 2019. The half year group margin was at 61%, 1.6 percentage points above the previous year. As you can see on Slide 10, the ImmoScout24 margin improvement is the result of increasing margins in all 3 segments. The Residential Real Estate segment proved to be resilient, with only 1.6% revenue contraction in quarter 2 versus 2019. This is due to secured revenues for mainly 1-year term contracts with agents and the already mentioned customer retention measures. Revenue with professional customers actually increased by 1.9%, while revenue with consumers fell by 9% in the second quarter due to the mentioned free listings campaign. Overall, the Residential Real Estate segment revenue improved by 2.7% in the first half of the year from EUR 120 million to EUR 123.2 million. Despite additions to bad debt allowances in connection with COVID-19, the half year 1 ordinary operating EBITDA margin increased to 64.5% versus 62.8% in the first half year of 2019. The Business Real Estate segment revenue decreased by 3.4% in Q2. For the whole of half year 1, revenues still increased by 1.4% to EUR 34.6 million. The segment benefited from a large share of contracted agent revenues, while revenue with project developers remained relatively stable in the half year. Due to scaling effects, the ordinary operating EBITDA margin improved to 72.1% in the first half year, an increase of 3.9 percentage points. The Media & Other segment, which contributed only 9% to the total group revenue, was mainly impacted by an overall decreasing ad sales market, which was accelerated by COVID-19. The subsidiary FlowFact also recorded lower revenue in half year 1 due to the ongoing migration of products into new cloud solutions. Immoscout24 Austria was able to generate growth, both in the first and the second quarter. The total segment revenue decreased by 17.6% in Q2 and by 12.2% to EUR 15.1 million in the first half of the year. The segment's profitability, nevertheless, improved slightly to a 40.4% half year 1 EBITDA margin. Now let us take a closer look at the customer and ARPU developments on Page 11. The number of residential real estate partners showed continued growth, with 5% in half year 1 to now more than 17,000 partners. At the same time, we achieved further improvement of the ARPU to EUR 709 per month, a 4.1% increase. This increase is mainly due to upselling via our latest membership additions and value-added services in early Q1. In quarter 2, ARPU remained stable year-on-year. Note that our focus in Q2 was on customer retention and support. The number of business real estate partners was around the level of the previous year at 2,795. The ARPU of Business Real Estate Partners also decreased slightly by 1.8% to EUR 1,747 in Q2, but is up 1.8% for the whole of half year 1. Now turning to Slide 12. With stable revenue development in half year 1, the increase in EBITDA margin was primarily driven by flexibility in structural, marketing and sales-related costs.Let us go through the main ordinary operating cost items. Own work capitalized has increased due to an increase of investments into product development following our focus on innovation. Personnel costs decreased by 4.1%, which is mainly due to the efficiency improvements. The slight increase in Q2 is due to a phasing of bonus accruals. Marketing activities have temporarily reduced in the second quarter due to COVID-19, thereby reducing related expenses. Sales costs have decreased mainly due to lower demand of membership products in the consumer segment, in this case, and mainly the credit check cost. IT costs have gone up due to the ongoing migration of our data center solutions to cloud and platform-based solutions, which is well on track. Lower personnel and marketing costs more than compensated for the increase in IT expenses. Other operating costs include bad debt provisions relating to Liquidity Plus. So ordinary operating EBITDA from continuing operations amounted to EUR 105.4 million in the first half of 2020. This represents a margin of 61%, and hence, an increase of 1.6 percentage points year-on-year. On Slide 13, you see the items below the ordinary operating EBITDA. Nonoperating costs decreased by 68%, reflecting the decrease in share-based compensation versus the previous year, and in addition, lower M&A-related costs in the first half of 2020. As a result, the reported EBITDA from continuing operations increased by 31% versus half year 1 2019.With regards to the key items below reported EBITDA. Depreciation and amortization decreased by 9.6% in half year 1 due to lower IT equipment depreciation and purchase price allocation amortization. The financial results fell slightly from minus EUR 10 million to minus EUR 10.2 million, although it had improved in the second quarter of 2020 from minus EUR 5.7 million to minus EUR 3.8 million, primarily reflecting lower financing expenses as a result of the repayment of debt. In the first quarter, finance expenses were affected by deferred transaction costs in connection with the early repayment of debt. Tax expenses almost doubled due to higher earnings in the first half of this year. They amounted to EUR 17.1 million, resulting in a tax rate of 27.9%. Net income in the first half year 2020 amounted to EUR 44.2 million, an increase of 62%. Q2 net income increased by 80%. Half year 1 earnings per share stood at EUR 0.42, 68% increase year-on-year. Now let us turn to debt and net cash on Slide 14. As mentioned during our quarter 1 call, we repaid the term loan and drawn recurring credit facility in April and thereby reduced our debt balance by EUR 320 million to EUR 225 million in June. While our total cash balance amounts to EUR 2.1 billion at the end of June 2020, we have a net cash balance of EUR 1.8 billion. This includes cash invested in money market and special security funds. Such investments are based on our guidelines to reflect liquidity needs and control risk exposure. The cash in the money market funds is chiefly earmarked for the second tranche of the share buyback program. Due to the short-term nature and liquidity of the investment, the full amount of the investment was reported under cash and cash equivalents on our balance sheet. The special fund mainly invests in fixed yield bonds, while following Scout's investment strategy. An external auditor was mandated to review the implementation of this investment strategy and the setup of a special fund vehicle, a capital management company. Moving to Slide 15. And as Tobi has already indicated in his opening remarks, we feel confident to resume guidance and give an outlook for full year 2020. This guidance incorporates our view on the impact of COVID-19 for the year and is based on certain underlying assumptions. We expect total group revenue for the full year to be around the same level as in 2019, which reflects the resilience of our business model. With respect to our segments, we expect Residential Real Estate revenue to be stable or slightly up. Business Real Estate revenue is expected to be stable or slightly decreasing. And lastly, we expect revenue of our segment, Media & Other, to decrease in the low teens percentage area, mostly driven by decreasing advertising revenues. Now coming to margins. We target an ordinary operating EBITDA margin of around 62% for ImmoScout24 and around 60% for the group. Our guidance for 2020 is based on the following key assumptions: no further lockdowns or similar restrictions due to COVID-19 in the second half of 2020; secondly, we assume there are no significant payment defaults under the Liquidity Plus immediate action program that is not exceeding the provisions we made. As a reminder, with this initiative, we offered agents to pay their April and May invoices by December this year; and lastly, we expect that the Bestsellerprinzip will have no meaningful impact on our business in the second half of the year. And with this, I hand it back to the operator to open the queue for questions. Thank you very much.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] And we will take our first question from Miriam Adisa with Morgan Stanley.

[Miriam Anuoluwapo Adisa, Equity Analyst]

Three for me, if I may. Firstly, just on the guidance for residential revenue. Just wondering what assumption for agent growth is embedded in your guidance there. Is there any reason to think that the momentum that you've seen in the first half should flow in terms of additions of agents?And then secondly, on ARPU, again, for residential, I mean, it sounds like it's a deliberate decision not to push migration. But given the property market looks pretty strong at the moment, what are you looking for before you start to push migration again? And do you think that we could see ARPU growth by Q4?And then finally, if you could just share your thoughts on Kleinanzeigen. Adevinta called them out as one of the businesses where they see a significant monetization opportunity. So what do you think they could do with that business? And how do you think you may have a competitive edge?

[Dirk Schmelzer, CFO & Member of Executive Board]

Thanks, Miriam. This is Dirk. On your first question regarding agent growth, we believe that we can grow agents somewhere in the area that we have seen in the first half year, maybe slightly less, as we are putting more and more emphasis on listings in Germany, as you can see from the strategy we are following.On the second piece where you were elaborating on ARPU, I mean, it is an absolutely fair point. We're seeing Germany coming out of this pandemic at the moment and especially the real estate market, quite healthy. But while we might have seen the lower end of the pandemic, we have not seen the economic consequences of the pandemic, and that is mainly affecting half year 2. So we are pretty cautious on our projections with regards to ARPU growth, significant ARPU growth in Q3 and Q4. But I can assure you, once we see opportunities there to deliver additional value to our real estate agents, we will take that and take that forward. But at the moment, we would stay rather cautious on increasing ARPU with our agents. And I hand over for the last question to Tobi.

[Tobias Hartmann, CEO & Chairman of Management Board]

Miriam, thank you. Regarding your question on Kleinanzeigen, I think we all agree that there is a lot of speculation in getting at this point. It's probably fair to assume that the real estate part of Kleinanzeigen is also an important part under the new ownership structure. And so for us, it's not so much to speculate about Adevinta's or eBay's future strategy. But I think what we can state and what we've demonstrated here is that we've learned over the past 3 to 6 months how listings and traffic can increase in a meaningful way if pricing is lowered or modified, and we'd like to build on that momentum. Thank you.

[Operator]

We'll take our next question from Craig Abbott with Kepler Cheuvreux.

[Craig Abbott, Head of Mid and Small Cap Research, Germany]

Yes. I would like, first of all, to start off with a strategic base question. Just wondering if you could give us an update on whether or not there's been any changes in your strategic thinking for Scout24 going forward or should we expect you to continue as more very small bolt-on acquisitions like the Immoverkauf24? Speaking of which, could you maybe provide us a couple of financial metrics for Immoverkauf24? And my second question was really just on -- maybe I will look it, but I haven't seen any data regarding how you're stacking up currently vis-a-vis your competitors in terms of your listings lead, if you can maybe give us an indication there.And my third question is, okay, you made clear, I think Bestsellerprinzip goes into effect in December. So clearly, you don't expect much impact this year. But in terms of looking out into 2021, are you sticking with your earlier indication of likely only sort of mid- to upper single-digit euro million impact on revenues?

[Tobias Hartmann, CEO & Chairman of Management Board]

Craig, it's Tobi. I'll start off with the first question, update on our strategic thinking. Our strategic thinking has not changed. We remain positive and optimistic about establishing and further driving the real estate ecosystem. We elaborated a little bit during this call, but it's really very meaningful to see how digitalization becomes more relevant. And some of the examples, what we've seen over the past 2 to 3 months, there seem to be a sheer impossibility in the past, how agents use certain tools, how agents are rethinking how they can market themselves, and obviously, how important it becomes to provide the right leads at the right time to the right party. So we believe we have the right strategy, which means that, yes, we are looking for feasible M&A opportunities that might be bolt-on opportunities just like Immoverkauf24. And we are not separating out any reporting metrics on Immoverkauf24 because we believe it fits perfectly into our existing ecosystem, and it's obviously part also organizationally of our real and lead engine-focused organization. With that, I'll hand over to Dirk for the other questions.

[Dirk Schmelzer, CFO & Member of Executive Board]

Thanks, Craig. Your first question was on the listing lead versus the next competitor. If we take the next -- the midpoint between eBay and [ eBay K ] and deduplicate the listings, we are roughly at the listing lead we had in the past, which is around about 1.8x, and that can be folded out into private PPA listings, where the sales, really rent listings, but you can do the metrics on that. And you come to the same conclusion that we have remaining and very solid listing lead versus the competition, which hasn't significantly changed over the past 12 months.With regards to your third question, it is true that we guided in our 2020 guidance an impact of EUR 5 million to EUR 8 million of revenues with the Bestsellerprinzip. If I take that forward and take forward what we have learned over 2020 and the first 6, 7 months now down the road, I would say that on Bestsellerprinzip, we rather end up at the lower end of that guidance, which is around about EUR 5 million of revenue impact next year on the Bestsellerprinzip than at the upper end of that. But we will provide more color on that once we reach 2021.

[Operator]

We'll take our next question from Lisa Yang with Goldman Sachs.

[Lisa Yang, Equity Analyst]

I have a couple of questions as well. Firstly, I just wanted to clarify, is it possible to have the residential ARPU in Q2? I'm not sure I've seen it, and I think you gave it in Q1. And how should we think about that for the full year? And just a clarification on the auto guidance as well. Maybe I misunderstood, but I thought previously you said the ARPU be flat for the rest of the year compared to Q1, and now you're seeing flat year-on-year. So just want to clarify if there's anything that have changed in the guidance perspective? So that's the first question.The second thing is on the competitive landscape. Just wondering, clearly, you're not trying to migrate your customers on to -- or push your customers on to more premium packages. Are you seeing similar behavior from your competitors? Just curious like what have you seen them doing more recently.And thirdly, I was wondering if you can comment on the financial health of your agents on both the residential and business side, given -- I mean if the market seems to be in the U.K. And on the business side, can I just clarify how much exposure they might have from commercial real estate, which could potentially come with more pressure in the future?

[Dirk Schmelzer, CFO & Member of Executive Board]

Lisa, thanks. I'll start with the ARPU question, and I start also -- you were pretty hard to understand, so I tried to read between the lines what you were asking. I think your question was around ARPU development for the remainder of the year. I would point you to what I've answered to Miriam in the beginning of the session, the Q&A session today. We are conservative on ARPU growth with regards to the remainder of 2020, simply for the reason that we are lacking a little bit of visibility on the rest of the year, and we are also looking at supporting our agents and continue to support our agents. And once we see, and that's referring to the third question you were asking, that the financial health and stability of our agents is stable and improving, and Tobi will answer on that later on, then we also think about increasing prices, and we have flexible mechanisms to do that. With regards to ARPU guidance, you were asking -- referring to the Q1 call. To my knowledge, I guided a roughly flat ARPU and no material changes in ARPU, and that happened in Q2 versus Q2 2019, where in Q2, you saw an ARPU for the Residential Real Estate segment was EUR 690 compared to EUR 688 in Q2 2019. And for the half year 2020, you saw an ARPU of EUR 709 versus EUR 681 in the first half year 2019. So all in all, an increase of 4% for the half year and 0.3% and for the second quarter.With that, I hand over to Tobi for the second and third question.

[Tobias Hartmann, CEO & Chairman of Management Board]

Yes. Regarding your question on any competitive moves or change in competitive behavior, we've not seen anything that we think we should mention here during this call, but we are certainly aware of the fact that these are special times and special times require special attention. So we are focusing very, very much on not only ourselves, but on our customers and also our competitors. And it's clear that we will expect and we will see probably some moves that we are not aware of today, so that's why we are laser focused on staying as close as possible to our customers, improving our operations, improving our products, continuing to investing into the product and helping our customers and partners out there.In terms of financial health of our partners and the relationships we have out there, I think it's fair to assume that the commercial segment is probably a segment where we have to watch closely and observe how things will develop. With the segment coming probably a little bit under pressure going forward with the space that becomes available, it remains open whether the financial health will be intact or whether there are any changes. On the pure effect, what we've seen so far, as Dirk also reported, we've only seen 1,300 of the agent population making use of our offer for Liquidity Plus, which is given our base of 18,000 to 19,000, not a very large share. But obviously, that could change, particularly if there was a second wave or if there were further lockdowns, which we are currently not expecting, but which could happen, so I hope this helps. Thank you.

[Dirk Schmelzer, CFO & Member of Executive Board]

Lisa, one additional point from my side. Ursula just pointed me to that. I think your quality of question was the development of the Residential Real Estate ARPU excluding finance partners, Q1 '20 versus Q2 '20, and that has increased from EUR 707 in Q1 this year to EUR 719 in Q2 this year.

[Operator]

We'll take our next question from William Packer with Exane BNP.

[William Henry Packer, Executive Director of Media Equity Research]

Three from me, please. As I recall on our last -- on the last conference call, you confirmed that the guidance you gave [ TMD ] for '21 and '22 still stood, albeit on a slightly different base. Can I just confirm, therefore, that you're talking to teen top line growth in '21, low to mid-teens top line growth in '22 and 100 basis points of margin improvement this year? And how does that circle square with the Bestsellerprinzip commentary for '21? That's the first question. Secondly, back on your comments on eBay K so far. It would be just helpful to hear a little bit of an overview from you as the key areas on which you repeat. Am I right in thinking it's primarily private listing and rental? Some kind of metrics comparing how penetrated you are versus the estate agent base might be useful.And then finally, talking to flat ARPU for the rest of the year, is that not inherently quite conservative if the market sort of models for room in that the state agents to choose to upgrade to higher packages in order to increase their share eventually for problems with lenders or consumers? So could there not be some upside on that?

[Dirk Schmelzer, CFO & Member of Executive Board]

Thanks, William. Thanks for the questions. I answer question one and three before Tobi jumps in on your second question. With regards to guidance, nice try, William. I think as we resumed our guidance for the full year 2020, we are, and we believe we are one of the first, if not the first, company in the space to be able to take this step, right? And this is due to the confidence we have in the development of our company and a reflection of the resilience we have experienced in the first half year. We are currently not giving guidance for the year 2021 and beyond as we are still in a very volatile environment. And that is also reflecting on your question 3, whether we are not a little bit too conservative with regards to the second half of 2020. That might be the case. And in the end, in December, William, we might all turn around and say what has happened and why have we been so bearish around the development. But as I said earlier on, we are -- we might have seen the downturn of the pandemic at the moment, but we haven't seen the economic downturn and the consequences of that over the remainder of the year. So we remain slightly conservative and cautious on the half year 2 development. So as I said, we're still in a very volatile environment, and we will be adjusting our forecast accordingly.And our strategic agenda remains unchanged. But when I sort of when I put some color on 2021, you were asking for Bestsellerprinzip. I just said to Craig this is going to have an impact of roughly EUR 5 million for the next year. Listings Plus is something we take into account when we will guide you on 2021 because it has been very successful for us and is continued as of now. We all need to see how the advertising market will play out in 2021. We believe it's going to be declining following COVID and the economic crisis related to that. We see an uncertain development with regards to crisis and with regards to a deteriorating commercial real estate market, project development market in Germany might follow a short to medium downturn. We have seen the first initiatives from the German government to cater for that, with first laws being discussed in the German parliament as we speak in order to accelerate new buildings in Germany, but we won't see that by the end of 2020 nor will we see that in the first half year of 2021. And then let's see what's happening with the increased competition from eBay, Adevinta and all the rest in the market, but I will hand over to Tobi on that.

[Tobias Hartmann, CEO & Chairman of Management Board]

Yes. So not much more to add because I'm talking as an external and I'm not familiar with your strategy. But you pointed out correctly, there's 2 sides of the coin. There's certainly the professional segment where one should argue and should expect that there will be some competitive moves, and then there's the private segment, obviously, where they're coming from.Let us focus on what we have done over the past 12, 15 months and what we are laser focused on doing and maintaining as momentum. We have a very, very strong customer satisfaction. We didn't mention this during the call, but the fact that we just -- in the middle of a pandemic crisis and making sure that we can win net new customers as well as showing a top line growth as well as having a really high customer satisfaction and the highest engagement scores with the traffic increase, in sessions increase is something to build upon, and so that's what we're focused on. Secondly, we have shown that we can diversify our revenue streams. So not only have it put up in membership packages, but also extending it to the homeowners as we've currently launched new membership packages, which is something that we will continue doing. So this remains intact, and obviously, we'll observe any competitive moves. And there's probably more to report out over the next coming months. Thank you.

[William Henry Packer, Executive Director of Media Equity Research]

Just a quick follow-up. So '21, '22 revenue guidance out. In terms of '21, '22 margin guidance of 100 basis points of improvement, is that still an ambition? Is that still in place?

[Dirk Schmelzer, CFO & Member of Executive Board]

As you're not giving up on that, I think what you have seen in the first and the second quarter that we have our cost pretty good, under control. And then also when we see the developments going into '21 and '22, we will be able to convert revenue growth into margin growth. And that said, I still believe that we are able to improve margin in '21 and '22. And yes, that's about it.

[Operator]

Our next question comes from Marius Fuhrberg with Warburg Research.

[Marius Fuhrberg, Analyst]

First one is on the Liquidity Plus program. Could you give us a bit more color on how big your exposure is in this one and how your experiences are with losses out of program and also what's your perception going forward is on the losses?And the second one is, how long do you expect the support programs, both for the professionals but also for the private users, have to stay in place? And what is your perception on this one? And maybe as well on the free listings for private users. As your competitor offers pretty much a similar program, how do you think you could get out of this cycle of offering free listings? And how do you think you could develop towards paid listings again?And the last one, on the lead generation. When I run the numbers there, you're currently at roughly about EUR 500 per lead. Is this a level we could expect going forward sustainable or do you intend to increase this?

[Dirk Schmelzer, CFO & Member of Executive Board]

Thanks very much for the questions. I'll start on the first question, which is referring to Liquidity Plus. We have coped for a bad debt level by the end of the year of around EUR 2 million coming from 1,300 agents that are currently making use of our Liquidity Plus program, where we offered them to pay their March and April by the end of December, so that gives you roughly a picture of where we stand on that. We think this is the necessary level we need until the end of the year, but certainly, we will react on a monthly basis once we see this going out of line, but we have no indications at the moment. For question two and three, I will hand over to Tobi.

[Tobias Hartmann, CEO & Chairman of Management Board]

Yes. Regarding your free listings question, as we've shared with you, we have some good experience with the modified approach we took there, so it's not just a plain vanilla free listing forever, but it's offense, it's a staged, and it's a modularized product approach. We will continue doing that, whether it's part of a program or not, because it's a part of our strategy that has -- seems to be very successful, as you can see, not only in financials, but also where we were able to compensate partially, but also in terms of engagement, traffic and fresh content and vibrancy of the marketplace. So we will hold on to that instrument in a more or less modified way going forward. And again, it's fully embedded in our strategy.On the Leads Plus initiative, it's something that we've also made good experience with because we've won new customers that before and quite honestly, didn't really know that this existed and didn't really know how to handle any of those leads. So we've learned a lot through this program. We think there could be similar programs like that, albeit not named like Leads Plus, but just as a campaign rhythm to win new customers and help them acquire new mandate. And also, what we didn't mention, obviously, this is a key to getting them hungry and driving appetite for new membership products and higher tier membership product. So this is something that we believe is part of the flywheel because more listings and partially-free listings will obviously lead to also more leads and to more memberships. Thank you.

[Operator]

We'll take our next question from Nizla Naizer with Deutsche Bank London.

[Fathima-Nizla Naizer]

Great. A couple of questions from my end, please. Firstly, revenue from consumers, single-digit declines in Q2. Just wanted to understand how should we think about this revenue line going forward. And how have sort of your consumer subscribers acted during this period? I mean, are you seeing high churn or is it just new members that you weren't able to acquire onto the platform? Some color there would be great.Secondly, on the lead sales that you were mentioning, are you going back to a model where this would be an ad hoc sale to agents or is it still part of the membership package that they take? Some color around the economics would be great. And has the take-up of this picked up as we move into Q3, which then supports the Residential Real Estate growth that we could hopefully expect at the end of the year?And lastly, on the share buyback. Could you give us an update on how much has been executed and how much is yet to come? Some color there would be fantastic.

[Dirk Schmelzer, CFO & Member of Executive Board]

Thank you very much, Nizla. On consumers, if I recall your question correctly, you were looking at what are the revenues and how do we look at the revenues we are doing with the consumers in the future. And there, you are referring to the listings or rather referring to the memberships we have on rent or on landlords. I wasn't sure about where you wanted to go.

[Fathima-Nizla Naizer]

Sure. I was talking about the membership products in particular that you offered to consumers.

[Dirk Schmelzer, CFO & Member of Executive Board]

Okay. If we are going to the consumer revenues in the first -- in the second quarter of 2020, we are looking at a total revenue of EUR 18 million. We have subscribed an amount of -- in the area of 130,000 to 140,000 consumers on our products. And you were mentioning a significant churn on these consumers, that is true. There is a churn, but the churn is not within the lifetime of the contract, but the churn is naturally because we are only locking them up for 1-, 3- and 6-month packages. And most of those consumers are looking for new apartments to rent and therefore, naturally churn once they have reached their target. However, what we are seeing is still a slight growth in this segment and still a very good monetization. Also coming from what Tobi mentioned earlier, the amount of free listings we were giving out. So if you ask me, will that develop in the future? Yes, this is part of our strategy going forward. This is part of monetization.The second part of our monetization is landlord monetization, where we have now contracted over 4,000 landlords. We're seeing the same development as on the leasing side here, where landlords are subscribing for an average ARPU of EUR 8 per month to rent out their apartment. And where we have landlords that are having more than 1 or 2 apartments, we see them retaining on our platform and retaining also on the subscription. But once they sold out or rented out their apartment, they move away from the platform again. But that is only the case with 30% to 40% of them, so 60% of them are staying. So we are looking at foreseeable and planned but also very pleasing churn trends on this side.With regards to sales leads, you're asking how that business is developing, whether this is part of the overall subscription or whether this is a stand-alone business. It is a stand-alone business. We are selling each lead on mortgage as well as on selling the next object. Separately to -- on the average, between 2 and 2.4 customers, the price of the lead depends on the quality. Is it an A, B, C or D lead? And on the average, we are nearing revenues there between EUR 100 and as we outlined earlier on, sometimes EUR 500 per lead. And we are now looking at a pricing model where we get a commission-based kickback per lead that we are delivering to the real estate agent, which makes the business model certainly much more attractive going forward. And the last question, I hand over to Tobi.

[Tobias Hartmann, CEO & Chairman of Management Board]

That was the last question.

[Dirk Schmelzer, CFO & Member of Executive Board]

Okay. Then that was it. Thank you.

[Fathima-Nizla Naizer]

Sorry, the last question is on the share buyback and an update on how far you've come.

[Dirk Schmelzer, CFO & Member of Executive Board]

Now that was my part as well, then. We are on the -- obviously, on the first ones that we issued, we are there. On the second tranche, we have an overall volume of EUR 490 million. End of the quarter, as you can also see in our presentation, end of the quarter, we have repurchased EUR 190 million volume of shares until the end of July. Until the end of quarter 2, it was EUR 140 million. So in July stand-alone, it was EUR 50 million, and we still have around about EUR 290 million to go until the end of this year.

[Operator]

We're seeing no further questions at this time. I would like to turn the conference back to Ms. Querette for any additional or closing remarks.

[Ursula Querette, Head of Investor Relations]

Yes. Thank you all for joining this call. And if there's any question left, you know how to reach me. Talk to you soon then. Thank you. Bye-bye.

[Operator]

That concludes today's presentation. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.