Scout24 SE

XETRA:G24

Earnings Call Transcript 2021-Q3

[Operator]

Good day, and welcome to the Scout24 Quarter 3 2021 Results Conference Call. Today's conference is being recorded. And at this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Ursula Querette. Please go ahead, ma'am.

[Ursula Querette, Head of Investor Relations]

Welcome, everyone, to Scout24’s Q3 2021 Earnings Call. My name is Ursula Querette, and I am Head of Investor Relations and Treasury at Scout24. As speakers, we have Tobias Hartmann, our CEO on this call, who will kick off the presentation. Dirk Schmelzer, our CFO, will then present our Q3 and 9 months financials. We will then have time for your questions. As usual, you can find today's presentation on our website under Financial Reports and Presentations. There, you can also find our quarterly statement with Q3 and 9 months 2021 financials. If you are using the weblink we provided beforehand, you can follow the presentation live. This session will be recorded, and a replay will be made available as quickly as possible after the event.Please be aware of the disclaimer on Page 2, and let us now turn to Page 3, where I hand it over to Tobi.

[Tobias Hartmann, CEO & Chairman of Management Board]

Thank you, Ursula, and welcome, everyone. Let me start on Page 3. I think we made it very clear over the last quarters, what we understand as ecosystem strategy. It is how we are moving away from a traditional classified business towards a network marketplace model and how this leads to a more diversified revenue model. As a proof point, let's take a look at our very pleasing Q3 results. While the core residential agent ARPU did grow through price increases, it is a bit dampened by new customers, but also boosted by our strongly growing Realtor Lead Engine product.On top of that comes the strong demand for mandates from immoverkauf24, which led to a respective revenue increase of 41% in Q3. On the consumer side of the business, we saw our Plus product revenue grow by 23%. So our traditional core agent business is complemented by acquisition products for agents, and our consumer listing business is complemented by subscription products, which now significantly overcompensate the free to list effects. Additionally, we are capitalizing on the fact that both customer groups, professional and private are becoming more and more digital savvy.The business, real estate business is still suffering from the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. But despite of that, and in context of our continued free to list push, we were able to achieve an overall revenue growth in Q3 of around 9%. And since immoverkauf24 has been acquired on July 1, 2020, organic and reported growth is nearly the same for the quarter. At our CMD, in 3 weeks, we will share more context and plans how we are tackling growth in the future, while at the same time, creating long-term shareholder value.Talking about shareholder value. In Q3, our EPS increased significantly following the recent share buybacks. It came out at EUR 0.29, 27% up year-on-year. I'll leave it to Dirk to talk about our next share buyback program in the amount of up to EUR 200 million. As just explained, thanks to the right product offering in place, we delivered strong revenue growth. And this, despite the ongoing challenging market conditions in Germany. Those of you who have followed the German election campaign have noted that the housing shortage is a major political topic over here. We are addressing this issue, amongst others, with mandate acquisition products and solutions for agents and tailored search products for consumers. These are all products which go beyond the traditional offering of a classified player.This is the main reason why despite decreasing listing numbers, which you can see on Page 4, we are delivering increasing revenues. At the same time, we are seeing an increased usage of our platform by home seekers. This is a proof of our significantly increased relevance. In the first 9 month of the year, the app traffic went up by 23% year-on-year, compensating for the decrease in desktop usage. Next to improved mobile usage, we believe this desktop trend is driven by the changed cookie consent, which leads to reduced measurability of traffic.Monthly sessions on ImmoScout24 were only slightly down by 3% to EUR 104 million, and therefore, almost back to previous year's level. So taking into account the cookie consent, the number of sessions on desktop and app together actually implies a significant increase in demand. This increased engagement is certainly due to the strong demand for property, which is ultimately met by the help of our search products.Those search products are included in the consumer subscriptions portion depicted in teal on the graph on Slide 5. Revenues from this product group are now exceeding the one-off listing or paid per ad revenues. The same holds true for the leads revenues, the yellow portion of the graph. As I mentioned before, we are becoming less and less dependent on our traditional classified business. From classifieds to ecosystem, that is our stated strategy. And both the leads and consumer subscription products bring us closer to either sale or rent transactions.Through our membership additions, the largest and orange portion of the graph, we offer our agent customers the right tools to efficiently market their inventory, and it also helps them win new mandates. This very solid core business, while growing at a slower pace is the foundation for our strongly growing transactional business.Page 6 now shows how this translates into 9 months 2021 key performance indicators. Our group revenue grew by 9.4% to EUR 287 million in a year-on-year comparison. The main growth driver was our Residential Real Estate segment with a revenue increase of 12.8%. Considering the operating cost developments linked to the changed revenue mix I showed you before, the ordinary operating EBITDA increased by 4.5% to EUR 165 million. Due to the strong demand for the real to lead engine product and continued price adjustments, the ARPU of the Residential Real Estate Partners increased by 5.9% to EUR 751. The Business Real Estate ARPU also increased, still at a low pace due to the pandemic by 0.5% to EUR 1,748.Once again, we were able to also grow our customer base by 2.5% to 20,511 customers. The biggest pain point for this customer base remains to win new mandates in a market with a lack of supply. The currency for these mandates is our growing registered homeowner base. At the end of September, we stood at approximately 670,000 homeowners, an increase of 34% year-on-year. The number of Consumer Plus product subscribers grew even stronger by over 80% to almost 237,000. With the resulting revenues, we were able to significantly overcompensate the declining pay per ad business, leading to a good overall growth of consumer revenues. This is fully in line with our intended business strategy, and we are pleased to see our company deliver very tangible results as part of our execution.With that, I will hand it over to Dirk to provide more color on the financials. Dirk, over to you.

[Dirk Schmelzer, CFO & Member of Management Board]

Thank you, Tobi. Welcome, everybody, also from my side. Now let's move to Slide 7, which shows you the segment view. As Tobi already mentioned, the Residential Real Estate revenue increased by 12.8% to EUR 212.4 million in a 9-month comparison. This growth was mainly driven by our revenue with agents, which grew by 14%, strongly supported by delivering sales mandates to our agents. The Realtor Lead Engine and immoverkauf24 together increased revenue by 111% to EUR 23.9 million in a 9-month view. Comparing quarter-on-quarter, the respective growth rate was 54% due to the consolidation of immoverkauf24 in Q3 last year.Revenue with consumers increased by 10.2% in a 9-month comparison despite free to list. This is due to a high demand for our Plus products, reflected in the strong increase on consumer subscriptions, as Tobi just told you. The ordinary operating EBITDA margin of the Residential Real Estate segment came in at 59.5% for the first 9 month of 2021, which is 3.9 percentage points below previous year. On the one hand, this is due to higher operating costs, mainly for homeowner marketing initiatives. On the other hand, the margin development reflects the changed revenue mix associated with our market network strategy, with the recent acquisitions strongly contributing to this strategy. Organically, the ordinary operating EBITDA margin was at 61.8% for the Residential Real Estate segment.The Business real Estate segment revenue is still affected by the pandemic, resulting in a stable revenue development with EUR 51.4 million for the 9-month period 2021. Nevertheless, the revenue with developers and new home builders increased by 4.3% and thus compensated for the decline in the revenue with commercial real estate agents. The latter was primarily due to a decreasing pay per ad business with commercial agents. The ordinary operating EBITDA margin of the Business Real Estate segment came in at 72.7%.The Media & Other segment revenue increased by 2% to EUR 23 million in the 9-month period. This was mainly driven by the strong ImmoScout24 Austria business, while at the same time, the media business declined. FLOWFACT also recorded a declining revenue due to the ongoing conversion of the payment model to software as a service. Since August 2021, the newly acquired Propstack also contributed to the Media & Other revenue development with a cloud-based CRM product for smaller agents. The ordinary operating EBITDA margin of the Media & Others segment fell by 5.3 percentage points to 34.5%.We already mentioned the continued customer growth and the ARPU increase. Page 8 gives you the customary quarterly and year-to-date overview by segment. The residential ARPU increased by 7.4% in Q3 can be explained by the growing Realtor Lead Engine revenues and price increases. On the other hand, the growing agent base creates downward pressure as it mostly applies to smaller agents. The Business Real Estate segment is still influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic with a slight recovery in Q3 reflected by the ARPU growth of 1.7%.Turning to Page 9. Let us go through the main ordinary operating items affecting our margin development. Own work capitalized increased by 21% to EUR 19.5 million in the first 9 months. This translates into a capitalization ratio of 7.4%, which is above our target ratio of 6%. This is mainly to do with capitalized project developments from Vermietet.de, which come on top of our accelerated product innovation efforts. Examples of such product investments include further development of the Home Seller Hub and the Plus products, which pay into our ecosystem strategy. However, I'm expecting that by the end of 2022, the capitalization ratio should be down to our 6% target again.Personnel costs increased by 14.5%, mainly due to the integration of Vermietet.de and Propstack employees. As a recurring topic from the last quarters, the higher marketing expenses mainly reflect our ambition to generate valuable homeowner contacts, which are at the heart of our leads business. With these leads, our agent customers can digitally accelerate their mandate acquisition efforts, eventually leading to more transactions. Our marketing expenses increased by 28% to EUR 27.8 million in a 9-month comparison. This includes expenses for TV and online advertising, search engine optimization, search engine advertising and performance marketing.IT expenses remained stable in a 9-month comparison at EUR 12.7 million. The increase in Q3 was due to a higher number of software licenses coming with more employees. The year-on-year growth in other operating costs by 21.4% to EUR 38.5 million is mainly due to increasing purchase cost in connection with the sale of more leads and Plus products, higher external labor costs due to additional call center activities and additional investments into FLOWFACT. Taking all those operating effects into account, brings us to an ordinary operating EBITDA of EUR 164.7 million for the first 9-month period and EUR 54.5 million for Q3 2021. This reflects a year-on-year increase of 4.5% and 4.4%, respectively. The 9-month margin came in at 57.4%, while Q3 was lower at 55.9%. Again, organically, the margin would have been at 59.1% for the 9-month period and at 57.1% for Q3.Let's turn to Page 10, where you see the items below the ordinary operating EBITDA with a highly accretive development in earnings per share. Non-operating costs decreased significantly by 70.6% in Q3, mainly driven by the development of share-based compensation. Due to the declining share price, long-term incentive program provisions were released in Q3 2021. This was partly offset by higher M&A costs. For the 9-month period, the non-operating effects decreased by 34%. As a result, the reported EBITDA was up 18.2% in Q3 2021 and increased by 9.2% in the first 9-month period.Depreciation and amortization increased due to higher depreciation rates resulting from the move to the new Berlin office as well as depreciation of own work capitalized. The strong decline in the financial result in Q3 is resulting from a lower amount of cash invested in the special securities fund due to further share buybacks. In addition, the actual performance of the fund was slightly lower than in previous periods. The recent share buybacks are also the reason for the strong increase in earnings per share. Based on a reduced average number of shares of 83.5 million for Q3 2021, this results in a 27% higher EPS of EUR 0.29. The 9-month EPS amounted to EUR 0.79, up 18% year-on-year.Let's take a closer look at the development of our share capital on Page 11. What you see here is the development of outstanding shares and treasury shares in connection with our capital return roadmap. The number of outstanding shares depicted in black in the graph forms the relevant base for calculating the EPS. The volume of up to 10% of our total share capital, which we can hold in treasury shares is reflected by the orange portion of the graph. In December last year, after the public tender transaction in April this year and 1 week ago, at the beginning of November, we canceled treasury shares.Consequently, our total share capital now stands at 83.6 million shares, of which 83.5 million are outstanding free float shares and less than 100,000 are left as treasury shares. As announced on the 3rd of November, the next share buyback program in the amount of up to EUR 200 million is just around the corner. It is planned to start within the next days and should be completed at the latest at the end of June 2022. And therefore, before the next AGM.Let me finish our presentation with Page 12 and our outlook for 2021. With increasing confidence in the business development for the rest of the year, we decided to refine our full year outlook. So mid- to high single-revenue growth now becomes around 9% revenue growth. And our previous outlook for the ordinary operating EBITDA margin of up to 60% is refined to a range of 57% to 58%. This range now also fully reflects the recent acquisitions of Vermietet.de and Propstack. I told you on our last earnings call that Vermietet.de would cost us 1 margin point this year. So without Vermietet.de, we would have been able to share here a margin outlook in the range of 58% to 59%.Just like immoverkauf24, Vermietet.de perfectly fits into our ecosystem strategy. Both businesses bring us closer to the real estate transaction. With immoverkauf24, we participate in sales transactions by realizing a share of the agent commission. With Vermietet.de, we participate in rental transactions when private landlords create and sign digital rental contracts over the platform and manage ongoing tenant relationships. In the first 9 months of this year, immoverkauf24 completed approximately 1,230 property transactions with our partner agents. Vermietet.de had 144,000 registered landlords on the platform at the end of September. By the way, the integration is running as planned. Users can now log on to Vermietet.de with their ImmoScout24 account and seamlessly transfer property data.With this, let me open the floor for your questions. Operator, over to you.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] We'll now move to our first question over the phone, which comes from Christopher Johnen from HSBC.

[Christopher Johnen, Equity Research Analyst]

Yes. First question on ARPU trends in residential. I'm curious how you think about the impact that the declines on the listing side that we're seeing in the market are impacting your ability to increase prices with agents. I remember, historically, this has always been discussion of more for more agents have been pushed to put more products on the platform. And hence, it was easier to go to them and say, look, you've used x percent more for sale listing in our platform. Hence, the price increase of x is only to be put into perspective. I'm wondering how much of an issue it is going to be when we look into Q4 and early next year? Because I would assume that the listings issue is not going to go away anytime soon.And then second, related to that, how do you see the final migration of the residual customers into the higher tiers on the membership side, having an impact on ARPU in the fourth quarter? And then third question, a bit of a bigger picture question on your current view on M&A. You've been linked to a number of transactions. But so far, you've mostly done small bolt-ons like Vermietet.de, for example. I'm just curious on -- in terms of the appetite, I mean what is generally on your radar at this moment? Are you willing to potentially look at cross-border again, hybrid agents or agents, purely tech? I mean what [would you] know about your M&A ambitions?

[Dirk Schmelzer, CFO & Member of Management Board]

Thanks very much, Chris. This is Dirk. I think I'll start with question 1 and 2, and then I will hand over to Tobi for the third question relating to M&A. So first of all, good one on the declining listings and the underlying ARPU trends around that. What we can say is that there are 2 elements around it, right? First of all, the overall agent revenue is increasing by the increasing value of transaction that he or she is undertaking in Germany. And we believe we earn our fair share around that with the value we are delivering to that. So that is also bought in by the agents. And therefore, our pricing with regards to the memberships is more and more based not on listings only, but also on local market shares and local surroundings.I think I explained that when we last year decided to move into the rate cards, that was also based on our pricing and the transparency initiative we have taken there. So we don't see an impact of the declining listings on the overall membership ARPU. We believe this can continue to increase in the future. And that is fueled by a second effect, which is certainly the additional business we are offering to the agents by providing the agents with leads through our lead engine on the one hand and through immoverkauf24 on the other hand. So we don't think that there will be a significant impact on the ARPU from the decline in listings, given the underlying pricing mechanisms we have put in place on our operational business.Secondly, you've been asking with regards to the migration. Migration is continuing. By the end of Q3, we had around about 80% of our agents migrated, and we'll continue to migrate the agents. I believe that by the end of the year, we have migrated around 95% to 100% of our agent base, and that is proceeding as planned. Interesting trends that we are seeing is that agent satisfaction is improving in the image edition and it's also improving in the higher tier editions, which gives us a clear signal that we are obviously offering something that is of value to our key customers, namely the general real estate agents. For the third question regarding M&A, I would like to hand over to Tobi.

[Tobias Hartmann, CEO & Chairman of Management Board]

Yes. Chris, thanks for your question. With regards to M&A, we've established clear criteria. Again, a few to recall. They need to fit the bill, to build on our ecosystem approach. They need to be accretive in the longer term. They need do help us building and establishing a strong competitive advantage. And the last question is, do we really need this inorganically? Or could we do this organically? And the combination of these factors are applied. There is lots of rumor about many potential transactions always in the market.There has been, obviously, since you followed the news. We've only focused on add-on acquisitions so far. We're very happy with the track records right now. We do think it's a good combination of strengthening our product foundation, whilst at the same time, accelerating with our transactional model, i.e., getting deeper into the transaction. So for now, that remains the strategy. Having said that, do we have appetite in general, if there's something interesting popping up? Absolutely, we are open for business. Thank you.

[Operator]

We'll now move on to our next question over the phone, which comes from Nizla Naizer from Deutsche Bank.

[Fathima-Nizla Naizer]

Great. I have 2 questions from my end. Firstly, sir, on immoverkauf24, could you please give us a bit more color on the economics that you've seen in the 9 months, the number of leads that you've been successfully able to sell? How many of those were generated internally on the Scout platform versus how many did you have to sort of acquire yourself? Secondly, what was the value of the transactions that these 9 months of sales have manifested? Lastly, on the responses, the agents themselves, are they still happy to share the 30% to 40% of the commission, if I'm not mistaken, with you in exchange for this leads? Some color there would be great. Secondly, with the potential change in the German government, could you maybe take us through what sort of implications it may have for real estate and for Scout in particular? Some color there would be great.

[Dirk Schmelzer, CFO & Member of Management Board]

Thanks, Nizla. This is Dirk. I once again start and then hand over to Tobi for the overall development in the political market in Germany here. So your question was mainly related around immoverkauf24. What I can confirm is that the overall revenue share with regards to leads, we are selling on a cost per lead basis versus commission-based leads is around 1/3 for the commission base and 2/3 for the Realtor Lead Engine. In total, the amount of leads that we have been selling and processing this year is around 80,000. And in the first 9 months of this year, we had 1,230 commission-based leads that we went through with immoverkauf24 and its customers. And what we can also state here is that the price per lead on the Realtor Lead Engine is significantly lower than what we see on the Realtor Lead Engine with immoverkauf here.And that was the second part of your question, we managed to get around 40% with a trend towards 50% of the overall commission of the agent. So that answers your question on whether we are maxed out. On this part, we still believe that there is a high willingness to pay on the agent side and a high willingness to share on the agent side to share 50% of the commission when we deliver an immoverkauf24 lead to the agent. I think that was about it, and that should give you some flavor around that. And with that, I hand over to Tobi for the question on the current government.

[Tobias Hartmann, CEO & Chairman of Management Board]

Nizla, just to build on what Dirk just mentioned. With over a year behind us now having integrated immoverkauf24, hopefully, you can see not only the numbers but also as part of the overall strategy and how we are executing against it, that this is a significant part of our future strategy, i.e., yes, we do think this will be a very growing business going forward. We've tried and pivoted around it, and we're very comfortable with the asset. We're very comfortable with the integration. We are very comfortable with the client satisfaction and how it's actually priced in the market. So there is more to come.On your question with regards to the government. Let's just roll back where we came from. So the former government obviously was led by CDU, but the SPD was the coalition partner, which is now the leading partner in the new coalition. So far in the coalition papers that we've seen from the new government, there is nothing mentioned to have any sorts of caps or restrictions further put on -- to restrict the market or limit the market. Let's also be aware of the fact that it's the FDP, which is the third-party in that coalition scheme, and they typically stand for liberal politics, i.e., they are against any sort of regulation or limitations.So by and large, for now, obviously, we don't have it in writing or we are not 100% certain. But for now, there is nothing that we would expect that could be challenging our position or could be weakening our position with regards to governmental legislation. I think the positive fact though is, on the other hand, and that's something we should focus on that clearly, the parties and also these 3 parties have understood that there is a problem of capacity of housing. And the former government Angela Merkel did not fulfill the expectations to their promises, i.e., new housing development plan. They fell short of their own goals.So that's what they've picked up, and they would like to make sure that there will be more capacity on the ground, i.e., we expect some stronger statements with regards to focusing on the housing topic of the new government, helping to lower some sort of construction costs, making it easier to get tangible permissions to build and have new buildings built up. Also that in combination with some sort of climate goals for the real estate sector. That's what we expect to happen. I hope that answer your question. Thank you.

[Operator]

We'll now move on to our next question over the phone, which comes from Adam Berlin from UBS.

[Adam Ian Berlin, Director and Equity Research Analyst]

Just 2 left for me. On the Page 6 of the presentation, you talk about 237,000 Consumer Plus product subscribers. Could you please break those out for us between the different products that are now in place? I know there's a lot [ of meter ] Plus, but you've also got a credit reports and some other products out there. Just to understand how that is being driven. And then the second question is, you didn't deliver very much Q-on-Q growth in [ARPU] within Residential Real Estates this quarter. You said it was partly to do with more agents coming on board, but the number didn't go up that much. What's going to drive the Q-on-Q ARPU growth in the next few years? Because you had very strong performance of immoverkauf24, you got the price increases, but it's still kind of stuck around that 750 number. So just trying to understand how we get more conviction that, that number is going to go up in next year.

[Dirk Schmelzer, CFO & Member of Management Board]

Thanks, Adam. I'll start with the latter question around the ARPU. First of all, 7.4% ARPU growth in Q3 for us is, first of all, a function of the Realtor Lead Engine revenues that we put in the ARPU, as you are aware. Secondly, we think that around 6% of the increase is purely driven by pricing, comparing on a like-for-like agent base. And the growing agent base certainly adds some downward -- put some downward pressure on the ARPU because the agents we are adding to our portfolio usually are smaller agents with an ARPU of EUR 200, EUR 300, EUR 400. So those effects, I think, already known to you. Now looking forward, I think what we need to understand is that when we do the year-on-year comparisons, we're coming out of the situation last year, which has been largely influenced by COVID and some discounts that we have been giving for various agents and for various contractual obligations.So when we look forward, we have a much clearer picture. And there, I would like to state what I stated before. In the future, you can expect ARPU growth by terms and condition-based price increases in the low to mid-single digit. And you can expect ARPU growth in the low to mid-single digits from additional services we're offering like the Vermietet.de engine and others. And we believe we can continue on that. So if in your model, you assume mid-single-digit ARPU growth to a high single-digit ARPU growth in the future, I think you should be on the safe side.Now when we come to the amount of subscriptions we're having on the platform, what we see here is that we have around [200]. It's a bit changing quarter-on-quarter given the seasonality, but we have around 220,000 subscribers on the Rental Plus product. On the BuyerPlus+ product, we have around 20,000 subscribers. And then there comes a few subscribers around the Landlord Plus product that we are offering. Here however, we are in the midst of the integration of Vermietet.de. So you are going to see that growing in the future, certainly. But at the moment, the majority of our subscribers is certainly coming from the Consumer/Rental Plus customer.

[Operator]

We'll now move on to our next question over the phone, which comes from William Packer from BNP Paribas.

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

Firstly, thanks for the color on immoverkauf. My memory is that you have very good visibility on the outlook of that business because of the way in which the product works. Should we expect growth to accelerate going forward? Or any color on growth outlook from here would be helpful. Secondly, could you comment on the investment required at immoverkauf to scale it? As it gets bigger, do you need to invest in marketing, customer service, agent relations? How should we think about that challenge? And then finally, regarding the competitive backdrop. Are there any market developments worthy of note? I suppose, 2 things that would be obvious to me, if you will. Firstly, Adevinta has now had control of eBay K for a while. Have you seen any movements from them? And secondly, the vendor leads segment is a very hot segment in global classifieds. Have there been any developments within the wider vendor lead segment?

[Dirk Schmelzer, CFO & Member of Management Board]

Thanks, Will. And welcome, and thanks very much for the questions. So I start off with immoverkauf24 and the growth outlook there. So what you can see is -- and what we experience is that the good thing with adding 2 different monetization models in place. On the one hand, the lead engine product, where we are billing our agents with a cost per lead. And on the other hand, the product with immoverkauf, where we are taking part of the commission, enables us to balance out the lease with regards to the capacity we are having on the immoverkauf24. So as we said on earlier occasions, there is an amount of agents that are subscribed to our product.There is some regionality in our product. And we are balancing out the amount of commission-based leads that we are bringing to the market based on the demand of our agents in the various regions. And when we see that we cannot fulfill this demand, we are putting additional leads to immoverkauf to make them commission based. If we see that demand in a certain region is lower, we are putting that on the commission-based lead machine. So that enables us to balance growth a bit here. When it comes to growth of the business, you are absolutely right. We need marketing costs and marketing spend on that. Although more than 1/3 of overall leads is coming from our own platform, we still prefer to buy some leads from affiliates and through performance marketing. And on the other hand, we need some personnel behind it to really deliver the leads to the agents and follow-up on the commission with that.And we believe that we can significantly grow the business. We're going to see slight growth rates in 2022 and an accelerated growth rate in '23 going forward with that business. But we also believe that we need to take into account the situation that we have with regards to the difference between spending the money on the one hand and receiving the revenue on the other hand and the expectations of our investors and our analysts on our margin and revenue development. And we balance this out and very carefully, but we are very, very bullish on the business.

[Tobias Hartmann, CEO & Chairman of Management Board]

Yes. Will, thanks for your questions. Obviously, very relevant question. We feel very comfortable with the immoverkauf24 model. We do understand now the economics. We also do understand what it takes to grow the business as we scale it. We have different options to scale the business. I would rather abstain from going into details here in this call. But one is regionality. The other one is the density of affiliated agents that we have out there. And the third one is also the tooling that we provide and the quality of leads that we provide. And those are all areas where we are constantly trying to improve to cast a wider net and to really drive that business because that gets us closer to the transaction, which is part of our network ecosystem strategy. So yes, you should expect us to scale it further down the road as part of our growth plan.On the market development and a competitive environment, we try to bring across the same nomenclature each quarter that we are talking to you and others on the phone or when we meet in person, which is we've been following a very, very clear strategy here, which is we are constantly and continuing to move away from the monetization from the pure listing rather into a more transactional relationship feed with customers, which is embodied by the memberships and with consumers, which is embodied by the subscriptions that we have. And the whole trick here is that we've invested heavily into our product stack to really support that. And what you can see from these numbers is it is working. It is scaling. It is scaling up, and it's working on the consumer side, and it's working on the customer side.So we believe that talking about competitive environment, we have the leading product portfolio out there. We do know that we are the largest player in providing homeowner leads today in the digital arena, by and large. And we do know that, as we've shown you on this call, that we've grown our -- just recently this quarter, we've grown 34%, our homeowner registered -- homeowners on our platform, which is a key investment area. So what does this mean? We think we have the right strategy in place. We will continue going down that path. We will continue to invest into our product stack and into marketing on exact those dimensions, i.e., the memberships on the one hand to provide more business to our agents, to our partners and the subscriptions on the other hand, because that's what landlords, homeowners and so forth, want us to provide it and have the optionality to engage directly or through an agent. Hope that's helpful. Thank you.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] And we'll now move to our next question over the phone, which comes from Andrew Ross from Barclays.

[Andrew Geoffrey Ross, Research Analyst]

I've got a couple. First one, just to come back on the point on residential ARPU and your comment there that you expect it to grow mid- to high single digit over time. Can I clarify that you did expect that for 2022 as well? Or should we be assuming that the weaker sequential growth you're seeing in the second half might persist into '22? That's the first question. Second question is to push you a bit harder on margins for next year, given that you've got to absorb the annualization of M&A plus the dilution from immoverkauf. Could margins decline further from 57% to 58%? Or is this about a level we should think about for next year? And then the third one is a housekeeping one, and I apologize if I missed it, but what was the revenue of immoverkauf in Q3?

[Dirk Schmelzer, CFO & Member of Management Board]

Thanks, Andrew. Another question pointing to 2022. We're still working on '21. I have to admit. And yes, you can confirm what I just said that ARPU development in 2022 will follow similar patterns as you've seen it in '21, with the growth rates I just mentioned, so somewhere between 5%, so mid- to high single digits. You're going to see that. And we're working on that. On the other point with regards to margin outlook, more specific ARPU outlook, revenue outlook and everything else, you can be assured that we will educate you on the Capital Markets Day in 3 weeks' time. And I wouldn't like to take that as of today. And on the last question with regards to the revenue of immoverkauf24 in the 9 months, that was EUR 7.9 million. And in the quarter, that was EUR 2.6 million, Andrew.

[Andrew Geoffrey Ross, Research Analyst]

Okay. Just on that point, am I right in saying it was EUR 5.2 million for the first half? And has that business accelerated, has it grown sequentially Q3 against Q2? What am I missing there?

[Dirk Schmelzer, CFO & Member of Management Board]

Can you repeat the question here? I'm sorry, especially the first part.

[Andrew Geoffrey Ross, Research Analyst]

You said it was EUR 7.9 million for the 9 months, right?

[Dirk Schmelzer, CFO & Member of Management Board]

Yes.

[Andrew Geoffrey Ross, Research Analyst]

Okay. Fine. And just to clarify, that was EUR 5.2 million at the first half, it's been EUR 2.7 million in Q3?

[Dirk Schmelzer, CFO & Member of Management Board]

Yes, absolutely. Yes. Sorry. There might be some rounding error in between. Yes.

[Andrew Geoffrey Ross, Research Analyst]

It is still growing sequentially then quarter-on-quarter. I'm maybe a bit surprised it's not growing more given your positive sign on KPI.

[Dirk Schmelzer, CFO & Member of Management Board]

Yes, we have -- okay. Now I get where you're coming from, Andrew. As I said earlier on, I mean, we need to balance the amount of leads we are bringing to immoverkauf24 based on the regional split of those leads. And when we don't have enough agents in the specific regions, all those agents that are partnering with us already have enough leads that they are following up. We don't put so much leads into the immoverkauf funnel, and we keep them on a cost per lead basis. So our target here is to improve and widen our agent base that is qualifying for working together with immoverkauf24 on the one hand, and balancing that out towards the agent base we have that is taking the commission-based fees from us. So I think I made this clear.In total, I think we are not growing as fast as we could, simply because we believe that there's -- we need more qualified agents on that, but we are balancing very much here the customer satisfaction and the home seller satisfaction on the one hand, with the agent satisfaction on the other hand, plus limits to growth with regards to our own people that are working on following up on those leads. I hope that answers your question.

[Operator]

It appears there are no further questions queued over the phone at this time. So I would like to turn the conference back over to Ms. Querette for any additional closing remarks.

[Ursula Querette, Head of Investor Relations]

Yes. Thank you very much for your questions. We will hear or see each other again in -- at the beginning of December for our Capital Markets Day. Looking forward to that. Thank you, and bye-bye.

[Operator]

Thank you very much to today's speakers. Ladies and gentlemen, this does conclude today's call. Thank you very much for your participation. You may now disconnect.