Scout24 SE

XETRA:G24

Earnings Call Transcript 2022-Q4

[Filip Lindvall, executive]

Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Scout24's Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2022 Earnings Call. My name is Filip Lindvall, and I am Director, Group Strategy and Investor Relations at Scout24. With me on the call today is Tobias Hartmann, our CEO; and Dirk Schmelzer, our CFO. Tobi will kick off the presentation, and Dirk will dive deeper into our fourth quarter and 2022 full year financial performance. As always, we will conclude the call with a Q&A session. [Operator Instructions]

You can find today's presentation on our website under Financial Reports and Presentations. Our annual report and nonfinancial statement will be published on our website on 23rd March. If you're using the web link we provided beforehand, you can follow today's presentation live. This session will be recorded and a replay will be made available as quickly as possible after the event. Please take note of the disclaimer on Page 2.

Tobi, now over to you.

[Tobias Hartmann, executive]

Thank you, Filip, and welcome, everyone. Let's get right into it and move to Page 3 of our presentation. I wanted to start off with recapping year 2022, how markets drastically changed and how we at Scout24 navigated these changes successfully so far.

Starting with macro. We all know that 2022 was an unprecedented year in terms of rising inflation and interest rates as well as significant geopolitical uncertainty. But even in this tough environment, we managed to outperform expectations coming into the year, leading to a guidance upgrade and closing out the year at the top end of the upgraded guidance. As part of the dramatic macro changes, the real estate market also changed significantly from a seller to buyer market.

As part of this change, IS24 became much more relevant for agents and rent seekers. The proof is in the pudding. Despite the more challenging market for agents, we added 668 new agents during the year. Growth even accelerated in Q4 2022, and we are continuing to grow the number of agents in January 2023.

The other major shift was the massively increased interest to rent. This benefits Scout24 because of our product TenantPlus. With our private subscription product, we crossed the mark of 300,000 subscribers during the summer, a remarkable achievement, and ended the year about 320,000 subscribers. Talking about our CMD targets, despite increased macro headwinds, we continue to deliver against these targets.

In summary, we are very pleased with how the company is performing and the continued positive operational and financial trajectory. We are grateful for the hard work being put in by our teams to deliver the strong performance, and we believe we are best positioned to continue our growth track record going forward. We are entering 2023 with confidence based on our resilient and diversified business model and high demand for our core product suite.

In addition, we see the current market environment as an opportunity to further accelerate innovation and continuously review how we can operate in the most efficient way.

Now let's move to Page 4 and key messages for the past year. Starting off with the full year results for 2022, we are very pleased to have delivered revenue and ordinary operating EBITDA growth of 15% and 13%, respectively. Revenue growth came in at the top end of our upgraded guidance, and OOEBITDA even outperformed our top end guidance range of 12%. These strong results were delivered in a year with significant macro uncertainty, the Ukraine war, a dramatically changed real estate market as well as a softening demand for seller and mortgage leads in the second half of 2022, but these results are not a coincidence. They are the outcome of rigorously executing our strategy over the past years.

Our revenue model is diversified, thereby enabling us to consistently generate double-digit top line growth throughout the different stages of the real estate cycle. We grew customers throughout 2022 and see continued strong demand for IS24 core products, specifically professional membership subscriptions, PPA and consumer subscriptions.

The increased demand for IS24 core products reflects the changed real estate market and the immense value IS24 offers market participants. These positive developments offset the cyclically softer demand for seller and mortgage leads. I will talk about this later.

In Q4 2022, we continued our path to generate sustained operating leverage, exactly as we've said we would do since the second quarter 2022. We expect this trend to continue in 2023. Dirk will talk more about this in his part. We are committed to delivering best-in-class returns to our shareholders. And as such, I'm very pleased to announce that our adjusted EPS has increased substantially by 26% to EUR 1.91. Finally, while we are still very early into 2023, the year has started off as anticipated, and we are on track to deliver 2023 guidance with 12% revenue growth and 13% ordinary operating EBITDA growth. Dirk will elaborate more on the full year 2023 guidance in his part.

Now let me move to Page 5 to walk you through our 2022 full year results. On group level, revenue totaled EUR 447.5 million, a 15.0% year-on-year increase. Ordinary Operating EBITDA of the group came out at EUR 251.1 million, representing a margin of 56.1% and a growth over 2021 of 12.7%. Both numbers exceeded our initial expectations for 2022.

In our Professional segment, subscription revenue increased by 10% to EUR 260.1 million. This is the result of strong core membership growth, strong PPA growth, a dynamic seller growth and also strong growth of our mortgage leads business in the first half of 2022. The number of professional customers grew more than 3% year-on-year. We are particularly pleased about this development given the changed real estate market. ARPU increased by 6.8% to EUR 1,025.

In our Private segment, including the landlord platform Vermietet.de, subscription revenue increased by 52.4% to EUR 60.1 million. This was fueled in particular by significant new customer wins for the TenantPlus product, growing our number of private customers in Q4 by 49.1% to, on average, almost 304,000. Private ARPU increased by 2.2% to EUR 16.5. The blended estimated customer lifetime value increased sequentially from Q2 by 2.7% to EUR 115. Given the scarcity of rental objects in Germany and the value add this product offers, it continues to drive new customer wins. We are very proud of what our teams continued to deliver in this business.

Now let me move to Page 6 for a quick summary of our Q4 2022 results. On group level, we delivered revenue growth of 13.1% and OOEBITDA growth of 14.4%. OOEBITDA margin was 57.7%, up 0.6 percentage points versus Q4 2021. We are delivering on the communicated strategy around operating leverage. Expect us to continue this path in fiscal year 2023.

In the Professional segment, we saw continued strong momentum in membership revenues, which was offset by a challenging quarter for OTP and mortgage. In total, revenues grew 9.2%. We continued to grow our customer base by over 4%, highlighting the strong demand and relevance of the IS24 platform in the new real estate market environment. ARPU growth of 4.7% was driven by strong membership revenue, again, partially offset by a weak OTP quarter. I will comment more on the Q4 2022 OTP developments in just a minute.

Private revenue growth remained strong at 28.1%, driven by continued growth of TenantPlus. At the end of 2022, we recorded almost 320,000 subscribers on average across the full year. ARPU slightly increased to EUR 16.8.

Now turning to Page 7. Let us review where we stand on targets and momentum for the 5 value drivers on the basis of full year 2022 performance and Q4. The key takeaway for you is that we have performed well above our stated targets on membership revenue. Private subscriptions also generated growth in excess of our target on a full year 2022 basis and in line with our target in Q4. The strong momentum of these revenue lines reflects the strong demand for IS24 core products, both B2B and B2C, in this market that has now become a buyer's market. As you know, these revenue streams are recurring and come at high gross margins. Seller leads and mortgage revenues grew well in H1 2022, but growth started to slow down in Q3 and was turning negative in Q4. Let's go through the value drivers in detail and what we are seeing in the market.

Professional membership revenue increased by an impressive 12.1% in Q4 year-on-year and 9.2% for the full year. Growth accelerated every quarter this year as our membership products are in high demand. They generate superior returns on investment for real estate agents. As commented before, we grew the number of customers in Q4 2022 by over 4%. The strength and resilience of our platform makes us optimistic about 2023. Seller leads revenue declined by 7.8% in Q4 2022, affected by the market environment. Specifically, agents are currently less willing to spend money on leads for new mandates as they already have fuller pipelines that take longer to convert into a sale.

Scout24 is a growth company. As such, we are focusing on market share gains and efficiency levers in times of demand shifts and industry-wide disruptions. To that end, the 7.8% decline still represents relative market outperformance when we compare it to the decline of transaction numbers and other relevant data points such as decline in new mortgage lending. For the full year 2022, seller leads grew 17.3%, a strong performance in the changed market environment.

We started into 2023 with a healthy mandate pipeline. That's good on the one side as there are a lot of mandates committed. But as we communicated in the Q3 earnings call, it is now taking longer to generate transactions, and this impacts our mandate split revenues negatively. However, the seller leads in the mandate business is in its early innings. And bear in mind, it only represents roughly 9% of our total revenues. Our mortgage business related revenue declined by 14.2% in Q4 2022, affected by the challenging market environment for new mortgage lending. Mortgage brokers are reluctant to invest in leads at this time of heightened uncertainty and decreased underwriting appetite from banks.

When we compare our Q4 decline to what other market participants have reported, we again see relative outperformance and higher resilience thanks to our lead monetization business model. For the full year 2022, we grew our mortgage business by 7.9%. Mortgage revenues contributed 4% to total group revenues in 2022. Our unique private subscription business continues to grow strongly as the product and value proposition resonates well with consumers and landlords. Revenues grew 28.1% in Q4 2022 and for the full year, 52.4%, mainly driven by continued strong growth in TenantPlus, which grew number of subscribers by 26.9% in Q4 2022 and by 49.1% for the full year. We are proud of what our teams are achieving.

We are in a fortunate position to have innovated TenantPlus product years ago, which has created another growth lever for Scout24, while at the same time diversifying revenue streams. We continue to innovate around potential product extensions and are excited about future revenue opportunities.

Our landlord solution around Vermietet.de is continuing to gain relevance. We grew the number of registered units on the platform by 108%, crossing the 1 million unit mark, ending the year 2022 at 1,052,000 units.

To summarize, we feel good about where we stand in terms of executing on our moving to the next level strategy. Our membership in private subscriptions businesses are performing strongly, and the high relevance of our platforms and these products for market participants is reflected in the growth rates and the continued momentum we are seeing.

Now turning to Slide 8. Given the changing real estate market, since last earnings call in November, we wanted to share our recent view on the German real estate market and what the new market environment means for Scout24. Starting off with the German market fundamentals. Based on the fact of significant undersupply of new homes over the past years, we don't see the market suffering a significant price decline. In addition, remember that agent commission level of 4% to 6.5% remains high and makes Germany a very attractive place to work as an agent.

So what about agents' financial health? Based on the fact that we are still adding agents to the IS24 platform and real estate prices remain high, we see agents have enough buffer to navigate the current market without going out of business. We think a likely scenario may involve real estate prices gradually adjusting downwards over the upcoming quarters, which will lead to number of transactions starting to normalize sometime late 2023 or beginning of 2024. We also believe that the role of a real estate agent is more relevant than ever before as part of the future real estate market in Germany. Agents will need to help moderate the potential gap between the homeowners' price expectations and the buyers' price willingness. This will take some time, but will increase the need for well-trained and professional real estate brokers.

What makes us confident is the fact that we provide a great lead quality to real estate agents. We pair this lead quality with the best marketing power toolkit for agents, and we offer that at reasonable prices as our share of wallet of agents' total income is not that high. A good product with high relevance at a fair price underscores the fact that a temporary period with fewer transactions will not lead to accelerated agent churn.

So what about our OTP and mortgage business in this market? Agents are holding back on buying seller leads. This is because they have a full pipeline of mandates that takes longer to convert. This behavior is rational. And while, of course, we would rather sell more leads, the most important thing for us is that our real estate partners remain in business. And if that means buying fewer leads for a few quarters, this is a trade-off we are very happy to make, in fact, we would encourage. The same development holds true for our mortgage business. If we now compare the previous real estate market with the current market, it is very clear that Scout24 has an increasingly important role to play to support all stakeholders to operate successfully in this new environment.

For agents, this means providing them with the market power and reach of the IS24 platform as well as best-in-class products to help them operate efficiently. Agents need high-quality buyer leads, which is exactly what they get from IS24. For potential buyers, we have to help them navigate our market with much more choice and provide transparency around pricing in a market where bid and ask spreads are still sizable. And for landlords, they need efficient digital processes to find the right tenant in our market with high number of applications.

The changed real estate market is a clear net positive for Scout24 as we are seeing increased relevance with all of our stakeholders. This is reflected in increased demand for our core products. In addition, there is demand from stakeholders to further digitize processes around sale and rent transactions. These are the reasons why we are optimistic going into this new market cycle. Scout24 is best positioned to take market share across its core products, emphasizing our market leadership and unique platform offering.

And with that, I would like to hand it over to Dirk, who will take you through the financial part of the presentation.

[Dirk Schmelzer, executive]

Thank you, Tobi, and welcome, everyone. On Slide 9, you can see the year-on-year revenue growth in our 3 segments and the respective ordinary operating EBITDA margins for the full year 2022. The 10.8% revenue growth in the Professional segment is based, as Tobi already mentioned, on a strong core membership business and a softened but still dynamic seller leads business.

As the Professional PPA business has gained momentum in the current market environment, these revenues add to the segment growth. Consequently, the ordinary operating EBITDA margin of the Professional segment came in relatively strong at 60.5% despite this year's additional growth investments.

The Private segment showed a revenue growth of 28.5%, strongly backed by private subscription revenue, which grew by 52.4%, including Vermietet.de. In Private, we also experienced continued strong growth in our PPA business, creating additional tailwinds. The Ordinary Operating EBITDA margin of the Private segment has significantly increased to 51.6% in 2022. This has mainly to do with the lower penetration of credit checks as part of a longer subscription term, whilst also accelerating the PPA business with longer standing times for listings as well as price adjustments on the subscriptions.

The Media & Other segment revenue increased by 9.7% in 2022. This includes the ImmoScout24 Austria business, which grew strongly. In our CRM business, we observed a planned shift from FLOWFACT to Propstack, reflecting our sales approach to focus on standardized and integrated product and feature sets. The Ordinary Operating EBITDA margin of the Media & Other segment grew by 0.6 percentage points to 34.9%.

Let's turn to Page 10 to dive a bit deeper into the Professional segment. As already mentioned, with a strong core business and seller leads growth, subscription revenue increased by 10% in 2022. We managed to increase our number of customers again in Q4 by 4.3%. Professional ARPU increased 6.8% year-on-year from EUR 959 to EUR 1,025, reflecting dynamic pricing and the mix effect of new customers. In these times, our highly diversified revenue composition comes at a great advantage, with a stronger core business in the context of the current market developments.

The seller leads growth was still at 17.3%. This, in addition to the revival of paper ad demand, added momentum to the Professional segment's EBITDA growth. Hence, despite additional growth investments, the Ordinary Operating EBITDA came in at EUR 176.2 million, a 4.4% increase compared to last year. This results in a margin of 60.5%.

On Page 11, let's take a closer look at the Private segment. I already elaborated on the year-on-year increase of the private subscription revenue by 52.4% and a significant new customer additions in 2022 of 49.1%. Revenue growth and net new customer wins continued to be fueled by the hot rental market. Speaking of important milestones, the private PPA business exceeded again the EUR 10 million revenue mark in Q4, increasing by 37.9% year-on-year. If we look at the full year, we generated growth of 23.6% in the private PPA business.

As a consequence of the successful development of the TenantPlus product, we reduced the business with third-party credit checks, leading to a decrease of 8.9% of the other revenue line. The described mix shifts, amongst others, had a positive effect on the Ordinary Operating EBITDA margin of the Private segment. In absolute terms, the Ordinary Operating EBITDA grew strongly by 45.4% to EUR 62.7 million in 2022. This is mainly due to a more efficient Plus product business, the revival of the high-margin PPA business and lower expenses for credit checks. The Ordinary Operating EBITDA margin came in at 51.6%, which is 6 percentage points higher than in 2021.

Turning to Page 12. Let us go through the main ordinary operating items. Own work capitalized increased by 8% to EUR 28.7 million in 2022. The increase was mainly related to development and integration projects at Vermietet.de, FLOWFACT and ImmoScout24. This translates into a capitalization ratio of 6.4%, which is slightly lower than last year. In Q4, it was down to 6% from 6.8% in Q4 2021. Expect this trend to continue.

Personnel costs increased by 11.7%. That is below revenue growth, mainly due to the integration of Vermietet.de employees and regular increase in wages. As a percentage of revenue, we were able to reduce personnel costs from 21.2% in full year 2021 to 20.6% in full year 2022. This trend will accelerate in 2023.

Marketing costs remained stable as we continued to invest into Vermietet.de, online marketing, brand campaigns and our seller and mortgage leads businesses. Beyond that, we launched a new TV campaign in the third quarter of 2022.

One important takeaway for you is that in the light of the changing German real estate market, we will be very focused on return on invested marketing spend, which may result in mix and channel shifts going into 2023 and beyond.

The year-on-year growth in IT cost of 18.4% to EUR 21.4 million results from the integration of Vermietet.de and increased AWS costs, which have been impacted by the euro-U.S. dollar exchange rate and also of the increased number of visitors. Good for the business, but it comes with a bigger check to AWS.

Selling costs increased underproportionately to growth in Plus product revenues, mainly due to a lower amount of credit checks sold with the Plus subscriptions. Putting all together, we get to a 12.7% higher ordinary operating EBITDA of EUR 251.1 million in 2022. The resulting margin is 56.1%.

Now let's turn to Slide 13. Looking back to our Q3 2022 results, we talked about closing in on generating operating leverage. We have delivered on that statement already in Q4 2022, where we delivered EBITDA growth in excess of revenue growth and hence, expanded our margin. This is as planned and outlined at the CMD, and a testament to our ability to combine strategic long-term investments while increasing the efficiency of our operations. As we have talked about before, we are coming out of an investment phase. And operating leverage also means that you can expect CapEx to go down further over the next couple of years.

In addition, we are focused on achieving further cost efficiencies in our operations, and we are working through our administrative and G&A expenses. Putting this together, we have the right platform in place to generate meaningful further operating leverage and margin improvement at increased scale in 2023 and beyond.

Now let's turn to Page 14, where you see the items below the Ordinary Operating EBITDA. Nonoperating costs decreased EUR 1.5 million in 2022. Expenses for M&A activities and reorganization had a cost increasing effect. A decrease in share-based compensation had a cost-reducing effect. Therefore, the reported EBITDA increased at a higher rate than the Ordinary Operating EBITDA, coming out at EUR 230.6 million in 2022, 14.8% higher than in 2021.

Depreciation and amortization decreased by 33% to EUR 42.3 million due to the termination of the purchase price allocation amortization of the ImmoScout customer base. The financial result is not impacted anymore by the performance of the managed liquidity. For Q4 2022, the financial results turned positive to EUR 6.5 million. With these developments, the reported net income increased by 36.4% to EUR 123.5 million in 2022. Due to the share buybacks, the basic EPS increased by 54.3%, testament to our highly accretive capital allocation strategy. The adjusted EPS increased at 25.7%.

Turning to Page 15 and full year 2023 guidance. Based on data points we are seeing in the first 2 months of the current financial year, we confirm our full year 2023 guidance.

Given the general market uncertainty, I wanted to provide you with some additional puts and takes how we are seeing the remainder of the year. Despite the macroeconomic headwinds and uncertainty in the real estate market, we expect to navigate successfully towards our growth objectives. To give you some further context on our assumptions for the current financial year: First, we see continued demand for membership revenues and healthy developments in our agent base. Secondly, we believe that PPA remains a growth driver. Thirdly, the Private segment will continue to profit from the current market environment. And lastly, we see a continued challenging environment for mortgage and seller leads.

To be specific, into our guidance, we have baked in a certain amount of softness in our leads and transactional businesses. And as Tobi mentioned in his part, we are using the current market environment to assess how to best run those businesses going forward. If we get to a situation where it makes sense to reduce investments for improved profitability, that is a choice we prefer. Consequently, we feel very comfortable with our EBITDA outlook.

To wrap up, we are very pleased with how the company is performing and the continued positive operational and financial trajectory. We are best positioned to continue our strong growth track record going forward. We will provide with the next update in our first quarter 2023 call on May 4.

With that, let's open the line for questions. [Operator Instructions] Operator, over to you.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] The first question is from the line of Diebel [ with Scout ].

[Marcus Diebel, analyst]

I think it's Marcus Diebel here. I'm from JPMorgan. I have 2 questions. The first one is on the agents. Clearly, also impressive growth in the number of agents in the fourth quarter. Could you just elaborate a little bit more what you think -- what the results are? Kleinanzeigen, for their property business, commented on also strong agent numbers. Is it just a shift more towards the sites? Is it market share gains? I think it's just still a bit difficult for everyone to square in this market why you saw strong agent numbers. And related to this, shall we also extrapolate the kind of like good growth also into the next few quarters?

And then the second question, very simple. Could you just update us a bit more on shareholder distribution? What are your plans for '23 in particular?

[Tobias Hartmann, executive]

Marcus, this is Tobi, thank you. With regards to your first question on agents, we see a pretty good, healthy mix of all sorts of different agents. There's smaller agents that are coming back into the market that figure out they would like to work with ImmoScout only. There's medium-sized agents that come back to the market because they feel that they have more marketing power in terms of customer service that we're learning. And then there's a couple of extensions also in the wider network of franchise agents that are subscribing to the ImmoScout products. Again, with regards to the ARPU, I think it's important that you saw that we grew our ARPU numbers as well. I do believe that Adevinta shared some good numbers in agent growth but at a constant ARPU. So we are pleased with that result.

[Dirk Schmelzer, executive]

Yes. On the second question, Marcus, I presume you are looking at our capital allocation strategy. Since we have delivered the last remaining cash from the AutoScout transaction in the past year, we are now looking at also capital allocation in the year to come. And I can only reiterate what we said previously. So how do we spend our cash? We will pay a dividend of 30% to 50% of our adjusted net income. Given the good momentum in the business, you can expect that to be the at the upper end. We continue to target attractive companies that help us to grow along our strategic value drivers. And thirdly, we believe that at current financing costs and share price levels, excess cash should be spent on share buybacks, as they are price earnings accretive. And we will educate the market as soon as we have combined our plans here and combined our numbers here, and come out with news on that.

[Operator]

The next question is from the line of Giles Thorne with Jefferies.

[Giles Thorne, analyst]

My first question is back on capital allocation, and that was clear, Dirk. What would be interesting to hear is your updated thinking on the amount of leverage a business like this should carry? You've always been very clear that you'll have 0 -- you've targeted 0 leverage, but that was when you were carrying a huge cash surplus, which has now disappeared. So your latest thinking on leverage and whether you would accommodate type of leverage that we're seeing in some of your peer group companies? And then my second question was much simpler in nature. Actually, the terms and conditions price rise was a big feature of last year's growth. I'm assuming you're going to do something again this year. Confirmation of what your plans are there would be useful.

[Dirk Schmelzer, executive]

Yes, I'll start off with that. Concerning the updated thinking on leverage, yes, you're absolutely right. We are going into a phase where the business is leveraged, and we've seen a slight deleveraging from '21 to '22. However, I believe that the guidance I previously gave, which is leverage of around 0, provides enough flexibility for us as a management team to see where our financing costs are going. And on the other hand, look at leverage in a more flexible way because of the huge ability of the business to deleverage very fast. So I'm not getting nervous if we are seeing leverages of 0.7, 0.8 while we speak, And believe that we will be somewhere around 0 back at the end of the year if we're not doing share buybacks, but would also carry a leverage if we come up with a share buyback proposal in the near term.

[Tobias Hartmann, executive]

Yes. And I will take the second question. This is Tobi. With regards to Ts and Cs, please understand, we are not disclosing any details on this call. But we tried to -- in the first part of this call, we tried to explain what this is about, what we think this is about. The role of an agent has become extremely important in this market environment. So we need to really focus on providing our customers with the best possible support. So you should expect us to continue to innovate around agent support and driving more value to the agents that they can even be very successful in this market. So that's our objective, and that's the strategy we've defined and we'll continue executing against that.

[Giles Thorne, analyst]

And sorry, Dirk, if I could just push you, would you be comfortable with carrying some kind of leverage, not just for a temporary period of time, but as a permanent feature as you manage your cost of capital?

[Dirk Schmelzer, executive]

Absolutely.

[Operator]

The next question is from the line of Chris Johnen with HSBC.

[Christopher Johnen, analyst]

Coming back to the price increase, I was under the impression that agents already had there around of terms of service price increases in January. I was actually going to ask how the churn was or the feedback on the price increases. So I may be horribly wrong, but yes, I'll be curious on a bit of a churn update in January. And then another one on the M&A pipeline. I mean this is clearly a recurring theme, has been over the past couple of years. I'm just curious whether there is anything interesting that you're looking at, at the moment, without being too specific, but I just wonder about the general pipeline at this moment. And then a very, very, very quick one. Could you maybe give us the listings growth number in Q4?

[Tobias Hartmann, executive]

Chris, it's Tobi. I'll start off. With regards to the price increase and the churn update, so far, we have no signs of any changing churn trends. So there's nothing to write home about. With regards to the M&A pipeline, we've not changed the strategy here either. So we're looking for either tuck-ins or value-adding targets that become available in the market. There is nothing imminent right now that would be changing the strategy or anything. So -- but obviously, we keep an eye open for any opportunities.

And with regards to the listings growth...

[Dirk Schmelzer, executive]

We've seen an increase in listings of around 30% in the fourth quarter.

[Tobias Hartmann, executive]

Yes.

[Operator]

Next question is from the line of Pete-Veikko Kujala with Morgan Stanley.

[Pete-Veikko Kujala, analyst]

It's Pete from Morgan Stanley. So to first on marketing and selling costs. If the leads business stays soft in 2023, I think you commented this a little bit, but what should the expectation be on marketing and selling costs? That's my first question. And the second one is on private subscriptions. Can you give some color on how many, for me, today, subscribers, paying subscribers you have in Q4? And do you expect monetization for this service to be like somewhat more meaningful in 2023 than what it was for 2022?

[Dirk Schmelzer, executive]

Pete, I'll start off with the marketing spend. As you've seen from our numbers, we've been growing marketing spend 2022 versus '21 by 39%. And this was part of a larger investment program that we did to fuel our mortgage leads and retail lead engine businesses and do some investments in brand marketing.

Now for 2023, we are rather looking at a flattish to underproportionate increasing number of marketing spend. And as you outlined correctly, the bad news around the retail lead engine -- mortgage lead engine environment these days is it remains the biggest unknown for the remainder of the year. The good news, it can be steered on a daily basis with spend on marketing, performance marketing as well as on affiliate marketing. So we feel pretty confident about the control we have around our marketing costs and you shouldn't expect a too steep increase in those numbers in 2023.

On the second part of your question, which is, I believe, around the monetization of Vermietet.de. We have more than 1 million units under management. And as I said on previous calls, we are testing monetization of this platform. And what we've seen over the last 12 months is a growth of around about 60% of subscribed paying landlords. So by the end of 2022, we are at more than 1,000 landlords paying for their services. And as you can imagine, this is referring to units, an overproportionate number of landlords that typically hold more than the average of 2 to 3 units on our platform.

[Operator]

The next question is from the line of Adam Berlin with UBS.

[Adam Berlin, analyst]

I've got 2 questions, please, on the Professional segment. The first question is, do you have an estimate of how many professional customers there are still out there who don't use Scout at the moment who could become Scout customers of a sufficient size or sufficient type of business model that could become Scout customers, because you seem to keep adding them and they seem to come some way? So just do you have an estimate how big that potential pool is? That's the first question.

The second question is, if you look at your Slide 10, and you can see that in Q4, subscription revenue -- membership revenue grew 12% and agent numbers grew 4%. So there was roughly about an 8% increase in membership revenue per customer in Q4. Is that 8% increase the right number to be thinking about into 2023? Or does that go up or down given the kind of discussions you've been having with customers?

[Tobias Hartmann, executive]

Adam, with regards to the TAM for professional customers, the stats that we have is that there's more or less 30,000, give or take, professional customers out there. And so considering we have crossed the 21,000 mark, there's probably, call it, 8,000 -- a little more than 8,000 of the customers potentially. Now as you also probably know, there's a lot of not so professional customers out there. So it's not really 100% of the TAM to assume that there's another 8,500 or so that we could go after. That's why we've emphasized during the calls that we will grow our customer numbers, but very, very slowly because we've already -- have them to good market.

On second question, I'll refer to Dirk.

[Dirk Schmelzer, executive]

Yes, Adam, your rough thumb calculation might be right if you would assume that the new customers come in at the average ARPU of EUR 1,000. However, as Tobi was elaborating, most of the new customers that are coming in are long-tail real estate agents. So smaller real estate agents that come in at a much lower ARPU than the average of our customer base. Hence, the membership revenue growth that you are seeing is beyond the 8.8% I think you were mentioning, and you can consider that number to be double digit into 2023 going forward.

[Adam Berlin, analyst]

So just to clarify the answer to the first question. Did you say the 30,000 number includes the nonprofessional agents, or the nonprofessional agents are incremental to the 30,000?

[Tobias Hartmann, executive]

No, no. These are the professional agents, the total number. But even with the Professional segment, there's more sophisticated ones, less sophisticated ones.

[Dirk Schmelzer, executive]

There's no big hurdles in Germany to become a real estate agent, and we referred to them previously as kitchen agents. Maybe you'll recall that term.

[Operator]

The next question is from the line of Joseph Barnet-Lamb with Credit Suisse.

[Joseph Barnet-Lamb, analyst]

So two for me. The seller leads and mortgages, clearly, it's been a tough operating environment in 4Q. You spoke about building in some softness into your guidance. Within your guidance, that softness, does that imply sequential revenue declines from 4Q levels? Or do you expect improvements? And secondly, the margin in Private spiked materially in 4Q. Dirk, can you touch on some of the dynamics on a full year basis. Can you give a little bit more color on 4Q? Were there any one-offs or phasing that aided that margin number?

[Dirk Schmelzer, executive]

The last question is the more easier one. So no, there were no one-off effects in the fourth quarter in the Private segment that we've seen. So the margin development in that part of the business is and remains quite healthy.

On the first one, I can only reiterate what I said to -- answered on previous questions here. Yes, we've baked in a certain softness of that business in first, second quarter of this year. And we believe that this will continue. And based on the business model we set up for Scout, ImmoScout24 specifically, we believe that we can migrate that and manage that through 2023 with additional growth we are seeing on the Professional side, we're seeing on the PPA side, and last but not least, we're also seeing on the Private side, because the product that we are offering here for tenants is spot on in a market environment that we're seeing in Germany right now where a lot of people are asking for rental objects and demand for sale objects has gone down.

[Operator]

The next question is from the line of Nizla Naizer with Deutsche Bank.

[Fathima-Nizla Naizer, analyst]

I have two as well. The first is on the Private customer numbers. It's over 304,000, as you mentioned. Is there a risk that if Germany goes back to being a seller's market that you could see higher churn? Or what are you doing to sort of keep these customers on beyond just finding a rental property? The second question is on the magnitude of growth investments in 2022. Could you remind us again, Dirk, as to how much you spent incrementally on these growth investments? And is it fair to understand that this would not recur in 2023?

[Tobias Hartmann, executive]

On your first question, with regards to a potential risk, we don't think it is a risk because we are continuously pivoting around extending our product into the living phase. And in Germany, as you know, everything is complicated. And also, once you've successfully landed an apartment, another complexity starts. And again, we're -- this is the time of the year where the expense and the reimbursement sheets come out for energy costs and so forth. We do expect that this will be a very dominating issue over the next 2 to 3 years in Germany, and there is a bunch of really useful product launches that we've planned to extend into that membership. So we don't see that there is a risk of churn.

[Dirk Schmelzer, executive]

Yes. In technical terms, Nita, I would think that the revenues we are currently seeing a double-digit growth with private tenants would then rather shift to private buyers with our BuyerPlus product. We're just coming out of a product demo that we've seen here. And we're all pretty thrilled about what we are building up here from a homeowner portal that allows you to manage your whole portfolio of real estate to a buyer portal that allows you to get more with ready basically and look for your dream home. And these are the products we have in our portfolio not only when the market turns, but when customers demand for that. So I'm pretty confident that also in the seller's market, our private subscription revenues will continue to grow.

On the magnitude of the marketing spend in 2022, you're absolutely right. We guided in 2021 an additional around about EUR 20 million of investment into marketing and selling costs. And what we guided at that point in time was that it -- as I said to a previous question, I think it was Adam pointing to that, as I said earlier, we believe that this will now normalize. As I said, marketing spend compared to revenue growth will not grow at the same pace, but underproportionately. And hence, the operating leverage in the business will continue in Q1 and Q2 and the following quarters in 2023.

[Operator]

The next question is from the line of Andrew Ross with Barclays.

[Andrew Ross, analyst]

I've got two more. The first one is on TenantPlus and the pace at which that has scaled through 2022. It looks to me like it slowed a little bit in the second half sequentially versus a very high growth in the first half. So just talk a bit about that and how we should think about that product scaling further into '23. Or asking the question another way, about 320,000 or so subscribers at the end of '22, what do you think that could be at the end of '23? And then my second question is about the pricing activity more broadly amongst your competition. You've already touched on eBay Kleinanzeigen having kind of flat ARPU. But in terms of the other player in the market, are they also putting prices up and is there kind of general inflationary environment for agents or not?

[Dirk Schmelzer, executive]

Let me start off and maybe then Tobi can jump in with the second part of your question. And this is around the pricing activity of our competitors. We believe that what we are seeing from eBay and also from Immonet, Immowelt, they are also piggybacking on our price increases following a usual #2 strategy that is following on price increases that the #1 in the market is taking. So we believe they are also taking advantage of that while we speak.

And on the second question, you're absolutely right. We saw that in the first quarter, we had accelerated our overall growth in the TenantPlus business, specifically. And we have seen a softening, as I might say that, when it comes to 30% growth, but we have seen a softening of that growth mainly due to the fact that in the second half of the year, we saw a lot of cancellations on the BuyerPlus product, which obviously, given the market environment in Germany, a lot of potential buyers have been frustrated and have given up searching the real estate these days. And that's the reason why you've seen a slightly lower growth in absolute consumer subscription numbers in the second half.

[Andrew Ross, analyst]

And how to think about that into '23 kind of subscription line?

[Dirk Schmelzer, executive]

I wouldn't guide on specific numbers here. I would think that at least the trends we are seeing in the first 2 months of this year, the business is continuing very healthy. We are the sweet spot of the current market environment with our product and pricing plans on that. And I would leave it there.

[Operator]

The next question is from the line of Will Packer, BNP.

[William Packer, analyst]

A couple from me, please. I just wanted to come back on the cyclical dimension. So just -- I want to talk a little bit about the timing of the slowdown in transactions. So if we look at the mortgage approval data, it initially slowed in Q3 and then slowed further in Q4 last year. So I imagine that the agents are beginning to feel the pain of the slowdown, but perhaps there's more to come. Is that a fair characterization? And then to what -- and then how would that filter through to your business if we do have a more difficult deterioration? Is the primary means via the agent churn number? Is that the one for us to watch out for?

And then the second question was around the ARPU in the Professional segment. It slowed in Q4. Can you just remind us what factors are behind the slowdown? Is it as simple as the OTP revenues were a bit weaker and so therefore, brought down the average? Or any further color there would be helpful.

[Dirk Schmelzer, executive]

Especially with the ARPU question, you've probably seen that the overall membership revenue growth was 12% in quarter 4. And that reflects also the ARPU increase we saw on the membership side. And you're absolutely right, the weakness was mainly due to the fact that we sold less on top products and lead engine products for real estate agents. So the softness in the realtor lead engine, mortgage lead engine product play to that.

On the cyclical dimension of the business, I think you're pointing to the right direction. Yes, the agents are seeing more pain in the context of difficulty to sell real estate, right? And that's why they continue to use our platform. And your question was, do we see that weakness in agent churn? I think that's counterintuitive. We see that in agent growth because agents meet our platform these days in order to sell the real estate that they have contracted with potential house sellers, and that's why we are not seeing that at the moment. And on the contrary, I would argue that as soon as the market is getting a better visibility on the development of mortgage rates and development of house prices, the volatility comes out of the market, agents will continue to contract and transact, and that might come faster than we think.

[Tobias Hartmann, executive]

Yes. And Will, let me just add, there's another dimension here which is, we believe, specific to the German market. A lot of people who had an intent to buy property because, as you know, the property penetration rate is very low in Germany, it's about 50% only, now diverted to rental because they were uncertain about the market development. Now having said that, they do have the money. They do want to buy. They're just waiting to get a further data point and then finally say, okay, here we go, now I can buy something. Now the problem is that some of the buyers and the homeowners still had their own old price expectations in their mind. So they were not willing to transact. But the longer it takes, there will be a segment of homeowners that will say, absolutely now I have to and I want to sell, which then creates a new momentum because there's money on the other side. It's just a new equilibrium of the market that needs to be met.

And then let's not forget about the German housing situation. As of 2022, there's 700,000 units in the real estate market in Germany that are needed on top. That number is projected to be at 400,000 each year 2023 through 2025 of new housing units that should be built which, as of now, will not be built because the government and the legal ramification of everything is too complex. So those fundamentals are intact, and it's just about getting more data points to get the demand and supply equilibrium going again.

[Operator]

The next question is from the line of Marius Fuhrberg with Warburg Research.

[Marius Fuhrberg, analyst]

Another question on the breakdown of your growth expectations for 2023, especially with regards to the professional business. How much of that do you account for price increases? And also for rate cut upgrades? Because, yes, many of the -- before already mentioned it, the impact of the profits -- on the profits of the engines will become visible presumably over the next months, and therefore, it's a question of willingness and affordability for price increases and yes, and with rate card upgrades.

The other question is a little bit more in detail. Do you see that agents move from the acquisition package back down to the image addition as they, at least, temporarily do not see the use of the acquisition package? Or do the agents remain in their booked package for now?

[Tobias Hartmann, executive]

Marius, it's Tobi, thanks. With regard to the first question, we've provided guidance, I think as much as we can at this point. So we're not disclosing any other rate card details or pricing details also for competitive reasons. But we feel pretty good about the guidance we just gave.

On number two, we don't see agents moving back because that would also deteriorate and actually bring down our ARPU, which is not the case. Now having said that, yes, you should count on us in launching new features that are cleared and tied around the existing membership additions to make it clear that an acquisition addition is maybe not so much en vogue anymore as opposed to something else what agents need during these times. And that's absolutely something that we've planned for.

[Operator]

Ladies and gentlemen, in the interest of time, we have to stop the Q&A session here, and I hand back to Filip Lindvall.

[Filip Lindvall, executive]

Well, thank you all for joining. On behalf of Scout24, I would like to thank you. And if you have any follow-up questions, please feel free to follow up with the IR team. Thank you now, and bye-bye.

[Operator]

Ladies and gentlemen, the conference has now concluded, and you may disconnect your telephone. Thank you for joining, and have a pleasant day. Goodbye.