Yeah, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the webcast results Q2 2023 of Hypoport SE. At our customer's request, this conference will be recorded. As a reminder, all participants will be in a listen-only mode. After the presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. I now hand you over to Ronald Slabke, who will lead you through this conference. Please go ahead. Yeah, welcome from my side as well to the Q2, to the presentation of the Q2 numbers of 2023. As you are aware, we are digitalizing three industries: the credit, real estate, and insurance here in Germany. Our roots are the German mortgage business, and with the current circumstances, we are in a special market environment. We were talking about this a lot, but be aware, there are other business models. I will talk about the market development there when I present the numbers of these businesses. But let's start to understand what's happening in general. When you look at our group, four segments, the largest one is credit industry. This is core in the mortgage business. Private clients as well are mortgage-linked. Insurance industry is something else, pretty stable market environment. Real estate is growing, it's very linked to the housing market, and this is to mortgages. Overall, our group is growing. All business models are gaining market share in their markets, the markets are pretty different right now. When we look on the numbers of the different units, you can see that credit is performing pretty well in the second quarter, +2% in revenue. Private client, together with the mortgage market, lost some revenue. Real estate was a negative surprise this quarter. We'll talk about this in more details. Insurance, here we see a seasonal effect, overall, it performed pretty well in the second quarter. In total, it mean for the group a decline in revenue, more or less a stable gross profit, but we lost EUR 2 million in gross profit, and this you see in our profitability level. We kept our cost base thin, and we managed our cost base pretty well, but the special circumstances led to a decline in profitability. There is a negative EBIT of EUR 2.5 million, unfortunately, after a solid black number in the first quarter. How it happened, we will talk about. Okay, let's start with our the core topic for Hypoport, the mortgage market and what's going on there. In general, this is already good news. We see a recovery of the underlying market dynamics. Everyone, everything indicates that we saw the bottom in the fourth quarter last year, and the recovery of, of the first, first quarter continues, if not something special would have happened. Long-term trends first. The German population is growing. In the last 10 years, it was growing from 80 million to 84 million. This year we see already a net migration again of a couple of hundred thousand people, roughly 200,000 in the first half of the year. At the end of the year, we may end up again with close to 500,000 net migration and then increased population again. This increases demand for housing, and thanks to German housing construction regulations, we don't build enough. We were up building 300,000 units per year from a depressing 150,000 units 10 years ago. Right now, everything shows down again, the new construction volume is declining, and it's predictable for the next two years already that we will see a declining in finished housing finished constructions here in Germany. The opposite happens to the interest of the people. 74% of the whole population, of all households, would prefer to be property owner. This compared to just 42%, which owns actually their property. There is a 30% uplift between current situation and let's call it wishful thinking of the population. The reason for this is as well linked to the renting market. We see that the regulation of the last 10 years, the interest change and the current direction of regulation squeezes the renting market, and there is more or less no supply to the renting market anymore. Even an active migration from renting to homeownership, we currently see as an as a starting effect. Rents increased sharply in the last two years by 90% as an average in the metropolitan areas, even more. In Munich or Berlin, we see double-digit rent raises within 12 months now because of lack of supply, and this squeezed the market. The overall supply side is down by 30%, but it wasn't already a lot of supply there in 2020. You can really be sure it's more or less impossible for an average or even high income household to find an appropriate renting apartment for their needs. On the other side, to acquire homeownership, we have a stable environment recently. Since September last year, the interest rates for a 10-year fixed mortgage is stable around 3% to 4%, and since January this year, real estate prices in German average is stable. In general, you know, the current situation should lead to more and more people acquiring homeownership because of the general environment. It doesn't happen, and we will come to this why. Okay, first of all, the 74% interest in home ownership is still underrepresentation, because 12% say they didn't decide. Only 40% of Germans say renting is my long-term choice, and they, they do this because they are not aware of the risk of rent staying in the current market environment. The risk of increasing rents is high, the, the risk of losing your home because of privatization is high, and if you signed a new contract in the last years, the probability that you have an indexed rent and with the current inflation outlook, the fast growth of your current rent is high as well. You can say, if you want to have a nice home in Germany in the next five to 10 years, you need to acquire it. You will not be able to rent it anymore. This was a great time in the past, in the 2010s, that you could rent nice places. In the future, you can only rent if it's fine to you, that you just sleep there. That is just a roof, and you can sleep there. If you want a nice home, you will have to buy it, because nobody is going to rent you this anymore because it's just not. It doesn't make sense from a financial perspective for the landlord because of the regulation. In general, Germans buy because of trigger event. The typical trigger event is the expectation of children or actually the birth of children, followed by things like a divorce, change of your job in a completely different metropolitan area, but these are already minor events. Core event are children and when you look on the current development and what's going on in the market, it's relevant to notice that the birth rate is on a higher level than 10 years ago, stable in Germany. Thanks to the net migration and the migration of especially young people to Germany, we see more births in Germany, and with this, more trigger events for families to consider buying something. What is relevant for this market as well is that the boomer generation, so highly skilled workers, today 60+, are systematically leaving the workforce market and enabling additional migration, but as well, salary increases for the younger generation. We have a pretty low unemployment rate, and especially under skilled workers, it's challenging to be unemployed in Germany and even to fear to get unemployed because of a pretty stable economy and a very attractive labor market. You have a trigger event, you have a stable income, you see that the renting market is closed so that there's no supply side on the renting market anymore, and for the existing ones, the quality goes down, and the prices goes up. Your choice is to consider buying, especially when you're feeling more and more secure. Last year we had a situation where a lot of crises occurred parallel, the Russian aggression against Ukraine, the problems with the energy prices, a sharp increase there. Inflation is coming up, interest rates going up, there was a high level of uncertainty for families. This changed now, they, they, there's more and more of them start to consider and checking out what they actually are able to afford, and this is something which is normalizing right now. With the increasing income level, with the increasing rent as a such, what is it? Alternative in, in, in paying for housing, it gets more and more attractive to buy in an stable price market with stable interest rates, even when it's got more expensive than it was a couple of years ago. Talking about affordability in the German housing market, the behind us lays, lays a period of extremely high affordability. Housing in Germany was cheap. It was for a long time, cheap from the price tag for properties, and it was additionally cheap from the mortgage rates. We saw mortgage rates of just 1% and still pretty normal price tags around 2015, 2016. After this, the prices start to rise, and for now, or roughly 1.5 years ago, we saw a sharp jump in interest rates to the current level of 3% to 4%, and with this, affordability changed dramatically in the market. You see the red bar here. What is important to notice and what just has to sink in with everyone in this market, that the current level of affordability is not super artificial or impossible to achieve anymore. We had the same level 20 years ago. It was just super attractive in the time in between, and it gets more attractive every month. Yeah, let's say housing was always cheap in Germany. Not always, as you see in the '80s and '90s, it wasn't so cheap, but from the feeling of the current generation, it was super cheap earlier. The truth is, we had an artificially low interest rate environment, and in this time, who didn't make the decision to acquire something made a mistake. Pretty simple. Today, it's again, a necessary, a complex decision, moving out of your renting space, which is too small for your family, and accept that the new space you acquire is has more rooms, but it's not super large like it would have been two or three years ago. It's not as central as it could have been two or three years ago, but it houses your whole family, every child has a room, and you don't have a huge stress because you live in an apartment that just doesn't fit the number of people in the household anymore. This adaption, adaption, is happening, yeah, but every trigger event, or every month, roughly 50,000, just trigger event from the birth side adds on another 50,000 from other events, and this, this frozen market environment, which we saw, especially in the fourth quarter, now slowly recovering in first and second quarter, there is still a huge backlog of families, which are in this phase of adjusting their wishes to their affordability, and it is just, it is just happening. What came in between. In the second quarter, to see a stronger recovery already was an very heated up discussions in the political, political environment about a new law restricting the heating with gas and oil in Germany and forcing people to acquire heat pumps. Very, let's say, a very tragic way to communicate the new law. A lot of changes in the short period about what is required by whom, for what property, and how much subsidies actually the government wants to spend on motivating people. The whole second quarter, we had this discussion, it was, let's say, articles about this topic had the highest click rate here in Germany on all news sites, and we saw a really divided population on this. The law didn't get effective. It was postponed after the summer. Just, it was already quite disarmed from its strength, and when it will get effective, it will have a period of five years until it really hits the market. Really unnecessary uncertainty for the decision maker in this market here, with an unnecessary downturn of the overall market for building or reconstructing houses here. This, this delayed the recovery of the market, and we lost minimum this second quarter. Currently in the, in the, in the summertime, we see a pretty solid market environment, so not the usual holiday season with a sharp drop in volume. For now, let's say maybe people recover already from all the stress and all this uncertainty and do their decisions because they, they understood that the law will not be as tough as it sounded in the beginning. Then we are back to this, what in the other macroeconomic key components happens. You see the, the interest rate adjustment on the current level, no hope that we will see soon an, a sharp decline again. This we found the new normal, this our 3% to 4%. We see that properties come to the market, and we compare this with a, a extremely low level, 2020, 2021, the, let's say everything what came to the market was fast sold. From there, we are up 50%, roughly. This is still not that there is a lot available, but if you search long enough, you will find something that fits your need. It's good that this recovered, and, and it's necessary for an increasing transaction volume in this market, that there are properties for sale, and they are there. Yeah, prices, more or less stable since the beginning of this year, after a 10% drop in the autumn and early, early winter last year. There is a subtle level of normalization, but sellers are not going to reduce their ask prices a lot anymore because they see that the decrease for the buyer side is huge, that there's nothing which comes to the market. The new construction is slowing down, migration is high, the seller side can just wait, and they are sitting on a huge unrealized profits, which they can just realize as well in a half a year or a year, in the moment when someone comes who really wants to buy this, because, yeah, for every property, you just need one to buy it. Yeah, on the renting side, as I said, there is no relief. If you are triggered and need a new apartment, the amount of properties there declined with sharp increase in rent. Okay, how about the different segments perform in this market environment? We start with the credit platform. In the center there, the Europace system. In the center of the Europace system, the mortgage production. You are aware of this, I will talk as well about personal loan and corporate finance in a moment, and say something about this market when I talk about the products on the platform. Okay, mortgage business of Europace, the credit side, -3%, more or less stable to the last year, last quarter, sorry. The new Sparkonto is a savings product for long-term interest rate savings, are down 9% quarter-over-quarter. It just doesn't make so much sense anymore in the current interest environment to secure your. This, This, this interest rate level with additional savings plans for long term. Just to give you a feeling, this Bundesbank reported volume of +1% and Europace -3% looks like we did actually have the market share gain this quarter. I doubt this. Yeah, whomever we talk to in any of the sales segments of Europace tells us that we are outperforming the rest. We see this in the mortgage broker market, which has the major share here. We see that the core competitor, the largest German mortgage broker, struggles with this environment, is not outperforming us. Yeah, from all what we know, and the last number they reported was, unfortunately, last year, they, they were declining more than we did, and we don't see that this dynamic changed. Within the sector of the independent brokers and the, let's say, underserved market is gray area, we see that there is certain path to scaling, to realize buying synergy by teaming up, merging or giving up. That there is, we, we, we see that trend to Europace, so we don't feel any loss in volume to old processes or other, other options. What we see is a positive turn to Europace in this stress environment on the broker side. In the cooperative banking and savings banks world, the branch networks face a tough challenge to acquire new clients, especially because a lot of clients are early online, have touchpoint with brokers there, so end up in this first segment of our platform. While bank branches profited from faster execution in the past on more trust, now for consumers, the best rate and comparing the best rate and doing this online got more important. They struggle, and with our +5% in the cooperative banking sector and +2% in the savings bank sector, we are the growth in the sectors and compensating part of their losses, which they see in new business volume. We are absolutely certain in these sectors, we are as in the broker sector, we are gaining market share. The last sector, private banks, let's say that they most of them don't disclose their quarterly volume by now. We can't be certain if there is someone outgrowing us right now. But the ones who are on the platform, who are in talks and negotiations with us about pricing models or migration, indicates us that we are performing better than themselves. Good news for us as well, organic growth, you can call it. Yeah, the Deutsche Bank, finally, after years of negotiation, and more than 1.5 years of a project, a huge IT project, with a lot of additional interfaces, harmonized their mortgage business, based on Europace technology, and started on first of July with migration of the Deutsche Bank branch network, after all other sales channels were already operating on Europace. This, so our market share in the private commercial bank segment is going to grow thanks to the addition of Deutsche Bank branches. So looking forward, Commerzbank needs to make a decision at some point, and UniCredit needs to make a decision at one point. This is the major shares of the rest. All is said, so we see positive traction in all four segments, and we see an outperformance in the second quarter of the rest of the market. How can it be that Bundesbank is reporting a different perspective? Yeah, the only explanation that we found by now is that Bundesbank includes in their numbers of new business origination as well, it paid out the payment of so-called Bausparverträge. This saving products, where you secure long-term interest rates, which were closed seven to 10 years ago, and which are now paid out to the consumer because they are, let's say this, they are available, they are included in the new business models. German Bausparkassen together in are a high double-digit creditor. They, they represent something around EUR 50 billion in mortgage volume per year. On such a seamless quarter, in the current market environment, where the whole market is only EUR 40 million, suddenly, the EUR 5 million to EUR 10 million per quarter of the Bausparkassen is relevant to the market changes. Saying this, we think that in this current market environment, people use their old contracts and use this money for modernization or paying back of mortgages. This is not new generated mortgage volume, which is in the market right now. With this, let's say it's the best explanation that we have why Bundesbank numbers are. Let's say, it doesn't show that we are gaining traction in all segments. Next area of product: personal loans. Minus 2% quarter to quarter. Usually, the first quarter is seasonally stronger in personal loans. There are no monthly numbers for this market, we expect that more or less, we are well-positioned right now in this market. Our offering is third-party personal loan aggregation, especially for banks, which have their own product, but their own product not always suits their client demand from a risk or price perspective. Using us, they are able to fulfill needs of clients, which they can't serve by themselves. This is a growing market, especially in an environment where everyone is rethinking its position. With this, we could grow in the last five years, and the current dynamic in private banks, in cooperative banks, in savings banks, shows us that, that we are on a growth track and keep, keep growing. Especially positive, our joint venture with TeamBank and the Cooperative Banking Sector, Genoflex, after a long period of piloting it last year, we are now in a field rollout and signing up and teaching and training dozens of cooperative banks and bringing them on the system so that they are able to not just provide TeamBank loans, but as well, third-party loans to fulfill the needs of their clients. Last product segment, the corporate business world here in Germany. In general, you can say, since last year, the sentiment in this area is as well weak. German Mittelstand faces a lot of challenges. We had the skyrocketing energy prices, we had disrupted value chains or delivery chains. We see an in a certain way, a credit crunch or sharp rises in short-term credit rates by ECB, plus banks who hesitate to provide new loans. For, for, for corporates, this altogether is a challenging environment for an advisory broker service like REM CAPITAL and FUNDINGPORT as a digital version of it. We, yeah. The good news is, it our sales force is well connected to this German Mittelstand. Especially because of the connection to the subsidized loan and subsidy programs of, of the government, which REM CAPITAL is, is advising on, there is always a talking point with the Mittelstand. If they plan to do something and there are a lot of challenges where they would have to invest money, they are talking with us. The new, new project volume was up in the second quarter, as you see in the chart, to EUR 500 million. This is already a good recovery from the weak first quarter and the weak fourth quarter last year. The problem is that, especially on the subsidy side, the current government, the current German government still didn't decide on valid solutions for German industry. That's, it's. They discussed multiple options and how to enable the transformation in the energy sector and the heating sector, and how to support the German industry in the current tough situation. They didn't come up with a program for this. We enable our clients to be well prepared, and as soon as government funding is for certain programs is there, we will be able to fast act. Because of this, we expect recovery, a recovery in the second half of 2023. Just the government has to act up until then to realize all these projects which we are preparing here right now. For now, Capital had a weaker quarter two. It's not unusual that we have a seasonal business here, and typically, the projects are finished in the fourth quarter of the year. All this said about mortgages, personal loans, and corporate loans, the segment overall performed pretty well, given the circumstances. Up in revenue, even slightly stronger in gross profit and the positive EBIT contribution to the group. This all before some additional price changes, especially on the Europace system for the mortgage world. Broker mortgages got roughly 20% more expensive in our fee model, starting on first of July, with this, we will see additional revenue growth, even if there is a stable transaction volume side. Be aware that in this EUR 4.3 million EBIT contribution, there is still a lot of investment ongoing. In the whole credit segment, we did not shut down any major project during our restructuring end of the last year. We keep investing here because we see that the current market environment is a huge chance and not a long-term issue for us and for you in the end. Okay, next segment, private client. This will be faster as usual. The Dr. Klein Franchise Network, 200 franchisees, lots of branches. We generate online leads of consumers who are interested in the mortgage advice. The franchisee is advising them with their people and the broker mortgages within the Europace system. Dr. Klein had a small decline in transaction volume by roughly 9%. Because we don't see any reason why Dr. Klein should underperform the market right now, we are pretty certain that Europace, with a 3% decline, was gaining massive market share. Because, Dr. Klein performed pretty well as well in the second quarter. The consumers tend to search for mortgage products online, for mortgage advice online because they, let's say, the high cost and the low affordability right now leads them to mortgage brokers online. Dr. Klein is very, very positioned and outperforming the only real competitor here in the market, which is an ING subsidiary. With this in mind, that even Dr. Klein saw a substantial decline, you understand better why we are confident that your business is gaining market share in reality. Yes, a, a, a small negative notice here, minus 4% on the side of loan advisors in our franchise network. Yeah, still, franchisees feel the pressure that let's say the amount of leads is increasing, but the people don't decide fast, so this really costly to and take them long to advise them, and this is putting a lot of pressure on their P&L. They are still laying off weaker advisors and keep just the best advisors let's say in the success rate of converting this online lead business. They, they, they are optimizing themselves, which is, which is, again, good and shows the stronghold of this business model. On the other side, when markets recover, it will take us some time, or will take the franchisees some time to have enough advisors ready for the increasing number of loan applications. This said, Dr. Klein had a slightly weaker number for the second quarter, but still stayed profitable, and from all what we know from the market, it's the only larger mortgage advice organization out there right now, which is profitable in this market environment. You see really the strong efficiency in the franchise system, where everyone is able to optimize on its own and all together, performing them pretty well. Let's come to the real estate platform. As you are aware of, we are serving two-thirds of the markets. The homeowner market with a sales platform and the property valuation platform, and the social housing companies, which provide roughly one-sixth of all housing, especially in the lower end of the market, with a financing platform and a property management platform here. Both markets changed in second quarter, or, or in both segments, we had changes in the second quarter, which were in a certain way, surprising and affected our short- and medium-term outlook here. Let's say, let me start with the ones who stayed or performed pretty well. Yeah, the sales platform of FIO saw an increase in transaction volume of 5%. These are especially mortgage real estate agents linked to banks, which started to see a growth in their volume again, which is good. It still, still had a decline in Q1, where we saw them losing market share. I'm not sure if they gained market share, but let's say they even they keep growing with our assistance in the digital world. Let's say they found their bottom in the first quarter, slightly later than everyone else, but it's going up. This is good for FIO, because if they have solutions to increase their market share and their revenue share, they need healthy clients as well. Good that they managed to turn this around. Something you can't see still in numbers, but it's getting more and more important, is a pretty successful development in the property management platform area. Here we provide an ERP system for housing associations, especially in the social housing environment. We saw in the both quarters, and especially in the second quarter, a pretty good success rate in signing new, larger housing associations up for our platform. They are up for migration. This takes a couple of quarters. Usually, they start at the full year, most of them will start on first of January next year. With this, the payment starts. Yeah, it's, it's not relevant for the current numbers, but the sales success here makes it a more and more valid investment case, where for a long time, we invested money, and there we see an upcoming opportunity. Yeah. Yeah, I, I, I told you already, yeah, yeah, we had unexpected developments in this segment. The first one is the valuation platform. First of all, after a couple of quarters, the declining numbers of new mortgages comes here, and we have a sharp decline in numbers of new appraisals that need to be done for banks. In the same moment, the regulator changed, let's say, a major product decision in the market, how you have to do the appraisal. They increased the threshold for a lean process from EUR 400,000 to EUR 600,000. With the declining prices and the declining numbers, this massively changed the number of products, of appraisals done above EUR 600,000, while it stabilized or even increased the number of appraisals below this benchmark, and now below EUR 600,000. While in one product area, we, we are lacking appraisals to be done, so in above EUR 600,000, in the other one, we can't keep track with the Service Level Agreement that we have because of this. We it's a mess, and this allocation of resources, and something which heavily burned money in the second quarter because of this mismatch. Yeah, yeah, what can I say? We are working on this. Second time that the regulator didn't help us here. To be fair, we, we could have been better prepared as an organization as well. We are not good in handling these changes in the last already 18 months here, and this is. Let's say, it's sad to see unnecessary losses here in a period where we turn around every dime in, in every other business a lot. Up for restructuring, again, we see potential on the sales side, activating our strong relations to banks. We see a lot of potential in optimizing the match of resources to products, and we just need to take our people with us on the way here. This is a challenge as well. Okay, third product area, financing of social housing here in Germany. Another decline from the already weak numbers of the first quarter, we are down to EUR 0.1 billion per quarter. Our usual run rate is EUR 0.5 billion, you see how weak this product segment is here right now. Yeah, core reasons as well, the intensive discussion about the German energy efficiency of buildings and how certain buildings should be heated. For this industry, very important, who's going to pay for it and the changes? How much are they allowed to increase the rent? How much subsidies are provided? In this whole discussion in the second quarter, this industry stopped executing any project in optimizing building efficiency because there was so much uncertainty about what is allowed, what, what they need to do, who's going to pay for it, that they simply stopped acting. The volume, even compared to an already weak first quarter, declined further. We are pretty certain that we saw the bottom here now. We see that the industry is aware of the huge responsibility it has to increase the energy efficiency and get to net neutral until 2024, sorry, 2045. The estimated cost for this industry alone is EUR 500 billion, and they are not rich in capital, and they can't fund different than borrowing money from lenders. With this in mind, there's a lot of mortgages to be protected, and we keep investing here in our sales force. We are digitalizing the process within the housing associations, how they actually plan their future financing with a portfolio management solution, and we develop and roll out marketplace for their mortgage business with the lenders. This all happens parallel, more or less, from your side, and this unit is going to recover short term, and long term has a attractive outlook. For the second quarter, the drop in profits from this unit and the losses in valuation and the heavy investments in the property management platform makes this our worst quarter for a long time in for this segment. We are actively monitoring here right now what we can do to get out of this pretty negative results of the second quarter. We have to climb up here again from a pretty negative performance and do better in the next quarters. Last platform, insurance. Finally, not so much about housing or credit. The insurance market is stable here in Germany. Everything is pretty fixed, which is like a lead us to struggle to bring this industry to some dynamic in the migration path. We changed our strategy multiple times and ended up with three segments in the insurance industry. In each of the segments, we control and marketplace, the digital integrating platform solution, and add additional services around this to enable partners to interact with our platform. In all three product areas, we saw a good level of success in the second quarter. In private insurance, we saw in three months increase in migration, migrated volume by 4%, which is an increase in speed compared to the last quarter. When you see that we heavily restructured this units here in the end of 2022, this is a pretty positive surprise that migration path accelerated slightly. Let's see how this turns out in the next quarters. If our clients finally execute the projects faster with us, would be great because there are still a lot of migration needed when you see that just close to half of all volume, which is in our systems already, is migrated to the centralized platform. Besides this, the validation rate is something to look at. This is the other side to the insurer. 30% of this migrated volume is already linked to an specific insurance contract on the insurer side. We are able to have the a digitalized flow of data between insurer and platform, and insurer and sales qualification, so that everyone profits from the added value of an of a platform and with all the services that we provide. This is stable right now with 30%, as well as area of intensive investment in the last years. Still, we are keeping to build interfaces and standardize their communication between us and the insurance, insurers. The more volume we have, the more attractive this kind of projects gets for the insurers. Vice versa, it the platform gets more attractive for the sales side because there is more automated data exchange with insurers when this validation ratio goes up. Second product area is industrial insurances, where we are in the development process of an tender platform for non-standardized industrial insurance policies here in Germany. We work together with all major brokers in this segment, and they are all pretty keen on our development here on the system that we are developing and take part in this process. Will be a very interesting second half of this year if this interest is materializing and we see transactions on the soon-to-be-launched corify platform. If this is happening, then this is a great success and a great opportunity because it's a EUR 30 billion market in premiums, and the efficiency in this market is low. The efficiency gain that we provide with this transaction, with this with this platform, transaction-based revenue model for us is it's huge. Yeah, fingers crossed that the interest is converting to monetization in the second half of this year. Last segment, pension market, especially in combination with employers, as well as EUR 20 billion segment of the total German insurance market, and something where we are growing double digits on a quarterly basis. Pretty successful in the last quarters. We have more and more relevant partners migrating their portfolio to our platform from the industry side. Lastly, groups of corporates, which just use the platform to digitalize their pension database, let's say, the contractual database of their pensions of their employees. As well, more and more brokers who join our platform, using our platform as their digital backbone. Still in this week, we will announce another large and important German player in this market to launch on ePension. This contraction will keep going forward, and this is a very nice success for this unit. All in all, with all this incremental gains here in the second quarter, the insurance segment for the first time showed a positive EBIT, and is well on track to break even this year. This is what they provided in the second quarter, and this is a congratulation to all the to all our employees here. They, they do a good job right now, and they help, let's say, to stabilize in general, the group. This is what they are doing, because they are doing something outside of mortgages. Total numbers. You're aware of this already, especially because of the declining volumes in valuations and financing of social housing, we saw a decline in our total revenue. We lost profitability because of the, the trouble in this unit. The good news is our core product lines, the core markets, are recovering. On this current level, we are operating still pretty, with pretty solid numbers and keep investing. On a long-term perspective, this is a period of growth in quality, in market share, in the declined market volume, and in importance in these different markets, something that we are working on to materialize. As I indicated already, price changes is one option to materialize this. We are in a constant process of renegotiating our pricing components now with our partners in this market environment. Besides the revenue side, we have a strong grip on our cost side. We reduced our cost base from EUR 60 million in Q3 to EUR 50 million in Q1. It stayed more or less stable in the second quarter. There's some inflation pressure, which we have to struggle with. On the other side, we always still find some areas where we are able to realize savings. For instance, reduce the office space that we have by subletting so that we optimize the cash flow for us. We keep investing in all major platforms and areas where we see positive traction. If we don't see positive traction anymore, then we will pull the plug of certain projects. For now, we see the opportunity to drive with them this market forward in the next couple of years. Talking about this market in the next couple of years, I'm sure you're already aware of this. German housing market, especially the private mortgage market, is defined by trigger events. People keep getting children, people get triggered. Since summer last year, you can say more and more people are in a distressed situation where their current rented apartment doesn't fit their family needs anymore, and they consider more and more to buy, plus they have to adjust to the current situation. They will do this. They will do this in the next quarter. We are absolutely certain that the transaction market for the existing household stock in apartment and homes will recover in volume. With this, it will bring the mortgage volume up to a pre-crisis level. We see right now that the new construction is still down, and we don't see any recovery there. We are roughly at just 25% of the new building permits granted to new homeowners than we have been two years ago. This would lead to a sharp drop in new house con- housing construction here in Germany. More than 10 years ago, we were roughly at 159,000 permits or finished apartments per year. This increased over a decade to 300,000. With the current development, we will drop, we will drop even below this 150,000. When you see a net migration, last year, 1.2 million, this year, something around 500,000 people. This is not sufficient. There must be some relief out of this. Construction and the volume of construction needs to increase again from this extremely depressed level where we are right now. Still no recovery visible, maybe later than the transaction market for the existing houses, but it needs to be a recovery there. Otherwise, it's just an completely mismatch we are heading to. Yeah, last but not least. Growth will come as well from the necessary energy efficiency increase of the fixing household stock. Yeah, current expectation is, we need for this EUR 20 billion per quarter to reach the 2045 goal of net neutrality for carbon emission. This all sums up to a market of EUR 75 billion to EUR 100 billion within this decade. For this, we are preparing. The 40, this current EUR 40 billion market is fine for us to stay and to keep on a sustainable level, investing in, in our services and growing them. We are absolutely certain, we, we expect a doubling of this market within this decade. A small part of this is as well a recovery in refinancing volume. For a long, long period, we said there is no link between refinancing volume and interest rate in Germany. For a long, long period, it was true. Just the typical German mortgage fixed interest rate period of 10 years climbed up slightly in the last 15 years and reached an average 14 years a year ago. With this sharp change in interest rate, all mortgages, which are longer than 10 years, now suddenly stay that long, while previously they were renewed after 10 and a half year, thanks to a prepayment option. We are right now in such a valley. We lost roughly EUR 30 billion in market volume from 2021 to 2023. Now, because of this longer duration fixed interest rate mortgages, and they will come back suddenly in 2027 when the 2012, 15 years mortgages get due, you can say. To be aware of this, the current market volume as well of EUR 40 billion per quarter is in a certain way affected and declined by roughly EUR 8 billion because of this change in the interest rate structure. As long as interest rates stay on the current level, it's very predictable in which moment this recovery will happen. If interest rate for 10 years plus mortgages goes down, this may happen earlier, because then you earlier refinance if your old mortgages has a higher interest rate. If you stay on this, 3% to 4% range, 2027 will be the next good year for refinancing. We, with the Europace technology, invest heavily in automated solutions for this refinancing processes of the future. This all said, you know already that we were slightly disappointed with our Q2, especially with this what happened in the real estate platform. We had to adjust our group forecast for this year and our ambition level. We expect a significant better second half of this year than the first half was, thanks to a lot of ongoing project changes in pricing structure, new clients we gained, and so on. With this, we give an revised outlook for this year. What is important for you and for us is 2024 and the upcoming years, we will see double-digit growth of Hypoport. It will be pretty easy in the beginning because of the low baseline of 2023, but we will see that the recovery of the market has strong performance of Hypoport on the top and bottom line in the next 10 years. For now, that's from my side, I hand back to the moderator. Ivan, please let's check if someone has any questions today in English. Thank you. We will now begin our question and answer session. If you have a question for our speakers, please dial star one, star one one on your telephone keypad now to enter the queue. Once your name has been announced, you can ask a question. If you find your questions answered before it is your turn to speak, you can dial star one one again to cancel your question. If you're using speaker equipment today, please lift the handset before making your selection. One moment, please, for the first question. There are currently no questions from the audience. For closing remarks, I give back to you. Yeah. Thank you. Okay, yeah, and I, we can make a survey here right now. For everyone who listen this, we consider next time in November to actually do just one call for all participants, Germans and English, in English. It's your language, but you will have to get up a little bit earlier because we will do this as always at 2:00 A.M. German time. Please give us a feedback to our industrial relations department if you are fine with this. Then we will have a lot of questions here because the German call is always pretty active from the analyst side. By joining both calls and doing this just in one language, we may get more interaction even. Thanks for your feedback. We are now concentrating on the third quarter. Hope to provide a positive development when we publish these numbers in November, and that we are able to talk here about a positive trend which continues in this market. Thanks for your attention and see you soon. Bye-bye. This now concludes our conference call. Thank you all for attending. You may now disconnect your lines.