Welcome to the preliminary results of Hypoport for 2024. So as you are aware already, we continue our growth path with double-digit growth at the group level on all major KPIs. The core source was the real estate mortgage market again with strong double-digit growth and an outperformance of the market growth. And the two smaller segments, Financing Platform and Insurance, contributed as well on their level. So let's quickly check the real estate mortgage market here in Germany.
We saw during the whole year slightly lower interest rates than the previous year, a pretty stable environment from the interest rate side, while consumer income significantly improved thanks to the delayed increase after the strong inflation of 2022 and 2023. On the other side, on the property side, the number of properties available to buy increased to a record high level for a pretty long period. And on the other side, the supply of rental units declined. The core reason is massive rent regulation here in Germany, which locks the rental market. Nobody with an existing rental contract is leaving the apartment anymore because of cheap rent. So if consumers have a demand, and typically when you found a family, you get children, you need a new apartment, and there is no solution anymore in the rental market in the current situation in Germany. More and more families, especially from the middle class, have to choose property ownership now, while in the past 58% were choosing to rent and only 42% of Germans live in their own property. So this is a massive change in the market, which is part of the significant recovery we see in the mortgage market. Prices in Germany started to trickle up again during the whole year, at plus 5% for condos, especially in the metropolitan areas, but also single-family homes in the countryside slightly increased in value. So any fear of price drops in the future left the market during 2024 as well.
This led to a recovery of the market. The black line during the year 2024 we saw a steady recovery of the market with a strong last fourth quarter, because usually the fourth quarter is weaker due to the holiday season. This year it was pretty solid numbers for the last quarter. You can see the transaction volume, both inflation-adjusted, both indexed, outperformed the market during 2024. And here you see a long period of 5 years in the end during the whole period. So while the market is still below everything we saw in the last five years, EURACE is up to the 2020 volume already again. Last year we saw a 27% increase in transaction volume on EURACE. Bundesbank reported for Germany a 21% increase in volume to 200 billion, 66 billion by EURACE. So you see our relevance in the market and the still incremental gains. When we look at our three major sales channels, our own franchise system with the brand Dr. Klein outperformed the total market with a growth of 30%, so plus 9% market to market. Our operations in the Savings Banks industry and the Cooperative Bank industry are even stronger, outperforming the market growth. So in both sectors we significantly increased our reach, improved our market share. So when you add this up, the three major channels, there had to be as well a loser: one major corporation partner of us, Deutsche Bank, was weak in 2024, the whole year after a struggle in the second half of 2023 already. Here we saw a negative impact on their transaction volume and with this an underperformance of EURACE compared to the three biggest segments here in the market for us.
When we go into details and check out the use of the mortgages that we distributed, you understand a little bit better what is going on in the German housing market in general. While the purchase segment is back to precrisis level from the volume on EURACE, the three other usages of mortgages are still distressed, you could say. So buying a home is the only solution right now for a lot of families to find a solution in the market and to fulfill the needs of their families. So the numbers of properties bought by Germans tick up now for the last two years and bring us to this volume, while foreigners or just investors who buy properties for rent are massively still distressed because of the unattractiveness of the rental market. So the distressed areas of our market are still new construction. You see that we are coming now to 4 billion per quarter while we were at precrisis level of roughly 6 billion. The need is high: we need 500,000 apartments per year, right now we are finishing 200,000 and we are financing 150,000. So we are far under the demand side with this. What we start in construction and finance in construction, and this mismatch is driving the prices for the upcoming periods. What is not financed right now is not built in the next two years, so there is a massive impact from this low numbers in new houses to the pricing side of the purchase market.
Well, as well under stress is the follow-up financing, refinancing market. Here we see that the typical 10-year-plus durations in the German mortgage market have been lifted up to 15 years precrisis, and homeowners don't need to refinance right now. They can wait until 2027 when their 15-year fixed term period is due and then they have to refinance. So the recovery of the refinance market we expect starting in 2027. And never a big topic, but should be a big topic when we look at our decarbonization goals here in Germany in the next 20 years. We need to decarbonize our home ownership stock, it would need 20 billion in investments per quarter. And for now this area is still not affected by any growth. And with the change in government right now, we can just hope that there are signals for this area, and as well new constructions here in Germany, coming from the new government soon.
One more view on the structure of our volume. When you compare the last eight years, how EURACE and the market developed, you can see that we had already eight years ago a strong position in the broker market. We expanded it slightly, but what is more important is that the brokers took market share from the banks. So mortgage brokers grew, and with them our volume is growing, giving us a constant incremental outperformance of the market. And the second major change is our success in the cooperative and Savings Banks industry over the last eight years. We ramped up from close to zero to now roughly 25% in both sectors with a strong growth record last year. If you remember two slides before, we had roughly 50% growth in both sectors. So we are fast closing the gap and convincing systematically the whole sectors that we are the way to do mortgage business today, and there is no alternative to this. In total, the segment delivered strong growth top and bottom line. When you eliminate our high investments in transitioning the property valuation business, we are at 35 billion last year with a market which is roughly on the level of 2017. So since then we saw strong growth in the market under the crisis. We will see the strong growth again, and with this our profits in this segment will massively uplift.
Short view on the two other segments. Financing platform: here we service housing associations, corporate finance and subsidiaries for them, and personal loan business. While all three markets are still on the bottom and didn't recover in 2024 compared to 2023, we could deliver a small topline growth. Thanks to a very strong cost efficiency program across the sector, we were able to provide a massive profitability growth even here in this environment. And here is massive potential for 2025 forward. With a new government in place, with a positive outlook on the recovery of the German industry and consumer sentiment, we see a significant potential in the next two years here for an uplift to old highs. Back last unit, insurance: very stable market environment. We are digitalizing the industry here for 10 years. We are right now focused on improving our profitability level step by step while keeping a solid migration path. We are on track with this and are open for strategic partnerships, something which made us successful in the mortgage industry, and we expect that in the insurance industry with the right partners we can speed up this process here as well. In total, we would call it a transitioning year for Hypoport. So core market is in recovery process, we are back to double-digit profitability numbers and to growth numbers, but still this is far below what we are able to achieve in a normal market environment here in Germany. So a long-term perspective from the gross profit: second best year ever, but this is still huge investments in certain areas, which reduces our EBIT level.
Outlook: we expect the German housing market to fully rebound to the precrisis level, and this means a quarterly transaction volume of 75 to 100 billion euros. This is a massive uplift from the current level right now, even inflation-adjusted. And every additional billion of transaction volume in the market, plus our market share growth, brings us higher profitability. Plus our ongoing investments need to turn and to profit. Expectation for this year: we double the EBIT, we deliver a record year on the gross profit level, and with this we have the first pretty successful year after this crisis again. And for 2026, we expect ongoing double-digit growth and from the perspective of profitability a new record year for Hypoport. For details, check out the videos here on this channel or contact our IR.
