Angi - Earnings Call - Q3 2025

Executive Summary

• Q3 2025 revenue of $265.6M declined 10% year over year; GAAP diluted EPS was $0.23. Operating income rose 179% to $21.8M; Adjusted EBITDA increased 12% to $39.7M, reflecting lower depreciation, SBC, and expense discipline.
• Results versus S&P consensus: revenue slightly missed ($265.6M vs $269.0M*), Primary EPS missed (0.296 vs 0.368*), and EBITDA modestly below ($33.7M* vs $36.1M*)—driven by network channel volume declines offset by strong proprietary channels growth.
• Proprietary channels strengthened: Proprietary Service Requests +11% YoY and Proprietary Leads +16% YoY; revenue per lead +11% YoY. Network channel leads fell sharply (now <10% of leads), weighing on total leads (-21% YoY) and revenue (-10% YoY).
• 2026 outlook reiterated: mid‑single‑digit revenue growth with “a little” EBITDA leverage via fixed‑cost discipline; TV spend to roughly double in 2026; CapEx around $60M in 2025 and similar in 2026 (front‑loaded).
• Capital allocation: 1.3M shares repurchased for $20.1M between Aug 4–Oct 31; new 3.2M share authorization approved Sept 17. Year‑to‑date repurchases total ~$111M (~15% of shares), with limits tied to the tax‑free spinoff noted by management.

What Went Well and What Went Wrong

What Went Well

• Proprietary channel momentum: Proprietary Service Requests +11% YoY, Proprietary Leads +16% YoY; revenue per lead +11% YoY—supported by customer experience improvements and SEM performance.
• Operating leverage from expense actions: Operating income +179% YoY to $21.8M on lower depreciation and SBC; Adjusted EBITDA +12% to $39.7M as pro acquisition and fixed costs declined year over year.
• Management execution and strategic clarity: CEO highlighted improving hire/win rates, higher NPS, and improving pro retention; reiterated mid‑single‑digit 2026 growth as proprietary gains offset network drag; AI‑first platform consolidation targeted by 2027.
  • “Our estimated hire rate is up double digits. Our estimated win rate is up nearly 30%... NPS is up nearly 10 points YoY… Pro churn better by 7% in the last 12 months”.

What Went Wrong

• Network channel headwinds: Leads in network channels fell 81% YoY; three larger affiliates had volume “bumps down,” pressuring total leads (-21% YoY) and revenue (-10% YoY) despite proprietary strength.
• Mixed estimate comparison: S&P consensus was modestly higher on revenue and Primary EPS than actual; EBITDA modestly below consensus, reflecting network pressures and timing/capitalization dynamics [GetEstimates].
• Elevated tax rate: Effective tax rate 49% (tax provision $10.2M), driven by enacted tax law changes, cross‑border effects and state taxes; prior‑year had a $26.6M benefit from valuation allowance release—driving YoY decline in GAAP net earnings (-70%) despite operating improvement.

Transcript

Rusty Russakoff (CFO)

Good morning, everyone. Rusty here, CFO of Angi Inc, and welcome to the Angi Third-Quarter earnings call. Joining me today is Jeff Kip, CEO of Angi. Angi has also published a shareholder letter, which is currently available on the investor relations section of Angi's website. We will not be reading the shareholder letter on this call. I'll soon pass it over to Jeff for a few introductory remarks and then open it to Q&A. Before we get to that, I'd like to remind you that during this presentation, we may make certain statements that are considered forward-looking under the federal securities laws. These forward-looking statements may include statements related to our outlook, strategy, and future performance, and are based on our current expectations and on information currently available to us.

Actual outcomes and results may differ materially from the future results expressed or implied in these statements due to a number of risks and uncertainties, including those contained in our most recent quarterly report on Form 10-Q, our most recent annual report on Form 10-K, and in the subsequent reports that we file with the SEC. The information provided on this conference call should be considered in light of such risks. We'll also discuss certain non-GAAP measures, which, as a reminder, include adjusted EBITDA, which we'll refer to today as EBITDA for simplicity during the call. I'll also refer you to our earnings release, shareholder letter, our public filing for the SEC, and again, to the investor relations section of our website for all comparable GAAP measures and full reconciliation for all material non-GAAP measures. Now I'll pass it off to Jeff.

Jeff Kip (CEO)

Thanks, Rusty. Good morning, everybody. We know you're all exceptionally busy and working very hard in this earnings season, and we very much appreciate you taking the time to join us this morning. As you know, our mission at Angi is to deliver more jobs done well to our customers, and our commitment to our shareholders is to return to growth in 2026 and beyond and generate more value. In the third quarter, we again posted the key markers for both. The most important metrics we look at to judge our customer experience are, one, our hire rate, the rate at which a homeowner submitting a service request on our platform hires a pro paying for that lead on our platform. Our pro win rate, which is the rate at which a pro wins the lead they pay for on our platform.

Three, our homeowner net promoter score, which we survey on a rolling basis. Four, our Pro retention. We again delivered improvement across these metrics in the third quarter as we have all year. Our estimated hire rate is up double digits. Our estimated win rate is up nearly 30%. Our net promoter score is up nearly 10 points year-over-year, nearly 30 over the last two years. Our Pro retention continues to improve, with overall churn better by 7% in the last 12 months year-over-year, and up 26% versus two years ago. We are not done yet. We are continuing to invest against a better, better customer experience. We also continue to post the key markers for our return to profitable revenue growth. Proprietary service request growth accelerated in the third quarter to positive 11%.

With proprietary lead growth at 16% and revenue for lead growth at 11%, the through line to growth in 2027 is clearer and clearer to us and hopefully to all of you. Our network channel has gone from nearly 40% of our leads a year ago to less than 10% this year, third quarter over third quarter, making the rate of growth or decline there an impact on our overall growth, but that will change trajectory as we start to compare next year. Our strong proprietary growth is mathematically the key marker for 2026 growth. We'll likely talk about this a little bit more in response to questions later. We're also generating materially more value for the business with our sales channel in pro acquisition.

We have only about half the sales headcount we had a year ago, but we're actually producing more overall lifetime margin, meaning the margin per pro and the lifetime capacity per pro are materially up. With the step change that we've delivered in our sales effectiveness and our recent launch and now ramp-up of online enroll, we have the key pieces to grow our overall pro capacity in 2026, and we expect return to nominal active pro growth by the end of the year and the beginning of 2027. With all these key markers in place, we're accelerating our platform transformation. Today, we operate on four platforms, three in the U.S. and one internationally. The U.S. platforms, in particular, have significant tech debt and legacy code, which has materially slowed the speed and efficiency of our product innovation and the business in the U.S.

With the rate of change in the landscape increasing, with the rapidly growing presence of AI, we have to move forward and get onto a modern technology stack and get off pieces of software which are in some cases 20 years old. We've been progressively already rebuilding key pieces of our architecture over the last couple of years, but we're now leaning in with the target of getting to a single modern global and AI-first platform by 2027. We've been and will be delivering new AI-first and AI-enabled software and improving the customer experience with it and our business efficiency as well as we go. This is going to be progressive improvement. There's no big bang here. This effort isn't going to hinder our trajectory. It's all built into our outlook.

If anything, the platform work will allow us to accelerate our efforts in the business as we go forward and hit our milestones. Again, with all of this in place, we are looking forward very optimistically to 2026 and beyond. We are never going to be happy with everything, but we do feel very good about where Angi is, and we have even higher confidence that we are going to deliver against our mission and goals going forward. With that, I think, operator, we are ready to take questions.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. We will now begin the question-and-answer session. As a reminder, to ask a question, you may press star, then one on your telephone keypad. If you are using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. If your question has been addressed and you would like to withdraw it, please press star, then two. At this time, we will pause momentarily to assemble our roster. Today's first question comes from Dan Kurnos with the Benchmark Company. Please proceed.

Dan Kurnos (Equity Research Analyst)

Great. Thanks. Good morning. Nice to see progress on the prop lead side. Jeff, last quarter, you suggested you expected mid-single-digit growth in 2026. Given that we're seeing much stronger trends in proprietary and obviously the weaker in network, plus all the migration work you're doing, has anything changed with regards to your 2026 outlook? I have a follow-up.

Jeff Kip (CEO)

Morning, Dan. Let's go Pats. Look, we are tracking the same target for 2026 revenue growth as we discussed on the last call. You referenced the mid-single-digit target, and that's about right. We expect modest overall service growth, with the strong performance in proprietary being offset by the network comparisons. I think you made the right comment that the proprietary looks a little stronger and the network looks a little weaker, and we probably net out around the same. We're delivering this all through very strong paid proprietary channel execution, and we're going to reinvest in branded advertising next year. We expect to double-ish our TV spend, given what we've seen on the strength of our branded traffic and our TV performance this year.

If you look at overall brand search metrics, which is something some of the larger companies out there are looking at to gauge their overall campaigns, we were only down in the low to mid-single digits in the third quarter versus the prior year, despite year-to-date cutting our TV spend by 70%, which is not, I think, a relationship you often see that'll bolster our growth. We think our significantly improved customer experience and the solid ROI there is, I think, contributing to that. I think revenue growth rates will likely vary through the year, likely a little lower in the first half of the year as we compare to higher network service request volume and evening out over the course of the year.

I think it's also just worth mentioning what we said on the last call, that we expect a little leverage from revenue to EBITDA growth as we keep our strong fixed cost discipline next year.

Dan Kurnos (Equity Research Analyst)

That's super helpful. Thanks. Look, second, there's a lot of moving pieces on EBITDA in Q3 and Q4, including the shift to CapEx, along with what you guys called out, the resolution of two matters that could result in some slippage into 2026. Can you just talk through those pieces and also how we should think about CapEx running in Q4 and next year? Thank you.

Rusty Russakoff (CFO)

Yeah, sure. Dan, this is Rusty. Yeah, so our EBITDA versus the guidance, it was a mix of a couple of different things, partly some contribution margin outperformance, partly less expense from less hiring, and then partly some timing of expenses. You'll notice, I think you're referencing that our international EBITDA bumped up quarter over quarter, mostly due to changes in the product organization that Jeff mentioned in the shareholder letter. We combined domestic and international into one team so that we can focus on consolidating onto one unified technology platform, which is an initiative that we have been orchestrating for a while. What this meant in Q3 was that the international folks shifted their work towards building out the new platform, which, due to the accounting rules, resulted in less expense being allocated to the international segment and more capitalized wages.

These financial dynamics were in line with what we've anticipated with this. Expectations going forward are that capitalization rates in Q4 should be a little bit higher than in Q3 as we continue to ramp up the platform work. We will continue at a similar run rate through the first half of 2026 before it tapers off as we start to complete some of that platform work in the back half of next year. What that looks like on a full-year basis is we'll be around $60 million of CapEx this year, around a similar amount next year, but we'll be front-loaded next year as opposed to back-loaded this year.

Dan Kurnos (Equity Research Analyst)

Got it. Rusty, could you just clarify what the two matters were? I know it's just timing stuff, but just helpful color on EBITDA, maybe some shift there.

Rusty Russakoff (CFO)

Sure. So we have two vendor-related matters that are from prior years that we had high confidence would resolve much earlier in the year. Both remain under discussion, and thus we're not really at liberty to give more detail on them. There's a chance either or both of them might resolve in Q4, but we're obviously running up against the end of the year. At this point, that's seeming less likely. We still expect to prevail ultimately, which might mean the impact will slide into 2026.

Dan Kurnos (Equity Research Analyst)

Got it. Perfect. Thanks for the color, guys. And yes, Jeff, go Pats.

Jeff Kip (CEO)

Go Pats. Thanks.

Rusty Russakoff (CFO)

All right, operator. Next question, please.

Operator (participant)

Our next question is from Andrew Watts with JPMorgan. Please proceed.

Andrew Watts (Equity Research Analyst)

Hi. Thanks for the question. First, could you give us an update on what the response has been from service pros to the ads migration? Second, could you expand on what you saw on the network channel this quarter and how that impacts your outlook going forward? Thank you.

Jeff Kip (CEO)

Sure. I'll take those. First of all, the ads migration is more than half done this morning. It consists of two 30-day rolling migrations. We're doing them over 30 days because we want to match the contract renewal date. It just makes a lot more sense for the business and the customer. We'll be about three quarters done on November 15th and then start a second 30-day. We've had zero disruptions or problems so far. We've had good feedback from our customers. You probably recall that ads pros really have no choice as to which tasks within a category they receive and no choice beyond their initial allocation of zip codes. This is positive. It'll make life better for them, and it'll also improve our matching because you'll have pros actually receiving the things they specifically want. We're getting good feedback.

The migration is one of the planks of this whole progressive global platform work that we've embarked on. We'll power down the legacy Ads Platform following the migration, saving money and allowing us to put resources elsewhere. There hasn't been any disruption of any kind of materiality in the P&L. We really expect that on all of this work, given the way we're working and given our experience. This is our sixth migration. We did five in the European business. This is kind of a continuation of the work we've been doing for a while now. I would just say that having something like this come off seamlessly is still impressive. The teams that have been working on this thing tirelessly for over a year deserve a real tip of the hat on the effort and the quality of work they've done.

Eden, Hugo, Dave, Joe, and everyone else, thank you very much. If you're listening, tip of the hat to you guys. Let me go to the network channel. A year ago, just recall, our network channel was almost 40% of our leads. It also had in the range of half the win rate of the rest of our channels. Today, the channel is less than 10% of our leads, and the win rate's material increase to be in the same range as the other channels. All of this was planned. We made a conscious decision to implement homeowner choice in January, which means that the affiliate homeowners who were previously automatched to available pros are now choosing each pro. Our data internally had said that homeowners who choose a pro were 60% more likely to hire a pro.

Indeed, we've seen that kind of lift in the affiliate hire rate. It has been a win for our homeowners and our pros. We also anticipated, as a result, that the volume of our leads would come down quite a bit, both because homeowners are going to choose fewer pros than they were automatched to and because there's less revenue for SR to spend on acquiring more SRs. We expected that. It was in our guidance. We're kind of on track there with a little bump here in the third quarter. We also expected volatility in the ecosystem. When we launched into this, we weren't sure exactly if everything would play out. I think net, over the course of the year, we've gotten a bit less volume and a bit more profit than we expected.

In the third quarter, we had three of our larger affiliates have bumps down in volume. One of them had to do with quality of SRs in their affiliate network. A second one told us they had operational issues. The volume came down. In the third one, we just did not have as much volume available. Now, we have gotten back a chunk of this volume, but not all of it. We are at a lower run rate. Again, we did not expect these things, and we also still expect that there will be some bumping up and down as we add network partners and some drop-off. At the end of the day, as we look forward, our current view is that we have kind of come back off our bumps. We are at our new run rate. We are constantly farming and looking for appropriate partners.

We think that, again, we're stable. We could go up. We could bump down. We'll see. It's now less than 10% of our traffic. It's not a strategic channel. We're going to take the right traffic that we can match to the right pros and get jobs done well. This is not something that we bank on as a source of future growth in particular. We're happy to have it and make it work and keep deploying there. Next question, operator.

Andrew Watts (Equity Research Analyst)

Thanks.

Operator (participant)

The next question is from Sergio Segura with KeyBanc. Please proceed.

Sergio Segura (VP of Equity Research)

Hey, good morning, guys. Thanks for taking the question. Maybe starting with AI Helper. Thought it was interesting that statistic you gave that it converts at a 2.7 times higher level than the traditional flow. Now that's the default experience. Just how should we think about modeling the impact? I guess, is that informing your view of maybe investing even more into marketing for 2026? I have a follow-up.

Jeff Kip (CEO)

Let me step back. Let's just talk about our approach with AI generally. First of all, we commented in the letter that we've made the move to AI first. What we're doing is we're looking to implement AI across our customer workflows and our team workflows as well. We are looking to, as we build new software, build it AI native. The AI Helper is really sort of one of the first prototypes where we are taking an LLM off the shelf. Our approach is to produce a fine-tuned LLM in each case. This is the first application. What a fine-tuned LLM means is that we have a set of proprietary knowledge, which is structured in a certain way.

In this case, it's our conditional set of service request questions by a task, which we can use to feed and change the way the LLM flows and the conversation with the customer. Secondly, we have a bunch of proprietary data on customer behavior through the product and in terms of the interaction between the homeowner pro that we can also feed. As we deploy these products, we get new data. Through all of this, we create a learning loop, which differentiates our experience from what somebody might get on an LLM with our proprietary knowledge or our proprietary data. This is our core approach. What we've done with the AI Helper is we first deployed it as an open box that effectively said, "How can we help you on the side?" or "Tell us in your own words." When people enter that.

That's ultimately a third of the customers who post service requests with us, they're more likely to convert. They're more likely to choose a pro. Thus, they're more likely to get a job done well. This started as a deprecation and conversion, and the learning loop has sped it up, and now it looks creative. We believe we're seeing some of this in our proprietary growth. I think when you go to the next step, which is, "Gee, how much more can this be?" We don't actually expect that the other two-thirds of traffic will triple in conversion because there's a causation and causality. You've got to do a split test to actually see what the shift is. We do believe there's upside in getting more customers through the AI Helper. We do believe that that's important going forward.

We don't have a big win baked into our numbers because we've actually just gotten the next phase of this test into play. The core of this is, when you look at LLM technology, we think it's a huge opportunity for us because we can take an application like the SR path, which is fundamentally a conversation between Angi and the homeowner. We can deploy the LLM to have more effective natural language conversations against a larger body of data than our previously somewhat rigid conditional path. We can end up delivering a better match on our core asset, which is the hundred X thousand pros who are ready to get jobs done well for the homeowner.

Because at the end of the day, we have always taken this conversation with a homeowner and the conversation with a pro, turned it into a conversation between the two of them because we have the largest supply of pros and delivered the offline experience that people want. We have done this on Google. We have done it on social. Now we are going to do it on LLMs. We are doing it within our product as well. Next question.

Sergio Segura (VP of Equity Research)

Thanks, Jeff.

Operator (participant)

The next question comes from Stephen Ju with UBS. Please proceed.

Stephen Ju (Managing Director and Senior Internet Equity Research Analyst)

All right. Great. Thanks, guys. So, Jeff, Rusty, I think I'll ask the AI question in a slightly different way. And I guess Angi's relationship with the broader world, I suppose. I think we're all looking at shifting traffic patterns because the usage of LLMs is picking up across the globe. How does this change your traffic acquisition strategy? What's working? What's not working? As you think about customer acquisition and service pro acquisition. Narrowing down the scope of the question a little bit, I think as we've gone through the restructuring over the last couple of years, I think you've taken a pretty conscientious effort to walk away from the traffic that was lower ROI. I would have thought that in the third quarter, we'd be bouncing off the bottom. I think there's sort of a directional quarter-on-quarter decline here that we're noticing.

In terms of the overall activity, I'm just wondering if you can kind of walk us through what you're seeing in the third quarter. Thanks.

Jeff Kip (CEO)

The first question on traffic shifting. There are some indicators out there that traffic is moving around, statistically getting produced. There is also what I would call the walking-around research of everybody you talk to doing searches in places. That sound a lot like LLMs or actually are LLMs. Look, our view on this is, again, what I said earlier. We think this is a great opportunity. We are in the middle of building our own proprietary app to deploy. By the end of the year on one of the major LLMs. We are in discussions with a couple of the others about deploying our current and then modifying new technology there.

We think it's a great opportunity because we think that our domain knowledge and our proprietary data and the context we have is going to allow us to enter the chat midstream in the LLM and read the context from the customer and get them more accurately and with more expertise to the pro they want. We think it's a great opportunity. Obviously, there's a bunch of cards. It's very early in the Texas Hold'em hand. There's a bunch of cards left to come onto the table. Between our development capabilities, our AI team, and the ongoing conversations we're having and the nature of our product, we think that we are very well positioned there. We're also, at the same time, kind of rebuilding our content approach. The structure of content that gets surfaced in AI is a bit different.

Although there is a lot of correlations to the way it gets surfaced in Google SEO, we are actively looking at what we do and how we do it to make sure we are in play there. At a minimum, we get the brand impressions. I think then finally, we are actively working with Google on everything they are doing in terms of how they deploy ad space and AI mode and elsewhere. The AI Max product, which is meant to sort of focus on getting to the right spot against the AI overview, is now over 10% of our spend. We are literally trying to stay on the cutting edge of everything about where traffic is, where it is going, and keep our team and our technology deployed in the right way there. We see this as opportunity, not as something bad. We see this as actually very good.

Your next question was about third-quarter trends and thinking maybe we should have been bouncing off the bottom. I think what we said is we get sequentially some improvement. We were at minus 12% in the second quarter on revenue, and we said minus 8%-11% on the third, and we came in at minus 10.5%. We had these bumps in the affiliate network, which is a non-strategic channel. Our core strategic channels are growing incredibly healthily. I think all of our proprietary SRs are going 11%. Our leads are going 16%. And then our revenue per lead is plus 11%. If affiliate was not there, you had the lead growth and the revenue per lead, you have very healthy growth.

I think in some ways, you'd argue that our core business, the best part of our business, is growing very healthily and is well up off the bottom. I think the network channel is a quirky channel. It's a group of affiliates who we're working with to try and buy homeowners' traffic that's going to match into our network and work well. It's not a big canvas. It's not quite as sort of algorithmically approachable as Google is. It's not as big as the social channels are. We got a couple of surprises at once. This will continue to be a theme. We do think we're going to offset it with this incredibly strong proprietary execution that you've seen growing every quarter. We do think that our TV is now performing better than it was, and we're ready to lean in.

We also think that our branded social organic is contributing to what we think is an incredibly strong performance in overall Google brand searches. I think we feel pretty good about all the good parts. We've got a little bit of noise in affiliate. We've got a little bit of noise in SEO. Again, nobody can bank on either of these as the key to their business anymore, I think. They're both less than 10% of our traffic. Look, we're pretty optimistic. We actually feel very good despite a little bump. I take my family skiing every year at Christmas, and we have to connect because we're going to Idaho. Sometimes there's a delay. We've missed a connection, but we always get to Idaho and have a great time skiing and put on the matching pajamas that my wife buys and have a family picture.

We are feeling pretty good right now. Next question.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. The next question is from Eric Sheridan with Goldman Sachs. Please proceed.

Eric Sheridan (Managing Director)

Thanks so much for taking the question. Maybe one, if I can. Against all of the investments you're making across the business, we noticed you also increased the authorization around the buyback. How should we be thinking about capital allocation back into the return profile for shareholders on either a linear level or elements of you being more opportunistic against the stock price in deploying that authorization? Thanks so much.

Jeff Kip (CEO)

Great. Yeah. Thanks, Eric. Since Q2 earnings, you saw we bought back the remaining shares in the authorization that was outstanding. That amounted to 1.3 million shares and about $20 million. Year to date, that takes us to $111 million, representing just under 15% of the company. In mid-September, the board authorized us to repurchase another 3.2 million shares. We have not yet repurchased any shares out of that authorization, and we will utilize that as the board deems that is an appropriate use of capital. Importantly, as we have mentioned previously, there are limits related to the amount of share repurchases in the two years following a tax-free spinoff. If we repurchase all of the shares under the current authorization, that would take us just under that limit.

Eric Sheridan (Managing Director)

Great. Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Our next question is—oh, sorry. Sorry, sir.

Jeff Kip (CEO)

Go ahead. No, go ahead.

Operator (participant)

Our next question is from Youssef Squali with Truist. Please proceed.

Youssef Squali (Managing Director and Head of Internet and Digital Media Research Group)

Great. Thank you so much. Maybe, Jeff, just stepping back a little bit, can you just talk about the broader picture, the health of the consumer right now, maybe just given the current macro? Has it changed at all on the margin? Maybe any difference between lower DMA versus higher DMA type of customers? And then on the—

Jeff Kip (CEO)

Sorry. Can you just tell me what—I apologize. DMA?

Youssef Squali (Managing Director and Head of Internet and Digital Media Research Group)

Oh, DMA, just higher, I guess, various zip codes, like higher income zip codes versus maybe lower income zip codes.

Jeff Kip (CEO)

Okay. Thanks. Keep going.

Youssef Squali (Managing Director and Head of Internet and Digital Media Research Group)

Just on going back to the need to consolidate from four platforms into one, maybe can you double-click on that a little bit? How heavy a lift is it? And how much of the turnaround in the business and the growth starting in Q1 of 2026 is predicated on that move to the single platform? Just trying to see what potentially could go wrong, could delay that inflection. Thank you.

Jeff Kip (CEO)

On the overall macro, I think our view is there was a big disruption in April connected to macro events. That kind of hung a little bit through May. We saw a pickup in June, and we feel like we've been kind of steady since then. Not a runaway homeowner demand like we had in COVID, but not a falling off homeowner demand like we had in the financial crisis. We think kind of stable. We can't say we pull anything different in trends on different zip codes. There are zip codes where we perform better and zip codes where we do not. We cannot say that there has been some kind of step change there. I think the macro looks steady as she goes right now.

I think secondly, on your platform question, as I said, we do not have any wins from platform integration particularly built in. We do not particularly expect disruptions. We are in the middle of our fifth migration of a significant pro network. For the fifth time, we see it is the same. I think we have seen less posts in other migrations. We think this improves the customer experience, and it is also going to improve the efficiency of our commercial engine. You can already see the improved efficiency in our consolidation with Salesforce to sell only the new product, which has been part of the success of selling significantly more capacity for pro and generating a lot more value. Could we see some lift? Yes. There are progressively going to be rollouts. You are seeing the first one in this migration.

We're going to see some impacts on our homeowner-facing side, which we think will be net improvements over the course of the first half of the year. We will progressively be delivering platform pieces which both have the chance to improve conversion and the customer experience and will allow our team to test, develop, and deploy faster and iterate faster. I think we've been very much held back on our ability to move with speed across the product and the customer experience for multiple years here by the legacy technology and tech debt. I think the way we look at this is we kind of roll forward our run rate and build in our knowns. Then we go execute. We're always anticipating what we know versus what we might not know and handicap.

I think right now, we've got a pretty even outlook over the course of next year. We don't expect a—we're not building in a massive lift from some piece of new technology. We're not expecting because we haven't in the now six—we're on our sixth migrations today. We haven't had a major disruption in any of them. We've got some pros working on this. Our own internal technology pros, not our external construction, especially construction and home services pros.

Youssef Squali (Managing Director and Head of Internet and Digital Media Research Group)

That's helpful clarification. Thanks, Jeff.

Jeff Kip (CEO)

Great. Operator, I think we'll take one more call, please.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. The next question is from Matt Condon with Citizens. Please proceed.

Matt Condon (Director of Equity Research)

Thank you so much for taking my questions. My first one is just, can you just talk about the sustainability and the acceleration of service requests? I believe the acceleration is partly due to the transition and spend away from the network channel into the proprietary channel. Is there just an upper bound on marketing efficiency and your ability to drive growth through that channel? My second question is just on competitive intensity. Just what are we seeing in the competitive environment?

Jeff Kip (CEO)

Can you back up? I apologize. There is something about the sound where I did not fully grasp your whole first question.

Matt Condon (Director of Equity Research)

Yeah. No, sorry. I can repeat. I'm just talking about just the acceleration service requests and if it's sustainable from here. Specifically, just as you transition spend from the network channel into the proprietary channel, is there an upward bound just on marketing efficiency? Can you continue to push on spend there to drive that service request volume? The second question is just on competitive intensity and if that's changed here over the past several months.

Jeff Kip (CEO)

Okay. We may get accelerated a bit in the fourth quarter, maybe even the first quarter. We're not necessarily predicting that on our proprietary growth. What I said earlier is we're going to have tougher compares as we go into the second, third, and fourth on the proprietary. We're actually thinking that if you have mid-single-digit revenue growth, then you have—we expect maybe modest net SR growth across all the channels next year. A little bit of variability around the mean through the quarters because of different compares. We also expect to continue to get revenue for service request growth. We'll see how the mix of leads per service request and revenue per lead comes in depending on the allocation of leads between our paper lead and our subscriber growth. We basically think modest.

Service request growth, modest revenue per service request growth. We are not actually saying we are going to accelerate through next year. Now, what I will say is the team—again, sorry about the standout team—the online performance marketing team has had a couple of great years, dramatically improving profit growth in 2023 and really turning it on with volume growth this year. I will tip my hat to them too. They have a list of initiatives, and their product and technology partners have a list of initiatives. By the way, they have been a big part of that acceleration and win, part of the new platform work effectively over the last couple of years. There is a list of initiatives, there is a level of execution, and we think we can continue to grow.

I think the other key point is growing pro capacity, which we're going to be back doing next year. If you look at what we've been able to do in terms of growing the lifetime value per pro acquired, we expect to be able to continue to drive up lifetime value per pro acquired as we shift from smaller pro to larger pro acquisition with our sales because we've gotten much better at prospect segmenting and targeting. We just added more talent to that team. We're pretty excited about it. We think there's a pretty big opportunity in larger pros. We think we're three to four times the penetration in pros with 10 or less employees as we are with pros with 10 or more. We have a big opportunity to keep shifting and getting that capacity for pro up.

I think you roll out online and roll in, that gives you another whole pool of pro capacity. The more pros I have, the more revenue there's available if I can buy the SRs. I think we have our online execution. I mentioned the TV coming in earlier. We have the ability to grow our network and have more demand in order to buy into. Yes, I think we can grow, keep growing. I think there's new pools available. We haven't hit all of the major platform channels. The LLM channels are a real potential new area of opportunity for us that, again, we're working right now on proprietary technology that plays directly into our core strengths. We're very optimistic there too. We do think we can continue to grow SRs. We have net modest expectations next year.

In an ideal world, we beat that soundly, but can't predict that right now.

Matt Condon (Director of Equity Research)

Questions about the competitive set? Thank you so much.

Jeff Kip (CEO)

In terms of the competitive set, we have some strong competitors out there. We continue to think that on a revenue basis, we're probably the size of the next two combined. We don't have exact data. The largest competitor is probably Google with their direct-to-pro advertising, and they've been probably the most formidable because when you own the highways, you can decide who drives on it. Over the last several years for us, we do think our competitors are real. We're watching carefully what they're doing. At the end of the day, we want to present the best solution to our homeowners and our pros and differentiate ourselves by providing the highest quality of experience. I think by doing that, we can continue to grow and keep our competitive position and be the top choice.

Our key assets are, number one, our network and the quality and skill of our network. Number two, our brand, which has been built over 30 years from the ground up by our founder, Angie Hicks, and everybody else. We have had 30 years of successfully connecting homeowners to pros for jobs done well. That is not an asset that any of our competitors have. Finally, I do think we have a commercial machine and a reach between our online marketing expertise and our ability to call and sell pros that we have got to the scale we have that others do not have. I think we have these advantages. We have got to keep improving our customer experience. We think we are very well positioned with our team. We are going to pivot our technology. I think we feel very good about where we are and our opportunities going forward.

Do we have any other questions, Operator?

Operator (participant)

There are no. There is one more question that is queued up if you'd like to take it.

Jeff Kip (CEO)

Sure. Let's go.

Operator (participant)

Okay. The last question is from Ygal Arounian with Citi. Please proceed.

Hey, thanks, guys. Yes, Max on for Ygal. Thanks for squeezing us in. Just one maybe on the 2026 deepest ask. And I think the language maybe shifted a little better from similar to modest to that more modest. Higher end from last quarter. So just curious what's driving that. Is that some of the expected efficiencies from the platform migration or some of those AI efficiencies from the internal tools you're using that you called out in the letter?

Jeff Kip (CEO)

I do not have our transcript from last quarter in front of me. I think we said mid-single-digit revenue growth and a little bit of margin leverage. I am not sure if we said large, modest, similar, or what we said. I think when we look at our margins next year, we are not predicting contribution margin leverage because we are going to invest up in the branded area. We think we get our leverage by holding our fixed cost discipline, which I think if you look at the P&L over the last couple of years, Rusty and the team have done a very nice job with. We do think we will get efficiency by being AI first. We think you put a multiplier on human productivity, whether it is coding or processing sales scripts or doing customer research.

So we think we're going to be able to hold our headcount and keep our fixed costs down and realize the leverage at the fixed cost line. As a baseline.

Operator (participant)

At this time, there are no further questioners in the queue. This does end today's Q&A session as well as today's conference. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect your lines.

Jeff Kip (CEO)

Thank you very much, everybody. We're very optimistic looking forward. Thanks for coming this morning. Thanks for listening to us. We'll talk to you all soon.