QuinStreet Q4 2025 Earnings Report

QuinStreet EPS Results

• Actual EPS: $0.25
• Consensus EPS: $0.26
• Beat/Miss: Missed by -$0.01
• One Year Ago EPS: $0.11

QuinStreet Revenue Results

• Actual Revenue: $262.05 million
• Expected Revenue: $255.84 million
• Beat/Miss: Beat by +$6.21 million
• YoY Revenue Growth: +32.10%

QuinStreet Announcement Details

• Quarter: Q4 2025
• Date: 8/7/2025
• Time: After Market Closes
• Conference Call Date: Thursday, August 7, 2025
• Conference Call Time: 5:00PM ET

QuinStreet (NASDAQ:QNST), an online performance marketing company, provides customer acquisition services for its clients in the United States and internationally. The company offers online marketing services, such as qualified clicks, leads, calls, applications, and customers through its websites or third-party publishers. It serves financial and home services industries. The company was incorporated in 1999 and is headquartered in Foster City, California.

QuinStreet Q4 2025 Earnings Call Transcript

Key Takeaways

• Positive Sentiment: Revenue and EBITDA surge: Q4 revenue rose 32% year-over-year to $262.1 M and full-year 2025 revenue grew 78% to $1.1 B, while adjusted EBITDA jumped 101% in Q4 and 299% for the year.
• Positive Sentiment: Auto insurance momentum: Auto insurance revenue grew 62% in Q4, clients are reaccelerating spend, and strong sequential growth is expected in fiscal Q1 as tariff clarity improves.
• Positive Sentiment: Strong balance sheet: The company ended Q4 with over $100 M in cash and no bank debt, providing flexibility to fund growth and margin expansion initiatives.
• Negative Sentiment: Ongoing tariff uncertainties keep some auto insurance carriers’ spending guarded until full impacts are understood, which may delay further demand.
• Positive Sentiment: Guidance for continued growth: Fiscal Q1 revenue is projected at ~$280 M with $20 M of adjusted EBITDA, and full-year 2026 revenue and EBITDA are expected to grow ~10% and ~20%, respectively.

Presentation

[Operator]

Good day, and welcome to the Queen Street's Fiscal Fourth Quarter and Full Year twenty twenty five Financial Results. Today's conference is being recorded. Following the prepared remarks, there will be a question and answer session. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to the Vice President of Investor Relations and Finance, Robert Amparo. Mr. Amparo, you may begin.

[Robert Amparo, Senior Director of Investor Relations & Finance at QuinStreet]

Thank you, operator, and thank you everyone for joining us as we report QuinStreet's fiscal fourth quarter and full year twenty twenty five financial results. Joining me on the call today are Chief Executive Officer, Doug Valenti and Chief Financial Officer, Greg Wong. Before we begin, I would like to remind you that the following discussion will contain forward looking statements. Forward looking statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from those projected by such statements and are not guarantees of future performance. Factors that may cause results to differ from our forward looking statements are discussed in our recent SEC filings, including our most recent eight ks filing made today and our most recent 10 Q filing.

[Robert Amparo, Senior Director of Investor Relations & Finance at QuinStreet]

Forward looking statements are based on assumptions as of today, and the company undertakes no obligation to update these statements. Today, we will be discussing both GAAP and non GAAP measures. A reconciliation of GAAP to non GAAP financial measures is included in today's earnings press release, which is available on our Investor Relations website at investor.quinstreet.com. With that, I will turn the call over to Doug Valenti. Please go ahead, sir.

[Douglas Valenti, Founder, Chairman & CEO at QuinStreet]

Thank you, Rob. Welcome, everyone. Fiscal Q4 was another quarter of strong revenue growth and continued margin expansion. We grew total revenue 32% year over year and adjusted EBITDA 101. Auto insurance revenue grew 62% year over year in the quarter.

[Douglas Valenti, Founder, Chairman & CEO at QuinStreet]

Home services revenue grew 21%. Q4 caps a successful full fiscal year 2025, in which we grew revenue 78% to $1,100,000,000 and adjusted EBITDA two ninety nine percent to $81,000,000 delivering strong operating leverage and margin expansion at scale. Margins expanded even as we accelerated ongoing investments and initiatives to drive further revenue growth and margin expansion in coming quarters and years. Our pipeline of growth and margin expansion initiatives is, in my view, the best, most innovative and most impactful in the history of the company. Our balance sheet also continued to get even stronger in Q4, again, despite heavy ongoing investments in growth and margin expansion initiatives.

[Douglas Valenti, Founder, Chairman & CEO at QuinStreet]

We ended the quarter with over $100,000,000 in cash and we have no bank debt. We have the competitive advantages and financial strength to continue to successfully invest in and pursue our enormous and growing long term market opportunity. Renewed demand from auto insurance clients was a key component of fiscal twenty twenty five success. Even as carrier spending growth moderated in the second half of the fiscal year, due in large part to tariff uncertainties. Some clients have recently begun to reaccelerate spending.

[Douglas Valenti, Founder, Chairman & CEO at QuinStreet]

And we expect strong sequential auto insurance revenue growth in the current quarter, our fiscal Q1. Even with the recent increases, auto insurance client spending continues to be generally guarded versus its potential given carrier financial strength and results and is likely to remain so until the tariff fog fully clears. So we believe that there continues to be significant pent up demand in auto insurance and that there will likely be another significant leg up in client spending as the full level and impact of tariffs become more clear and as the industry continues to adapt. We do not expect a significant gap down in carrier spending from current levels, given one, current carrier financial strength and results. Two, the fact that carriers have had time to anticipate and prepare for the impact of tariffs.

[Douglas Valenti, Founder, Chairman & CEO at QuinStreet]

And three, the levels of most applicable tariff agreements announced thus far have been relatively moderate. And as I mentioned earlier, a number of our auto insurance clients have just recently begun to reaccelerate spending. Given that outlook, we, QuinStreet, are going to continue to invest aggressively in media capacity and products to be positioned to prosper from the pent up and growing demand we expect in auto insurance in coming quarters and years. Just as we have done so successfully in past cycles. Turning to our outlook.

[Douglas Valenti, Founder, Chairman & CEO at QuinStreet]

We expect revenue in fiscal Q1 to be about $280,000,000 and adjusted EBITDA to be about $20,000,000 Our initial view of full fiscal year 2026 is that revenue will grow about 10% and adjusted EBITDA will grow about 20% as we work to further expand margins. With that, I'll turn the call over to Greg.

[Gregory Wong, Chief Financial Officer at QuinStreet]

Thank you, Doug. Hello and thanks to everyone for joining us today. Q4 was a strong finish to a record year for QuinStreet As we delivered yet another quarter of strong double digit revenue growth and expanded adjusted EBITDA margins. For the June, total revenue grew 32% year over year and was $262,100,000 Adjusted net income was $14,700,000 or $0.25 per share. Adjusted EBITDA through 101% and was $22,100,000 Looking at revenue by client vertical, our financial services client vertical represented 71% of Q4 revenue and grew 36% year over year to $186,600,000 Our home services client vertical represented 27 of Q4 revenue and grew 21% year over year to $71,700,000 another record revenue quarter for that business.

[Gregory Wong, Chief Financial Officer at QuinStreet]

Other revenue was the remaining $3,800,000 of Q4 revenue. Turning to our full fiscal year performance, 2025 was a record year as revenue grew 78% year over year and surpassed $1,000,000,000 for the first time. Our financial services client vertical represented 75% of full fiscal year revenue and grew 108% year over year to $817,200,000 Our home services client vertical represented 24% of full fiscal year revenue and grew 24% year over year to $261,800,000 Other revenue represented the remaining $14,800,000 of full fiscal year revenue. Adjusted EBITDA for full fiscal year 2025 grew about 300% and it was $81,300,000 Turning to the balance sheet, we closed the year with $101,000,000 of cash and equivalents and no bank debt. Turning to our outlook, as Doug mentioned, we expect revenue in fiscal Q1 to be about $280,000,000 and adjusted EBITDA to be about $20,000,000 We expect full fiscal year 2026 revenue will grow about 10% and adjusted EBITDA will grow faster at about 20%.

[Gregory Wong, Chief Financial Officer at QuinStreet]

This is our initial view on fiscal twenty twenty six. And we will, of course, provide updates to our expectations as the year progresses. In closing, fiscal twenty twenty five was a record year for QuinStreet. We grew revenue almost 80% and surpassed $1,000,000,000 for the first time. We also quadrupled our adjusted EBITDA year over year and doubled our cash position.

[Gregory Wong, Chief Financial Officer at QuinStreet]

We believe that our market opportunities are still in the early innings and have never been bigger. And we will continue to invest against those opportunities in fiscal twenty twenty six and beyond. With that, I'll turn it over to the operator for Q and A.

[Operator]

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question and answer session. Should you have a question, please press the star followed by the one on your touch tone phone. You will hear a prompt that your hand has been raised. Should you wish to decline from the polling process, please press the star followed by the two.

[Operator]

If you are using a speakerphone, please lift the handset before pressing any key. Your first question comes from the line of Jason Kreyer from Craig Hallum Capital Group. Please go ahead.

[Cal Bartyzal, Equity Research Analyst at Craig-Hallum Capital Group LLC]

Great. Thank you. This is Cal on for Jason. So maybe to start, can you just kind of walk through what you saw as far as carrier spend trends across Q4 and what you're hearing from carriers amid some of this reacceleration into Q1?

[Douglas Valenti, Founder, Chairman & CEO at QuinStreet]

Sure. We initially saw in Q4 pretty consistent spending levels with which we had seen in our Q3, which was of course moderated from the heavy period of the kind of July to December year was the heaviest period and then moderated January through June, just to put it in calendar metrics for folks, since we're in such a weird fiscal. Those spending levels were steady, stable. And then we began to see those spending levels begin to increase as we got deeper into the quarter. And we got indications that carriers expected to continue to increase those spend levels into the current quarter and have had recent indications from carriers that they also expect to increase spend further in the December quarter.

[Douglas Valenti, Founder, Chairman & CEO at QuinStreet]

So, general gradual increases in spend as carriers do, as I indicated, they have exceptionally strong economics right now, very attractive combined ratios, And we're getting a lot more clarity, they're not full clarity on the level of tariffs. And they've had plenty of time to anticipate and prepare for those. But a lot of activity, a lot of demand, not all of that demand yet in the market as they continue to hold back to be sure that they're ready to absorb some continued uncertainties with tariffs. But I would say, if I would characterize it, I'd say a growing momentum, growing confidence, and growing commitments as we indicated the current quarter sequentially will grow pretty significantly in auto insurance over last quarter with the demand that we've now gotten, demand increases we've now gotten from carriers.

[Cal Bartyzal, Equity Research Analyst at Craig-Hallum Capital Group LLC]

Great. Thank you. And then just to follow-up, can you just kind of touch on some of the assumptions in the initial 2026 guidance? And just following up on some of your comments there, just curious your thoughts on the potential for a budget flush dynamic that we kind of saw at the back half of last calendar year, maybe happening again this year with carriers running so strong on profitability.

[Douglas Valenti, Founder, Chairman & CEO at QuinStreet]

Yes. 2026, it's early. We're giving you our early view. We're trying to be, I would say, relatively conservative versus what we might believe our full plans could represent and versus what we anticipate could happen in auto insurance. So, the early book certainly doesn't, would skew to the conservative end of what we think could happen this coming year, both in terms of the macro and like the auto insurance market, as well as the progress we can make across the business.

[Douglas Valenti, Founder, Chairman & CEO at QuinStreet]

So that's how I would generally characterize it. I think that your question about Q4, calendar Q4 is a great one. Listen, the carriers are entering the second half of the calendar year, again, with very strong economics. One of our sophisticated investors has done some pretty detailed analysis. And I think he indicated that the large carriers that report publicly could have the worst month every month in the remainder of the calendar year that they've ever had the past ten years, and still make their annual combined ratio target.

[Douglas Valenti, Founder, Chairman & CEO at QuinStreet]

That's a lot of surplus. And of course, what's not included is what the impact of tariffs might be that might add into that. But the further we go into the next few months going towards the end of the year, and the longer those strong ratios continue, you could we, as I indicated, we've already had some carriers tell us that they do expect already to increase spend pretty meaningfully in calendar Q4. And we certainly could see more of that. Again, it's going to be somewhat dependent on tariffs and how they flow through the system.

[Douglas Valenti, Founder, Chairman & CEO at QuinStreet]

And of course, weather events, although those are typically pretty well reserved for at this point in the year.

[Cal Bartyzal, Equity Research Analyst at Craig-Hallum Capital Group LLC]

Great. Thanks for all the color.

[Douglas Valenti, Founder, Chairman & CEO at QuinStreet]

Yeah, you bet.

[Operator]

Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Zach Cummins from B. Riley Securities. Please go ahead.

[Zach Cummins, Senior Research Analyst at B. Riley Securities]

Yes. Hi, good afternoon. My questions. Doug, I wanted to ask you just about general trends with some of your carrier base. I mean, a lot of the recovery has been driven by, call it, the top two or three carriers over the past twelve to eighteen months.

[Zach Cummins, Senior Research Analyst at B. Riley Securities]

So just curious of maybe the spending levels or potential intent to spend across your entire carrier base versus maybe some of the trends that we saw over the past twelve months.

[Douglas Valenti, Founder, Chairman & CEO at QuinStreet]

Yeah, no, it's a super good question. We have actually seen very strong activity broadly across our carrier base. I think, and I don't, this is good data actually. We had more carriers spending over $1,000,000 per month with us this past quarter than we have ever had in the history of the company. And I think it was like eight or nine carriers spending at those levels.

[Douglas Valenti, Founder, Chairman & CEO at QuinStreet]

So we're seeing so it's broad based. I think also if you look at the numbers that Progressive actually represented a lower percentage of our overall revenue last quarter than it has over the past couple of quarters. So again, I only say that because we have to report that publicly, and because it's another indication of pretty broad based participation and growth. Underlying that, I would say something you can't see, but we're experiencing is very, very strong engagement with our carrier partners and clients in terms of interest in the channel, interest in performance marketing, and interest in our marketplaces and performance marketing in particular. And a lot of work going on across a very wide range of carriers to get better and better at digital performance marketing so that they can participate at much greater, stronger rates than they currently do.

[Douglas Valenti, Founder, Chairman & CEO at QuinStreet]

There are very few carriers today who spend nearly as much as they should on digital performance marketing. If you look at the efficiency of the channel, and if you look at kind of where the customers are, where the prospects are, where the potential customers are, and where they're shopping. They're shopping in digital. And when they shop in digital, the vast majority of them that are in market end up in a performance marketplace, of course, ours being one of the largest. So, broad participation, very broad inches, very broad spending, very broad activity. We're seeing strength across the board.

[Gregory Wong, Chief Financial Officer at QuinStreet]

Hey, Zach, this is Greg. Just to add a little bit more color to that is, as Doug mentioned in his prepared remarks, our auto insurance business grew 62% year over year in the quarter. If you exclude our largest carrier in that mix, the auto insurance business is over 60% year over year. So it shows you the broad based carrier demand that we have. And that's helpful.

[Zach Cummins, Senior Research Analyst at B. Riley Securities]

Thanks for that, Greg. And Greg, just my one follow-up question for you, Really around the margin side, I think just based on your directional commentary for initial 2026 outlook, you're somewhere around EBITDA margin for the full year. So can you just talk about progression with some of your margin expansion initiatives in Q4 and how you expect those to potentially translate over the next several quarters?

[Gregory Wong, Chief Financial Officer at QuinStreet]

Doug, Yes, do want to take that to.

[Douglas Valenti, Founder, Chairman & CEO at QuinStreet]

Yeah, we have seen very strong progression of our margin expansion initiatives and expect that that momentum is only is going to continue. Let me give you a sense for what we're talking about. We have, first of all, there's the optimization of existing media, particularly in auto insurance, where we're making great strides in more carrier participation, better matching, better yielding for those carriers in the marketplace so that we can get better margins there. We're also growing new media capacity to serve the demand to continue to offset what we're seeing as a big mismatch between the surge in demand versus the ability to grow media.

[Douglas Valenti, Founder, Chairman & CEO at QuinStreet]

So we're investing very aggressively in some new proprietary scale media opportunities that are also growing very rapidly. And have good performance now, but the margins on those programs are only going to expand and are going to expand very strongly in coming months and quarters as we continue to scale them and optimize them. So also in auto insurance, we're growing new whole new footprints in and around auto insurance and product market opportunities that are already coming at significantly higher margins than the legacy business, which of course is our core business. But these new businesses are reaching good scale. One of those new businesses just got to about $8,000,000 per month has margin profile that is three times that of the core legacy click marketplace business.

[Douglas Valenti, Founder, Chairman & CEO at QuinStreet]

And by the way, that growth, it's over 100 growth I think last year, year over year. So we expect that to keep growing. And by the way, QRP grew at over 100% last year, and we expect it to grow about 100% again this year. So it's getting to good scale. So a lot going on in insurance that we expect to keep going on.

[Douglas Valenti, Founder, Chairman & CEO at QuinStreet]

Also a lot going on in the other businesses. We are optimizing for margin, our personal loans business in a way that is delivering dramatically faster growth in margin there than revenue growth as we optimize those marketplaces and prepare them for a next stage of growth in revenue at better margins. We also, by the way, to make sure that as we continue to implement and execute these margin expansion initiatives, get the most out of them, we will have our operating expenses, our non variable operating expenses this fiscal year will be flat over last year. We got to that by doing a number of internal restructurings that streamlined the organization and by continuing to adopt new technologies that are allowing us to be more and more productive. So there's just a steady stream across the business of very big, very meaningful margin improvement initiatives that we've already gotten some good traction on, but have a lot further to go than we have gone.

[Douglas Valenti, Founder, Chairman & CEO at QuinStreet]

So I would say that's what gives us the confidence to talk about next year is expecting it once again to grow EBITDA faster than revenue to start take our kind of the base level of EBITDA that we had for last year as a starting point and say fiscal Q1, and only grow from there in terms of our margins.

[Zach Cummins, Senior Research Analyst at B. Riley Securities]

Got it. Very helpful. Well, thanks again, Doug and Greg, for taking my questions and best of luck with the rest of the quarter.

[Gregory Wong, Chief Financial Officer at QuinStreet]

Thank you.

[Operator]

Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Patrick Scholl from Barrington Research. Please go ahead.

[Patrick Sholl, Vice President at Barrington Research Associates]

Hi, thank you. I was wondering if you could maybe talk a little bit more about some of the other business items like the home services side and how tariffs have been impacting that side of the business going into fiscal twenty twenty six?

[Douglas Valenti, Founder, Chairman & CEO at QuinStreet]

You bet, Patrick. There have been grumblings amongst home services industry folks that the tariffs could have some impact. But we are not seeing any indications from any of our clients that that's going to impact their spend levels or their aggression in the market. And we don't see them having an effect at all on our outlook for home services to once again grow 15% to 20% is kind of where we always take our objective to grow home services year over year. And we certainly think we can do that again this year in home services.

[Douglas Valenti, Founder, Chairman & CEO at QuinStreet]

A lot of momentum in home services, a lot of great operational excellence in that organization. We also have expanded our product footprint pretty significantly there and are having a lot of good results with that. And we're launching the next version of our central QuinStreet media platform, what we call QMP, the media optimization platform that's being launched in home services over the next few weeks. And we expect that to actually allow us to grow home services even faster and with a lot less friction. Because it's a pretty complicated business to grow.

[Douglas Valenti, Founder, Chairman & CEO at QuinStreet]

It's got a lot of pieces to it. And that's one the reasons I always talk about the operational excellence in that business. A business with an organization that has to be excellent to do the things they do in terms of growth and margin. And we're not hearing again, we're not hearing much, we're certainly not hearing or expecting that it's going to impact our outlook for that business in the next fiscal year. And as far as other businesses, we're not really hearing anything.

[Douglas Valenti, Founder, Chairman & CEO at QuinStreet]

The place we're hearing the most in the industry has been most vocal and is obviously going to has the potential to be most impacted is on auto insurance. Now that being said, to refer to yet another study which was done by one of the other companies that are not one of our competitors, but one of the other digital insurance companies. They released a study that suggested that a 15% tariff, if that's where we settle everywhere, and of course we have settled there in Japan, EU, and South Korea, are super important countries for autos, would represent the need to increase auto rates on average about 6%. Now averages are very, very dangerous, of course, because it's a super complicated industry. But that's nowhere near what we went through a couple years ago, right?

[Douglas Valenti, Founder, Chairman & CEO at QuinStreet]

In terms of double digit rate increases for, I think, two and a half, two, three years running. So that's why I indicated before that the agreements we've seen to date are relatively moderate in terms of the tariff levels. I think that may be why we're beginning to see a reacceleration amongst the auto insurance clients. Hopefully, they're reading that through and running that through their models and coming to the views that they're likely in pretty good shape given the strength of their current financial models.

[Patrick Sholl, Vice President at Barrington Research Associates]

Okay. Then of circling back to one of your earlier answers, I think you talked about opening up additional media sources. I'm just kind of curious if you could provide an update on maybe like the mix of media sources and just the contribution from some of the acquisitions that you've done over the past couple of years to expand the amount of media that you're able to source traffic through?

[Douglas Valenti, Founder, Chairman & CEO at QuinStreet]

Yeah, we don't really talk about the mix because that's pretty proprietary and pretty competitively sensitive. We get chased everywhere we go, so we'd rather not give them a head start. But I can tell you that the acquisition we made of Aquavita Media, which was a company that allows us to give much more aggressive in media outside of Google, if you will. It has been very successful for us. And if you need any indication, just look at how we have to keep marking up the earn out.

[Douglas Valenti, Founder, Chairman & CEO at QuinStreet]

So we love that. It's a huge new world of media. We've historically been pretty concentrated, quite frankly, ecosystem, and we love that. We're gonna keep driving as much as we can there. And by the way, we have a lot more to go there because we're not as big as we should be.

[Douglas Valenti, Founder, Chairman & CEO at QuinStreet]

The Aquavita and the kind of the other media opportunity is massive, And Aquavita has given us the ability to be very successful there. And we're getting to pretty good scale, but nowhere near where we will eventually get in those other channels.

[Patrick Sholl, Vice President at Barrington Research Associates]

Okay, thank you.

[Douglas Valenti, Founder, Chairman & CEO at QuinStreet]

Thank you.

[Operator]

Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Chris Sakai from Singular Research. Please go ahead.

[Chris Sakai, Director - Institutional Research at Singular Research]

So your guidance implies adjusted EBITDA margins of about 7% in Q1 versus 8.4% in Q4. What's driving this sequential margin compression? And is this smaller investment?

[Douglas Valenti, Founder, Chairman & CEO at QuinStreet]

Yeah. It's a combination of media capacity still being trying to catch up with now continuing to increase auto insurance demand, Chris, and the need to keep optimizing that media against that demand. But as long as that gap exists, then media prices and or competitive competition for that media is going to continue to push down margins. So it's that which we're working as fast as we can to address through optimization and other approaches. And the fact that we are going to aggressively invest in building new capacity to close that gap.

[Douglas Valenti, Founder, Chairman & CEO at QuinStreet]

And those investments are real. It takes a lot of money to build an at scale new campaign, whether it be in the Google ecosystem or outside the Google But we think it's essential that we do that both to have the capacity to meet the current demand, but have the capacity to meet the current demand plus what we see as a coming new surge of demand, and of course, to optimize margins around that. We think 7%, pretty good baseline that we've reestablished now. It was the average last fiscal year, and that was a big expansion over the fiscal year before that. And as we indicated in our outlook for the year, we do expect that to be a baseline and that we will be expanding margins pretty significantly beyond that as all these efforts and initiatives continue to come to fruition throughout the fiscal year.

[Chris Sakai, Director - Institutional Research at Singular Research]

Okay. Can you break down the growth within financial services beyond auto insurance? How are other verticals like personal loans, credit cards, other insurance products performing?

[Douglas Valenti, Founder, Chairman & CEO at QuinStreet]

They all grew year over year in the quarter. We still think we're quite early in all of those markets and facing a lot of opportunity to continue to scale them. I would say of the three, the one that had the revenue, lease growth in revenue was personal loans with us because as I indicated, we're really going through a margin optimization program there. We're growing margin a lot faster than revenue and getting rid of a lot of bad revenue. And we're doing that because we want to get that we're establishing a new base of profitability in that business as we look to scale to the next level of scaling.

[Douglas Valenti, Founder, Chairman & CEO at QuinStreet]

Overall, the three of them, those three businesses, credit cards, banking, and personal loans, grew year over year. And we expect that they're going to grow very nicely again this year. But like the other businesses, we expect that in all of them, we want to grow and we expect to grow margin even faster than revenue.

[Chris Sakai, Director - Institutional Research at Singular Research]

Okay, great. Thanks for those answers, Doug.

[Douglas Valenti, Founder, Chairman & CEO at QuinStreet]

Thank you, Chris.

[Operator]

Thank you, Chris. Your next question comes from the line of El Nibor from Lake Street Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

[Elle Niebuhr, Equity Research Associate at Lake Street Capital Markets]

Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my question. So first one, assuming a lower interest rate environment in 2026, for calendar year 2026, how should we think about incremental growth in the home services segment?

[Douglas Valenti, Founder, Chairman & CEO at QuinStreet]

That's a great question, Mel. I would say that we really model it that way. So I would guess that it would probably supportive of more growth in home services because you'd likely have more home buying activity. And typically when somebody buys a home, one of the first things they do is start doing a little work on it. That's been something that has been missing.

[Douglas Valenti, Founder, Chairman & CEO at QuinStreet]

As big a part of that market than the current kind of stalled home selling environment as it used to be. So it would certainly likely be a positive. I can't think of any ways in which it would be a negative. But we have not modeled that into our outlook.

[Elle Niebuhr, Equity Research Associate at Lake Street Capital Markets]

Awesome, thanks. And then second one for me. In regards to product development, where are you pointing investments in your development effort?

[Douglas Valenti, Founder, Chairman & CEO at QuinStreet]

Sure. Several places. One is, of course, QRP continues to be a big focus of our product development efforts. And as I indicated, I have indicated in the past, that's an incredibly important strategic business for us and for the future of digitization of the insurance, and particularly the insurance agency channel. And we're seeing renewed activity as the market has come back and very good growth.

[Douglas Valenti, Founder, Chairman & CEO at QuinStreet]

And we have very good outlook for that business. So we're going to continue to invest there. We're also investing in our finance product in home services, three sixty Finance, a very big market opportunity to provide a point of sale kitchen table, we call it, financing app to contractors. And we have a big contractor network in home services, and this is an add on product of very high value to those contractors. It matches up well to our ability to run a marketplace, and in another marketplace, in this case, a lending marketplace.

[Douglas Valenti, Founder, Chairman & CEO at QuinStreet]

And we're putting a lot of our money there. And again, that business was up very significant this past year. We expect it to be up almost 3x at least this year, and could be up as much as five to 10x this year. So that business we are continuing to spend aggressively to scale. Both those businesses I would point out are very contiguous to our core business, but also do not have media costs.

[Douglas Valenti, Founder, Chairman & CEO at QuinStreet]

So, also very enhancing to our margins. But we're also spending money on continued improvements in our core technologies. So, I indicated before, we are launching our next version of QMP, our core media optimization platform that runs our marketplaces and media. We're launching that in home services. That's a big effort.

[Douglas Valenti, Founder, Chairman & CEO at QuinStreet]

It's a big development project. We expect it to have a big impact across the business, but in particular initially in home services where scaling is going to help us to scale with a lot less friction, a lot less effort than we've had in the past. And then we have a new call platform, which is also a contact platform for consumers, which we're rolling out this year. And that's a big part of our spend and very important part of our overall economic model and one that reengagement, remarketing to consumers that don't fully complete the process online is very accretive to margin thing that we do. And we've really been limping along on three different platforms that were legacies of three different acquisitions and three different businesses.

[Douglas Valenti, Founder, Chairman & CEO at QuinStreet]

So it really hasn't been optimal. And we've freed up the capacity and the spend over the past year or so to completely rebuild and relaunch those capabilities on a unified platform that I expect is gonna have big impact on that part of the business as well. So Greg, did I miss any big ones? There's, I mean, a lot of, there are a lot. I only invested probably four of the 10 to 12 significant projects. But I think those are the four biggest Greg. Is that right?

[Gregory Wong, Chief Financial Officer at QuinStreet]

You hit the big ones. Yep.

[Elle Niebuhr, Equity Research Associate at Lake Street Capital Markets]

Well, awesome. Perfect. That's it for me. Congrats.

[Douglas Valenti, Founder, Chairman & CEO at QuinStreet]

Thank you, Elle.

[Operator]

Thank you, Elle. And there are no further questions at this time. Thank you everyone for taking the time to join Queen Street's earnings call. Replay information is available on the earnings press release issued this afternoon. This concludes today's call. Thank you.

Participants

Executives

• Robert Amparo, Senior Director of Investor Relations & Finance
• Douglas Valenti, Founder, Chairman & CEO
• Gregory Wong, Chief Financial Officer

Analysts

• Cal Bartyzal, Equity Research Analyst at Craig-Hallum Capital Group LLC
• Zach Cummins, Senior Research Analyst at B. Riley Securities
• Patrick Sholl, Vice President at Barrington Research Associates
• Chris Sakai, Director - Institutional Research at Singular Research
• Elle Niebuhr, Equity Research Associate at Lake Street Capital Markets