Thank you all for standing by, and welcome to the REA Group Ltd full year results for 2022. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there'll be a question and answer session. To ask a question at that time, you'll need to press star then one on your telephone keypad. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I'd now like to hand the conference over to your first speaker, Alice Bennett, Executive Manager of Investor Relations. Thank you. Please go ahead.
Good morning and welcome everybody. My name's Alice Bennett, executive manager of investor relations, and I'd like to thank you for joining REA Group's 2022 full year results presentation. Before we commence, I'd like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which we're hosting our meeting in Melbourne, the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation, and pay our respects to the elders past, present, and emerging. Today, you'll hear from REA's CEO, Owen Wilson, and Janelle Hopkins, REA's CFO. Owen will talk to our overarching financial performance and strategic highlights for the year. He'll then hand over to Janelle to talk to our financial results in more depth. Following this, we'll be happy to take your questions. With that, I will pass over to Owen to get us started.
Thanks, Alice. I'd like to welcome everyone this morning and also acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which we're meeting and pay my respects to the elders past, present, and emerging. REA has delivered an exceptional FY 2022 performance. This very pleasing result was driven by our outstanding Australian residential business with record uptake of our premium listing products. The strength of these products and the market's clear recognition of the value they deliver enabled us to fully capitalize on the healthy listings environment. We also delivered excellent growth in our property data, financial services, and Indian businesses. Looking at our results from corporations, revenue was AUD 1.17 billion, an increase of 26%. EBITDA, after share of associates, was AUD 674 million, an increase of 19%, and NPAT was AUD 408 million, an increase of 25%.
The board has determined a record final dividend of AUD 0.89 per share, fully franked. This takes full-year dividends to AUD 1.64 per share, an increase of 25%. Along with our strong financial result, we achieved a number of key milestones, as outlined on this slide. Our personalized experiences and focus on driving membership delivered increased consumer engagement and continued substantial growth in seller leads. In March, we relaunched property.com.au with aspirations to build Australia's leading property research destination. We achieved record depth and Premiere penetration, reflecting the superior value in our customer offering. Add-on products also achieved record uptake. Key milestones were reached in our strategic investments with growth in scale and product enhancements in financial services, India, and Southeast Asia. These highlights will be covered in more detail in the coming slides. REA's growth is underpinned by our clear strategy.
Our purpose is to change the way the world experiences property. We took a deep dive into our strategy at our recent Investor Day, and you remember that we have three core objectives. Continuing to deliver Australia's largest, most engaged consumer audience and driving the most leads and the best leads to our customers. Providing our customers with superior value across property advertising, our agent marketplace, and agency services. Becoming Australia's leading property data, valuations, and insights provider. We are very focused on our strategic priorities, which are outlined on this slide. We have an excellent platform for growth. I'll share the highlights for the year from each of these five key areas in the remainder of the presentation. Excuse me. Turning to our audience highlights. Our audience is the air we breathe.
The millions of Australians visiting realestate.com.au each month power our marketplace and drive the value we deliver to our customers. We are Australia's number one address in property and have expanded our audience leadership position, enhancing the powerful lens we have on the property market. We have an average of 12.7 million people visit our site each month, with over half of this audience using our site exclusively. Our app held its position as Australia's number one property app with an average of 59 million launches each month, up 7% year-on-year. Moving to consumer highlights on slide nine. realestate.com.au is the lifelong property companion for Australians, adding value and efficiency throughout their property journey. Our goal is to convert Australia's largest audience of property seekers into realestate.com.au members, and we accelerated the growth of this cohort during the year.
We enhanced our membership offering with exclusive content and experiences, such as our Coming Soon feature, while our personalized homepage delivered a 25% year-on-year increase in monthly active members. Our property owner experience leverages consumer behavior data, property supply data, content, and financial calculators to assist owners in making decisions related to their property. Consumers recognize the value of our property owner dashboard with visits up almost 200% year-on-year. We know members are three times more likely to act, resulting in the best quality and highest quantity of leads for our customers and our financial services business. In FY 2022, we delivered a pleasing 54% increase in seller leads and 32% increase in finance leads. realestate.com.au is the number one destination for renters in Australia, as outlined on slide 10. Our strategy is centered around making renting simpler and more efficient.
Rental applications play a key role in the rent journey, and we have significantly improved this experience. In June, we retired our previous application platform and replaced it with the enhanced realestate.com.au rental applications. This offers renters a simplified process, more privacy, and helps streamline property manager workflows. As part of the new platform, a key part of the new platform is the integrated realestate.com.au renter profiles. We know renters are facing market challenges when securing a home, and this feature enables efficient and secure applications for multiple properties. Three renter profiles are created every minute, demonstrating the high value, high level of trust consumers have in our platform. Momentum behind our tenant verification service, Tenant Check, continued into Q4 with a 66% year-on-year increase in the number of renters purchasing this service.
Tenant Check is automatically attached to rental realestate.com.au rental applications, which not only optimizes the process for renters, but provides property managers with efficiency gains. Our goal is to remain Australia's first choice for digital property advertising solutions while helping our customers grow their businesses. We describe our customer strategy as the AA A strategy. In March, we launched Premiere+, our most comprehensive advertising product package for the residential market. The customer response and uptake has been outstanding, surpassing our expectations. This package is designed to meet the needs of our customers in each phase of the property advertising process, including new pre-market and post-market features. Our Agency Marketplace connects prospective sellers and landlords to our customers. Visits to Agency Marketplace increased 13% year-on-year, and as I mentioned previously, we had impressive growth in the volume of seller leads delivered to our customers.
At the heart of our agency services strategy is our customer platform, Ignite. Feature enhancements, such as the inclusion of rental applications, resulted in strong growth in active users. Usage of our Connect offering, which is designed to help streamline customer workflows, increased significantly in the second half of the year. Turning to data which underpins REA's business. As we outlined at our Investor Day, we believe PropTrack can become Australia's number one property data business, and we've made excellent progress towards this goal. Our unique data and insights drives the value in our consumer products and experiences. The size of our audience gives us the most comprehensive, data-driven view of the Australian property market, and our exclusive content helps keep this audience engaged. Visits to PropTrack Insights on realestate.com.au increased 210% year-on-year in Q4.
We also made significant progress towards our goal to have Australia's most accurate property valuation model. In June, we released AVM 3.0, which leverages more data sources than ever before and uses machine learning technology to value more properties at a high level of accuracy. The value of our AVM has enabled us to expand relationships with major banks as we accelerate the digital transformation of the mortgage valuation process. This has resulted in strong revenue growth for our data business. Turning to financial services, record results were achieved in FY 2022, with submissions up 13% year-on-year and settlements up 28% year-on-year. This growth was driven by broker recruitment, productivity improvements, and market conditions. 154 new brokers joined Mortgage Choice in FY 2022, taking our network above 1,000 brokers for the first time.
Integration is well progressed and is on track for completion in Q3 this year. An exciting milestone was the launch of our refreshed Mortgage Choice brand, supported by a national media campaign highlighting the message, "You're never alone." We also established a new direct-to-lender digital lending partnership with ubank and further leveraged Simpology capability to deliver an enhanced home loan comparison experience. Moving to our global businesses. In FY 2022, REA India secured and maintained its position as the number one property portal in the country, with the flagship site, Housing.com, achieving record audience levels. The site achieved 14.2 million average monthly visits, an increase of 50% year-on-year, and a new record was reached in May with 16.7 million visits. The growth was driven by a strong focus on SEO, targeted marketing, and an improved mobile experience.
The result of Housing.com's effective marketing campaign saw Housing.com make great progress in spontaneous brand awareness. REA India also realized a number of other key highlights, including expansion into more tier-two cities, the launch of commercial listings, and the extension of the Housing Edge platform with new product offerings. REA has a 17.5% interest in Southeast Asian-based PropertyGuru, which holds market leadership in Singapore, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Thailand. As we've mentioned previously, PropertyGuru surpassed a significant milestone to commence trading on the New York Stock Exchange in March. The business achieved 42% growth in marketplaces revenue in the March quarter, driven by improved yield and high utilization of premium products, along with the inclusion of REA's former assets in Malaysia and Thailand. Pleasingly, PG also reaffirmed revenue growth guidance of 44% for the current calendar year.
In North America, REA has a 20% interest in Move, Inc, which operates realtor.com. Move delivered solid revenue growth during the year by focusing on yield enhancement and beginning to diversify revenue streams such as seller, rentals, and new homes. This result was despite very strong prior year comparables and an increasingly challenging macroeconomic environment. Alongside our growth agenda is our commitment to a sustainable future and driving positive change. REA continued to progress our environmental, social, and governance goals during the year. We strengthened our commitment to environmental issues with renewed carbon neutral certification and reduced our energy consumption with the installation of solar panels at our headquarters in Richmond. The talent market remains competitive.
Our focus on making REA a great and inclusive place to work resulted in our organization being named an inclusive employer by the Diversity Council of Australia and being certified a great place to work. Before I hand over to Janelle, I'd like to make some comments on current market conditions. The Australian property market remains healthy, supported by some strong underlying fundamentals. While economic conditions have changed, some significant positives remain in place, including record low unemployment, high levels of household savings, and increasing immigration. We do expect that as interest rates continue to rise, property prices will continue to moderate. It's important to look at these price movements in the context of the very strong property price increases in recent years. If we have a 5% fall in house prices from here, it would only take us back to August last year.
A 10% drop will be back to May last year. Rental vacancies are very low, and rents are increasing at double-digit levels in many markets. This will inevitably attract more investors to the market. The demand for property remains healthy. In July, we saw our highest audience levels since March this year, and we delivered almost 2 million buyer inquiries to our customers. Yes, there are fewer buyers than this time last year, but it's our view that the supply-demand imbalance that existed last year needed correction. It's important to note REA does not monetize house prices, and as I've said before, the logic of buying the full suite of our premier products makes greater sense in softer markets.
REA is strongly positioned in this market for continued growth, backed by our unrivaled audience and a product pipeline that is going to deliver exceptional value to our customers and consumers in FY 2023 and beyond. I'll now hand over to Janelle to talk through our financials in more detail.
Thanks, Owen, and good morning, everyone. REA has delivered an exceptional result for the year. From our core operations, revenue increased 26% year-on-year to AUD 1.17 billion. Operating expenses increased 34% to AUD 499 million. EBITDA, including the results from our associates, was AUD 674 million, up 19%. The group delivered NPAT from core operations of AUD 408 million, up 25%. As we did at the half, we've provided both group core results in the ASX release for the year and growth rates excluding the REA India and Mortgage Choice acquisitions to give visibility of like-for-like performance. Excluding the impact of acquisitions, group revenue increased 18%, costs increased 11%, and EBITDA, including associates, increased 20%. The group results from core operations differ from reported statutory results, with a number of one-off items excluded.
On slide 20, we provide a summary of the reconciliation between the core and statutory results. Turning to our Australian residential business and trends in the market. Residential revenues increased by an impressive 24%, with strong year-on-year growth in buy revenues tempered with modest growth for rent. Buy revenue benefited from an increase in national listings, strong growth in depth, an 8% price rise, and continued growth in our add-on products, particularly Audience Maximiser. In the charts on the right-hand side, we've set out the quarterly changes in new buy and rent listing volumes. National new buy listings increased 11% year-on-year in FY 2022, with Sydney up 8% and Melbourne increasing 8%. It's fair to say that the 2% growth in the fourth quarter was stronger than expected, given the timing of public holidays in April and uncertainty with the federal election in May.
The chart showing rent listings highlights that this market remains challenged, with listings down 10% for the year. The rental market continued to be impacted by a severe shortage of stock due to a high level of investment sales over the past two years and escalating demand as cities rebound from COVID-19 and overseas migration returns. Rent revenue increased due to the 6% price rise and higher depth penetration. However, this was largely offset by the decline in rental listings. As we provide each reporting period, the following slide shows both the penetration and mix of depth listings in the residential business and the success of our Premium listings products. There is no scale on this graph, but the relativities between the categories are to scale. Our depth and Premiere penetration continued to improve across the year, with record penetration across all states.
The first half benefited from the record sign-up to the current two-year contract, and the second half saw continued growth in depth penetration and customers upgrading to Premiere+, which we have started to monetize in FY 2023. As we highlighted at our recent Investor Day, the group will continue to target double-digit buyer growth throughout the cycle. In FY 2022, the combination of record depth and an 8% average price rise delivered 14% growth in buyer yield. Turning to commercial and developer. Revenue for the year increased by 3%, with strong growth in commercial, partly offset by lower developer revenues. Commercial revenues increased due to a 1 July price rise, with strong growth in depth penetration, and we saw continued positive momentum in commercial sales listings, as well as the return of lease listing volumes in the second half. The developer business has been challenged.
As you can see on the chart, project commencements were down throughout the year. Melbourne and Sydney lockdowns impacted the first quarter, and combined with rising input costs and supply chain issues, this has resulted in developers less willing to take new projects to market. Media, data, and other revenue grew 9%. We saw strong growth in data, which increased 28% as PropTrack benefited from new contracts and increased valuation volumes. Media revenue was up with developer display, the largest component, flat, while programmatic revenue grew. Other revenues, which is largely Flatmates.com.au, declined marginally. Financial services operating revenue increased by 12% to AUD 79 million on a pro forma basis, assuming we owned the Mortgage Choice in the prior period. Revenues have benefited from a 28% increase in settlements driven by continued growth in our broker network, increased productivity, and a strong housing market.
This has been partly offset by higher broker commission payments, which have increased as our brokers have written more business. We flagged at the third quarter result, we have reviewed our trial book valuation as part of our year-end process. This has seen a reduction in the asset valuation as we updated key assumptions based on recent market activity. Key drivers for the change included higher mortgage run-off rates as more people held excess cash in offset accounts or have accelerated their mortgage repayments. In addition, broker payout rates are expected to remain high as a result of higher broker productivity and the stronger settlements in the current market. This valuation adjustment has reduced financial services core net revenue by AUD 13 million to AUD 66 million.
As outlined at our recent Investor Day, our focus continued to be on scaling the broker network through continued recruitment, increasing market share through incentivizing productive brokers, and building our digital mortgage offering. The FY 2022 result reflects this investment, as well as the integration of the Mortgage Choice and Smartline business. REA India has delivered an impressive performance for the year, with pro forma revenue growth of 92% to AUD 54 million. As the chart on the left-hand side shows, revenue was driven by growth in Housing.com's property advertising business, which benefited from strong customer growth. Revenue growth was also driven by our adjacency products on the Housing Edge platform, Rent Pay in particular. These products come with associated COGS, such as payment gateway costs, resulting in them being lower margin, but importantly, supporting cross-sell and customer retention.
As we flagged previously, REA India has continued to invest for future growth, which has resulted in a core EBITDA loss of AUD 35 million for the year. Operating costs were up 56% year-on-year on a pro forma basis, which reflects higher headcount to deliver strategic initiatives and remuneration uplifts as India is experiencing even tougher labor market competition than Australia, increased brand spend to support audience awareness, and increased COGS in line with strong growth in adjacency revenues. Throughout the year, we increased our shareholding from 60.8% to 73.3% at 30 June, as we elected to fund 100% of the business investment via equity injection, with News Corp holding the minority interest. Moving to our strategic investments. Total associate contributions from core operations were AUD 3 million in FY 2022, down from AUD 9 million in the prior year.
This includes our investments in Move, PropertyGuru, Simpology, realtor.com, and CampaignAgent. Move's equity accounted contribution for the year declined by AUD 2 million to AUD 14 million. Move delivered 11% revenue growth driven by the traditional lead generation product and the referral model, with overall lead volumes down 23%. Move saw higher employee and marketing costs as the business continued to reinvest to drive their core businesses and expand into adjacencies. For more information on Move, please refer to the News Corp results release. In Southeast Asia, PropertyGuru contributed an equity accounted loss of AUD 6 million to core group EBITDA. As Owen mentioned, PropertyGuru listed on the New York Stock Exchange in March 2022, and as part of that process, REA Group contributed $52 million to the PIPE capital raising associated with the listing. As a result, our shareholding is now 17.5%.
PropertyGuru is expected to report its half-year results on the New York Stock Exchange in late August. On the next slide is our core operating jaws. Our jaws remained open for the year, excluding acquisitions. As you can see from the chart on the left-hand side, that FY 2021 and FY 2022 jaws were wider than the 1%-3% range we have typically seen in the past, reflecting reduced costs in the face of COVID uncertainty. The 11% core operating cost growth, which excludes acquisitions, is reflective of a number of key factors. In the prior period, we had lower than typical spend, particularly in the first half as we slowed investment in new initiatives and deferred pay rises due to COVID uncertainty.
In the current period, the main driver was higher employee costs, which were driven largely by increased headcounts to accelerate growth initiatives and upward pressure on remuneration costs. In addition, we had an increase in COGS associated with revenue growth from products such as Audience Maximiser and to a lesser extent, Connect. While these products increase the cost base, they are high margin products that positively contribute to our strong EBITDA. While COVID saw some distortions to year-on-year cost growth over the past two years, compound average cost growth from FY 2020 -FY 2022 was 7% per annum. As we have highlighted earlier, the group continued to invest to support ongoing growth, with investment focused on a number of new products and experiences across multiple lines of business. During the year, we increased the pace of our investment program as market conditions continued to improve.
In addition to acquisition of REA India and Mortgage Choice, which you can see in the blue section of the chart, key areas of spend included uplifting our core consumer experience to drive membership, the launch of Premiere+, improvements to the PropTrack data products, and the relaunch of property.com.au. As a result of the continued investment, total depreciation and amortization is expected to be in the range of AUD 86 million-AUD 92 million in FY 2023. Turning to our cash position. We ended the year with a strong closing cash balance of AUD 248 million. The group delivered operating cash flows of AUD 488 million, which is the addition of the first four bars on the graph.
As you can see, the strong operating cash flow, cash flows allowed us to continue to invest in the business as well as deliver strong shareholder returns in the form of dividends. During the year, we refinanced our debt facilities with a new facility of AUD 600 million, with maturity dates split over 2024 and 2025. At 30 June, AUD 414 million has been drawn, enabling headroom to finance strategic portfolio opportunities as they may arise. Finally, on current trading, July national residential new listings were up 7% year-on-year, with Sydney listings increasing 8%, 18% and Melbourne up 6%. Year-on-year growth rates in the first quarter will reflect the Sydney and Melbourne lockdowns in the prior period. Growth rates beyond that will reflect the strong prior period listing volumes.
Residential buy yield growth is anticipated to grow double digits in FY 2023, driven by an average national 6% price rise, new product launches including Premiere+, plus continued growth in depth and Premiere penetration. The group is targeting full-year positive operating jaws for Australia, with operating cost growth expected to be in mid- to high-single digits in FY 2023. This reflects the continued inflationary impact to salaries and investment to deliver on our strategic growth objectives. For REA India, we'll increase our investment to capitalize on the recent momentum and cement our number one audience position, with FY 2023 EBITDA losses expected to widen. As a result, total group operating costs are expected to increase low double digits.
Lastly, the group expects combined contributions from associates to decline to a single digit loss in FY 2023, reflecting continued investment across our portfolio of associates to drive long-term growth. Before we head to Q&A, I just wanted to reiterate that we're extremely pleased with our results in 2022 and approach 2023 in an incredibly strong position. As we have demonstrated over the last two years, we are well-placed to adapt to changing market conditions. I will stop here. Operator, can we please now open the line for questions?
Thank you, Janelle. We will now begin the question and answer session. If you'd like to ask a question, please press star then one one on your telephone keypad and wait for your name to be announced. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Our first question comes from Kane Hannan at Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.
Morning, guys. Just three for me, please. Firstly, just the buy yield growth into next year, that double-digit target. I suppose, do you think its pulls will reach the 14% you did this year? Or is that more, you know, a high watermark in terms of the growth aspirations? Secondly, Premiere+, if we would just put those Q4 attachment rates on your depth penetration chart, you know, how would that compare to Feature, Highlight, and then some of those bars? Then finally, just India, appreciate the cost commentary you provided. Is it reasonable to annualize those second half losses into 2023, or could it potentially be even worse than that? Cheers.
I'll take the buy yield growth, Kane. Look, we are very optimistic about our yield growth for FY 2023. We've flagged double digit. That will be a combination of our 6% price rise, plus growth from new products and increased Premiere penetration. Whether it gets to 14%, we can't necessarily specify, but we absolutely believe it will be double digit. On India, look, the way we think about India, we've said we're going to invest for growth in the India business. We, you know, we're very excited about it for FY 2022 on a pro forma basis. I hope that helps from a point of view of expectation around India.
Yeah. On Premiere+, Kane, you know, we won't be putting another kind of bar on the graph that we put up for penetration because it's still a Premiere listing within the Premiere+ package. What I can say, it kind of follows on from what Janelle said about yield. Premiere+ is gonna make a very pleasing contribution to our buy yield growth in 2023.
Perfect, guys. Thanks.
Our next question comes from Lucy Huang at UBS. Please go ahead.
Good morning, Owen and Janelle. Thanks for taking questions. I've got three as well. Firstly, just wondering if you can provide us some color around the residential rental business. Any early color in July and August on volume growth and whether that's improved, and also your expectation for yield growth, in that business moving into FY 2023. Secondly, just on cost growth. Just wondering if you can give us some color on the level of inflation that you're seeing across the business and, if the macro does soften moving into the second half of 2023, what kind of levers can you pull to manage the cost base there Thirdly, just to follow on from Kane's question on Premiere+, any color on, you know, how many listings right now, where we're seeing the attachment of Premiere+? Any color on that would be great. Thank you.
I'll take questions one and three, Lucy. In terms of the rental market, residential rent market, we are seeing early signs of a recovery in listings, which is very pleasing. As I said, you know, rental rates are increasing at a huge rate of knots, which will have two impacts. One, you know, people won't wanna move from their rental properties if they don't have to. As leases expire, those rents will increase, which will attract investors back to the market. The other impact it's having, and we're seeing that in our numbers, is a higher propensity for tenants to engage with our consumer products, particularly our Tenant Check product, to put themselves in the best possible position of being selected for a property.
In particular, our new rental application experience, it makes it a lot easier to apply for multiple properties, which so many people are doing in the market at the moment. In terms of Premiere+, look, it's and we're not gonna put our penetration rates or anything like that. It is, you know, for a new product launch, we've always talked about our new products or our new bundles taking a long time to mature in the market and this product will have further maturity. But the level of sign-up is probably higher than we would've expected for a new product entering the market. It's only been in for two or three months. As I said, it is gonna have a very pleasing upward influence on our buy yield next year.
Lucy, to your question around costs, in Australia, we've guided to mid- to high-single-digit cost growth. That cost growth is primarily gonna be due to higher remuneration costs that are growing. As you referred to inflation, pleasingly, our remuneration growth will be less than inflation. Plus it will also reflect the impact of annualizing the ramp up in headcount that we undertook in the second half of FY 2022. Importantly, we're not anticipating a substantial increase in headcount overall into FY 2023. Levers we've got to pull, as you know, you've experienced over the last two years, we can always pull levers if we need to slow down our cost growth.
We do have a proportion of our workforce that is flexible, so we can flex that up and down quite quickly, as well as we continue to have ongoing vacancy rates, so we could slow recruitment if we needed to at any point in time.
Thanks, guys. Yeah.
Our next question comes from Eric Choi at Barrenjoey. Please go ahead.
Morning, guys. I've got three. Might ask them one by one, if that's all right. First one, just a dumb one. I'm just trying to gauge the EBITDA impact of these trailing commission adjustments. Simple question is, what would that AUD 674 million of EBITDA have been excluding these trailing commission impacts?
Yeah. It would've been, if you add back the AUD 13 million impact to core revenue, it'd be AUD 13 million higher to the AUD 674 million.
Got it. It's 100% cut through. Got it. Second question. Positive jaws comment for Australia in FY 2023. Does that include the benefit of cycling off a weak finance base in FY 2022? Does that mean that your jaws could be higher than the 1%-3% you've seen historically?
Yes, it does include cycling over that, the weaker financial results in FY 2022. It could be higher. You know, we have flagged that we do anticipate drawdowns to be open. How much will be depending on what happens from a point of view, most likely the impact of market conditions and listings.
Awesome. Can I have another stab at Premiere+, but maybe slightly differently? Can we talk about second order impacts? Maybe for Owen. Is your depth penetration across all products, even on base Premiere, is that stronger than you'd usually see in July maybe because of Premiere+?
As Janelle flagged, we expect, you know, total depth and total Premiere penetration. Premiere+ is still Premiere listing. We do expect that to increase from 1 July. Premiere+ will have an impact on that. We saw some customers move from no depth at all up to Premiere All, and from Highlight All and Feature All up to Premiere+, because of the value of the product. You are going to see an increase in Premiere penetration from 1 July as a result of that.
I wonder, I know you're not giving us penetration percentages, but maybe for Janelle, I wonder if you could comment on the sensitivity. At sort of back of the envelope every sort of 10% penetration of Premiere+ might add like sort of AUD 7 million or AUD 8 million of revenues or sort of 1 percentage point to your yield target. Do you think that's sort of sensible?
I think the other element you've got to factor in, Eric, is geo mix. Geo mix can have an impact. You know, in this quarter, not only are we gonna have, you know, an abnormally positive listings environment because of lockdowns last year, but that abnormal positivity is gonna be in the highest yielding markets of Sydney and Melbourne. You get a disproportionate impact on yield. And similarly, you know, in the quarter just finished, we had higher growth in listings in the regional or non-metro areas than the metro areas. That kind of brings the yield down a little bit. It's not a number that we would say if it's up 10, it equals this or down 10, it equals that.
That's really helpful. Thanks, Owen.
Our next question comes from Entcho Raykovski at Credit Suisse. Please go ahead.
Morning, Owen. Morning, Janelle. My first question is also on the trail commission adjustment. In your view, is there any more trail commission to come out in FY 2023? Or is this, are you treating this essentially as a one-off and your best guess is that you're essentially done?
Yeah, look, we update the assumptions as part of the valuation of the loan book, and we reflect our expectations of future impacts of settlement rates and run-off rates. Our expectation, based on everything we know today, we've reflected that within the valuation adjustments that we've made.
Those assumptions could change.
They could.
Back the other way.
Yeah.
You know, we could be sitting here this time next year in a higher interest rate environment and have to change our assumptions for much lower run-off, and therefore you'd end up with a positive valuation adjustment if that.
Mm-hmm.
If that happened.
Just for clarity, that would likely be taken above the line.
Yes. Yes, it would be. The way we've talked to our financial services business.
Yeah.
You can see in the ASX, we've talked about our operating revenues and then our net revenue for financial services, but it's all part of just our standard business as usual practices.
Got it. Okay. Secondly, I'm just interested in your take on the extent to which the return of off-market transactions may have supported listings in recent months and whether that will support listings into FY 2023. I know it's maybe a difficult question to answer, but you know, you would think that as the market obviously softens, that some of those off-market transactions really sort of trail off and you don't get too many of them. Yeah, interested in your perspective, in what you're seeing.
Yeah, you're spot on, Entcho. You know, in this market, where there are definitely fewer buyers than this time last year, the propensity to try for an off-market transaction or off-market being obviously not advertised falls away. We do expect some of that volume, some of that activity to come back onto our site. If you know, speaking to agents, particularly, you know, this time last year when the market was really hot, you know, there were more buyers than sellers, you know, the level of off-market was probably very high. I think we're gonna see that. We probably are seeing it in some of the numbers. You know, our listings in June were the highest they'd been since 2013. Our listings in July were the highest since 2015.
July was not really cycling over that much of a lockdown. I think you're seeing some of that. You know, we are gonna see a really weird listings environment by quarter. Q1 is clearly going to be positive as we cycle over the lockdowns of last year. As I said, you know, the buyers are still there. I see a world where investors are gonna start coming back to this market as well. As long as there are buyers around, then vendors do have the opportunity to come to market. We still have options for our customers to have a pay on sale option. It is a much higher yielding product, and we haven't seen a lot of uptake of that to this point in time, but that we could see some of that happening.
As we cycle over Q2, Q3 and Q4, we're obviously cycling over some really high comps. No net, I think we said at Q3, we're expecting listings to be marginally down for the financial year, with a really strong finish to Q4, and that completely surprised us, I've got to say. You know, our expectation is that, you know, listings are probably gonna be down in a low or mid-single digit, but still very healthy. I mean, if you look at that listing number in total, that's still a really good year, compared to prior years. You know, it's still a good market.
Okay, thank you. That's useful color. Maybe just the very final one, again, it's related to this one. At sort of the peak of the hot market, so to say, do you have any estimate as to what percentage of transactions may have been done off-market without a listing?
Yeah, we've tried to calculate that to see what the opportunity was if it comes back. It's almost impossible because you've got to match up transactions. A lot of transactions or changes in owner of property, they're not sales, and so it's very hard to track. You have to rely on sort of anecdotal evidence from customers, and customers love to brag about this, quite frankly. You know, I've had customers say that, you know, they're doing one in five off-market this time last year. Now, I take that with a grain of salt. You know, it could have been as high as 5%, 10%, at the peak. That's a lot of listings to come back on site in a softer market.
I'll say it again, you know, this is a market where buying, you know, all of our Premiere products, you know, the full suite when you're trying to sell makes absolute sense. I think, you know, it does set us up well, in terms of our penetration.
Okay, great. Thank you.
Our next question comes from Paul Mason at E&P. Please go ahead.
Hey, just two from me. So the first one, I'm just wondering if you could give a comment on the performance of the residual Asian assets that weren't vetted into PropertyGuru. Looks like you've consolidated them into the Australian business. So just some color on whether they were actually significant or whether they were basically de minimis at this point. And then the second one, just on the listing pattern in terms of growth and then, you know, whether it's positive or negative this year, month by month. Can you just give us a bit of color in terms of comping the lockdown, you're expecting August and September to be the easy comps, and then it starts getting difficult in October specifically? Or is the difficulty more sort of weighted to November onwards? Yeah, those are the two from me. Thanks.
Look, the question on Asia, the only thing left from when we have reflected this in our Australian segment overall is our MyFun business. No, there's no other Asian separate operations.
On the listings color, you're spot on, Paul, that, you know, July was up nicely and Melbourne wasn't in lockdown in July last year. We've got to remember that. August and September will be much easier comps because we're cycling a lockdown. When the lockdowns finished, we had a big bounce in listings in October and into November, and so those months in particular will be tougher comps. It then shallowed out in a little bit over the normal Christmas shutdown of December and January. Q4, though, will be probably the toughest one to cycle over. You know, Q4 was, as I said, the highest listings since 2013. Sorry, June was higher than 2013, but Q4 was a multi-year high as well.
I think that, you know, Q1, nicely positive, Q2, slightly negative, Q4, definitely negative, I would think, and Q3, hard to tell. It's. I've got to qualify that. Listings are incredibly hard to predict. I mean, we were sitting talking to you at our Q3 results, which were in May, and at that point in time, we still thought listings were gonna be negative in Q4, and they weren't. I've got to qualify all of that with they're very hard to predict. If anyone can give me an accurate listings prediction model, I'll pay handsomely for it.
Thank you.
Our next question comes from Roger Samuel at Jefferies. Please go ahead.
Hi, morning all. I've got three questions. First one just on Premiere All. I remember last year there was a strong sign-up of agents on the Premiere All contracts, and I'm just wondering if you're seeing any pick-up in the sign-ups this year as well. Secondly, just on Highlight and Feature. I mean, we talk a lot about Premiere, but what about Highlight and Feature? Is there any plan to push these products further given that, you know, the vendors might be more price sensitive in this weaker housing environment? Then just thirdly, on financial services, you mentioned that finance lead went up by 32%. I'm just wondering what's the conversion rate from the leads to actual mortgage. Thanks.
Thanks, Roger. Yeah, Premiere All, we did see continued sign-up across the course of this year. We had obviously really strong sign-up last year, but that continued in the year. You can see that in those Premiere penetration numbers, across the half. Then obviously a lot of those Premiere All customers have now signed up to Premiere+. In terms of Highlight and Feature, they are the entry level depth products. There are still a lot of customers who don't have depth or contracts. The opportunity for us is to convert, initially customers to Feature and then try and upsell them to Highlight and then obviously on to Premiere. Not everyone goes through the tiers in order.
As I said, we had a number of, a very pleasing number of customers go straight from Feature to Premiere+, and we had some non-DIY customers go straight to Premiere+. You can go straight from bottom to top in terms of our tiers. Highlight and Feature are the way we upsell customers. I think in this market, you're gonna get two types of consumers. Our customers are telling us that they are trying to sell almost every type of advertising they can in a market where it's softer and you need to try to be everywhere to attract buyers. There are some consumers who wanna test the market and therefore don't wanna commit to a large marketing schedule.
Inevitably then, you know, the sense of buying the best product on the biggest platform makes most sense to them as well. Both of those types of vendors make sense to buy our top product.
On our finance leads, look, we're really pleased with the increase in overall lead volume throughout the year. We don't disclose the conversion rate, but what I can say is there's a mix of the leads that come through. Some are earlier in the buying cycles that need to be nurtured for longer there, and some of them are hotter. What we've been doing to focus on increasing the conversion rate is putting a concierge service in where we take those leads and ask some basic questions and then can feed them off to brokers and now some of our salaried brokers. We've seen double the conversion rate when those leads go through our concierge service versus going direct to the brokers. There's more things that we continue to do to focus on increasing conversions.
That's good. Thank you.
As a reminder, if you wish to ask a question, please press star then one one on your telephone keypad. Our next question comes from Nick Basile at CLSA. Please go ahead.
Good morning. Just two questions from me. The first on residential buy yield guidance. Just regarding the price increase of 6%. I thought based on the Investor Day, we might be looking at closer to a high single digit number in terms of price increases. Just interested in any change in thinking around that. Secondly, on the operating jaws guidance being positive, does that assume listings growth decline in low single digits? Or what is the kind of base assumption there?
On the expectation around operating jaws, we have provided guidance that we expect operating jaws to be open for Australia. We are anticipating double-digit buyer yield growth and overall, we are anticipating double-digit revenue growth. As Owen has flagged, we are expecting listings to be down year-on-year, but you know that we still are expecting that revenue growth will play through. On the pricing, we did have two-year contracts where the 6% price was a lock, so there's no change. However, we are yielding up through Premiere+, as Owen flagged earlier.
Continued selling our add-on product as well.
Yes.
... which also helps drive that yield into double digits. The positive operating jaws, absolutely. We've done that on the assumption of listings being down that sort of mid- to low-single-digit .
Just a follow-up question on the price for those contracts that have rolled off. Are you now looking to increase them by more than 6%?
No. If you're on Premiere All and you're continuing with the second year of your contract, your price increase is 6%. What has happened, though, is a lot of those Premiere All customers have opted to take Premiere+ on. The Premiere All customers have moved up to Premiere+, which is a much higher yielding product.
Okay. Thanks.
Our final question will come from Siraj Ahmed at Citi. Please go ahead.
Thanks. Three questions from me as well. Just the first one, can I confirm that in slide 22, where you show ad penetration, that the second half 2022 benefited or fourth quarter really benefited from Premiere+ in terms of their penetration, but the actual yield and, you know, price benefit comes through in FY 2023? Second thing, in terms of double-digit underlying yield growth in FY 2023, I know listings is difficult to forecast, but let's say a second half turns out to be weaker than your current expectations. Do you expect that to impact yield growth? I mean, do you expect some exceptions being triggered? Supposed, just keen to understand how you've seen in previous cycles. Lastly, again, in terms of financial services in Australia, is the assumption that it continues to grow next year, that you gain share if lending commitments decline? Thanks.
In the penetration chart, you can see penetration continue to grow in the second half. That's continued, just ongoing additional sign-ups to our overall depth products, as well as people signing up to Premiere+ in quarter four. You're right, we're not saying to monetize those until from 1 July this year. In relation to yield opportunities, we you know continue to see that opportunity for yield growth to come from, again, the 6% price rise plus Premiere+ add-ons. Whether yield will be impacted by lower listings. We don't see that being a material impact.
No, no. The two drivers, it's volume multiplied by yield.
That's right.
Yield will hold regardless of what listings do. You know, volume will be volume. Financial services, yeah, we've had very pleasing broker recruitment in July already. I think it was 18 we've put on in July. We'll see, you know, more brokers into our network. What's really pleasing is new brokers, they take a while to mature. The number of brokers we've brought over the last couple of years will really start to hit their straps in FY 2023. That will help with volume growth. We're driving more and more leads off our site to our brokers as well. In a market that might be softer as the number of transactions falls, we think we are well-placed to grow better than market.
Can I ask a quick follow-up, Janelle, on the first question? Just in terms of the penetration. As we should be thinking that they accelerate in June or July, the penetration chart will look much higher, should look higher than that, right, than second half 2022?
Not substantially higher necessarily, because we've reflected the sign-ups to Premiere+.
Yeah.
In that second half penetration chart.
Yeah. Okay. That's what I wanted to confirm. Thanks. Thanks, Owen. Thanks, Janelle.
Great. Thank you.
Thank you. That was our final question, so I will hand back for any closing comments.
Look, thank you everyone for joining us today and for your time commitment. As Janelle said, and I'll reiterate, we are extremely pleased with our result in FY 2022. As we've outlined in a number of ways, we're approaching FY 2023 in what we think is a very strong position, and we're very excited about the year ahead. Thanks for your time today. We'll close the call there.
Thank you so much. This does conclude today's call. Thank you all for joining. You may now disconnect. Thank you all for joining. You may now disconnect.