Hello, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by for KE Holdings Inc.'s fourth quarter and full year 2022 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Today's conference call is being recorded. I would now like to turn the call over to your host, Ms. Siting Li, IR Director of the company. Please go ahead, Siting.
Thank you, operator. Good evening and good morning, everyone. Welcome to KE Holdings or Beike's fourth quarter and fiscal year 2022 earnings conference call. The company's financial and operating results were published in press release earlier today and are posted on the company's IR website, investors.ke.com. On today's call, we have Mr. Yongdong Peng, our Co-founder, Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer, and Mr. Tao Xu, our Executive Director and Chief Financial Officer. Mr. Peng will provide an overview of our strategies and business developments, and Mr. Xu will provide additional details on the company's financial results. Before we continue, I refer you to our safe harbor statement in our earnings press release, which applies to this call as we will make forward-looking statements.
Please also note that Beike's earnings press release and this conference call include discussions of unaudited GAAP financial information as well as unaudited non-GAAP financial measures. Please refer to the company's press release, which contains a reconciliation of the unaudited non-GAAP measures to comparable GAAP measures. Lastly, unless otherwise stated, all figures mentioned during this conference call are in RMB. With that, I will now turn the call over to our Chairman and CEO, Mr. Yongdong Peng. Please go ahead, Stanley.
Thank you, Siting. Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining KE's fourth quarter and full year 2022 earnings conference call. For the past two years, the industry has faced unprecedented challenges, but every winter will pass and spring will come as promised. In January and February, people around the country quickly emerged from the pandemic. At the same time, the real estate market began to recover. By the end of February, existing home sales on our platform had rebounded sharply, reaching a level close to the same period in 2021, the most active year for existing home transactions. Sales of new homes have also increased significantly year-over-year, returning yearly to the post-lockdown level in 2020. As we transcended this round of market correction, our firmly held views have been proven correct and our underlying capabilities have been validated.
First, our market-neutral view and persistence in that view has been proven. As part of our digital service platform for the housing industry, professional agents must act as the counterbalance of herd mentality in up and down market cycles. This means they must not blindly follow the crowd or engage in hype. Rather, they must evaluate the market objectively, multidimensionally, and rationally. They must be a stabilizer for the market and never magnifying anxiety. The market has been in a downward trend since the middle of 2021. Through it all, we have always believed that consumer desire for better living will not change and the market will return to a normalized level. We also see opportunities in the market recovery.
Therefore, with a stable state of mind, we quickly made a series of internal adjustments to cope with short-term fluctuations and prepare for market recovery. We launched our One Body, Two Wings strategy, transformed from scale expansion to quality growth, and implemented a series of measures to reduce costs and enhance efficiency. We protected the commission collection and operation security of service providers on our platform, provided them with tools and capabilities in order to support them through the trough of the cycle . In addition, hundreds of our management members went to the front line to help with the battles. Our market-neutral view has allowed us to strengthen our muscles and watch for a recovery when the market was in a downturn.
Facing the current market in recovery, we will continue practicing our market-neutral view , acting as a counterbalance against market chasing behaviors. Significant market volatility harms the industry in the long run, we hope to facilitate a healthy and orderly market recovery. Second, the capability of Beike as a platform has been further validated during the large market fluctuations. We established the Beike platform in 2018 in order to open up the capabilities we have accumulated nearly 20 years to the industry.
We have constantly refined our protocols, ecosystems, and digital infrastructure to further unlock the ACN network effect and the scale effect of our platform , providing support for customers, service providers, and industry partners such as developers, helping them to better interact, cooperate, learn from one another, and achieve win-win results. This run of market volatility is the first major test we have experienced as a platform. We have delivered more stable profitability than before and proving our ability to expand our business, which demonstrates our strength as a digital service platform for the housing industry. We have also prepared the momentum needed for the industry long-term development, high quality industry supplies have been protected and stabilized.
The low quality and inefficient supplies, not only on our platform, but also outside our platform, are celebrating their exit , which is a good thing for the entire industry. We proved our more stable profitability. In 2022, the national existing home market GTV fell by 31% year-over-year, and the sales of the top 100 new home developers fell by 42% year-over-year. However, our annual non-GAAP net profit backed the trend and achieved a year-over-year increase of 24%. Our operating cash inflow grew by 135% in 2022. Against the significant fluctuations in the external market, we have demonstrated the stability of profitability and power of our platform model. We also tested out our platform's extendability. In 2022, the first year for us to advance our One Body, Two Wings strategy.
Our home renovation and furnishings contractual sales reached RMB 6.9 billion, increased 31% year-over-year on a pro forma basis. Backing the market trend, this result benefited from our network infrastructure of stores and agents, our digital transformation capabilities for low frequency, complex, and heavy decision-making industries, and our full integration with Shengdu in Beijing. Two Wings accounted for more than 10% of our revenue in 2022, increasing from less than 3% in 2021. Our One Body provided more than 90% of their customer leads , the ability of our platform to extend to a wide range of sources around the sector of living has been initially validated, showcasing the high replicability of our industrial capabilities and our ability to meet more and more complex needs of our customers.
This represented a solid step in our never-ending innovation and development. Third, our view on the accelerated arrival of the era of agent empowerment and quality service has been validated. With the accelerated exit of low quality and inefficient supply in the industry, we expect an increase in unit store productivity in the future. The trend of larger store will become more pronounced given their wide coverage of both home listings and community customer leads and more diversified business operations, leading to stronger risk resistance. As such, store efficiency has become a key management variables. High quality agents are crucial to our operations. Store owners' abilities in store operations, team management, as well as recruiting and energizing agents have become differentiating factors in successful operations.
With respect to agents , the industry will not and should not be flooded with exit capability. In the future, the industry will enter the era of efficiency improvement of existing capability and agent empowerment. The productivity of high-level agents is 2 times the industry median, which shows that the mid-level group of agents will become the most vital force in the industry in the future. We have always been and will continue to be committed to helping agents improving efficiency, obtain a decent and a stable income, realize long-term employment, and pride themselves of their professionalism on our platform. We have been firmly moving forward with our large store strategy. In 2022, we supported and empowered the reorganization of over 3,000 stores on our platform.
We also consistently strengthened the professional competencies of store owners. At the end of 2022, more than 6,900 store owners completed the study in our Beike Huaqiao Academy. Moreover, we built out the store and agent ranking infrastructure with competencies ranking standards, which improve the management and operating capabilities of the platform and store owners and assisted in building an agent talent pipeline. We also advanced the governance of existing and new home business conducts. Resolutely cracking down on incidences of wrong behavior. We set up a comprehensive monitoring mechanism to encourage customers, business partners, and platform employees to supervise and report. Violations such as off-platform transactions.
We also fully implemented and jointly promised with new home developers that there will be no customer information leakage, customer poaching, and so on, and promoting the customer contact information to be provided or private throughout the showing process. All this worked to enhance security in agents' operations. While the store and agent count on our platform declined in 2022, with the number of active stores and active agents at around 37,400 and 350,000 respectively. The structure and efficiency of store and agents on our platform continued to improve throughout our efforts.
In the fourth quarter, the proportion of A-graders stores in cities excluding Beijing and Shanghai increased by 5.5 percentage points year-over-year, and the monthly agent churn rate dropped to less than 5% for non-Lianjia stores and only 3.1% for Lianjia stores. Together as a group, we have gone through a difficult winter and this experience has given us a lot of strength. Our team will be more determined than ever and become the backbone of the industry. It's also the most valuable assets of Beike. One who possesses a piece of land shall have his peace of mind. Turning to our onboarding, our existing and new home transaction services. In 2022, we transitioned to a stage of quality growth from one of scale expansion.
We quickly adjust our operation to improve efficiency and cut expenses, scaling down the P&L units for operation and management. With digital tools, we can check gross margin on a per order and personnel basis, as well as profit for each store, which encourages the business team to focus on profitability indicators as well as cultivate cost-effective mindsets among managers at all levels. Driven by these initiatives, we significantly enhanced our platform's operational efficiency and optimized costs and expenses. Moving to existing home transaction services. According to data from the Beike Research Institute, full year GTV of existing home sales in China were RMB 4.983 trillion in 2022, dropping by about 31% year-over-year and declined by about 3% year-over-year in the fourth quarter.
Whereas existing home transaction GTV on Beike's platform fell by only 23% year-over-year in 2022 and rose by 1.5% year-over-year in the fourth quarter. We outperformed the industry amidst challenges thanks to our empowerment and retention of high-quality store owners and agents, enhancement of the ACN network effects , continuously deepening platform operations, increased user value delivered to end customer and business partners. For example, we rebuilt our platform's leads allocation mechanism for existing homes in 2022. The new mechanism allocates leads based on store tab performance scores, raising the percentage of agent matching with familiar home listing by 10%. It reduced the number of unproductive actions agents took to acquire leads, allowing them to be more focused. As such, agent provided customer with more professional services. Next, moving to new home transaction services.
On a market front, according to data from National Bureau of Statistics, GTV on new residential home sales in China amounted to RMB 11.7 trillion in 2022, down 28% and 27% year-over-year for the full year and the fourth quarter respectively. GTV of CRIC's top 100 real estate companies fell by 42% and 30% year-over-year in 2022 and the fourth quarter, respectively. In comparison, GTV of new home sales on our platform declined by 42% year-over-year in 2022 and by 26% in the fourth quarter.
While our full year GTV performance was in line with the market, we realized write-back of our new home bad-debt provision for the year, and our DSO hit the lowest, while our profitability reached a record high since our listing. This represent the excellent results of our core strategy, which is not compromising agents' and consumers' interest in exchange for expansion. At the same time, we proactively strengthen our risk controls, security, and profitability. Specifically, we consistently integrated our developer risk evaluation system to manage business risk in a preempting way. In the fourth quarter, Commission in Advance model accounting for 44% of our total commission, doubling from the beginning of the year. It ensures the security of agents' receivable collection.
Moreover, the average number of homes sold by projects under the Commission in Advance model was 35% higher than the general new home projects, reflecting that the developers' sell-through was also accelerated . The proportion of state-owned developers continued to rise, with their projects accounting for 45% of our new home revenues in the first quarter. Moving to our two main businesses. Over the past years, we validated the authenticity of our strengths and capabilities in the two wings industry and further demonstrated that our two wings business are not only natural fit for our core business, but also feedback to it. 2022 was also a challenging year for the home renovation and furnishing industry. According to data from China Building Decoration Association, the total revenue of leading home renovation and furnishing companies in 2022 decreased by about 9% year-over-year.
Our home renovation and furnishing business generated contracted sales of RMB 6.9 billion in 2022, rising by 31% year-over-year on a pro forma basis. Among our contracted sales, 33% were attributable to core business customer referrals. On top of this, in April 2022, we launched our new retail sales of home furniture and furnishing strategy, which leverages our full service renovation offerings. New retail home furnishings contribution to our total contracted sales grew from 12% in the first quarter to 26% in the fourth quarter of 2022, further retaining the platform's business beyond low-frequency transactions.
With respect to our rental services in 2022, the number of rental units managed by our home rental services exceeded 120,000, with over 17,000 units under decentralized leasing management or Carefree Rent. More than 90% of this was contributed by core business customer referrals. Clearly, the modularization and the improvements of our core business has enabled our Two Wings business to substantially outperform the market. Meanwhile, the broad market space of the Two Wings business, as well as the recognition from customers and society, greatly boosted agent professionals' value, and more importantly, breathed fresh, enduring vitality into our organization, setting the stage of boundless possibilities for us to unleash our potential.
Leveraging our digital transformation experience in decision-heavy industries with low transaction frequencies, complex processes, and a focus on offline operations, we have been working to reshape the home renovation and furnishing industry. Through digitalization and online operations, we strive to standardize the construction that is, while restructuring the home renovation, construction, and a customized furniture delivery process. We established a quality-based service provider management and an incentive mechanism, as well as our order dispatching system as part of our scientific management capabilities. Additionally, our Home SaaS tool will also take part in these initiatives to lead and implement industry digital transformation. In December 2022, 80% of our order in key cities were automatically dispatched. Our renovation delivery cycles were shortened by five days from previous year, and our A-rated service providers' retention rate reached 97%.
These capabilities will help us to grow with quality. In 2022, we worked even harder to fulfill our society responsibilities and be an enterprise of the era. As the only private enterprise selected among the first group of affordable rental housing operation services enterprises in Chengdu, we have provided more than 1,700 rental homeowners and talents with superior leasing operation services, including leasing brokerage services as of the end of 2022. Leaving behind a year of challenges, but also rewards, we are ready to embark on a new journey in 2023, facing the recent notable market recovery. We will maintain a consistent strategy for our core business based on our market-neutral view .
That is, on top of cost reductions, efficiency enhancement, and risk controls, we will continue to deepen our operations and improve our ecosystem to capture high-quality growth opportunities. In 2023, we will work to enhance our long-term capabilities, which require persistence and a continuous investment in areas such as business conduct, governance, services, and product delivery for home renovation, and incremental efficiency enhancement of our existing pool of agents. Through these efforts, we will seek and fill the gap between our capability and the needs of consumers and service providers. Fulfilling our society responsibilities to be a great company in the hearts of the society and the people. Thank you. Next, I would like to turn the call over to our CFO, Tao, to review our fourth quarter and full year financials.
Thank you, Stanley, and thank you everyone for joining us. Before discussing more detail about our fourth quarter and full year 2022 financial results , I'd like to provide a brief update on the housing market in 2022. In 2022, China housing market encountered unprecedented challenges affected by the frequent disruption from pandemic. macroeconomy softened, and the customers' uncertainty around the future expectation heightened. These factors dampened buyers' home purchase willingness and their ability to pay, while also impeding transaction process. Additionally, in the new home market, consumers' confidence in the housing product delivery hit a trough given the spillover risk among the real estate developers. All of the above greatly diluted the positive effect of the favorable policies, resulting in a profound and sustained market correction.
Facing the predicament, we took decisive actions and seek answers from the front-line operations, sharpening our focus on the sense of business, risk control, and efficiency enhancement. We managed to achieve a strategic transformation in 2022 to high-quality growth from scale expansion. Particularly, we reported a smaller contraction in net revenue compared with the market adjustment, realized significant year-over-year gross margin increase, and a trend-bucking non-GAAP net income growth , effectively mitigating the impact of the macro conditions, especially in profitability and cash flow, further strengthening our leading position in the industry. Now, let's turn to the financial details for Q4. Our net revenues were RMB 16.7 billion in Q4, exceeding both the high end of our guidance and the street consensus.
Mainly because, first, people's day-to-day lives as well as existing home transactions normalized after the pandemic peak in some core Chinese cities at the end of December. Second, the existing home market in Chengdu and some cities in Yangtze River Delta performed well in Q4, leading to a year-on-year increase for non-Lianjia existing home revenues from their lower base in 2021. Third, new home sales settlement performed well in Beijing and Shanghai in Q4 under our sales conversion initiatives. In particular, our net revenues from existing home transaction services decreased by 11.8% year-over-year to RMB 5.3 billion in Q4. Our GTV of existing home transactions actually increased by 1.5% year-over-year in Q4, with the GTV by connected agent increased by 24.3% year-over-year in Q4.
They were recorded on a net basis in revenue, while GTV from Lianjia decreased as top-tier cities took a heavier blow of COVID in Q4. They were recorded on a gross basis in revenue. Our net revenues from the new home transaction services decreased by 26.8% year-over-year to RMB 8.3 billion in Q4, primarily due to the decrease of new home GTV of 26.1% to RMB 263.5 billion in the period. Net revenues from the home renovation and furniture were RMB 2.1 billion in Q4, compared to RMB 58 million in the same period of 2021, primarily because we completed the acquisition of Shengdu, as well as organic growth of this line of business.
Our net revenues from emerging and other services increased by 152% year-over-year to RMB 1.1 billion in Q4, primarily attributable to the increase of net revenues from our rental property management services and financial services. Gross profit increased by 40.4% to RMB 4.1 billion in Q4. Gross margin increased to 24.4% in Q4 from 16.4% in Q4 2021. The increase primarily due to, A, a shift of revenue mix towards existing home transaction services and home renovation and furnishing, with a relatively higher contribution margin than new home transaction services. B, a higher contribution margin for both existing and new home transaction services as a result of effective cost control. C, a relatively lower co-percentage of costs related to store and other costs of net revenues in Q4.
Operating expenses decreased by 9.6% year-over-year to RMB 3.7 billion in Q4. General and administrative expenses decreased by 18.6% to RMB 1,792 million, mainly due to the decrease of the provision for credit loss and the personnel cost and overheads. Sales and marketing expenses were RMB 1,333 million in Q4, compared to RMB 809 million in the same period of 2021. This increase was mainly due to the consolidation of Shengdu.
Research and development expenses decreased by 31.1% to RMB 509 million, mainly due to the decrease of personnel cost and share-based compensation as a result of decreased headcount. Income from operations was RMB 387 million in Q4, compared to loss from operations of RMB 1,184 million in Q4 2021. The increase in gross margin and the decrease in operating expenses have brought about the increase in operating margin to 2.3% in Q4 from -6.7% in Q4 2021. Our non-GAAP income from operations was RMB 1,339 million, with non-GAAP operating margin reached 8.0% in Q4, compared to -2.2% in the same period of 2021.
Adjusted EBITDA was RMB 2,164 million in Q4, compared to RMB 484 million in Q4 2021. Net income was RMB 372 million in Q4, compared to net loss of RMB 933 million in the Q4 2021. Non-GAAP net income was RMB 1,547 million in Q4, compared to RMB 42 million in the same period of 2021. Turning to our financial detail in fiscal year 2022. Our net revenue decreased by 24.9% year-over-year to RMB 60.7 billion, while the GTV declined by 32.3% to RMB 2,609.6 billion due to the soft market sentiment and the COVID-19 disruptions. Our gross profit reported a narrower decrease of 12.9% year-over-year to RMB 13.8 billion.
Gross margin increased by 3.1 percentage points to 22.7% in 2022. Our loss from operations was RMB 833 million in 2022, compared to loss from operations of RMB 1.4 billion in 2021. Operating margin was -1.4% in 2022, compared to -1.7% in 2021, primarily due to a relatively higher gross profit margin, which was partially offset by the increased spending in home renovation and furnishing and emerging and other services in 2022 compared to 2021. non-GAAP income from operations was RMB 2.3 billion in 2022, compared to RMB 1.4 billion in 2021. non-GAAP operating margin was 3.8%, compared to 1.7% in 2021.
Our net loss was RMB 1,397 million in 2022, compared to RMB 525 million in 2021. Non-GAAP net income was RMB 2,843 million in 2022, compared to RMB 2,294 million in 2021. I'd like to highlight the following financial highlights for the full year. China's real estate market experienced a severe adjustment in 2022. According to Beike Research Institute, the existing housing market fell 31% in the year, while data from CRIC shows new home sales from the country's top 100 developers tumbled 42%. Due to our diversified business structure and the better retention of high-quality service capacity, our annual GTV saw a milder fall of 32%.
Thanks to the stronger monetization ability of our new home and existing home business, as well as the increase in the proportion of the home renovation and furnishing services with a higher monetization rate, our revenue declined by only 25% year-on-year, a much smaller contraction compared with the market adjustments. More encouragingly, our non-GAAP net profit saw a trend bucking growth of 24% for the full year of 2022 on a series of the cost optimization measures. The value of the platform has supported us in achieving impressive results in profit quality management. Secondly, our One Body business, which is the home construction services, delivered a strong performance in profitability and financial health, and achieved remarkable results in cost and expense optimization.
In terms of the cost control, the fixed cost of our One-Body business fell by over 1/3 year-on-year in Q4, and the variable cost as a percentage of revenue dropped around 6 percentage points year-over-year. In face of the market downturn, we also made forceful measures to scale down the P&L unit for operation management, encouraging the business team to focus on the profitability indicators through the performance evaluations. For Lianjia, we made a considerable effort in 2022 to deepen this operation and achieve notable results. Proportion of loss-making stores declined by 7 percentage points in 2022 from 2021. The Lianjia to connected stores, agent pro-productivity ratio in cities excluding Beijing and Shanghai increased to 1.3 in 2022, versus 1.2 in 2021. The adjusted improvement in agent compensation efficiency also helped reduce our cost.
In 2022, we continued to expand the strategic collaborations with state-owned developers, with purchase from those partnership accounting for 45% of our sales in Q4, rising from 28% in Q1. The proportion was 41% for the full year of 2022. On top of this trend, we still managed to have a new home marketization rate increase moderately in 2022. Although the profitability of our existing home transaction services fluctuated quarter-over-quarter due to the pandemic impact, on a full year basis, the contribution margin of existing home business reached 39.8%, up 2.8 percentage points from 2021, driven by stronger operating leverage due to the fixed cost optimization and higher revenue contribution from platform services. As our revenues from existing home service continue to expand, we expect this business will improve further in profitability.
In the full year of 2022, the contribution margin of new home transaction services reached 23.6%, up 4.4 percentage points from 2021, mainly driven by the increased percentage of high profitability projects and the significant fixed cost reductions, validating our strategy of strictly balancing risk and profits in a high volatile market. In particular, new home contribution margin climbed to 26.2% in Q4, hitting another record high since our listing, supported by incremental improvements in the new home market in some tier cities. With the increase in existing home and the new home contribution margin, our gross margin for the full year of 2022 expanded notably to 22.7%, up 3.1 percentage points year-over-year.
Thirdly, in terms of the operating expenses, while maintaining our investment in new business, including home renovation and furnishing, our total non-GAAP expenses in 2022 declined by 20% year-over-year to RMB 11.8 billion. The productivity of the platform operation teams in terms of their support to frontline agents increased by 20% year-over-year by end of 2022. For new home business, we continue to promote Commission-advanced model to ensure more secured commission collected by platform and agents, and speed up the project sales too. Commission-advanced accounted for 44% of our total commission in Q4, up from 20% in Q1. In Q4, Commission-advanced accounted over 36% of commission from state-owned developers, and 49% of that from private developers.
Under such efforts, in 2022, we had a bad debt provision written back of RMB 206 million for the new home business, and RMB 21 million for the whole group, compared with the bad debt provision of RMB 1.3 billion in 2021. This reflects our principle of adopting most prudent accounting treatment, while undersizing the achievements under risk control management with a sharp focus on receivable collection and improving the sense of the security of agents. Fourthly, our home renovation and furnishing business has gained considerable traction. Benefiting from powerful synergies between Beike and Shengdu, our pro forma revenue for 2022 amounted to RMB 6.2 billion. Revenue totaled RMB 2.1 billion in Q4, up 13% quarter-over-quarter.
Specifically, full year contract sales in Hangzhou and Beijing exceeded RMB 1 billion each, with Hangzhou achieving city-level profitability and Beijing breaking even in the second half of 2022. Our leading growth in these top cities demonstrate our ability to achieve the fast breakthroughs in scale during the dry sales stage while making notable improvements in profitability. Aided by our further supply chain build-outs, quality delivery, and the digitalization capabilities, we are confident that we will accomplish the high-quality expansion in more cities. Fifthly, our cash position and cash flow remain robust and sufficient, and we have a sound capital management. At the end of 2022, the combined balance of cash-like items totaled RMB 78.3 billion, or $11.4 billion, up by RMB 1.1 billion from end of September, and RMB 7.3 billion from end of 2021.
The combined balance of our cash equivalents, restricted cash, and short-term investment was RMB 61.1 billion. The balance of our long-term cash-like items, mainly included in the long-term investments, amounted to RMB 70.2 billion. Our net operating cash flow was RMB 2.6 billion in Q4, remaining positive for the fifth quarter in a row. We have a zero deposit in Silicon Valley Bank under Credit Suisse. We have maintained a steadfast commitment to risk control and receivable management. Cash collection from new home business has exceeded the new home revenue for six quarters in a row, totaling RMB 35.9 billion for the full year, with cash to revenue ratio at 1.25.
New home DSO was at 64 days in Q4, shortening by 14 days from Q3 and 28 days from the same period of 2021. Turning to the guidance of the first quarter of 2023. We expect total net revenues to be between RMB 18.0 billion-18.5 billion in Q1, representing an increase of approximately 43.4%-47.4% from the same period of 2022. This forecast concedes the potential impact of the recent real estate-related policies, the macro economy recovery status, as well as release of the pent-up demand in 2022. It constitutes the current and preliminary view on our business situation and the market condition, which are subject to change. Entering Q4 of last year, policy relief initiatives were rolled out on a large scale on both supply and demand side.
In early December, COVID-19 curves were optimized, and since then, infection has quickly peaked out, driving an upturn in property market. Notably, since the beginning of this year, home prices ended sequential decline. Transactions start to rebound. We think this should be viewed rationally and objectively. The recent uptick can be attributed to two factors. One is the higher sales volume partly generated by the released pent-up demand once the pandemic situation eased, which further illustrates that the housing demand can only be deferred, not eliminated. The other reason is that the market expectation has gradually improved against the backdrop of microeconomic recovery and the successive introduction of supportive policies. As an eventful 2022 passed in the wake of numerous unexpected shocks, the main policy set this year will be pressed forward with a program.
With a pragmatic approach to promote economy recovery and revive the market confidence. Supporting the housing upgrade is on the top of initiatives for expanding domestic demand. As an enterprise, we will remain equally practical and rational, and always uphold market-neutral view . That is, steady long-term market development is aligned with the fundamental interest of the consumers, the government and the industry. It has been and will continue to be our belief that the industry enduring value is built upon stable transaction volume and the prices, rather than fluctuations. As market stability leads to sustainable transactions, which accentuate the value of agents. Agents should be the counterforce to the market's ups and downs. This is our social responsibility as well as professional dignity.
In 2023, our One Body, Two Wings strategy will draw more diversified development and continue to scale its function, which poses a higher requirement for our operational stability, resources allocation, and profitability. As such, our finance strategy will remain focused on the essence of business operations. On the basis of optimized cost and expenses structure in 2022. This year, we will reap profits from efficiency for business growth and continue to improve the service quality. At the same time, we will continue to strictly control the risks, balance the relationship between the efficiency, receivable collection, and the scale, and the scale growth, and promote cooperation with upstream and downstream on the condition of safe accounts receivable. Under the neutral market view, we are fully confident in the housing market's stable development in the long run.
This has not provided a stable environment for our long-term development, but also offers a great opportunity for us to further elevate the quality of our operations. Going forward, we will continue to forge ahead with the enduring strength in our hearts and face hard headwinds with tenacity and optimism, powered by our relentless pursuit of creating indispensable value for the vast living service sector and our society. That concludes my prepared remarks. We would like now to open the call to your questions. Operator, please go ahead.
Thank you. If you wish to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. If you wish to cancel your request, please press star two. If you are on a speakerphone, please pick up your handset to ask your questions. For the benefit of all participants on today's call, please limit yourself to one question. If you have additional questions, you can re-enter the queue. If you are going to ask the question in Chinese, please follow with the English translation. Today's first question comes from Timothy Zhao with Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.
Yes, Thank you, management, for taking my question , and congratulations on the strong results to end the year. My question is on the industry outlook. Could Madeline share your updated outlook for the existing home and new home market for 2023? Especially related to the strong growth of the existing home volume in China over the past 2 months. Could you share some color on how much about the rebound is from the pent-up demand? How sustainable do you think is the current run rate in the existing home market? Thank you.
Okay. Thank you, Timothy. Regarding the recent market performance, to the uncertainty caused by COVID-19 recedes, the Chinese residents mentality has shaped back to the pursuit of the wealth security and the growth from precautionary saving and risk aversion. In terms of the real estate policies, there were over 1,000 stimulus policies released across country in 2022, compared to roughly 450 tightening policies in the year of 2021. As a result, support for market recovery is accumulating. We saw increased policy support in December and January, where almost the strong second-tier cities loosened their home purchase and mortgage restrictions. Among these cities, for example, Zhongguang and Foshan implemented the full relaxation. To some extent, this policy change have a support of bottoming out in the market.
According to recent real estate market data, consumer sentiment towards the housing market also has significantly improved on the demand side. For existing home sales, weekly transaction on our platform before the Chinese New Year holiday in January were close to those in July 2021. The monthly existing home GTV on our platform in February was close to the historical high in March 2021. Among that, the GTV of Tier One cities in February was just 8.6% lower than the peak of March 2021, while the GTV for the stronger Tier Two cities and the weaker Tier Two cities, plus Tier Three and Tier Four cities grow 11.3% and 5.5% from the 2021 peak, respectively.
Particularly, stronger Tier Two cities showed a strong momentum with Chengdu, Suzhou, Nanjing, Zhengzhou, and Tianjin all exceeded the high point of March 2021 by 20%. The strength was partly due to the one-time release of the pent-up demand accumulated during the pandemic. For new home sales, it also demonstrate a notable recovery trend. Our new home subscription growth turned positive in January, growing 20% year-over-year. In February, our new home subscription increased by 148% year-over-year from the lower base in 2022, reaching the level of June 2021, driving a year-on-year new home sales growth since February of this year. Regarding the housing prices, despite the very strong momentum in transaction volume, fortunately, we haven't seen significant fluctuation in housing prices.
In January, prices for both existing and the new home ended a long streak of the monthly decline across the country. In February, existing home price grow 1.6% quarter-over-quarter, but it still posts a year-over-year decline of 5%. As the increased number of customer list their homes for upgrading demand amid relaxed government policies this year. The number of listed existing home nationwide grew 10% year-over-year. The ample existing home listing keeps the market supply and demand relatively balanced. We still hold a neutral market view. The recent rebound in transaction volume demonstrates the housing market high resilience and elasticity on the demand side.
This short-term rebound was driven by several factors, including normalized transaction demand, one-time release of the accumulate pent-up demand during the pandemic flares up, and even earlier release of future purchase needs from the customers who are concerned with the potential housing price rise. These factors led to the sales volume being built up within a very short time. Sticking to a market-neutral view, we believe the market will gradually normalize and will enter into a more stable growth stage over the long run. Since March, we have also noticed that the weekly transaction volume of existing and the new home subscriptions on platform began to steadily normalized. Regarding the future market, in terms of the market sustainability, based on our analysis of top 30 cities, we expect the market to be relatively stable in the future for both tier cities.
The average floor space of the house transacted and the home buyers demographic since this year were very similar to the prior 3 years. This transaction have been driven mainly by the home upgrade and the rigid demand for the property within the floor area of 90 square meters. In addition, the distribution of purchase by local and the non-local residents has also been stable. For second-tier cities, home upgrade demand was significantly stimulated. This drove a 3% increase in share of transact house over 90 square meters, and a 5% increase in percentage of customer aged over 35, and a 4% increase in percentage of non-local home buyers. Going forward, such market match might experience volatilities in the short term due to the structural change.
Nevertheless, with the non-local taking root in these cities, more supportive policies and stabilizing housing prices, home upgrade demand from the local residents might follow up and might help bring solid demand support and help the market stabilize in the long run. For existing home market in 2023, based on our neutral market view, we presently believe that the existing home market will grow by around 15% year-over-year in 2023, where the prices remains relatively stable. We believe there is plenty of upsides for the market given this transaction unit of existing and new home in China. Accounted only for 3.5% of the total number of existing homes in 2022. That turnover rate for existing homes was only 0.7% versus the normal rate at least 1% historically.
We need to consider the potentially unfavorable factors, such as the impact from the global economy slowdown, growing geopolitical tensions, and the muted export growth on the macroeconomy and housing demand. For new home market in 2023, we expect the total GTV of the market in 2023 to remain at the same level as in 2022. Housing project delivery has become less of a concern for consumers, with the deployment of the financing policies for developers and the improvement of their funding status, as well as gradually, resumption of the project construction. With price stabilizing, home upgrade demand will return back to the new home market. The new home market recovery will further ease real estate developers' cash flow constraints. Recently, land auction went well in the city like Hangzhou and Suzhou, where several private developers appeared on the land auctions list.
Private developer renewed enthusiasm for the land auction in more areas is also a critical indicator. Over the past few years, China's housing market has seen great highs and lows. Looking back, short-term uncertainties are inevitable, and one mustn't be overly optimistic or pessimistic about the sub-trends. Yet, as we navigate through the tides of the market volatility and cycles, our unwavering belief in the long-term outlook for the China housing market remains steadfast. We firmly believe that against the backdrop of the housing is for living, not for speculation, the existing home market will increasingly take center stage, while new home operations demand a more refined approach, and the quality service will come to the forefront. The time for this change is approaching. Thank you, Kingsley.
Thank you. Thank you. Our next question today comes from Griffin Chan with Citigroup. Please go ahead.
This is Griffin Chan from Citigroup. Thanks, management, for the question opportunity, and also congratulations on the very solid results for the fourth quarter and also for the whole year. My question would be that both the new home and existing home markets will be entering a healthier and a more stable development stage in 2023. Can management share with us whether the company will dynamically adjust its strategies in response to changing market conditions, such as channel expansion to gain more market share? Where are your target markets this year? Will you expand through Lianjia or non-Lianjia stores? What is expansion strategy in markets where you have relatively low market share, such as Shanghai, Guangdong, and Fujian? How will you deal with the competition with the local leaders? Thank you.
Thank you, Griffin. Our view on the market share is we don't operate with the market share as our KPI. The management team has always been adhering to the core principle of taking care of the customers and helping service providers to be good to customers. Nevertheless, we must reach a certain scale threshold city-wise to realize the network effect and the scale effects of our core business, and to fully benefit from the extensibility of our agents and store network as infrastructure around the living services. Therefore, we need to pay attention to scale and the need to achieve the sufficient scale through the connecting and empowering our connected store and agents.
For existing home transaction services, this round of massive market correction has presented us with opportunities to scale faster. We anticipate a greater number of customers will enjoy the quality service offered by Beike this year. In past two years, the market correction was long and deep, resulting in significant industry supply-side reductions in various regions. Still, we have better capacity retention. The number of active agents in 25 key cities even increased year-over-year at the end of 2022. Moreover, we have a focus on retaining high-quality agents, which allows us to benefit more from the market rebound during the recovery cycle. Specific initiative in different cities. For our top-performing cities, we will continue to explore opportunity in specific market segments, such as middle to high-end market, suburban market, et cetera.
In the cities with a competitive environment, we saw our business expand at a relatively fast pace starting in the second half of last year. Our better capacity and retention, our business conduct governance, our focused operations, and our community expert training generated remarkable results. We have even bigger opportunities in the cities where there is still a lot of room for improvement in our scale, and the market is relatively fragmented. For example, in Shanghai, our trading army market or market penetration is still significantly lower in Beijing. To expand our business in the cities, we will actively implement a series of initiatives, such as establish more connections to the high quality service providers, investing in our brand and service quality, and strengthening operational efficiency.
Regarding the new home transaction services, this year, we will consistently emphasize the risk aversion as top priority, as we did in the year of 2022 and 2021. We will not proactively loosening our risk controls or compromise the business security, especially the security of agents' receivable collection in exchanges, so-called platform skill expansion. We will also make a dynamic adjustment depending on the market and the recovery of the developers. As developers cash flow situation improves, their receivable payment to us will improve as well, which will lead to the upgrade their rating in Beike credit ranking system. To improve the credit ranking will allow us to expand our cooperation, and the addressable market for our new home transaction service may also expand. Meanwhile, new home channel sales market has seen significant increase in concentration in the recent bout of market correction.
Our better and safer receivable collection and healthier new home business conduct gains trust from a larger number of service provider and agent on the sectors. They connect us with ACN and the FangJianghu channel, becoming the cornerstone of the continued expansion of our new home transaction services as the market recovers. Thank you, Griffin.
Thank you. Our next question today comes from Jiong Shao with Barclays. Please go ahead.
Thank you very much for taking my question. Let me add to my congratulations on the very strong results and the guidance. You talked about improving efficiencies of your agents and of your stores. I was just wondering, could you talk about your target, if you have any, for the stores and agents for this year? You have already improved their productivity quite a bit last year. How can you sort of improve their productivity further from here while sort of not losing the very strong cultural and the performance element of the equation? Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Shao. Although we have no plans for significant expansion for our stores and agents. As we mentioned last quarter, our focus is on improving per store and per agent efficiency while enhancing the agent income, rather than pursuing a large-scale expansion. This approach will not change. Only when the income of stores and agent increase steadily can the industry retain the high quality people and achieve the healthy development. Furthermore, given the current trend of balanced supply and demand market, and the broader emphasis on the housing is for living, not for speculation, we do not anticipate a significant increase in industry capability following this market recovery. Our plans for the agent and stores this year include the following.
Regarding the scale, store-wise, we plan to focus on the large and high quality stores, and drive the onboarding of FangJianghu stores for new home sales to our platform at Connect stores. Agent-wise, we plan to recruit agent during the spring recruiting season in 2023. After which, we expect to maintain a stable agent count. This includes increasing of the proportion of middle-level agents and increasing the number of agents in few cities which need skills function. Regarding the cost here and the efficiency, let me talk about the store productivity first. In 2023, we expect to see a significant improvement in store productivity as a result of our ongoing efforts in large store and agent ranking system, this conduct governance, and Huaqiao Academy.
We are committed to improving the management on loss-making and inefficient stores. We believe that the inefficiency could be temporary. Regarding the agent productivity, the general agent productivity has a huge room to improve in the long run. Beijing could be a benchmark, where our agent's productivity is 3 to 4 times higher than the industry average. For Lianjia, in 2022, excluding Beijing and Shanghai, Lianjia's agent productivity was 1.3 times that of Connect agents. Our target this year is to further increase this ratio to 1.4 times. For Deyou and Beike Connect stores, although we will not set a specific target for agent productivity this year, we will improve a range of operating metrics to improve the agent productivity.
Such metrics includes cross-store, cross-brand cooperation ratio, accompanying the home tours by home listing agents, price difference management between the listing and transaction prices, and the ACN role split ratio for one transaction. In terms of the culture, we believe in the value of taking good care of customers. We believe in the value of sharing successful experience and infrastructure to the industry to empower and enhance industry efficiency. We believe in the value of protecting the interest of the service providers, paying commission timely. We believe in the value of improving the industry code of conduct and help developers and all participants to work with a sense of security and fairness. We believe in the value of our hundreds of thousands of excellent service provider who have been serving the community for many years and established this unique mode in home services, and we believe in the value of time.
This is what we have been doing, not perfectly, but we're on our way. Thank you, Mr. Shao.
Thank you, Tao Xu, for the insight.
Thank you. Thank you. Our next question today comes from John Lam at UBS. Please go ahead.
Thank you, and also congratulations for the results. My question is regarding on the cost optimization. We have seen that in the third quarter last year, the cost optimization was very effective. Is there any room for further improvement in the cost optimization? Can the expense ratio from the third quarter last year, 2022, could be used to infer the subsequent profitability? Thank you.
Thank you, John. For cost and expense for our one-body business, we quickly implement a series of cost reduction and efficiency enhancement initiative in 2022. Consequently, the cost and expenses for our one-body business were optimized to reach the level in 2019, which we believe is relatively sustainable. In terms of the cost control, in the fourth quarter of 2022, the fixed cost of our one-body business fell by 36% year-over-year, and its variable cost as a percentage of revenue dropped by 5.6 percentage point year-over-year. In terms of expenses, the total amount of non-GAAP operating expenses declined by 70% year-over-year to the same level in 2019. The e-expense reduction will be most significant if we exclude the impact from the consolidation of Shengdu.
Commission in Advance accounted for 44% of total new home commission in fourth quarter, up from 20% in the first quarter. This ensures the collection of the new home receivables, mitigating the negative impact of the new home bad debt provisions on the expenses. In 2023, our platform's agent productivity will see even greater improvement, and we will implement incentive to develop and retain our existing employees. We also hope to offset the cost of such initiative through the continuous cost control of the non-personnel expenses. In addition, we hope to improve the agents' productivity with technology investment to reduce their time spent on the low productivity matters, hence allowing them to get off work earlier, spend more time with their families, and contributing to further industry optimization as well as potential platform profitability improvements.
All in all, our finance strategy for our One Body business will remain focused on efficiency. With the optimized cost and expense level in 2022, we will support the quality growth cost effectively. Meanwhile, we will continue to strictly control the risk and strike a balance between the efficiency, receivable collection speed, and the skill function. With ensure the security of the account receivable, we will enhance our cooperation with partners in upstream and downstream. For Two Wings business, regarding our home renovation and furnishing business, in addition to making sure its total loss ratio will not further expand, we will capture opportunities to reinforce our fundamental capabilities, including the products, supply chain, and the service delivery ability, and invest in high-quality service providers. On the whole, we will reflect some of our redundant investment we made during the last round of market growth.
while continuing to promote our business growth, strictly control the cost and expense to balance the growth and the profitability. Thank you, John.
Thank you. Sorry, can I ask one more question? You also mentioned about the Two Wings. What is your plan regarding on scale expansion and also efficiency improvement for Two Wings? In terms of the strategy for expansion and also the scale of investment, could I say that for the full-service home renovation and furnishing model, you achieved that the 0 to 1 in 2022. Is 2023 a critical year to go from 1 to 10, please share with us with key focuses and goals in 2023? Thank you.
Okay. I will answer your question. 2022 was the year our Two Wings was born and took root. We have taken a solid step forward in both our home renovation and furnishing business and our rental business. It is still a barely stay in most cities. On the home renovation and furnishing side, our total contract sales backed the trend and increased by more than 30% year-over-year. With total revenue exceeding RMB 6 billion in both Beijing and Hangzhou, we reached the first milestone of over RMB 1 billion in annual contract sales. For our rental services, we enter 30 cities in 2022, and the total number of rental units under management exceeded 120,000.
In 2023, we will establish benchmark cities, And make commitment investment to build long-term capabilities. In 2023, our two wins business will build on the current momentum in the cities we enter. We will not be pursuing comprehensive and rapid scale expansion. First, instead of focusing on short-term and rapid scale expansion, we will continue to decisively invest in our long-term capabilities, including the ability to standardize services and provide better online experiences, as well as our online operations of the supply chain, digitalization capabilities, product specification for Chinese consumers, and professionalism of service providers. Second, based on these capabilities, we hope to achieve comprehensive scientific management, business need conversion and operating efficiency improvement for both renovation and furnishing.
We also expect to reduce the vacancy period for our rental units, improve consumer satisfaction, and enhance the efficiency of our service providers and our business. Our 2023 goal is to penetrate several key cities deeply and establish them as benchmarks, enabling our Two Wings to truly complete the breakthrough. In 2024, we will replicate and promote this benchmark to more cities. Yeah, that's my answer. Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you. We are now approaching the end of the conference call. I will now turn the call over to your speaker and host today, Ms. Siting Li, for closing remarks.
Thank you once again for joining us today. If you have any further questions, please feel free to contact Beike's investor relations team through the contact information provided on our website. This concludes today's call, and we look forward to speaking with you again next quarter. Thank you. Goodbye.
Thank you. This concludes today's conference call. We thank you all for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect your lines and have a wonderful day.