Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Auto Trader's 2022 Investor Day, being held here physically in London and also broadcast for those that aren't able to make it. We certainly do appreciate you all taking the time to spend with us. It's been about seven and a half years since our IPO and four and a half years since our Capital Markets Day. It is a good time, given the amount of things that have happened over that time for us to step back, reflect on what we've done and reflect on where we're going, which is exactly what we hope to do for you today. We have five goals, that we'd like to achieve with you today. The first is to talk about our core classified marketplace.
It's been at the heart of our strategy and our financial results for some time, and we expect that to continue for some time to come. We believe actually that the health of that marketplace is as strong as it's ever been, and actually, due to a number of changes, some within Auto Trader, but some within the industry, it's likely to become even more relevant as we move forward. The second thing that we wanna cover, especially relevant, given the current macroeconomic environment, is our assumptions around the market, particularly the used and new car market, and how we see that playing out in the midterm.
The third area is a new area that we have spoken around with investors and analysts but never spoken directly to, and that's the platform strategy that we've been busily putting in place, which will be covered later on by Catherine and Chris. The fourth area is to explain exactly what we mean by digital retailing. Those of you that have been around the space will be aware that there's many, many different companies going about this in many, many different ways. At one extreme, you have pure marketplaces that focus on lead generation or some form of enhanced lead, all the way through to players that are operating marketplaces and operating as retailers within those marketplaces. We wanna be clear on exactly how we think about that challenge and the implications it has for our financials and the opportunity we've got ahead of us.
Which really brings us to the final point, and that's gonna be finishing up with how we think about commercializing that digital retailing opportunity, how we think about the business more broadly, and how you can expect us to speak to that in future results from this point forward. You'll be glad to know that you don't have to listen to me for the whole time. We've got our full team from Auto Trader that will be speaking to the topics throughout the day. There's myself, obviously, and Catherine and Jamie, who will be known to many of you through results, presentations, and the like. We also have Chris, our Chief Technology Officer, Bex Clark, our Group Sales Director, Ian Plummer, our Commercial Director, Ben Smith, one of our Product Directors, and Jon Davies, our Head of Strategy. It's gonna be really, really helpful.
I think all these people will be presenting during the day, but they'll also be joining me for the Q&A. I think you will hopefully get a good sense of not only the general bench strength within Auto Trader, but the level of diligence, thought, and expertise that we put behind all the initiatives that we're going to cover today. The plan. Hopefully you've all grabbed a copy of the hard copy packs that are available over on the table over there. I'm going to start with a general introduction around mainly looking at what we've achieved since our IPO and since our capital markets day to have some small sense of how we've done against previous promises that we've made.
I'll then move to position the rest of the day, starting with our purpose, but very quickly getting to the way that we think about the strategy for our business. That is progressively unpacked through the day, as you can see there, with Jon and Bex covering our classified marketplace. With Catherine and Chris then covering the enablers, which includes the platform strategy that I referred to earlier. Ian and Ben talking about what digital retailing is to Auto Trader and what we've actually achieved so far and how we're thinking about that moving forward. As I said earlier, we'll finish with Jamie and I talking about how we're thinking about commercializing the opportunity and reporting on Auto Trader's financials moving forward. We'll finish hopefully with plenty of time for Q&A.
There will be a break at about quarter past two if our timing turns out to be precise. Right. Perhaps the best way to start is why an Investor Day and why today or why this year? The answer is that certainly over 7.5 and 4.5 years, you would expect that a lot has changed. Actually, in the last 2 years, an awful lot has changed, both inside and outside Auto Trader. We all know about the pandemic, so there's no reason to wax too lyrical about that. During the course of that, we've seen shifts towards more digital channels. Auto Trader responded to the crisis in a way that has really had a transformative impact on our customer base and also within our own business, partly as a result of necessity and people working from home.
We really doubled down very hard on product development, which has now put us in a position where we're able to speak about much of those areas today. It is fair to say that everything that we speak about today, I wouldn't be surprised if you've heard mentioned in some of our conversations. What I think you'll find is very different is the way that those things self-reinforce each other to help achieve a common purpose. What you'll hear is that we're feeling pretty optimistic about the future. We have a classified marketplace that feels like it is in very good health. Because of that marketplace, we've built a platform which we're now exposing increasingly to thousands of our customers, and they're choosing to operate their businesses on that basis as well.
That level of integration is obviously good for the classified marketplace because it increases the stickiness and depth of the relationship we have with our customers. It also becomes a very obvious enabler for us to be able to undertake digital retailing and park those transactions into those retailer systems through the integration that we've built. Finally, that brings me onto the digital retailing opportunity, which we will cover in depth today. In short, it is about us enabling any retailer to be able to sell through any channel, thereby ensuring that Auto Trader is always the place that has the most cars available to buy online. The final point I should make before we go on is that perhaps unlike other Investor Days, this isn't about conjecture or hypothesis at all. All the products that you're going to see today are built and are live.
For those of you, I know some in the room that have been wondering what we've been up to, we have been working on all these products. This is not about a required technical investment. It's not about whether these are technically feasible, things to do. It is all out there now and live on the website. The question really for the future now, even though there will always be continuous development in our products, is really one of customer adoption and the barriers to that as opposed to technical investment. Before we get to the future, I will indulge in the past for a little while. Auto Trader has a history, both pre-IPO and post-IPO of consistent, predictable execution and financial performance.
Over the period since IPO, our revenue CAGR is 7.8%, and over the same period of time, our operating profit has grown at 12.5%. It's not lost on me the slight blip there in FY 2021, which most of you that know Auto Trader will be aware was driven by our decision to support our customers when they were required to close their business. The reason for that decision was that we wanted to optimize for the moment that we emerged from the crisis as opposed to optimizing during the crisis, which I hope somewhat justified by the results we reported in the last full year, which looks as though we haven't missed a beat, perhaps. Over that period of time, we've also returned just about or just over GBP 500 million to shareholders through share buybacks.
A couple of observations I wanted to make on these charts. The first is that our profitability has always been maintained and been relatively stable, having increased in the early years. That's driven by adherence to an asset-light business model and asset-light operations. It runs very much within the blood of Auto Trader. We are also ruthlessly disciplined when it comes to costs. Finally, we predominantly focus on organic growth over inorganic growth. The vast majority of the growth that you see there will have been organic. The second observation that I wanted to make has been the point that's been raised literally at our IPO and every point since is how cyclical is Auto Trader's business model. It's been difficult to assess that because in the last big downturn, we were transitioning from a magazine business.
Well, it is worth pointing out merely empirically that for three of the years on those charts being FY 2019, 2020, and 2021, stock not only was flat, it was actually negative. There were cyclical lows during the course of those three years, and hopefully you can see that that didn't have a material impact on that steady march forward that we always try to make as a business. I'd like to think that that wasn't accidental, and it wasn't necessarily because the market gifted us those results. I do believe firmly that it has been down to delivering on both the actions and the strategy that we laid out at our IPO and subsequently iterated or reinforced at our Capital Markets Day back in 2018. Unfortunately, I can't present a perfect record.
However, it's fair to say in most areas we did deliver on exactly what we said. The only exception which you can see there was really around growing advertising revenue from manufacturers. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the way that that market's gone literally since the point of the Capital Markets Day. It's fair to say on new car overall, I actually feel as though we've made more progress than we would have expected at the time. We now have physical new cars on Auto Trader, and we have 1 million people looking at them every month. That is something that none of us thought would be possible back at the time of the Capital Markets Day. Unfortunately, it has involved us doing a whole bunch of things that we never anticipated at the time, but such is life in a digital business.
It also means that opportunity to work with OEMs is not something that we're walking away from at all. We're now better placed than we'll ever be. Whether that will turn up as display revenue, whether it turns up as new car revenue, or whether it turns up as transactional revenue on the back of the Autorama acquisition, that still yet is yet to be determined. It's also part of that delivery has been about a constant cadence of product development. You're gonna hear a lot about technology, a lot around product development. It is kind of the big thing that we do.
I'm not gonna go through each one of these other than to say that one stream of product development is all about building better products for retailers that either enable them to increase their revenues, to reduce their costs, or to find efficiencies in their own business. It's fair to say now that Auto Trader in previous guises wouldn't necessarily have had permission to work in this way with retailers. In no small part to the work that became before COVID, but particularly the support that we provided during COVID, it's fair to say that the vast majority of retailers will say Auto Trader feels like a completely different business. I'd like to say we always wanted to work that way with them, but sometimes it does take dramatic and bold action to shift people's perceptions. I think we have very much done that.
The second stream of product development that is worth talking about, especially as it relates to our past and our future, is our focus on the consumer. Although we don't make a lot of direct revenue from consumers, we're under no illusion, and you should be under no illusion, that they are the source of Auto Trader's competitive advantage, and ensuring that we always remain the very best place to find research and buy a car will always be important to this business. At the end of the day, that is why retailers use us. There's just a few examples of what we've been working on here, some of which we will go into further in the presentation. Generally, you have things like website functionality. You can see their price flags and admin fees.
Two really critical elements when it comes to buying your car is this car good value? In order to understand that, you need to understand how the price compares to other like cars and what additional charges might go along with it. Now, that change, particularly, you can imagine, wasn't the easiest change to convince our retailers to make. Something that I think I imagine that no small number of them would take a vote against if they were able to choose if we move forward on that. For consumers, it's absolutely critical, and it does just show that line that we need to walk as a two-sided marketplace. The second area is really a broad area of consumer behavior change. It was mentioned on the video that you saw at the start.
The reality is the product car is going to change dramatically over the next 10 years. Electric vehicles aren't the same as combustion engine vehicles. The way people shop for those vehicles is radically different. Brand doesn't mean the same thing. The product all of a sudden goes back to a functional purchase. We need to ensure, as consumers approach that first electric vehicle decision, where they'll find themselves disoriented, confronted with a bunch of language that makes no sense at all to them, that actually Auto Trader helps them navigate that, be it in a detailed search or through content. The final area is really where we look to develop our own channels. That's channels where we can acquire and retain consumers that are very difficult for others to get at. Most obvious example of that is our apps.
We've doubled our apps team over the past couple of years and doubled down on investing in those platforms. You might ask why. Well, we have about 17 million downloads of the app, which is a quarter of the U.K. Population, which is every man, woman, and child. I don't imagine we have too many younger users of our apps. You can for yourself imagine that most of the license holders will be much, much higher percentage than that. That traffic is very, very difficult to disintermediate. The app sits on their handset, and it's literally a direct relationship with Auto Trader, so it is a very strong source of advantage for us. Finally is the work that we've been doing on social content and video.
I'd say if you rewound three to four years ago, I think this was an area where we were behind, and we weren't necessarily up with where the platforms were. Thank you to Rory and the team. Actually, they've built some very, very good content that's engaging customers. We've got a YouTube channel now with 750,000 people that follow it and active followers on TikTok and Instagram also. Enough about the past. We should start looking to the future. The right place to start, although I'm not going to labor this point a lot, is with our purpose. Our purpose is up there on the screen. It's driving change together responsibly. It may sound a little generic, but within Auto Trader, this has a very specific meaning that is very, very well understood by everyone in the business.
If you wanna understand how we make decisions, how we prioritize things, how we think about our people, how we respond to a cost of living crisis, how we respond to a global pandemic when our customers are required to close their business, you can almost certainly understand where we'll end up by these four words. We are going to continue to drive change as we always have in the automotive marketplace, doing our best to make it better for consumers and better for retailers also. That's really where together comes into it. Together is as much about the team inside Auto Trader working as one towards a common purpose as it is ensuring that we're working with our retailers and with the rest of our industry, rather than using our advantage against them and competing with them.
Finally, there's responsibility, which, a big word, but in short, is about us holding ourselves to the very highest standards when it comes to culture, when it comes to ethics, and when it comes to technology. We'll talk in depth, but the way that we're going about achieving this, you can see beneath it there. We're looking to continue to grow our marketplace. We're looking to enable digital retailing. We're looking to continue to build on the strong relationships we already have with our customers. From a cultural perspective, we're very, very focused on creating an inclusive culture where everyone can be their best and achieve their most when they come to work at Auto Trader. Finally, environmentally friendly choices, which is really about us doing our part to achieve a net zero future, whether it's within Auto Trader or for the transport industry more broadly.
Today, we're going to cover the first three of those in some depth. The last two, culture, and particularly ESG, are areas that we'll touch on briefly, but they are very, very big topics in and on their own right, and they are quite well summarized in our most recent annual report. Of course, if investors or analysts do have further questions about this, we can take them in Q&A or address them outside this session. So touching on culture, it would be remiss not to say a few things about it. Thankfully, Chris is actually going to share later, a lot around our technology, philosophy, and approach, which really does explain a lot of how we work. At the end of the day, our culture is enabled by our technology.
That's why it's hard to do what we do, because the technology investment has literally been decades in the making. It's not the only aspect of culture. There's how we think about our people, how we think about teams, how we think about the organization. There's our Make a Difference strategy, our diversity inclusion strategy. Our ESG strategy, including the move towards net zero. Those things are all things that are actually key to our strategy, not merely tacked on the side of our strategy. Very, very important to our people, and something that we do spend a lot of time on. In that regard, we do believe that results need to speak at least as loud as words.
When it comes to understanding how we're doing from a cultural perspective or ESG perspective, we are very, very transparent, providing our cultural KPIs along with every results. You can look at those. They're the key measures that we are focused on moving, and I think it's fair to say we feel good about those KPIs. They are good in absolute terms. They're moving in the right direction, but I won't for a minute say that we're done or that they're perfect. There's still definitely work for us to be done. You can also see through external validation, whether that's Glassdoor reviews or whether that's external recognition and awards that we've won.
If you do dig into this for a moment, you will see it's something that we do take very, very seriously and put a hell of a lot of effort behind. With purpose, goals, and culture done, we can now get into our strategy. Today we're going to be working through this visual that you'll see here. It starts with our classified marketplace. We're absolutely a core focus business. We always have been. It's underpinned a lot of our success, and none of that is going to change. The marketplace that we have is still very much at the core business and in a very good place to grow. Outside of that, and this is where we get into some of the newer areas, there's the platform area that I spoke about earlier.
Our platform is where we've taken the technology platform and data platform that sits underneath Auto Trader, and we're exposing that now to other customers so that they can run their business on it. We're doing that through a series of partnerships and very often directly with retailers or manufacturers themselves. Embedding our technology and data in their businesses allows them to unlock efficiencies, and for us, it increases the stickiness of the relationship and depth of the partnership that we have. Because we're making this investment, actually, many more of our customers are able to talk about data-based pricing, able to talk about selling digitally because Auto Trader are taking on the burden of investment in technology and data.
The reality is if we were not to do that, then there would only be the very largest of our customers that would have the budget and capability to replicate the solutions that we're making available to any retailer that works with Auto Trader. Now, as it turns out, that not only strengthens the position of our classified marketplace, so we would do it even if there wasn't an opportunity in digital retailing, but that level of plumbing into retailers becomes a very easy way for us to enable digital retailing, moving those reservations, finance applications, part exchange quotes seamlessly into our customers' workflow and solutions. Which does bring me to the outer circle, which is digital retailing. It's all about Auto Trader being an enabler for any retailer to sell on Auto Trader or in their forecourt. It is not about Auto Trader retailing cars direct.
It's very much a role of bringing technology and automation to a process that today is dominated by physical labor and manual tasks. Today is about unlocking this, starting at the middle and moving to the outside as we go through the day. It is worth saying, again, just to jump back into history a little bit, this comes as just another evolution of Auto Trader, and the key point that I wanted to make here is that these evolutions have always been gradual. We've always had a very firm eye and high level of conviction about where the transition will end up. Where we have ended up has been a materially better place in terms of the usefulness for Auto Trader and actually the value of the business and the financials that it generates.
That was true when we were a print business, tackling it magazine by magazine, region by region. It was true in 1996 when we saw the web at its very earliest stages and thought, "Actually, this could be something that might end up doing a better job than our magazines." We progressively grew that and grew that. It was literally over decades until we got to the point where we saw actually, we're pretty sure this is going to be the only thing that's gonna matter at some point, at which point we accelerated, released any constraints, and that all culminated in the magazines closing in 2013. Even within that digital box, there have been evolutions that were not necessarily always called out. We had to move to mobile because that became very clear that it might even trump PCs and desktop internet use.
Now, the majority of our audience are on mobile platforms, and I spoke about apps earlier. We'll definitely touch on this later. We've now had to transition to be a business that not only has expertise or has become a data and technology business, but a data and technology business that can turn those into services that can be used by others. Now we find ourselves at the start of what we believe will be a third great evolution of Auto Trader, and we intend on approaching it in exactly the same way as we have previous evolutions. That is gradual with a very firm eye on the end result, which we'd like to think in the long term will result in a materially better Auto Trader than the one that we have today, as good as it is.
That brings me to the equity story as we see it from an Auto Trader perspective. We are a trusted marketplace, and many of you actually will have seen a very similar slide at this time of the IPO. It is not exactly the same. It has moved on quite significantly, but one thing that hasn't is the position that we have with consumers, which does, as I say, underpin all our competitive advantage. The second thing, as I mentioned, we have built much, much deeper partnerships with our customers than we could have ever imagined, certainly pre-COVID. That's translated into increasing spend from customers with average revenue per retailer growing at 8.5% since 2015. As I said at the start, that is in spite of a cyclical weakness in stock.
We're a very profitable business, and we intend on remaining that way. That's driven by our asset light approach to both our business model and to our operations, along with our cost discipline and focus almost exclusively on organic growth. We're very fortunate to have a business model that is very resilient, as you've seen through the more recent stock downturns. We're also quite fortunate that that business model has a number of structural changes taking place around it, which means it's only likely to become more relevant rather than less.
I've spoken about the attractive growth opportunity that we have in our classified marketplace, which is in as good a shape as it was back seven and a half years ago, and we obviously have the opportunity to extend that into digital retailing, which you're going to hear a load about during the course of today. Finally, but certainly not least, that is all built on a technology platform and culture that has been decades in the making and is by far and away one of the most difficult aspects of Auto Trader for anyone to replicate and gives us confidence in our ability to be able to execute the plan that we're going to lay out and adapt where we need to be.
With that, we'll move back to the strategy wheel and start with Bex and Jon to speak about the center of our strategy, the classified marketplace.
Thank you. Okay, thanks, Nathan. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Bex Clark, Group Sales Director. I've had the enormous privilege of working for Auto Trader for over 20 years. My roles in Auto Trader have always involved either looking after customers directly or as has been the case through the majority of the years, leading our teams that are indeed customer-facing. I've worked with retailers, manufacturers, and advertising agencies and was playing an active role in our transition from print to digital. In my current role as Group Sales Director, I'm jointly responsible for our retailer business, our retailer revenues, and the 220 people that obsess every day around customer performance and retailer profitability. Nathan talked to three parts of our strategy. Jon and I are going to spend time talking about our core classified marketplace, which is the beating heart of our organization.
Established in 1977 and seeing continued growth for over four decades through foresight, innovation, and bold decision making. We'll talk to this in two parts. I'll talk to the core classified marketplace and the runway for growth, and Jon will talk to the structural trends underpinning this continued growth trajectory. Okay, so at the heart of our classified marketplace is our unrivaled audience. U.K. car buyers recognize Auto Trader as the destination of choice, offering the largest selection of vehicles and is indeed a marketplace they trust. This is undoubtedly a core strength and is our unique proposition in automotive retail. On this slide, we compare against our marketplace peers, and on the next slide, go on to think about other names in U.K. Automotive. In terms of prompted awareness, this was at 88% in March 2022 and is almost double that of any of our peers.
We have a strong brand position. Only 5% of our traffic is paid, and we work hard to continue to position our brand with consumers, whether through content such as YouTube, as Nathan mentioned, our brand communications, or through our app, where, as Nathan mentioned, we have 17 million app downloads. In terms of trust, 65% of U.K. car buyers trust Auto Trader. While trust has always been important when typically making the second largest purchase following a home, it is even more so today in the current economic climate where consumers crave reassurance. We never tire in our efforts to ensure buyers have confidence in the vehicles and retailers on our marketplace, whether through our price flags, admin fees, or indeed reviews.
When we think about our valued brand, one of the key metrics that we track is first choice consideration for consumers when looking for a new or used vehicle. This list is slightly wider than the one just seen and includes retailers and editorial content providers. Here that you'll see that Auto Trader is not only the most trusted brand, but we are also the first place visited for 61% of U.K. car buyers. We also remain the largest marketplace in both stock and visits. Stock here on the x-axis is typically around 430,000 unique vehicles at any one time, with our nearest peer at 300,000. This is a key strength, bringing choice and depth of comparison in one central place for consumers. In terms of visits, we have over 50 million visits each month, again, stretching far beyond others.
The blue bubbles on the chart represent the share of cross-platform minutes spent on all U.K. automotive websites. Again, we power ahead with Auto Trader representing 75% market share of all cross-platform minutes. For further context, this is at a time when OEM and often retailer websites in terms of traffic are diminishing. Okay, it's these combinations that makes Auto Trader powerful. At IPO, we shared this flywheel, and we talked about both components of our marketplace, retailer and consumer. Balancing the needs of both is hugely important for us, and we're proud to say that since IPO, we have increased strength on both sides. We have consumers spending nearly 600 million minutes each month on site. This is the largest volume, again, of in-market buyers.
At the same time, as you'll have seen in our results, we have over 14,000 retailers live. That includes car and non-car. To give you an idea of what that looks like for purely car retailers, that's approximately 87% of U.K. car retailers choosing to invest with us every single month and feeding this extensive choice of stock. We continually develop our platform to be the best recognized and trusted experience for consumers and the most effective channel delivering real ROI for our retailers. Now we move to ARPA, which as Nathan mentioned, we have consistently grown every year since IPO, excluding FY 2021, where we gave our packages free to retailers whilst forecourts were closed during COVID. We'll talk to some of the drivers in a moment, but before we do, it's worth comparing our ARPA growth against the broader market context.
We have grown ARPA since FY 2015, while the new car market initially growing from 2015 to 2017 has since declined, and more recently, more dramatically due to a combination of well-communicated supply-side factors. While the used car market, which typically sees a lag after new but tends to be more stable, has also seen a decline since the high of FY 2017. That said, we do know used cars tend to be less impacted by tougher economic conditions. The point to note here is that ARPA growth is not necessarily contingent on a healthy new and used car market, and this gives further confidence that we can continue to grow ARPA in challenging trading conditions.
Reviewing the drivers of this compelling ARPA growth over the past eight years, we can see that the price and product levers have grown every year as we bring more value to consumers and maintain relentless in our pursuit of products that help our retailers perform better and operate more efficiently. Stock, as Nathan mentioned, has been more challenging and a negative lever between FY 2019-2021 due to that unique supply and demand situation emerging from COVID. For ease here, we have excluded COVID discounts on this slide. This strong ARPA performance is testament to our teams across the whole of the business working as we do in true collaboration, but especially to our product, technology, delivery, and sales teams.
We now turn to review our take rate and to have an informed view, have modeled the estimated retailer gross profit across sales and after-sales on cars between FY 2018 to FY 2022. You can see in the earlier years it was approximately GBP 11 billion- GBP 11.5 billion fairly consistently, and that's despite some fluctuations in volumes and gross PPU. FY 2022 saw a marked step up due to those previously never experienced circumstances. High demand and supply slowly starting to improve led to increased margins and gross profits at all-time highs. Over that period, the amount of revenue that we benefit from in used cars has been between 5% and 7%, with the lowest year being FY 2021, again where we offered COVID discounts, and the highest being in FY 2020.
When we estimate our share across new and used sales combined, it is somewhere between 3.5% and 4.5%. The question then is whether we think we've reached a take rate ceiling within our core proposition. We can think about this in a few ways, but one is comparing our performance with other businesses in other sectors. We show here our position over time alongside a number of marketplace businesses in different sectors and observe that there are plenty who have a greater share than we have today. On this visual, we have shown our take rate of new and used car sales at 3.5%-4.5%.
Even just our used car share is at 5%-7%, suggesting there is good headroom. Of course, we recognize that some of these businesses have models very different to our own, but this gives confidence that further opportunity exists. Okay, so moving back to ARPA, we believe that we can grow ARPA, first of all, through our pricing power as our marketplace position continues to strengthen. We also believe there is still significant product headroom. Managing products. These house our hugely powerful data, helping retailers make better, stronger, informed decisions on a daily basis and across many areas, most noticeably with sourcing, pricing and supporting them in stock turn.
Dealer Finance, helping more retailers maximize the opportunity of even more qualified buyers and will become even more important for electric vehicles and leasing, and at a time right now where consumers have less access to disposable cash. Vehicle Check. In a world where consumers crave more touch points to offer peace of mind, Vehicle Check provides key vehicle history and information. On new car, a continued opportunity to grow both retailers and stock and go from strength to strength which we have already built. Package penetration. We've seen packages continue to grow, again from strength to strength, redesigning the product staircase in 2027 and again in 2021. We also continue to see more retailers recognize the benefits of gaining stand out among their peers and investing more in search. Finally for now, Market Extension that you'll hear more about later.
A new solution enabling retailers to broaden their target markets while bringing efficiencies for retailers of all sizes. Okay, to summarize just before I hand over to Jon, we believe we are in great shape. Auto Trader is the largest and most trusted automotive marketplace, the first brand U.K. car buyers turn to. Our unique network effect of retailers and consumers enable us to be that destination of choice for U.K. car buyers and in turn, a marketplace where retailers can be successful. Our ARPA performance remains extremely healthy, and that's despite some tougher trading conditions with stock in particular throughout COVID-19. We are confident that we have runway for future growth underpinned by robust opportunities in our classified marketplace, and as you'll hear later on, in addition with digital retailing. I'll now hand over to Jon.
Thanks, Bex, and good afternoon, everyone. For those of you I haven't met, I'm Jon, and I work across strategy and investor relations at Auto Trader, and my background is in automotive manufacturers across planning, sales, and marketing. Now for this next section, we're gonna give some thought to our working assumptions on the market over the next decade to think about the implications on our business as it currently stands and also as our business evolves towards digital retailing. We're gonna cover four broad areas. The first is how many cars there'll be on U.K. roads. The second is how regularly consumers will change their cars. The third is finance. Then lastly, we'll think about electrification. Let's start by thinking firstly about the car park.
Now you see on the screen and, in the packs you've got that our hypothesis is that the car park, the total amount of cars on U.K. roads will grow over the next decade, and it rests on three core assumptions. The first, and if you wind back maybe the last sort of 20 years or so, we've seen population growth, and at the same time we've seen the proportion of the population have a full driving license. Interestingly, including with the younger cohorts, which I guess in the popular press is often sort of painted that young people don't take cars. That's been growing at the same rate. Going forward, we've taken the ONS forecast on population and actually slightly softened the proportion of the U.K. population with a full driving license.
Even in that relatively conservative scenario, you get about an extra 1.4 million people driving in 10 years' time. The question then is, do they want to own a car? All of the available data we see is fairly consistently, and if anything, through the pandemic, it only increased, consumers desire exclusive access to a car. When you ask consumers why they're changing their car, about nine in ten will say that is because of necessity rather than choice, and that's even more accentuated, as you'd imagine, on used cars rather than new. The third assumption, and Bex, Nathan have both talked to the suppressed new car market right now, given all the sort of supply side factors, we expect over the midterm that volume to come back.
While you can see it on the chart, it won't reach the heights that we saw through sort of calendar year 2014 through 2018, we do think it will accelerate above where it is today and crucially, given the car park conversation, ahead of the scrappage volumes. If those three assumptions bear out, we expect to see the car park grow over the next decade. There are more cars and more drivers. The next question is how regularly the car park turns the transaction rate. We shared earlier, Bex covered this, that ARPA growth hasn't been contingent on used car transactions or new car registrations, but it is important to our business for two predominant reasons. Firstly, our customers, it is contingent on their business, or their businesses are contingent on it.
Secondly, as we move closer to this transaction, it becomes more relevant for us. Now to give a kind of historical context, before the pandemic, consumers changed their cars somewhere between sort of every three and three and a half years, and you'll know in our results presentations, we often share this chart. Through the pandemic, given the constraints on the new car side, that's risen to about four. Every year every car is changing every four years. The question is what's gonna happen over the midterm? We've tried to show on this slide that we actually think there are quite good arguments on both sides about whether the turn cycle will stay slow, which is the arguments on the right, or that it will increase in speed, which is the arguments on the left.
If, for example, we continue to see a very constrained new car supply side and, for example, a very negative consumer confidence outlook, you would expect that would continue to weigh on the transaction rate just as it has through COVID. However, on the other hand, if we do expect to see new car registrations come back to some level, and you've got these kind of factors on the left where consumers have often got very real reasons to change, whether it's that kind of necessity point, you need to get a new car, or there's new technology coming in terms of electric vehicle hardware or finance contracts are coming to an end or whatever it might be, actually, we believe these arguments on the left, even and including that you'd have car buying experiences getting better through the shift online.
We think the arguments on the left will likely bear out to be stronger. On balance, we suggest the car parc is unlikely to turn slower than we've seen it in the last couple of years and may increase over the medium term. Now we've talked there briefly about finance, and we wanted to briefly mention that as our kind of third strand. You can see on the slide the finance penetration on new cars has risen. It's risen on used cars. Then within new cars, you've seen a slight change of mix where we've seen the growth of personal contract hire. Now, it's maybe relevant to call out that's been in a very sort of favorable monetary policy backdrop.
It's clear consumers are much more comfortable than they were a decade choosing finance to access mobility, in this case, cars. What will happen to the kind of monetary policy backdrop over the next 10 years, of course, will likely be different. Funders may have to think about affordability and lending criteria. There are a few dynamics to finance in the motor sector that are relevant and worth maybe calling out. The first is that the interest rate on a car is fixed. It's locked in for the term of the agreement, unlike, for example, a variable mortgage interest rate or something like that. Anyone who's currently in a finance agreement will continue to pay that amount per month for the rest of their contract.
The second factor that's relevant now is for those car buyers who have taken a finance agreement out, at the point of the finance agreement, there would've been a forecasted residual value set, and in the last couple of years we've seen very, considerable price appreciation in used cars. Many of those customers who are currently in a finance agreement are in positive equity. In addition, we think there are kind of other dynamics and factors at play. People who may be looking to buy a new electric car and may not want to take on that residual value risk will, we think, continue to take personal contract hire, which is partly why you see some of the rise in the charts on the screen.
For car buyers who maybe are struggling economically and won't have the cash to buy, finance will remain a very compelling option for mobility. On top of that, as we mentioned earlier, finance is a pretty big catalyst. You come to an end of a contract and have to decide what you're gonna do with mobility. However, we do think it's quite likely that some of the finance types will change. We've seen manufacturers play around with sort of shorter term flexible leasing products and things like that. If you're a retailer, compliance in this area is something that is sometimes challenging. Actually, we believe that we've got a very important role to help educate consumers and support retailers through this landscape in finance.
In sum, we think finance will continue to evolve and be a crucial part of the buying journey for many. The last of the four trends we wanted to cover was electrification and perhaps a minor personal anecdote. One of my first roles in an OEM was looking after the Nissan LEAF back in 2011 when selling electric cars was perhaps slightly harder than it is today. Back in 2011, there was about 1,000 cars sold that were battery electric. Last year, there was 190,000. We've seen huge growth in the uptake of EVs. What we're trying to show on this chart is that we think that will continue to trend upwards.
You can see on the chart we've plotted out there the growth in new car registrations, the battery electric vehicle mix, and also the used car mix as well. I guess our confidence that we expect to see something like this happen is that much of this, particularly on the new car side, which obviously flows through into the used, is that it's supply driven and much of it is driven by legislation, whether in the U.K. or commitments that OEMs have made publicly to move towards electrification. As night becomes day, new cars become used cars. You can see we've rolled out that forecast into the used car park, and we expect that by 2030 about one in every four cars on British roads will be an EV.
Within this kinda context, you see a couple of interesting and new dynamics. One is traditional brands, mainstream brands, Ford, Nissan, Peugeot and so on, are moving their production manufacturing capabilities engineering behind electric vehicles and having to make very material cost savings as part of that process. Having to cut distribution costs and many are planning moves to agency models or some form of direct sale model. At the same time, we're expecting to see more new entrants enter the market. I'm sure everyone's well aware of the growth of Tesla, but we think there will be others. Polestar, MG have done well in the U.K., and we know there are other Chinese brands who are already in Europe and coming across to the U.K. later this year and early next year.
If you look at a market like Norway with very high EV penetration, about 20% of their current new car registrations are done by new market entrants. At the same time, and we've talked about this, we expect to see the financing options slightly adapt and change on EVs. If you're a retailer, your business model will have to adapt. If you're a franchise retailer and you're going under an agency agreement, that's a material change to your P&L. If you stock, say, under five-year-old cars, in about four years' time, 40% of the cars you sell will be battery electric vehicles. What does it all mean, and what does it all mean for us?
Well, from a consumer's point of view, it means greater choice, more options, but also, at least over the next few years, a lot more complication and a lot more brands and models to get your head around. If I was to ask about Focus or Golf or Qashqai, I think everyone would know those nameplates. If I talked about the bZ4X or the ID.3 or the EV6, these are not as well known. If a consumer's coming to the market, they don't have the same anchor points that they previously did. It's in that context that we believe we have a very important role to play, helping consumers make the choice to go electric. Nathan actually briefly talked to some of these earlier.
We've kind of sketched them broadly, kind of from the top of the funnel to the bottom of the funnel as you go across the screen. We think our role is across all of those areas to help dispel myths, to help consumers who maybe are just considering electric, but particularly when they're on our site looking at electric cars, enabling the most fair comparison across vehicles to make that decision. We haven't actually put it on the slide because we only agreed at the weekend, or only signed it at the weekend, but we're also gonna be the headline sponsor for World EV Day this Friday, which I'm sure many of you have come across, and subsequent events like the EV Summit in the autumn.
Maybe one example, if those of you in the room have bought an electric car, I'm sure this is something you'll have appreciated. The buying journey is as complex as a normal internal combustion engine car, but there's added layers. You might be, for example, looking at a new electric car, go on multiple manufacturers' websites and see slightly different things. You might see on one website a charge time of maybe between 10%- 80%, it takes 15 minutes on a certain charger. You go on a different website and it says you can get so many miles in so many minutes. You go on another one, and it's got a lot of information about kilowatt hours, which unless you're into energy, you probably don't know a huge amount.
It's in that context, it's quite a complex buying journey and you're more likely to drop out. We think with the quality of data we have, as well as the opportunity with the amount of eyeballs on our site, we can do things like the one you can see on the right, where we can simplify much of the complexity around electric cars, where we're helping answer the questions that consumers really have when they're about to buy. For example, I'm on a journey, I need 30 mi at one point. How long is that gonna take me if I'm in the public network? Or how long will it take me to top up the whole thing from home? We've used a lot of language around miles and minutes, which everyone knows, rather than things like kilowatt hours, which aren't well known.
Of course, if you're into it, you can go deeper, select the dropdowns and find out more. We do this across brands so that consumers can make that decision easier. In sum, we think we can do this better than anyone, and we hope to help many consumers make that shift to electric. Let's just briefly zoom out before we finish our section and think about our proposition for consumers in that context, and also then retailers. Let's start with the consumer value proposition. As a car buyer, and I've tried to illustrate this on the right on the screen, if you bought a car back in 2018, 2019, the next time you come to buy a car, I'd suggest it's a more complex journey.
There's more fuel types, more retailers, more finance, and a wider array of ways about going to buy. In that context, our core classified business brings choice, trust, and transparency. As we'll cover through Ben and Ian later, we'll increasingly be able to offer consumers control over the journey that they choose to for themselves. What about from a retailer point of view? Well, with brands and leasing companies going direct and the rise of digital retailers, you can see that the types of retailer customers we work with has only expanded. For all of those businesses, we can offer the most effective sales channel, the best data in the U.K. at a granular level to help guide decision-making, and the most retailer-friendly tools. Right now on Auto Trader, all five of those groups are currently selling cars direct to consumers.
Let's summarize before I pass over to Catherine and Chris. Our core belief is that the automotive retail market will go through some fairly significant changes over the next decade, and we believe these are generally tailwinds to our business and that we have an opportunity to play a bigger role in the market. We expect more drivers driving more cars on the road, meaning a solid supply and demand landscape for our classified marketplace. We expect more EVs with new brands coming to market, new nameplates people haven't heard of, and ever-increasing hardware and software capability. We believe we've got a crucial role here to help consumers navigate this added complexity. We expect new entrants to come to market, thinking afresh about their approach to retailing. At the same time as well-known brands change their distribution strategy.
For both of those groups, we can be a highly effective sales channel and a primary data provider. With the growth of finance, we think we can help consumers make that decision and drive finance conversion, but also for retailers, reduce their double keying in their systems and so forth. Then there's the question of the changing retailer landscape, and it clearly will change. Retailers will include digital retailers, manufacturers, leasing companies, as well as franchise and independent customers. We may see consolidation, particularly in the franchise space, but in that context, we think a few things become even more important to the customer base. Used car sales growth, other sources of revenue, and a focus on cost control. In all of those areas, we believe we're very well placed to support.
We've shared there our working assumptions around the car market for the next decade, and we believe on balance, these are tailwinds for our business. With that, I'm gonna hand over to Catherine and Chris to talk about our platform.
Good afternoon, everyone. You've heard from Jon and Bex about how our core marketplace is performing and that it really is healthy and strong. Now, Chris and I are gonna talk to you what we believe are the technology, data, and product enablers which support and extend this core classified marketplace model and underpin our digital retailing strategy. Our focus on building this platform and these foundations is a fundamental part of our strategy and one that we believe differentiates our approach from many of our peers and our competitors. To begin, if we return back to our strategy diagram, that Auto Trader as a platform layer builds upon our core classified marketplace and is a new and important part of our growth story.
Through the capabilities we're building in this platform layer, we've moved from helping our customers to win and perform better in the classified advertising space, to enabling them to win in retailing overall, to helping them with pricing, with sourcing, and to drive margin and growth performance in their businesses. We're embedding our technology and our data into customers' processes and their workflows so that we're an essential part of their operations. These services have long been used to power our Auto Trader business and systems, but we're now making them available to our customers to use in their own system, which drives significant cost efficiencies and improve sales and margin performance for them as well.
By Auto Trader and us investing in this technology, in this data, in these services for the industry, we can provide our retailers and partners with a real advantage by giving them access to great solutions that they otherwise wouldn't be able to design, to invest in, or to build themselves. For consumers, we can provide them on our marketplace with a seamless, integrated experience, all on that trusted consumer platform. If we think about our goals and how we deliver on them to make digital retailing possible for all segments and all types of retailers, rather than just the online retailers, and to empower any consumer to go on the buying journey they choose, whether that's online or involving forecourt channels. These enablers are all essential to make these goals a reality.
We have the data, the technology services and products that over time will enable the entire industry to realize the benefits from online retailing and for our digital retailing products to operate at scale. The more we learn from retailers and consumers about how that journey to online transactions will evolve in the automotive industry, the more conviction we have that these enablers are worth investing the resources, the time, and the effort to really get right and to scale. These platform capabilities will strengthen our position in the market and extend barriers to entry for our competitors. As sectors mature and digitize, platforms exhibit long-term disruptive value.
When we look to other sectors and some of the biggest structural changes triggered by the move to online retailing, we believe there is a strong read across into the automotive sector, and that we're really well-placed to deliver these for the industry through our platform and product strategy. Whether it's having a central view of stock, which is so important for omni-channel retailing, or delivering price transparency and confidence for retailers and consumers, or completing that all-important integration layer into what are complex and often legacy systems, or finally enabling retailers to extend their reach to sell into new markets and new consumers. We have the technology services and products that will enable the industry to realize these opportunities and benefit from retailing online.
This is why we're so focused on the second strand of our strategy, Auto Trader as a platform, where we're acting as the data technology and product layer for the entire industry. These enablers that we'll be talking to you about strengthen up that existing classified marketplace and add value to that core business, but they also create a platform to facilitate the digital transaction and the sales process. There are three components to our platform strategy, and Chris is gonna talk to each of these in a bit more detail. There's firstly our technology platform, which we believe is in great shape and positions us to deliver technology solutions to our retailers and to our partners increasingly as a service. There's then the extensive integrations we're creating across the industry with retailer technology providers, finance houses, and with the funders.
This integration layer and platform is unique to Auto Trader. The final part of our platform is then our data assets, where we have access to unparalleled data at scale, which makes our data best placed to become the currency for the entire industry. I'll now hand over to the most important person in Auto Trader, Chris, our CTO, who will start by talking us through our technology platform.
Cheers, Catherine, using my preferred intro there. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Chris. I'm Chief Technology Officer at Auto Trader. When I joined Auto Trader nearly 25 years ago now as a software developer, Auto Trader was a magazine business. It's been a pleasure to have been here throughout our own transition to becoming a digital business. As Catherine says, our technology platform is in really great shape. We've got a lot of great tech. We've got a lot of very smart people. After the break, after we finish up here, you'll hear a little bit more about some of the new products that are coming.
Ahead of that, I wanted to share what I consider to be some of the more foundational pieces of our technology platform, and how I think that sets us up to be successful and sets our customers up to be successful also. The four things I just wanna run through here are, these four things up on screen now. The first of which is cloud infrastructure. This is actually not a novel thing anymore. If I were to set up a startup tomorrow, I would, you know, immediately go cloud first. The point is, when we began our website business, about 25 years ago, this wasn't an option. However, we haven't stood still, and we've definitely not been left behind. What we've actually done is continued to invest in public cloud, technology.
We've migrated all of our services now through to Google Cloud, which is our preferred supplier. We're seeing all the benefits that one can get from public cloud. Scalability, resilience, security, and a certain amount of cost transparency. It's really important that we continue to invest in this foundational stuff. We're a 45-year-old brand, but we're still very much using kind of technology that a start-up would use. Closely related to that is our investment in data technologies. We operate a very, very busy marketplace. We've got tens of thousands of retailers advertising with us, hundreds of thousands of cars, and millions of consumers.
All of that generates a fantastic amount of data, and what we wanna try and do is make sense of it in as close to real time as possible and turn that into insight in our products. To do that, we need to have the technology and smart people to be able to do that. Our data technology is something we've really spent a lot of time and effort on over the last five years or so, particularly. When we talk about the products themselves, again, we've invested in making this as slick and as agile as possible. We can't possibly know what our consumers and retailers will like, so what we try and do is test those incrementally.
A lot of the Deal Builder functionality that you'll see after this section, we've been testing those components with real users out in the wild, and getting feedback by watching how people interact with that. Across our various product teams, we're doing now routinely over 1,000 software releases into production per week. Those are tiny little changes, small packets of change that we're continuously releasing and understanding how they perform. That's probably gone up tenfold since we IPO'd, so that's a trend that we see continuing to increase. Finally, people and culture. I'm really proud of the technology culture that we've built over the last couple of decades. We continue to invest in our people.
Early careers, for example, is super important when trying to attract and retain great people, which is what I believe we need to sustain ourselves as a technology business. Those are the kind of foundational stuff. There's no particular one product in there. That's the thing that sets us up for success, and those are things that we've spent a long time investing in, and we'll absolutely continue to invest in. Moving on, I wanna introduce the term Auto Trader Connect. You will have heard this term a couple of times in the videos, maybe. Really, the way I would explain that, it's our umbrella brand term for how we see clients, customers, partners connecting into our platform. Some of that stuff that we've built, I just talked about.
To try and sort of explain that, when you think about Auto Trader's marketplace, the two obvious sides to that are the consumer side, where we have the website and the apps that we've talked about, and then we have our retailer portal, where we surface all the tools for our trade customers and joint ventures such as Dealer Auction. For that marketplace, powering all of that, we've got various data sets, services, core foundational stuff that's providing all that functionality that we've built on over the years. The idea behind Auto Trader Connect is to take some of that functionality and start to make that available to partners and other parts of the automotive industry. We've begun on this journey already.
At the back end of last year, we released what we call Retail Essentials, so this is a set of services. As the name suggests, start to build the foundations of better vehicle data. When it comes to electric vehicles, for example, like we've talked about, the vehicles, the products themselves are getting more complicated. It's hard for retailers to keep up and understand that. Retail Essentials starts to make some of that reference data available. The second point is providing that in a way that people can plug that into their own technologies and into their own systems. For retailers, we recognize they've already got a ton of technology. They've probably got different systems, different vendors, different partners. We're not trying to replace all of that, and we don't think that's the right solution.
What we are trying to do is integrate that, though. For something like digital retailing, this is gonna be really important. Not only do you need to describe what the product is, what the car is, you need to make sure that if its status changes, if someone reserves it or buys it, that happens across the industry, across the dealer website, across the dealer's systems. Retail Foundations, Retail Essentials, sorry, is trying to provide those foundational bits. We have a short video here, which I hope will be formatted better than the ones at the intro, to hear from two of our customers just trying to explain some of that.
Auto Trader Connect. Welcome to real-time retail. When data sharing between systems is not instant, it results in inefficiencies for retailers and poor consumer experiences. That's why we're transforming data feeds and introducing real-time data across your network. Access to advanced vehicle data makes ad creation quicker, easier and more accurate. With this more advanced data, we can remove inaccuracy, ensuring you maximize the retail price of your vehicles. Create and manage stock from your existing stock management system with automatic updates to your other key sales channels, saving you time and money. All this is done in real time. Add, edit and remove via cloud bursts from key consumer-facing channels in an instant, ensuring important sales channels are kept right up to date. The days of daily feeds and data inaccuracies where edits can only be made once in a 24-hour period are numbered.
Driving efficiencies for retailers, putting an end to consumer inquiries on cars that are already sold. Auto Trader Connect, real-time data across your network.
Matt, you've been using Auto Trader Connect now through the dealer desk system. What drove you to use it?
Time saving and better data for customers. Better data for us as well, I should say in that, because we like to think we're experts, but we don't know everything about every single car. When we've got all that data at our fingertips straight from the dealer management system, it syncs into here, which means when we do have customers outside, we can talk to them about all the data on that car in terms of optional extras and everything like that. The other side of it is time saving.
Wow. In terms of time, when you've got about 60 vehicles here.
Yeah.
In a typical week, how long did it use to take to manage your stock, edit your stock?
The longest part of that was uploading each stock. Including getting them photographed, 30-45 minutes per car. You can now shave a good 15-20 minutes off that because we're not flicking between system to system to system. It's just in the one place.
What problems did you have using the old data feed system?
Biggest issue we had was timing, because if you had the vehicle advertised on a Thursday, you couldn't change it till the Monday. From that perspective, we were miles out. We were missing out on opportunities of how we should buy our vehicles, how we should price our vehicles. I think that was probably the biggest thing for us.
What about the time saving aspect of it in terms of man-hours? What's the saving like there?
The way that we work it centrally, the time saving is hours and hours a day because it's all there. The information is all there.
Previously, it'd be someone on-site whose responsibility that was to get that deadline, get that stock on as quickly as possible, photographed and prepped and sent that across to the stock management systems and the classifieds.
Absolutely. It would be one website per website. You would have to do, "I need to do Auto Trader. Then I need to do Volkswagen's website, then I need to do our own website." You're talking about three different areas, three different advertising, three different keys. Let's be honest, if your role is to advertise used vehicles and you're triple keying on a regular basis, how motivated are you going to be to put all of the effort in on every single advert? It helps us advertise the vehicle on every platform every time, at the right price every time. The speed of it is also brilliant.
All right. You heard there in the video from a couple of our customers. I think there's an independent customer and a franchise customer in there. We launched Retail Essentials last year, the end of last year. It's gone down really well. Since then, we've been busy integrating with, lots of different providers. We're working with all the major retailer groups, and large independents, some of which have their own, software development teams. For the smaller independents, we're working with those partners and providers of software, and we're integrating those as well. Today, we're live with over 70 of those individual providers, and there's, dozens more in the pipeline. We're making really good progress on that, stock integration part.
In the finance and funding sectors, our acquisitions of AutoConvert a couple of years ago and more recently Autorama have moved us forward in integration to financial lenders as well. Across the industry, we're trying to connect up the technologies and the different software providers. We've talked a little bit about those technology foundations, why we think we're a technology company and how we've set ourselves up for success. We've talked about Auto Trader Connect, which is how we go about kind of plugging those into the rest of the industry. Just wanna finish now talking about some of the actual data and insight itself. Two good examples of this are our valuations and our vehicle metrics.
Basically in both these cases, because we operate that busy marketplace, we're able to see a lot of observations of what's happening, so we can see who's advertising vehicles and at what price. We can use that to inform our models and provide that information back to future advertisers and advise them what's the right price to advertise at. Two ways we can improve that. One is just by seeing more observations than anyone else. Well, tick, we do that. Then the second thing we can do is be more precise about the vehicles themselves. We've invested heavily in vehicle information about describing those vehicles, so we can be more precise about exactly what type of vehicle is for sale. We call this our retail back strategy.
We're looking at retail prices, and we're working back from that to work out what future advertisers should maybe position their vehicles at in order to sell quickly. It's worth saying it's not just retailers and consumers that benefit from this. As we've started on this journey, we found there's actually whole new potential customer segments, even outside of automotive. There's a bunch of examples on the slide now. One to call out is the ONS down there. We've started working with the ONS now, and we provide used car prices and valuations data, which is used to inform the Consumer Prices Index and is an indicator of inflation, for example. It's not our fault. Yes, that's it. Back over to Catherine.
Thanks, Chris. After this section and after a short break, you'll hear more about our journey towards a transactional marketplace. To summarize on the enablers first, our platform approach both supports and extends our core marketplace and sets us up to become that transactional platform in the future. These technology data and product enablers that Chris has talked about further embed Auto Trader into our customers' processes, as well as supporting and embedding the performance of our existing advertising products. By investing to solve these industry-wide challenges, we're extending the gap between our proposition and our competitors and doing things that no one else is delivering or can deliver. The breadth and depth of our integrations across systems and technology providers and lenders is unique to Auto Trader and is very difficult to replicate.
Our data set is unrivaled in the industry and is the only place you can go to understand real-time retail pricing trends. As we'll come on to, the scale of our reach products will enable retailers to maximize the benefits from embracing digital retailing by enabling them to sell anywhere. These services and products will provide significant growth opportunities for our marketplace for many years to come, and they'll improve how the industry operates, positioning us increasingly at the center of it. In the process, we'll deliver materially better outcomes for both consumers and for retailers alike. That concludes our thoughts on the enablers and our platform strategy. We'll now take a short break. It would be great if you could be back with us in about 15 minutes time.
My name is Ian Plummer. I'm delighted to be talking to you today about how Auto Trader can accelerate digital retailing, both in our business and also in terms of how we do that with and for all of our industry partners. That's something that's particularly close to my heart because I have a bit more than 20 years of experience within the automotive industry, and they've taught me. I'd like to think they taught me plenty of things, but they've certainly taught me the value of digital and data throughout the automotive ecosystem. They've also definitely taught me the enormous challenge, but also the huge potential of enabling transactional capability.
Before joining Auto Trader a little bit more than five years ago, I held several director-level positions in almost all of the key parts of the automotive industry's value chain with some of the world's leading groups, from Volkswagen Group to Renault-Nissan Alliance. Quite unusually, those roles have spread from one end of the spectrum, at international head office level of manufacturers, all the way through to the other end of the spectrum with a single site dealership and running one of those, including some of the key bits in between, heading up the manufacturer networks in the U.K., for example, for a couple of brands, or as the MD of a top ten retailer group over here in the U.K.
With that industry perspective and relationships, I aim, like to think, to bring a solid understanding of our key customers back into Auto Trader and in reverse, to ensure that Auto Trader connects really well in mutually valuable partnership with all of those same customers. Ultimately, to bring things back to the huge digital retailing challenge that motivates us all so much here today, as well as to paraphrase our purpose, I like to think that my role, like those of everybody at Auto Trader, it really is about driving change together, responsibly. Ben and I are going to talk to you this afternoon about the outer ring of this diagram, digital retailing, building on the solid foundations laid by the strength of the Auto Trader marketplace and enabled by the power of our data platform solutions.
We're going to show you in three steps how we're adding transactional capability to both Auto Trader and, as I said earlier, to the businesses of our many partners. Firstly, why digital retailing has such relevance and value in automotive, and also why we believe Auto Trader is uniquely positioned to enable digital retailing across the U.K.'s automotive ecosystem. Then Deal Builder, Ben will talk to the consumer and retailer proposition and really bring it to life, I think, by showing you the deal, Deal Builder product journey. If you haven't seen it, we're showing outside, you can check that still at the end of the day. Lastly, new vehicle digital retailing. I will share with you some of our thinking and plans for Autorama. Onto our first section of why digital retailing and why Auto Trader.
Over recent years, there's been a much publicized long-term trend that I'm sure you're all aware of, toward consumers buying much more online. As this chart of online sales as a proportion of retail spend shows, I think, rather clearly. The trend was certainly boosted and accelerated by COVID, and although it's been brought back somewhat by the last few quarters where we've been able to more freely and of course more physically return into retailer spaces, it remains well ahead of the longer-term trend line, with online retail now accounting for more than GBP 1 in every GBP 4 spent. This has essentially been because it's working, because there are benefits for both buyers and sellers. For consumers of almost all categories, buying experiences online have continued to improve. For physical retailers, online sales have brought big opportunity, often by working with marketplaces.
With benefits within that arena for retailers falling typically into three buckets. You can see on this chart. Increased sales reach, yield optimization, and cost or time savings. By way of very simple examples that I'm sure we can all understand quite easily from our own shopping experiences, you can imagine cases where the clothes retailer in Cornwall can now reach a much wider market through Not On The High Street, for example, or a jeweler in Lincoln can broaden their reach on Etsy. Now, while it's fair to say that automotive has been lagging behind the wider retail market, we are now starting to see these same trends take firm hold in automotive retailing here in the U.K.
As I mentioned earlier, from a personal perspective, that is great to see because having lost a lot of time in this respect, I look back on the efforts that I made. I think a lot, but probably not enough to make progress in my own omni-channel efforts, either running a network from the manufacturer point of view or running my own retailer group. I put a lot of effort into omni-channel. It didn't mature quick enough, but it's great to see that it is now playing a bit of catch up and automotive is really maturing towards this area. To visualize the change that we have seen over time in our world of automotive retail, we've pulled out here the key jobs that a consumer does when buying their next car.
Now, historically, no surprise, you know that car buying was almost exclusively done offline. Started probably, in many cases, with consumers looking at the Auto Trader magazine, and searching for a car in that way. It went through to the final delivery of the vehicle physically with the retailer. Pretty straightforward. That journey today has blended considerably, and the research and search phases are predominantly now done online. The valuations work that we often do as consumers is also increasingly done online, and some other car buying jobs are starting to see a growing digital element to them. Now, the direction of travel appears very clear to me. Increasingly, we can see that car buyers are embracing a more fully blended offline and online car buying journey, where they can really combine the best of both worlds.
Where digital can provide the greater transparency, speed, and ease we're all looking for, and physical engagement with retailers can both add invaluable advice and the more emotional aspects of car buying that we know are so important. As you said, with Bex, I think touched on earlier, this is such an important household purchase. We wanna see it, we wanna touch it, we wanna probably smell it, but we definitely also want to drive it. The combination is really quite powerful. Now, the evidence on these trends is quite clear. Car buyers want to do more online. That's shown in this data on the chart you can see in front of you by the combination of the two darker blue bars on the chart.
They list each of the car buying jobs, and if consumers haven't yet done all of these jobs digitally, most car buyers are saying they would prefer to do most of the car buying jobs here digitally in future. Crucially, there are still a number of jobs that many people will continue to prefer to do in person within the retailer environment, or perhaps in various combinations of digital and physical. This is really a crucial point. We've designed our product very much with that in mind, rather than a fully end-to-end transactional journey, which we frankly don't believe many consumers yet are prepared to do. Our Deal Builder journey enables our retailers to deliver a true omni-channel experience, building on our retailers' very own strengths.
It gives buyers the type of consistency and transparency that they want and need, as we all do as online buyers, in order to feel confident in any form of digital transaction. While our consumer research shows that most car buyers want to do much more, but not all online, it also shows that the majority of them want to have the control and the flexibility to do as much or as little as they choose. Our omni-channel approach will give them just that. By way of a further example, stepping out of research and data for a moment, if you look at today's market, you can see some very practical applications of the same thing. I think if you look at how automotive re-retailers have responded recently and how their models have converged, you can see that traditional retailers are adding in digital capability.
Online-first retailers are adding in physical capability. When consumers start their car buying journey, they'll most often start with a couple of makes, models in mind. They may have a clear idea of the type of car they want. This is a very important start point. You can see on the chart here, the results of our recent car buyer survey done in the summer of just this year, 2022. It shows how buyers anchor their car search first and foremost on the car itself. Now, very rarely do consumers start with the retailer, for example. They go car first. Of course, inevitably after this entry point, we know that consumers are then very likely to consider other models.
Our own on-site data, the type of thing that Chris highlighted earlier, enables us to really understand the consumer trends that are out there at any moment in time, shows that most consumers consider now around 13 different makes, and that's up from about 11 two years ago, probably as a result of the ever greater product choice available in the market in the fast changing world that Jon described earlier. One in five are looking at both new and used cars, and as many as four in 10 now look at new electric or hybrid cars, as well as ICE vehicles. Again, this is a really key point and why we believe so many consumers use Auto Trader. We have the widest pool of choice. All those makes, new and used cars, EVs and ICE.
Whether digital or physical, car choice is a fundamental point which remains not just at the start of car buying, but at its very heart. Given this, we want to explain our approach to digital retailing, what we are planning to do, and also, of course, what we are not planning to do. Now, as you can imagine, based on the insights we've gathered, and I've shared back to you in the short form just now, our approach remains very much car first, but it enhances this hybrid digital physical approach that we know most consumers really are looking for. Most of all, it enables, or it's focused fundamentally on enabling our partners of all sorts, shapes and sizes to retail more cars more efficiently.
It targets significant scale and breadth, an approach, as has been touched on already today, that is far from easy, but which will build significant and sustainable value for the long term. It remains very much asset light and technology rich. We'll initially offer our digital retailing journeys for consumers in two different forms. Firstly, Deal Builder, which Ben will talk to you in a moment. For consumers who want to lease a new car and who have a probably higher propensity to commit to a new car sight unseen online, we have Autorama, and I'll talk to this myself a little later on.
It's this combined proposition, which means we will have, we believe, a unique digital offering in U.K. automotive, one which is based on key strengths of real consumer value, the widest choice of vehicles in the market, an easy, transparent, flexible omni-channel buying journey, the broadest possible ways of purchasing vehicles from the broadest possible array of retailer partners, all backed up by the absolutely vital digital retailing ingredient that Auto Trader is really most recognized for by the more than 10 million visitors to our platform every month, and that is trust. As Bex showed you earlier, Auto Trader is by some distance the U.K.'s most trusted automotive brand. Now, I'm gonna get into the details and let Ben show you much more visually how our digital retailing products are really taking shape.
Thanks, Ian, and good afternoon, everybody. I'm Ben. I'm a Product Director at Auto Trader, and I'm going to be talking to you about the products that we're building that are adding a transactional capability to our marketplace, built on top of the core classified marketplace and the technology platform you've already heard about. I've been with the business for nearly four years, and prior to this, spent time in financial services and automotive building new products, including one of the early online-only car retailers that launched but unfortunately failed to get to meaningful scale. That does mean I've got some firsthand experience of getting consumers to buy a car online and a little bit of experience of delivering them myself as well.
Referring back to this visual, digital retailing is another network effect that we'll build on top of the classified marketplace and technology platforms. It's a little bit more complex than some of the products that we've built in the past. It's built on top of foundational platform elements that don't have an interface like Auto Trader Connect. The Deal Builder journey navigates across multiple asynchronous touchpoints between consumers and retailers, and as such, it can be a little bit cumbersome to demo. Rather than trying to do that today, we've brought this end-to-end journey to life with a series of videos, but I want to stress that everything you're gonna see today is live right now. This is not a vision. These are our products as they exist today in market being used by consumers and retailers.
The first video I'd like to introduce demonstrate how our digital retailing capabilities are built on top of our core marketplace.
Digital retailing is removing the geographical boundaries and physical limitations of the automotive industry. Retailers are no longer limited to just selling to consumers from their local area or from their forecourt. With Auto Trader, they can now reach consumers in every corner of the U.K. and unlock the potential of the online car buying market. In 2021, we launched Market Extension, our reach product that enables any retailer to advertise their stock to local consumers in any region across the country. Since launching Market Extension, we've seen a variety of different types of retailers use the product. From single-site independents looking to grow into new markets, to online-only retailers who want to advertise their stock in every region of the country. For consumers, this means even greater choice.
No longer limited to visiting their local retailers to view and test drive vehicles, they can now choose to buy from retailers anywhere in the country and have their car delivered to their home. With consumers doing more or all of the buying journey online, it's more important than ever that they feel confident that the information they see is accurate and that the vehicle they're interested in is available. Our data for defining and classifying vehicles now includes factory-fitted optional extras, which helps retailers price their cars more accurately and create adverts quicker. Our API platform, Auto Trader Connect, makes sure adverts are up to date across all retailer systems and advertising platforms in real time.
Auto Trader data, pricing tools, and reviews bring transparency to the process of searching for a vehicle online and give consumers confidence that they can trust the vehicle, trust the retailer, and trust the price is fair. Regardless of whether a consumer is looking to buy online, offline, or a hybrid of the two, our tools are increasing trust and creating more confident car buyers.
We're asking consumers to commit to buying a car online, so it's important that the information they see online is accurate, that they trust it, and that they're confident that the car is available. We've heard a bit already about Auto Trader Connect. Auto Trader Connect help retailers to create accurate adverts quickly and enables them to keep all of their systems and advertising platforms up to date in real time. Probably more importantly, for consumers, it means they can be confident that the information they see in Auto Trader is accurate, up to date, and that that car is available. Catherine talked earlier about the importance of accurate product information and reliable real-time stock data as a foundation for any industry that's moved online.
With many consumers now transacting online without even speaking to a retailer, it's important they're confident in the car, they can trust the retailer, and that they know that the price is fair. We're now really seeing the benefit of products that we've introduced over the last few years that bring greater transparency and trust to the consumers shopping on our platform. Examples of these might be dealer reviews, price indicators, and admin fees. Market Extension allows any retailer, big or small, to unlock access to as much of the U.K. car buying population as they choose. I'd just like to give an example of a retailer that's had some success with Market Extension. They're an independent retailer based on the South Coast, and they wanted to extend their reach while they were restricted by lockdowns.
They also knew that the market was changing and more and more consumers were going to be open to the idea of transacting online and having their car delivered. Their goal was to achieve a stock turn of 12 and to grow their business from a stock of 90 to a stock of 200. They took six Market Extension regions, offering click and collect and home delivery across their three sites. They're now overachieving on all of these goals. They're looking to expand from 200 to 500 stock, and they're in the process of opening their fourth site and prep center. Auto Trader Connect, price indicators, and Market Extensions are all examples of products that build a better core marketplace.
They're great for consumers, they're great for retailers, whether they're choosing to sell predominantly online or offline, but most importantly, they're important foundations for bringing the transaction online on Auto Trader.
Which brings us on to Deal Builder. Our consumer feedback and research consistently flags issues with the buying journey. These include cars advertised, but they're no longer available because they've been sold or no longer available. Cars that are advertised for different prices on different websites because it's really hard for retailers to keep those all up to date. A Part Exchange process that is often seen as not very transparent or fair. A finance application process that can be long and frustrating. The biggest pain point we hear of all, when consumers have found a car on Auto Trader and they want to buy it, but they can't get hold of the retailer. We hear similar themes played back from retailers too.
The difficulty of keeping all of their advertising platforms up to date, double keying into different finance systems, and missed sales opportunities because they can't keep up with the inbound inquiries. Our Deal Builder journey is designed to solve these pain points for consumers and retailers. We're pleased to share that Deal Builder is now live with a small number of customers, and we're very happy with the feedback that we've had so far. The second video I'd like to introduce shows you our consumer Deal Builder journey.
With a growing number of consumers that are looking to do more online, our new Deal Builder journey gives them the control to build their deal on Auto Trader and order their new car from the comfort of their home.
We've already launched and tested the individual parts of this journey, from Part Exchange through to finance and reservations, allowing us to get valuable, real-world feedback from both consumers and retailers. Now we've brought them all together into one seamless journey, where consumers can choose the parts of the car buying process that they're comfortable completing online. Our Part Exchange product gives consumers the control to assess the condition of their car using our simple online questions. We'll provide an instant valuation, which can be added to the deal and put towards their new car. We've designed this product to bring true transparency to the Part Exchange process, guiding consumers through the journey step-by-step, with plenty of useful tips and no complex language.
At the end, they get an upfront fair valuation based on their assessment of the vehicle, putting the consumer in control without having to negotiate with a salesperson. Organizing car finance the traditional way can be a stressful and time-consuming process, with consumers having to take lots of documentation to a retailer for them to manually enter into multiple systems. This face-to-face interaction can be uncomfortable and complex, particularly when having to share personal information or if the consumer is declined for credit. Deal Builder comes with online finance applications built in, allowing the consumer to complete this entire process in their own time and from the privacy of their home. We've eliminated all the jargon, replacing it with easy-to-follow language that guides them through step-by-step.
This fully regulated journey gives consumers the control to select from finance quotes they're eligible for and to get a full online approval, not just a soft check before they visit the dealership. To enable this, we've integrated directly with lenders via our AutoConvert platform, which allows us to advertise the retailer's finance products within Deal Builder. This means they can sell their finance products directly online on Auto Trader. Bringing the finance application process online means significant time savings for both consumers and retailers and removes some of the retailer's compliance burden of selling finance. Next, our Deal Builder journey gives consumers the choice of whether they'd like to collect their purchase from the dealership or have it delivered to home, if that's a service the retailer offers. The final step of our online Deal Builder journey is to reserve the car.
In just a couple of clicks, consumers can make a refundable reservation payment, which secures the car while the order's being processed, giving them peace of mind. Once a car is reserved on Auto Trader, the retailer can then see and manage the order via our retailer portal. They'll also be able to use any dealer management system that integrates with our API if they prefer. Using Auto Trader Connect, the vehicle status will be updated to reserved across all platforms. This makes sure anything that happens on Auto Trader is reflected offline and gives clear attribution of the sale as originating from Auto Trader. This saves the retailer time, reduces haggling, and removes some of the compliance burden. All they need to do is contact the consumer, process the order, and the deal is done.
In summary, Deal Builder addresses key pain points that both consumers and retailers experience.
Consumers want to do more online, and Deal Builder enables this. It gives the consumer the control to do as much or as little online as they choose, and to get human support as and when they need it. For retailers, it means significantly more qualified buyers, many with a part exchange price agreed and a finance application already approved. This is an important shift. It's from Auto Trader acting as a marketing channel to Auto Trader acting as a sales channel, and we think it's this that will be transformative to our business. We launched Deal Builder in August and are now live with a small number of customers. This was the first car that was ordered online through Deal Builder by Mary.
She reserved the car at 1:15 A.M. on a Wednesday morning when, I think you'll agree, almost every dealership in the U.K. is probably closed. She collected it the very next day. The feedback from the beta customers we've got so far has been overwhelmingly positive, particularly around the finance application process. We've been intentional about our approach to digital retailing, and we know it's taken slightly longer than some of our peers, but with good reason. Our solution will work for any retailer, big or small, however they choose to integrate with us. We're providing accurate condition adjusted Part Exchange valuations. Our finance solution enables retailers to use their lender panel to sell their finance online, maintaining their existing commission structures. We're taking reservation payments online, and we're holding those until the transaction is completed and confirmed by both the buyer and the seller.
There would've been quicker alternatives for each of these, but they would've been much harder for us to scale. Becoming a digital retailer will require our customers to change. They'll need to change their technology, they'll need to change their processes, and they'll need to change how they view their relationship with Auto Trader. Inevitably, this will take time, but opens up a much wider opportunity for us, and we're confident that next year we'll have the largest choice of vehicles available to buy online of any website in the U.K. We're making good progress towards having digital retailing at scale at Auto Trader. Market extensions and Auto Trader Connect are both live and available to any of our customers. We've individually piloted the component parts of the Deal Builder journey.
That's guaranteed Part Exchange, reservations, and finance, and they're now live in the end-to-end journey we talked about earlier. That is available for single site customers that use our dealer portal, and over the coming months, we'll be onboarding new retailer types onto that beta, including larger multi-site groups and retailers who integrate with their DMS using Auto Trader Connect. The next 12 months will be crucial as we get important feedback from both consumers and retailers and refine our value proposition. The final video I would like to introduce shows the retailer side of the Deal Builder journey.
This is a completely new way of selling for retailers and a huge opportunity for those that are willing to embrace it. They are no longer limited to selling to just consumers in their local market when their dealership is open or when they can respond to inquiries. Retailers using our standalone reservations product have seen 40% of reservations happening outside of typical opening hours, and retailers using Market Extension to reach consumers nationwide are selling more than six out of 10 of their cars to buyers outside of their home region. Our digital retailing products now packaged together as our Deal Builder journey enable progressive retailers to sell cars 24/7 to consumers all over the country, delivering additional sales and driving efficiency.
When a retailer receives a completed order, the part exchange is then checked, the finance paperwork is finalized, and the reservation is confirmed without them needing to worry about negotiating or managing multiple systems. Retailers can focus on what they do best, preparing the car to an exceptional standard and delivering a quality service to consumers however they choose to buy.
There are several elements to our digital retailing value proposition for our customers. Firstly, and most fundamentally, consumers want it. More car buyers want to do more of the car buying journey online, and Deal Builder enables this. Those retailers that embrace this will gain share, and those that won't or can't will get left behind. Secondly, it makes economic sense. Retailers using Market Extension and Deal Builder will be able to expand their addressable market without needing to make significant capital or operational investments, and in turn will reduce their overall cost per sale. Those consumers that come from the online channel will be further down the funnel than a traditional lead, which in turn will improve the efficiency of the sales team. We're enabling retailers to sell their products online. That's their finance, their add-ons, their commission structure. We're not replacing it with our own.
All of this is enabled by Auto Trader systems. These are tools that retailers are familiar with, and they're becoming deeply embedded in our customers' businesses. Lastly, finally, we're not looking to disintermediate or intercept the retailer from the sales process. They continue to have a direct relationship with the consumer. Auto Trader is just facilitating more of that transaction online and becoming a really efficient sales channel. There are significant costs involved in automotive retailing, and we've shown a breakdown of these on the left. Now, inevitably, this does vary quite wildly depending upon the retailer, their size, their location, whether or not they've got an after-sales capability, et cetera.
The important thing is that we believe this cost base forms part of the addressable opportunity for Auto Trader with digital retailing, taking revenue share from other operating expenses. Now, there are longer term structural factors that bring both challenges and opportunities, and we've identified some of the headwinds on the right. As Jon talked about earlier, we see that there are opportunities for retailers in the growth of used cars and the opportunity for them to move into new other sources of revenue and the opportunity that digital retailing brings. We believe that retailers who adopt digital retailing will both increase their addressable market and find ways to remove costs from their businesses, and we think Auto Trader can help with both of these. In summary, we see our addressable market moving into costs, whereas before it's just in advertising and marketing.
For retailers who are looking to increase their sales and stock turn, our prominent products help them gain share in their local markets, and Market Extension helps them move into new markets without increasing capital and operating outlay. For retailers looking to increase GPU, our sourcing and pricing tools help them increase measurable margin, and in time, we see the opportunity for Deal Builder to increase finance and add-on penetration. More of the journey moving online will increase sales efficiency, and many of our other tools and product are aimed at realizing operational efficiencies across our retailers' businesses, including how they manage their stock, how they sell finance, and how they move vehicles. To conclude, we believe that digital retailing and Deal Builder will be a win for consumers.
It will be a win for retailers that go on this journey with us, and it will be transformational for Auto Trader. For consumers, it means more choice, greater transparency, more control, increased confidence online, and overall, a better car buying experience. For retailers, it means increased sales, improved operational efficiencies, improved GPU, and overall customer satisfaction. For Auto Trader, it means clear sales attribution, incremental revenue through accessing new parts of the retailer wallet, embedding our tools and processes more deeply within the business, and forming longer term, deeper relationships with car buyers. That's Deal Builder. I'd like to hand back over to Ian, who's going to talk about new car digital retailing through Autorama.
Thank you, Ben. Today, as Ben just highlighted, we wanted to give you a bit more of the context, of course, around the recent acquisition of Autorama, and share with you some of our initial thinking around the joint proposition we'll be building. As Nathan mentioned earlier on this afternoon, we've made significant progress on new cars since the last time we got together at the Capital Markets Day back in 2018. We scaled, in fact, very fast from that point. We were obviously hit, as the whole of the industry was, by some very exceptional new car stock pressures. Ever since that point, from Brexit through COVID to semiconductors, Ukrainian supply issues and so on. They're all holding the market back today.
Despite all of those headwinds, I can suggest Auto Trader is now embedded in the new car marketplace and has become recognized and valued by consumers, retailers, and manufacturers alike. Earlier, Jon also shared with you some of the key market trends around OEMs, the shift to agency models, and the shift, extremely crucial one, towards electric vehicles, which are driving so much of this change. As well, even as different ownership and usership models which are coming into play. There really are some very significant shifts taking place in the automotive market today, and all of these major trends were, in fact, key factors in our thinking about the Autorama acquisition. Combining Autorama and Auto Trader means we have a really compelling proposition for OEMs, retailers, and funders, one that therefore positions us extremely well and responds to those same market shifts.
As Nathan also touched on earlier, over the past few years, we've made, I think, very big strides in terms of building senior executive level relationships with the OEMs and with their finance houses, with their leasing partners and so on. For example, monthly now, we share very valuable insights on forums that we've held ever since around mid-2020 with the CEOs of those different stakeholder groups, as well, of course, with the retailer partners and the CEOs of the top retailer groups, too. Similarly, thanks to the value of the work that they do for their own partners, Autorama have also built excellent relationships with their OEMs, new entrant brands and established players alike, as well, of course, as with the retailers delivering those cars and with the funders behind them.
We believe our joint proposition is going to be a compelling one for those partners. That proposition for OEMs and leasing companies will be based on three main components. Firstly, an effective sales channel, a route to market that can be ideal for new entrant OEMs, but also answers many long-standing issues for existing OEM partners who are well-placed to know from past experience, have long been looking for ways to retail more cars more directly and more efficiently without the need for brokers and with more control. Second, that theme of greater control plays into a second key point because we know we can provide an opportunity to substantially increase loyalty and retention rates for our brand partners.
Again, this is also a massive issue for brands and finance houses today, given that with today's very complex route to market, typically, it's estimated that they see around a 10%-15% renewal rate on that business, which compares to a roughly one-in-two renewal rate on PCP business. Third, data solutions, which we believe can provide invaluable pricing intelligence, allowing our partners to optimize their sales mix more efficiently and make smarter use of the very substantial VME budgets that they typically require today to find the price points and sales elasticity that are required to profitably and efficiently hit targets. Now today we've already started testing traffic being driven into Autorama in the last few weeks since the completion of the acquisition, and we're seeing some very promising early results. We're bringing to life that Autorama online buying proposition within Auto Trader's search journey.
We're allowing buyers to go quite easily from their search on Auto Trader through to a completed order with Autorama. We've demonstrated we can take targeted Auto Trader customers into a leasing journey, and we've observed that traffic converting to sale, of course, on Autorama. It's important to emphasize though that we're being very targeted in that approach. We're aiming to turn the heads of searchers whose criteria for search likely match the type of product and the price bracket of offers where leasing can be a very relevant alternative. We certainly don't intend to serve leasing adverts for every customer, on every search by any stretch. We will certainly bring our scale to bear over time. As I've already said, this year, we're testing driving traffic into Autorama's journey. Over the midterm, we'll integrate that journey onto Auto Trader.
Gradually and carefully, we'll show more leasing offers to relevant consumers with good targeting. Particularly in the short term, the scale of our volume growth will of course be contingent on the new car market and the levels of supply needing to free up from the state we're in right now, we've talked about already today. Demand for this product is clearly already very real and certainly increasing, as Jon touched on. We believe we can grow this business very significantly over the midterm. Jamie will talk later in more detail about how to think about Autorama's P&L. I'll show you in just a moment how we're targeting margin at around 20%-30% of net revenue in the midterm. First, though, to illustrate the growth opportunity, we've shown here how the market has evolved from 2016 through to 2021.
You'll see that despite the overall market shrinking by around a third, a bit more than a third, broker volume actually grew. It grew from around 3.5% of new car sales to more than 6.5% of sales, most of which is PCH business. We expect to see that type of PCH business grow over the coming years and take from PCP and other forms of finance. All the more so as the market, hopefully, soon returns to freer levels of new car supply. Lastly, we wanted to share with you how we think about Autorama's profit per car. Currently, we estimate that retailers pay us around GBP 90 to GBP 110, GBP 120 per car sold. We know that an acquisition cost at this level really does deliver a fantastic and efficient return on investment for resellers.
This is at a 70% operating margin, of course. We make around GBP 75 profit per car. However, with Autorama, because there's additional work involved, the profit equation is actually quite different. The value per car sold will be much higher because all the reasons listed on the slide here, and operating margin will be around 20%-30%, therefore leaving around GBP 275 of margin per car. That clearly adds up to a big opportunity to develop our new car digital retailing proposition with Autorama, which adds in turn to the very broad but also very deep digital retailing transition that Ben and I have outlined across the whole of the Auto Trader platform. On that note, we're going to pass over to Jamie and Nathan for our final section of the day.
Good afternoon, everyone. We're now moving into the final part of the presentation. As Nathan touched on earlier, our move towards digital retailing is a major transition for the business. However, Auto Trader has a history of successful major transitions. We moved from a magazine to a website, but importantly, with digital retailing, it's not cannibalizing our classified marketplace. It is very much built on top and is complementary to our current offering. This significantly extends our runway for future growth. It's not just major transitions either. We have a strong history of successfully launching and monetizing new products. We launched a new set of advertising packages in April 2017, which were evolved in May 2021. These packages saw initial strong uptake from customers who were early adopters, and once we had some data on the product performance, there were fast followers.
We saw increased growth, albeit at a slower rate, as customers considered how they would compete for sales on our marketplace before we moved into a more regular sales cycle. We expect the adoption rate of digital retailing to be slower than the package upsell journey shown here, but the revenue opportunity is significantly larger. The other point to note is that many of our products. We see high retention rates as customers rely on them both in how they run their business and also drive sales. Here you can see the numbers of our standalone data products, Retail Check and Retail Accelerator, and we believe digital retailing can be just as sticky.
To touch now on why we think the uptake of these digital retailing products will be slower than the example just given, we believe that adding a digital retailing layer is creating a completely new network effect model on top of the very large network effect model that already exists. We need to bring customers onto the product that are highly invested in bridging the online to offline journey, which will give consumers a great experience when they visit the forecourt. Each customer will be of a certain size with a certain number of cars that they have available for sale. Whilst it seems obvious why car buyers would want to do more online, there is still work for us to do to ensure consumers that are shopping on Auto Trader are committing to the purchase by completing an online deal.
Initially, this will likely start small and be something that will grow over time. Finally, we need deals to convert at a high rate into sale at the forecourt. The more buyers we get through the Deal Builder funnel, the stronger the value proposition, the more retailers will bring onto the product set and the greater choice offered to buyers, thereby growing the network. There is a question about which customer segments and vehicles are in scope for our digital retailing products. It's clear that many of our existing customers are looking to adopt more digital practices. While it seems likely that a full online transaction lends itself to younger, more expensive vehicles, our Deal Builder journey with the buyer still visiting the forecourt should be applicable to most customers and vehicles.
Now, it is still at a very early stage, but we wanna help everyone understand how we're thinking about the opportunity that exists, how the charging model might work, and what KPIs will be most important. As everyone knows well, our current model is largely subscription, with retailers, average revenue per retailer, and stock being key revenue drivers and KPIs that we report. It's likely digital retailing will have a small subscription fee, but the majority of revenue will be generated by a transaction fee, which will have some link to the price of the vehicle. With a transaction model, our success will depend on how both our Deal Builder and Autorama journeys grow their penetration of overall transactions.
As already shown in Autorama, where we've given delivery volumes and average yield per delivery, we will start to report from FY 2024 the volume of customers on digital retailing, the volume of deals completed, and post-monetization expected before the end of FY 2024, the average yield per deal. As already mentioned, volumes and revenue will likely start small, and until it becomes a more material contributor, revenue will be included within Auto Trader ARPA, and growth will appear in the product lever. Ian just touched on GBP 90-GBP 120 we receive today per car sold from our retailer customers, and we believe through the combination of the subscription and transaction fee, that over the long term, the same opportunity exists with digital retailing.
The efficiencies to be gained by digitalizing the car buying journey will see us take share from other operating costs beyond advertising and marketing, and we believe we can retain our 70% operating profit margins with this journey. There is investment required in teams to support buyers through the Deal Builder journey and further sales resource to onboard customers. The difference between the Auto Trader and long-term Autorama margins are down to Autorama closely managing the buyer through the transaction, but also through the life of the lease and having oversight for the full distribution and fulfillment of the vehicle. We don't see Auto Trader needing to replicate this in Deal Builder, as it's supporting an omni-channel experience, which is likely to continue to exist for a long time. Finally, we're very aware that the Autorama acquisition impacts the presentation of our financials.
This slide helps give a steer of how we will report for this current financial year and beyond. There is a consolidated group view for revenue and operating profit, which includes the GBP 50 million deferred consideration for Autorama, which is taken over a 12-month period. We'll then break down the core Auto Trader business as you all know it today, and the Autorama business separately. The Autorama business does take ownership of some vehicles, historically about 10%, to bridge the gap between OEM, consumer, and funder. The value of these vehicles are shown through vehicle and accessory sales and the cost of goods sold, which should largely net each other off. We believe this presentation will allow shareholders and analysts to identify how both the new acquisition and the core Auto Trader business are performing. Nathan will now provide the final summary.
Thank you, Jamie. I said at the start, we hoped that we were able to join the dots on many things that you will have heard about previously, and hopefully we have done that, or at least we'll do so with any clarifying questions in the Q&A. We wanted to finish by just simplifying back to the strategy as you see on the screen in front of you. This is a strategy that we think will enable us to drive change together responsibly, in line with our purpose statement, and also better serve the core needs of the whole trade side of the market, including our retailers, as well as car buyers also. Hopefully, what you've heard today is that we've got a classified marketplace that is very, very well invested in.
For that reason, it is in very good health and has a good runway for growth. It's also meant that we're able to expose that as a platform that not only runs Auto Trader, but is increasingly running the businesses of our customers and helping them be successful in retailing. That becomes a very key enabler when it comes to the world of digital retailing, which you've just heard all about from Ian and Ben. We thought we would finish with what we think you should take away from the presentation today. Some of this is a reiteration of our strategy, which should come as no surprise. Our classified marketplace, as we said, does have a good runway for growth.
The platform that we've built not only strengthens our classified marketplace and is indeed something we would have done even if digital retailing wasn't an opportunity, but it turns out to be a very important and key enabler for making that adoption curve much easier than it would otherwise be. As Jamie said, we expect digital retailing to be incremental, and a lot of that is down to the economics that Ben shared with you earlier. This is solving a slightly different problem and allows us to eat into the fundamental operations of a retailer, which accounts for probably 85% of their gross margin, leaving about 15% for profit. For that reason, we expect trade revenue in the years ahead to be higher on average than it has been in the past.
Again, it is as simple as our classified opportunity remains as much the same as it was years ago, and we have the opportunity for digital retailing on top of that. As Jamie's covered and Ben and Ian covered at some length also, we are ultimately looking to provide the most number of car vehicles available to buy online in the U.K. By virtue of that decision, we need to be an enabler as opposed to a retailer ourselves. An enabler is what we have been for many, many years. For that reason, we don't expect any change in the margin or material change in Auto Trader's margins, as Jamie's just talked about, excluding Autorama. That being said, Autorama itself represents a very aligned and potentially significant opportunity for us to do what we do in used on new cars also.
That brings us to the end of the presentation. I wanna thank all of you that came in to see us, all of you that have joined us on the broadcast. I'd like to thank everyone who's presented and also everyone who's worked behind the scenes to help build this presentation. That then brings us to the Q&A. If you can just give us a few minutes, we're gonna assemble ourselves on stage. If I could just ask, I believe there's a microphone. Yeah.
Yes, over there. I'm going to try and work out an inclusive way of asking questions, but if you can just start with your name, your organization, ask a question, and if you can be respectful, try not to ask too many so everyone in the room gets a chance. I think we'll time box this. We've got till about 4:30 P.M., so the best part of an hour, if you should choose to use it.
Oh, thank you. I might just grab my water. I'm going to be the lucky one that gets to allocate questions. Giles, you're right at the front, so let's start there.
Cheers. Thank you. It's Giles here from Jefferies. First question's on the online car buying narrative, which is steadily, perhaps sometimes a little slowly, tightened over the past four years since the last Capital Markets Day. I think today we've got a clear sense of the vision and of the products that will deliver it. I appreciate Jamie's laid out some of the rudiments of what that monetization will look like. I think the final piece of the jigsaw is could you paint a picture of what the impact on the product ARPA is gonna be over the medium term. I guess the second question is linked to the first question. Would you care to. I mean, you've laid out a vision of structural growth and a structural uplift in your take rates.
Would you care to say where you think you could get to, referencing that chart that showed all of your peers? On a separate topic altogether, though still somewhat linked, there's an exciting zeitgeist around C2B marketplaces and selling your car online. You're obviously primed to participate in that. You've got a foot in it, though that's, you know, guaranteed part exchanges, which is part of a purchase journey. Would you care to unshackle yourself and start pushing a motorway-esque consumer proposition, around selling your car online?
Perfect. Thank you. Good questions. Jamie, do you mind taking the product ARPA? Yeah.
On the last one, Catherine, do you mind taking C2B? I don't know. Jon, did you wanna talk to take rates or would you prefer me to?
Oh, I can actually.
Oh, there you go. We will add anyway.
Look, I think you take from the presentation that we haven't given the kind of specific contributions or even where it can be for the kind of medium term. I think in terms of how I think about modeling it, you know, obviously we've, you know, got something live. There's lots of work to do over the next 12-18 months in terms of scaling that up, getting more consumer engagement, getting a lot more dealer engagement. You know, the speed at which that scales will be very much dependent on the findings from those trials and the success of them. You know, we've got an aspiration to monetize the Deal Builder journey before the end of FY 2024.
You know, that you would expect there to be some contribution in FY 25 and beyond. But, you know, like I say, it is dependent on what happens over the next 12 to 18 months. I don't think we wanna be beholden to exactly what that contribution is. I think from a take rate perspective, you know, we've said long term, we think there's the same opportunity in digital retailing as there is in our existing classified business. If we're thinking of a take rate today of between new and used, the 3.5%-4.5%, it is very much over the long term. But, you know, to get to 7%-9%, that's what we're thinking aspirationally in terms of what the opportunity to go after is.
In terms of the C2B opportunity, we are the place that consumers go to value their car today. We have the top of the funnel part of that journey. We then also have two big sources or potential sources of stock for retailers. We have our C2C consumer facing business today, where we still see about 350,000 odd unique vehicles a year. Then we have Part Exchange, which we've had part exchange guide, a lead product for a number of years, delivers a lot of value to retailers, and we now have the part exchange journey as part of Deal Builder. We've got another potentially significant source of stock for retailers in through that channel, as well as the consumer vehicles that are listed. What we're not doing at the moment is connecting those different parts of that journey.
At the moment, the priority is very much enablers, platform work, and then getting the end-to-end consumer buying journey. There's definitely an opportunity in the near future for us to explore connecting those parts of the selling journey into a more meaningful product. It's just not the priority at the moment.
Excellent.
Good afternoon. It's Silvia Cuneo from Deutsche Bank. My first question is on the relationship with the OEMs. You talked about how consumers focus on the car make rather than the retailer or the finance package. Just wanted to ask, what are your thoughts about the OEMs potentially going direct to consumers? Is this more of a risk or an opportunity for Auto Trader since you have already gone through the investment? Second question on Market Extension and how this could disrupt the car dealership market potentially. Do you think this could mean that the market becomes more fragmented, perhaps with car retailers being more competitive at a national level?
Just finally on the Auto Trader enabler, just wondering if you're thinking about potentially marketing the product somewhere outside the U.K. market, given Auto Trader compared to some of the classified players seem to be more advanced in that shift. Thank you.
Okay. Where are you, Ian? Do you wanna take the OEM question, if that's okay? Maybe Catherine, me?
Yeah.
Yeah. I can take the outside or you can take the outside U.K. It's a pretty quick answer, so.
Okay.
To answer the first one, if I may. The OEMs risk or opportunity on going direct. Firstly, have to say that there's a lot of talk about going direct or moving to an agency model, but there's no one form of going direct or one form of agency model. There's a very blurry, sort of different group of shadings of gray, if you like, in between black and white there. It's gonna be an interesting period of time. We move from a franchise distribution model that everyone's known into some form of difference going forward to the extreme of very direct sales all the way through to some brands very clearly saying they're gonna stick with today's model.
Bearing that in mind, going direct for a manufacturer implies having an audience of people that want to come into their brand website. If we look at how things have evolved over time, and I refer to my own experience working brand side, trying to generate omni-channel type of progress, you are fundamentally hampered if you assume that your consumer wakes up in the morning thinking, "I'm gonna buy that brand of product and only that brand, and I'm gonna pop to that brand website." That is just not how we shop for cars in the same way it's not how we shop for other things. If you look at the trend over the last, I think back to the just pre-pandemic period, brand websites combined have lost around a third of their audience.
Back another three years to 2016, they've lost two-thirds of their audience. At the same time, we've obviously, at a different level in terms of scale, way ahead of it, grown our audience. The trend is only going that way. Therefore, back to the point, risk and opportunity, massively much more of an opportunity to enable that connection for a brand to try and sell more directly, if that's what they'd like to do, with or without retailer engagement, if that's what they'd like to do. That's something that I think will enable those new entrants we talked about at various points today just as much as the established players as well.
I think when it comes to Market Extension and the impact on price competition specifically, and then we can perhaps talk about competition more widely. I think the industry's been on a journey for a number of years, and retailers have where prices are undoubtedly becoming increasingly transparent. We've been driving a lot of that. We're making our valuations increasingly visible, increasingly available on Auto Trader and integrating them into lots of different parts of the industry. The Auto Trader Connect product and retailers' ability now to get pricing consistency and transparency across sales channels, I think it's also had a bigger impact on price competition than what we're seeing so far through Market Extension. I think with the Market Extension product, from what we've seen from the online retailers and digital retailers, they are typically not the most price competitive retailers in the market.
There are local supermarkets or local price leaders that are driving greater price competition than new online entrants emerging into those regional markets. We're definitely seeing the increasing visibility of Market Extension as, you know, hopefully we continue to drive stock penetration of that product. We are seeing that changing some of the local competitive dynamics, and actually, in some ways, it is a helpful backdrop for us to encourage, you know, adoption of Auto Trader Connect, adoption of some of the other products that we're trying to roll out and encourage our retailers to adopt. I think there's bigger influences on price competition. Actually, I think some of the dynamics, the competitive dynamics that are playing out are actually helpful to some of the other things that we're trying to do.
Chris can take that.
Yeah, on the question about would we consider other markets outside the U.K. Very much the trend has gone the other way. We're very focused on the U.K. Part of the reason for that is we're going even deeper in our integrations. When we look at partners like government agencies or, particularly specialist partners, they may not be available in other countries in the same way. We've chosen to go very, very deep and focused on the U.K., and I think we'll continue down that path.
Perfect. We'll just go next here.
Good afternoon, thanks for taking my questions. I'm Lisa Yang from Goldman. Three if I may. You retreated your outlook for the full year today, but just wondering whether you can share a bit more details whether any of the assumptions you made at the last set of results have changed in terms of used car prices, volumes, dealer forecourt, so given how the environment has deteriorated. I think related to that, just curious, you talk a lot about the cyclicality of your business. Obviously, you know, who knows how your business is gonna be impacted. How do you think you're benefiting from the current environment? 'Cause clearly the dealers obviously have improved their gross margin significantly in recent years.
They probably need you more, so Auto Trader outperform in the near term, and at what point do you expect the macro to your performance to catch up with the macro? That's the first question. Second, as you're transitioning towards a more transactional model, I'm just wondering how you think you're incentivizing your sales force or how the incentives change, and is there a risk of cannibalization, especially how, you know, compared to how they are selling their core products today. And lastly, I'm just curious, in terms of what you think are the real barriers to entry to the real barriers to a greater adoption of online car sales today, and where do you think online car penetration can go to over time for used cars? Thank you.
Okay. My best guess is, Jamie's gonna give the first one, on the outlook for the year. I actually heard four questions, Lisa. Cyclicality might be better.
Shall I take that?
Catherine? I'm sorry. Transition to transactional model and barriers to adoption. I thought, Bex, you could start with that, and perhaps others can add if that's okay.
Yeah. I mean, on the outlook specifically, we put out the RNS this morning saying that it was unchanged. I think slightly passing the buck, but it's probably better for Jon than Catherine to talk about the market dynamics that we're seeing. We can talk about the pricing data that we disclose. We can talk about the market. Obviously, transaction volumes come out. I think getting into the detail of, you know, exactly, you know, you can take from the kind of market view how that's potentially impacting the business, but I think would leave, like, the specifics to the half-year results in November. Slightly pass over for market commentary.
Shall I start and then?
Yeah.
I think if we start with what we're seeing on Auto Trader, we're actually still seeing overall demand, the measures that we track to get a sense of consumer engagement in the buying journey. We're still seeing those track ahead of the pre-pandemic levels. We are down from the highs we were seeing in 2021, but still a good way ahead of 2019 levels. Overall demand we feel is robust. That, as you will have seen from the used car transaction data, isn't directly translating through into used car transaction growth. Transaction growth was down for Q2 about 12%-13%. Interestingly, when you break down that transaction data, where supply is there, so in five years and up vehicles in particular, when the new car market was stronger, we see transaction volumes in growth.
Where we're seeing used car transactions decline is where the supply is not available, which I think is why, you know, the demand data we're seeing on Auto Trader isn't flowing through directly into transaction volumes. That being said, because of the supply constraints, used car prices are still 19% up year-on-year, up about 43% in total since prior to the pandemic, which means while there's less transaction volumes, the actual value of used car transactions is still very strong. The size of the market by revenue is as big as it's ever been. For our retailers, that backdrop is still translating through to actually relatively robust trading conditions. They're still making good margins, better margins than they were before the pandemic, despite the fact that consumer demand has softened slightly.
In terms of what we're seeing in retailer forecourt levels and churn and some of the metrics that we track, I think we're seeing more normal behavior in all of those metrics. We saw an unusual period during the pandemic where we didn't really see any retailer churn. We saw retailer growth. I think we're just seeing a return to what we would consider to be more normal market conditions.
I'll perhaps just add, I guess, two things. One is to Catherine's point, what we're seeing fairly consistently in a lot of the metrics we're looking at is we're coming off the highs of 2021 back to more pre-pandemic norms. A good metric we monitor a lot of the time is days that cars remain in stock. That is behind where it was last year and the year before, but ahead of where we were pre-pandemic. On pricing moves, another thing we monitor, because sort of in a perfect economic model, you just look at supply and demand, but we're quite interested in dealer behavior.
One of the things we track and share with our retailers quite regularly is how many dealers are changing prices and whether they're changing prices more than they were before the pandemic and so on. On all of these metrics, we're actually seeing dealer behavior remain sort of fairly stable. There's nothing dramatic happening. Dealers aren't aggressively changing prices. If you look at our retail price index, you will see it coming down. That's largely a mix effect. If you look at month-on-month prices versus before the pandemic, it's pretty much in line. We are seeing a fairly healthy market in that sense.
Excellent. Bex, could you
You want me to take that?
Yeah.
I heard the barriers to entry for online selling.
How we think about sales.
Yeah
incentives, which is.
Yeah, sure. Okay. I guess first of all, as Chris touched on, a lot of the investment in technology that we've been putting underway for best part of a decade now makes it extremely hard for anybody else to compete with that and, you know, in terms of similar time frames. I think in terms of the products that we have for our retailers, they are quite typically very powerful and impactful in terms of the response and performance that they have for our retailers. We mentioned Prominence earlier. Jamie touched on it. I mentioned the inroads that we've made with our Prominence products. I think reliance on data, and this brings in also how we're working with our sales teams.
The way in which we use data now in terms of the conversations with our retailer customers has never been as integral to everyday conversations that we have. We are using all of our key data points around price position, other metrics that we have, retail rating, performance rating, to help retailers really understand why their forecourt is performing in the way that it is, and that is at kind of the full forecourt level and indeed at individual granular vehicle level as well. That data, I think is a real barrier for anyone else because again, it's the access to data that we have that no one else does. I think also the way in which we're working with our sales teams is we're surfacing this data to make it really easy to have the right conversations with customers.
Indeed, in the past, our own people may have had to look into different tools and systems to get access to data, and now it's all served much more easily and more readily available. You know, from our salespeople's perspective and our customer perspective, it's feeling extremely powerful and strong. Indeed, customers are coming to us to ask us for that insight and help to understand their performance and how is their performance compared to perhaps some of their peers.
I think. Just on the- Well- Oh,
Sorry. Go for it.
No, I was just gonna add a couple of barriers of adoption. We're very good at being grumpy at Auto Trader. I think this one is slightly different, and Jamie alluded to this as well. Very often the products that Bex spoke about, you switch them on, leads go up, you know, churn's low, the money's good, it's all very easy and very consistent with kind of our core products. This is a bit different because we are providing essentially an online shopping journey on Auto Trader. One of our barriers to adoption will be that we're going to be very selective about who we allow to come onto the trial and, you know, that literally stock. They've maybe got a dealer website with us.
They're already benefiting from that tech, so they can straight away be good candidates for Deal Builder. As you get into other segments of dealers
It's more beneficial if they do use that, they'll be able to benefit from that real-time change in stock status. It doesn't stop us getting started. We've very much done that, and we've got a good runway of customers in the pipeline. Hopefully we'll get the majority of dealers onto AT Connect for those that aren't already on the platform.
The second question was around kind of conversion drop-off through the Deal Builder journey. It's probably worth noting, you know, it's live with a very small number of customers. Although we're tracking the conversion of that through the online funnel, probably don't have any particularly, like, meaningful data to share on that. But it's worth noting that each of those product journeys, so reservations, guarantee Part Exchange, and finance have all been live and piloted individually, and we've got much more data on the conversion of those. For each of those, we measure the conversion to the point of the consumer doing a thing on Auto Trader. Let's take reservations for example. We'll measure the conversion from the advert through to them reserving the car. We're also looking at the conversion from the reservation through to the sale.
I don't have the data off the top of my head, but I think reservations is around 60% of consumers that reserve the car go on to buy it. We've learned loads during that pilot around, you know, what is important for getting consumers increasing that conversion rate. Live stock information, Auto Trader Connect would be a good example of that. You don't want consumers going to the effort of reserving a car only to find out that it wasn't actually ever really available because it had been sold six hours before or something like that.
In terms of the slower rate of adoption, at the moment, price will not be a barrier 'cause we're not charging for Deal Builder at all. At this stage, I guess the beta trial isn't charged for, gives us a chance to really understand the value that it drives to retailers before, as Jamie said, we make a decision around monetization, at some point. I think there will be a point where we kind of cross the barrier between, okay, it's now like no longer a mass trial. We've got a good head around what the value of the product is. We can look to monetize it. Just the visibility of that, we don't necessarily have just yet.
I think as you say, Nathan, we're learning so much, aren't we, with the customers that are live on it now.
Yeah.
In terms of how they're using it, how they're managing the consumers, looking at it from the retailer perspective and the consumer side as well. It gives us real opportunity to learn and understand before we decide what comes next.
Just on that, you said kind of 80% of it will be transactional revenue. What will be the 20% then if that's...
There'll be a small subscription charge, which effectively gives you access to the software. If you had someone that just walks in, you can still process the finance application, do the guarantee of part exchange. You can use the software at point of sale on the forecourt, so you have access to those tools. The 80% is a transaction fee for any that are done on the Auto Trader platform.
Just to add, that is the point around any retailer. The complexity of the builder Ben took you through, all those tools, the finance platform that we've built, the Part Exchange process, you can just as easily turn the screen around and let the consumer do that in the forecourt physically as you can them doing it on Auto Trader, which is kind of what was alluded to.
Hey, it's Andrew here from Barclays. I've got two. The first one is to push you a bit harder on numbers. I think in the last couple of sets of results, you've talked about the idea that in a normal stock year, digital retail may accelerate the output growth from high single digits to double digits. Given you're gonna start monetizing this kind of towards the end of fiscal 2024, is a sensible assumption therefore that you grow in a normal stock year, high single digits in 2024, and then we see about acceleration to double digits in 2025 and beyond? The second question is, there's an assumption within that that dealers will pay incrementally for digital retail versus what they're paying for their normal classified spend.
That makes sense, but what gives you confidence that it definitely will happen, particularly if we are in an environment in fiscal 2024 and 2025 where maybe the health of dealer margins is not as good as it is right now? Thank you.
I can take the first one. You know, as we said in the presentation, the aim is to monetize this before the end of FY 2024. I think, you know, and to reiterate the answer to the very first question, it is hugely dependent on what happens over the next 12-18 months in terms of the trial, in terms of the adoption, in terms of consumer engagement, and most importantly, sort of to the monetization question before, and this almost leads to the second question, that our customers are really realizing a tangible benefit from these products. It has to be that it's making the forecourt experience more efficient.
They're able to manage consumers in a more efficient way that we are, you know, starting to see that those other operating costs that we referred to are, you know, accessible in terms of opportunity for us. You know, I would say it'd be optimistic to assume that for FY 2024. I think bear in mind, we've only targeted monetization by the end of it. Whether it's 2025, 2026, you know, will hinge on the success of the trials and the rollout, which, you know, we are committing that we are gonna provide updates on these things through the reporting cycle and start presenting the KPIs that I mentioned at the end of the presentation, that hopefully help form how, you know, how close that opportunity is in terms of really making an impact to the numbers.
I can start on the confidence. I mean, the first thing I'll say is that we'll stop guessing what happens in the future and just try and really work with what we see today. That being said, I think a couple of comments with regards to the conference on getting customers to pay for digital retail. It'll be very interesting to hear Bex's answer 'cause she's the one that ultimately will be lumped with convincing our retailers to do that. I would say that you know, ultimately, the value of the digital retailing isn't necessarily getting the incremental sale, except as it relates to Market Extension, because that is what Auto Trader's platform does.
What we are enabling retailers to do is generate, we believe, more revenues through additional ancillary products like finance, and also do those sales with a lot less labor than what you would ordinarily expect. I mean, we send, you know, I think it's 13-14 million leads to retailers. A lot of the work that happens in a dealer is sifting through leads, and what we're essentially allowing to happen is a lot of that work to happen on Auto Trader. I think there's no question that when times get tough, as my chairman has said about other industries, those businesses do clamp down on costs because actually survival becomes more important than profit optimization.
I think in this case, actually, there's a good case to say that we can help them clamp down on those costs more effectively than what they might otherwise do. I think the other point I would make, which is Jamie's point, is that we are talking about a performance-based model here, which is very different to the sort of big subscriptions that we're used to in our core business. There's an element of you will only pay when you do see the benefit, which is a bit more helpful in tough scenarios. As to what that scenario looks like, I guess we'll have to wait and see. I don't know, Bex, did you want to?
It's similar, I guess, Nathan. I think the customers that we're already talking to about digital retailing, ultimately, they yes want to see overall profitability and return on investment. Like you say, though, Nathan, it's not necessarily all about incremental sales. More retailers now are open to working with us, looking at those new solutions, Market Extension that's allowing them to, you know, broaden penetration beyond their current areas. They're equally more open to looking at how we can support them with those efficiencies within their own businesses. I think many retailers of all sizes actually recognize that their internal infrastructures will need to change in terms of their people, what their people are doing, and indeed, we're already seeing good retailers change their practices now.
When we're talking to them about digital retailing, there are many retailers that are fully kind of cognizant and accepting of what we're talking to them about and how the Auto Trader platform will allow them to achieve more and at scale. I think similar to the kind of things that you said. I think just one other point I would say as well, more broadly on our retailer sentiment as was touched on earlier, more than ever coming out of, you know, COVID and all the work that we've been doing from a tech perspective, we're seeing more and more retailers just wanting naturally to work with Auto Trader. Yes, you know, the financials need to stack up, but the sentiment is probably the strongest it's ever been and gives us that platform on which to move forwards from.
We're gonna head across this side. Do you want to?
Hi, thanks. It's Mike Allen from Zeus. It was just a quick question on Autorama, if I may, and the marketing. Clearly to build up the brand, they've done some clever marketing strategies, but you might also argue that the marketing investment, maybe by your standards, might have been underinvested. I'd just be quite interested in plans for marketing in Autorama and whether it needs to accelerate to educate the consumer about PCH at the right time. Second question is, would a monthly subscription model ever be out of the question?
Do you want me to take that one, yeah?
Do you want me to take the first one?
Sure.
I think just on the marketing, I mean, I think you're right that, you know, there is a need to educate people around the different financing options that exist. You know, there are people that clearly are leasing cars today, but maybe not everyone knows that a lease is an option. Obviously, people buying electric cars, it seems to be growing in popularity and gaining some share.
I think, you know, clearly we've bought the Autorama business with the view, as Ian said in his section, to integrate it into the search experience in a very targeted way, just acknowledging that it isn't, you know, it's finding the people that are likely or predisposed to lease a vehicle, you know, not taking sales away from customers or not detracting from, you know, the very large, you know, used car or physical new car audience that we've got. I think rather than, you know, long-term marketing the Autorama brand very strongly, we're probably more focused around that integration and trying to educate people around how we engineer the search experience on Auto Trader.
I think that, you know, that is one of a handful of drivers that is why we think we can improve the margin profile for that business.
I think in terms of how consumers pay for cars and the different financing models that might be out there in the future, a part of the technology layer and integration layer that we talked about building earlier, by having all of the lenders in our platform, by having all of the funders through the Autorama acquisition.
We hopefully, in the future, we're increasingly agnostic. Like, we have the tech, we have the ability to serve those finance deals against any of the vehicles that a retailer or anyone selling those cars wants them to be served against. So clearly we're gonna keep working with our retailers, with the manufacturers, with the people selling the car, to make sure those financing options work for them. But we also, when it comes to the consumer, are very cognizant to how those buying behaviors might change, and we feel like we have a platform now that is future ready for however those buying behaviors evolve. We can increasingly serve the right finance deals to the right consumers to give them the best choices and flexibility for them.
Perfect. We'll go to Adam at the back there. If I'm missing anyone. How are you?
Hi, it's Adam Berlin from UBS. I have two questions. First question, I'm imagining a scenario where a customer buys a car on Auto Trader, and it gets delivered by the dealer, and there's a problem. It's the wrong color or it's late. How do you manage that situation? How do you not take the blame for that? How do you educate customers around that? And how do you have to kind of scale up your infrastructure or people to be able to kind of deal with that customer relationship management side? I mean, it seems it could be a, if the scale is, you know, a large issue. The second question I want to ask was a question for Chris. There's a lot going on. You talked about 300 people in your software team.
How often are you knocking on Nathan's door to ask for more resource? Do you think you have enough? How stretched is the team at the moment?
Do you wanna go with the first one? Do you want me to take that one? Yeah, go on.
I mean, we talked about our brand and what our brand represents to consumers, and clearly, first and foremost, we're an incredibly trusted brand. Actually that for us, I think is part of the opportunity with digital retailing. Consumers, we believe, will be more likely to do some of the jobs in the buying journey online on Auto Trader because of that trust in our brand. It's one of the things that we are most conscious of protecting and preserving when it comes to everything that we're doing across the business. In the specific example of digital retailing, we are, as Nathan talked to you, being really, really careful about the retailers that we onboard, we bring on to this trial.
One of the jobs that we're increasingly focused on and doing is getting those retailers to sign up to service standards and to commit to care packages for consumers that reflect, you know, industry standard practices and norms, but ideally go above and beyond in terms of the level of support and protection they are prepared to provide. It's a bit like I see it a bit like the journey we're on with our platform products. We are picking off the big structural challenges within the industry, and we are bringing technology and data solutions to the industry to solve those problems.
We are improving price transparency, improving stock visibility, and I see the journey that we need to go on with some of our retailer partners, not all, in terms of service standards, in terms of aftercare, in terms of the care packages and wrappers they put around the transaction. It's actually quite a similar journey. Many retailers are there. Many retailers, we're very confident that we could put on our digital retailing products today, and they would stand behind the consumer service that we expect. Not all of them are there, and we are gonna need to go on a journey with many of them to get them there.
It's worth adding, you know, I mentioned in my part and, you know, why the margins are flat, not increasing, is that there is some investment in consumer-facing teams. They gave the example of managing the consumer through the buying funnel. Equally, the example that you gave there, you'd have that team available to, you know, manage a query or help resolve challenges between the buyer and the retailer if it was required. There is more consumer-facing teams as we envisage it in a future-looking organization than we have today to help manage that.
Lovely question about have we got enough tech people? Well, no, we haven't. But nobody does. What I can say is that we've got more technologists than we've ever had in our history. We're growing year on year on year decently. We took a very conscious decision quite a few years ago that as far as technology people are concerned, we try and do that with our own people. Resist the temptation to outsource stuff or try and scale up with short-term contracts or anything like that. The reason is, we'd much rather do the hard thing of decide what are the big things to build and spend our time and people and efforts on that than trying to do everything at once. I think that's worked very well for us.
It's not entirely straightforward to do, as you might all appreciate. It's very hard to hire good technologists and good people in general. The way we're managing to grow, frankly, is through early careers investment. We take an increasing number of graduates and apprentices and people that are maybe retraining from other careers, and that's the way we're able to grow responsibly, I think. And also taking into account like diverse teams and basically growing in a sustainable and responsible way. I think that's working for us. I think everyone here will get frustrated at some point with not enough people, particularly Ian over there. You know, it's working for us, so I think we're kinda growing in a responsible way. We can sustain that, and that is our plan.
I think it is partly driven by something Chris would agree with, is Software engineering is like a creative task, and if you start to lower your standards of quality, I do think there can be like a 10x difference. You know, someone's writing bad code in the back end, it flows through to the testers. You get bad releases, you're rolling back. I do think we, you know, our standards are unashamedly high. That means that our recruitment rate is low. Perhaps unashamedly low as a result, or we teach them ourselves, which is essentially what the early careers program is.
Yeah, I think exactly that. It's not to say, you know, we never say never. We wouldn't like, for short term, invest some external help, but you can't do that for a sustained period. I think it just ends up the quality drops right off so. We have tried it in past versions of Auto Trader. It has. Hopefully with that number will be slightly higher than 300 next time we see you.
Yeah.
I'd just say it's not a conscious, like we'd hire more people if we could.
Yeah, it's been unlimited.
Deliberate decision that we say, "Oh, we're gonna grow by five heads next year." We hire as many people as we can that meet our recruitment and quality standards, and we fill the early careers hopper as full as we can, while making it sustainable within the base that we've already got. We're not sitting here constraining it in any way at all. The constraint is quality and our ability to deliver the big things that are gonna have an impact for Auto Trader.
Jamie's team are extremely understanding of vacancies, and basically we're always on for technologists, so we're always hiring for good people.
Yeah. Then we'll go to the back.
Hey, thanks. Pete from Morgan Stanley. Three from me. Firstly on Deal Builder. You decided to bundle the products under Deal Builder now. Was that the plan from the start, or do you see some kind of other new benefit from bundling them as opposed to how you started them individually? Second question is on penetration. We've had a few questions about that, but I understand that you're selective on the trials, but just to kind of get a sense of what needs to happen for penetration to be meaningfully higher from these levels. Are we mostly talking about customer education or is it customer infrastructure? Do the dealers need to actually spend money themselves in order to adopt these new services? Then the last one is on Autorama.
You mentioned that in the medium term you might be merging the brands under Auto Trader, and I believe you've said this before as well, but do you have any other kind of operational plans or differences to be done for Auto Trader-Autorama? My main question is whether at some point the gross revenue and net revenue could be the same. Thanks.
Okay. Do you wanna take the last one?
Mm-hmm.
Does anyone in particular feel like taking the first one, the bundled point?
I don't mind taking it. No.
Okay. Penetration, do you wanna have a go at that from a technical perspective.
Catherine, maybe if you add on the penetration between you and Chris.
I think the long-term vision, you know, over the last few years has always been to bring an end-to-end car buying journey online, and we were working on the individual products for quite a number of years, kind of Part Exchange and finance in different guises. I think COVID and the shift online sort of really accelerated that and gave us conviction that there was demand for an end-to-end integrated car buying journey, and that's absolutely what the focus is at the moment.
That's not to say that at some point we might look at offering those as standalone products, but very much the focus is now on integrating those products together into Deal Builder. Obviously we sort of obviously showed a video that showed part of the journey, but it is possible to skip through those. You know, a number of the deals that we've had so far have just been a reservation where the consumer has chosen not to do a part exchange appraisal and not to do finance. That is a fairly quick journey then to just reserve a car.
I think that, I mean, just probably been slightly overly grumpy, but better in the interest of transparency. When we rolled out the products individually, it was very clear that there was a high degree of onboarding with an individual customer about what had to be done at the forecourt. So there's definitely, you know, a big driver behind the change is actually only doing that onboarding process once and really helping the retailer understand actually this is how you reappraise the Part Exchange, how you finalize the process of the finance application and process the reservation all in one go just makes the rollout significantly easier than if you've gone out and done Part Exchange, and then you come along three months later to do reservations.
I think, you know, some maybe underestimate on our part rolling them out individually around that operational complexity, but hopefully significantly improved with this joined up journey.
Just on the infrastructure that retailers need. Part of the platform strategy is to remove as many of those infrastructure barriers as possible by either retailers using our existing portal system or by us talking to and integrating with their existing technology providers. That onboarding point that Jamie made, that you still need people at the dealerships on the forecourts understanding for the omni-channel journeys, in particular, how to pick up a consumer that's completed half of a journey online on the forecourt. Now, our job is to make that transition, that handover as seamless, as easy as possible. I think the more retailers we're onboarding, the more we are integrating more deeply with those third parties, the easier we can make it.
In terms of education, we try not to really talk about retailer education because we're not teachers, and trying to tell our customers what to do often doesn't go that well. What does work really well is being able to show them brilliant case studies of customers that are, you know, like some of the videos we saw earlier, where a product has very obviously transformed something that a customer's doing. Prominence is the best example of this. When they see, you know, their neighbor down the road, their biggest competitor, suddenly appearing, you know, in positions on Auto Trader where they feel they should be appearing or they would have appeared a few weeks ago, that's what changes retailer behavior.
I'm confident as we work through with these early retailers to get those case studies, we'll have some brilliant examples where we have transformed retailers' businesses, and that will be the thing that gets us the momentum, rather than trying to educate them on what to do.
Sorry, there's one last part on Autorama. You know, I don't think I was going as far as to say that we're merging the brands, but I think by them being less reliant on marketing their own brand and leveraging the Auto Trader platform to supplement sales. I think in terms of whether gross and net revenue become the same, I think long term that is what we aspire towards. We wanna be asset light. Obviously, you know, the historic 10% that they're taking on balance sheet, that feels enough to say, let's not say we're gonna drop it tomorrow, but actually understand why that's happening, you know, under what circumstances over a slightly longer period.
You know, we don't wanna be retailers, we don't want balance sheet, and hopefully over that long term period, you know, the gross and net revenue do become the same number.
Okay. I have to go to the back. You've been very patient with me.
Hi, it's Catherine O'Neill from Citi. Firstly, I just wanted to ask on Auto Trader Connect, the Retail Essentials part that's already out and Market Extension, how is that being charged to dealers at the moment? Is that currently within packages? And can you give us an idea of what proportion or percent of your retail customer base are using that and what you see as your sort of broader addressable market within your retail base overall? Then on Deal Builder, probably asking the same question someone asked earlier in a different way, so probably get the same answer.
I just wondered if you could give us a bit more detail on how you came up with Deal Builder on a per car basis being double the revenue of what you would have now without Deal Builder, and if there's any way you can sort of break down how you thought about it or the logic you went through. On the 70% margin, including Deal Builder, is that you expect to keep that margin at 70% from the outset, or is that once you get to a certain scale with Deal Builder?
Okay. Do you wanna take it, Jamie, or?
Yeah.
At Connect?
The first bit, the Auto Trader Connect, the Retail Essentials, the first module that Chris talked about earlier, that was the product that we launch as part of our event each year, which is the moment where we, once a year, we review pricing and products and packages and go to market with our customers, with typically a bundled combination of those things that puts up the value of our core packages. Auto Trader Connect was launched about this time last year actually, and since then we've been on a journey of integrating with, Chris talked about earlier, we're now integrated with about 70 partners. We've still got some more to do. In terms of stock penetration, I think we're more than halfway through, both in terms of the coverage of stock we've got on Auto Trader and in terms of those partners.
We've got a smaller number of integrating partners left to do, but they represent a slightly bigger proportion of stock. We're confident that we will get there and we're engaging with those parties. Technically, the work's not on our side actually. It's typically sitting with the third party. In terms of Market Extension, that is, an optional package that retailers can choose to go on. The yields about double our standard advertising packages. At full year results, we reported having about 6% of stock on Auto Trader, and we'll update again at the half year where we've got to with that product.
The long term Deal Builder opportunity being double what we get for advertising is. It does hinge around, I mean, some of the data points that we gave in the deck. Looking at take rate versus peers that are in more of a transactional space, and also the size of the operating expenses that sit outside of advertising and marketing feels significant. That actually even double what we take for advertising marketing is still only a relatively small percentage of those other operating expenses. In terms of the margin, you know, it. I think yes is the answer. That we can hold that from this point in time looking forward, even though we're not monetizing, expecting to monetize before the end of FY 2024.
You know, the reason is the trial's relatively small, it's still scaling up. We had talked about this at the last set of results that, you know, the core advertising marketplace, you know, through prominence products, through the price lever, generally is that incremental revenue is generally coming through at a higher margin. We're investing that higher margin into this Deal Builder journey, into the digital retailing journey. That's why we think that those margins can hold from this point, doesn't need to dip before monetization.
The only thing that I'd add is, I think there's no perfect precedent for what we're doing, so we've not really found a model anywhere else that's very difficult to point to an exact level. Where we do look to models that are transactional, one being our own in Vanarama now, where marketplaces or like marketplaces are charging per transaction, they tend to be at levels that are higher, what we're suggesting. That includes in the U.S. with website providers, in some cases with marketplace providers. We know how much it costs to sell a car. We now know how much it costs to sell a new lease vehicle in the Autorama business. We know what those cost per acquisitions are.
There's to some degree, we think it's a reasonable assumption, but we've got no reason to believe that we shouldn't be able to achieve those kind of levels. It is something that's yet to be validated. We have lots of reasons to believe that it should be quite sustainable, but none of them are a perfect match with what we're doing.
Oh, we could get Gareth whilst you're there. Oh, right in front of you.
Sorry, just one follow-up on the Market Extension question there. I think the video referred to somebody taking six regions. Are you selling on a regional basis and sort of there's a sliding scale, and that doubling of yield is only if you take every region? Secondly, you reference AT Moves in one of the slides. Is AT Moves you physically shipping cars around for the dealers? Can you just expand a little bit on what that is? Sorry, that might be naive, and I should know the answer to that.
It's a great question. Market Extension is carved up into 10 regions. Like, it carves up the U.K. into 10 regions, so you can opt how many regions that you buy. Double the yield is to take all 10 regions, which, to be fair, I think the majority of customers that take the product do go for total U.K. coverage. 6 regions isn't necessarily 60% of the price. You get a sort of consistent volume discount the more regions that you take. 6 regions will be marginally more than 60% of the average incremental yield, if that makes sense.
AT Moves is a marketplace platform. It was originally a business we acquired, but it enables retailers or in the future consumers to be able to place jobs to move vehicles on a platform where essentially there's a reverse auction with logistics providers. Yes, we're facilitating what would it be? How many moves? I think we had in our last report.
120.
120,000 vehicle moves a year. We're doing that in a typically Auto Trader asset and operationally light way, where we're just connecting to a portion of those moves are going directly from a dealer to a consumer. That's not yet part of Deal Builder, although it's an obvious thing that we can then do, is allow that, Mr. or Mrs. Retailer, if you'd like to take Deal Builder, would you like the optionality to be able to provide home delivery? That is something that in future we should have good reason to believe we should be able to do that.
They'll be using one of our logistics partners.
Yes
to fulfill the move.
Not Patrion.
Not us directly.
Fair to say with AT Moves recently, we've seen an increased number of retailers using the solution because we're able to save retailers money using our solution compared to their existing providers, so it's really competitive.
Yeah, whilst it's not necessarily a big contributor to Auto Trader's revenue, it is fair to say that, you know, there are examples where customers have saved well and truly more than their Auto Trader bill by moving across to that platform, because logistics fees are so, such a big and expensive part of their business. Yeah. Jessica.
Hi, thanks. It's Jessica Pok from Peel Hunt. I've just got one follow-up question. You've obviously tested and launched some of the individual products that make up Deal Builder. In the future, is it a matter of the products will only exist within Deal Builder, or will dealers be able to take the individual products as well? And in terms of the pricing, the subscription fee, and then you've got the transactional on top. Does that only apply when you use the interface for Deal Builder if you can actually take the individual products as well? Thanks.
I think these questions were partly sort of answered by Ben earlier. I'll give a quick answer, and if my team think that I might have missed a nuance, they can cover me from there. At the moment, we're focused on those products all together because we think it's easier to have, Jamie alluded to it, one conversation about, "Do you wanna be a digital retailer? If so, you need to do these things on Auto Trader." Over time, we'll hit different barriers that I think might mean that we would consider allowing dealers to go onto some of that functionality. The most obvious one is a finance platform which has universal applicability on Auto Trader, but also in the forecourt. I don't think we're setting any rules around what we may or may not do.
I do think that Bex's team does have limited capacity, and we need to think very carefully about where we wanna kind of place our eggs. We will adapt as we learn and go through that. Did you wanna take the subscription?
Yes. I don't, you know, at the moment, as sort of best we know now, I don't think you would effectively unbundle the subscription and the transaction, 'cause I think the product is to allow our customers to sell their cars online on Auto Trader. That's, you know, someone doing that journey on Auto Trader is the transaction. The customer just gets the benefit of having the point-of-sale solution as an additional part of that product. I think it is the on Auto Trader bit that we think is the really important part of the product.
Yes. Oh, just here, if that's okay. Thank you.
Yeah, Sarah Simon from Berenberg. Two unrelated questions. First one was just, we've been hearing from a few players about hosting and cloud costs being denominated in dollars, and if there's anything we need to think about there. The second one was just obviously, the physical retailers have been encouraged to move online because of the aggressive moves by, you know, the pure online retailers. I'm just wondering if you're seeing any kind of change in the
urgency that the physical retailers have felt, given that the online guys are now significantly less ambitious in terms of their volume targets, or whether that's sort of the change in the pure online retailer strategy is feeding through in any way to the demand you're seeing or the pace at which you're moving.
I can take the first one. We do have some of our overheads that are invoiced in dollars, but it's not a meaningful contributor, and I don't think it would have a material impact from a cost perspective.
Okay.
Well, I think more generally, that's more than offset by the flexibility of public cloud infrastructure. So we do a lot in terms of, like, cost management to keep an eye on how many resources we're using. So that's a huge advantage over having to invest in physical servers and data centers. So I would say any sort of currency related things is offset by that.
I think in terms of, retailers and the shift to online, there's been a series of trends and waves almost that I think have just gathered momentum over the last five years. Even before the pandemic, you had Sytner, Arnold Clark, some of the very progressive retailers wanting to maintain or seek some form of competitive advantage by investing early in online retailing tools. You then had the pandemic. We've then had, the Cazoo, cinch, and others investing huge marketing investment in trying to change, drive that consumer behavior change. We've now got cost pressure on physical locations and on people costs in particular that is, you know, driving and another catalyst I think to put even more momentum behind that shift to online.
I think that momentum is now, and the dialogue that we're having with customers is very much that it is inevitable that more of the buying journey will happen online, and increasingly that 5%-6% penetration that we see today will grow. The consensus seems to be that it is a gradual evolution and shift towards online, and that the forecourt still has a role to play for some of the buying jobs well into the future. In terms of the reaction or any changes in the last six months as perhaps some of the momentum or some of the investment behind the online retailers has waned slightly, the biggest shift we've seen, and the biggest impact on us has actually been reduction in marketing spend.
As soon as Cazoo stopped investing above the line, many of our retailers, it coincided when many of them were looking at costs. Many retailers, many other players have also retrenched slightly when it comes to above the line, in particular, marketing spend. Actually for us, with our pretty consistent investment in marketing each year, there's an opportunity for us to gain some share of voice, I think, in some of those more traditional forms of advertising in the coming months and years. Actually it's, again, I think another impact may well be, you know, as that marketing spend consolidates, Auto Trader becomes a more important channel, the most performant channel we know for all of our big customers.
That flight to quality that we've often seen, in the past when retailers are looking to cut back on marketing spend, we're hoping and expecting to see in the coming months.
Just to add to that, I think the other thing I'd highlight was that Catherine mentioned the COVID period.
Yeah.
Retailers during that COVID period started out without many tools. We'd put a lot of tools in place to help them to retail at distance. They got into that habit. They had to do that out of necessity. They were getting to the point at the end of the third lockdown in the latter part of March, early April 2021, where they're hitting 90%-95% of normal sales volumes with the doors closed. A consumer couldn't go onto the forecourt into the showroom, but they were selling a huge amount of cars. How they were doing that was selling at distance, obviously.
Distant selling as a principle had always been totally excluded from the possibilities of any retailer, any manufacturer selling cars, because they always feared that the cars might come back to them, because in the legislation that is a legal consumer right. The reality that they discovered was actually why would a consumer spend the time to buy a car only to maybe send it back. They would only send it back if there was substantial reason to do that, which wouldn't increase by buying a car online necessarily compared to normal times. They discovered that there was huge benefit in doing this.
Allied to the non-educational stuff that Catherine mentioned earlier, when we show them the kind of consumer research that says this is what people are wanting and they can see that themselves, we think those are probably bigger drivers than anything else. I'll just finish with one last point, which is that we can see a lot of those larger retailer groups that Catherine also mentioned, were very keen on now expanding their sales and going further, like Ben's example at a sort of slightly lower scale. They can see a way of doing that asset light in terms of their physical assets.
They can actually leverage the benefits of Auto Trader and our digital presence to give them a digital presence, which means they don't need to have quite so many cars and certainly not as many forecourts to get a broader reach of sales. I think that's probably a positive driver rather than a negative fear factor that's playing positively to that growth.
That brings us pretty much to time, so we might wrap it up there. Thank you again for all of you that have made the effort to come in and see us in London and everyone that's joined us on the broadcast. I hope it's been a good use of your time.