Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the presentation of Rightmove's results for 2021. My name is Peter Brooks-Johnson, and I'm joined by Alison Dolan, our CFO. I'm going to talk through the highlights of the year. Alison is gonna go through some more detailed financials. I'm gonna spend some time giving you a little more color on the housing market and our strategic developments. 2021 was Rightmove's 21st birthday, and much has changed in the property market in the last 21 years. One thing which hasn't changed is our constant innovation. In the last five years, we've invested over GBP 35 million in innovation, which among other things, has increased the amount of time home hunters spend on Rightmove by over 50%.
The last time we met, there was much questioning about how Rightmove would fare in a very busy market and a market where stock was constrained. To demonstrate how we've emerged from the shadow of 2020 and the robustness of the model regardless of the underlying property market, I've compared our performance versus 2019. Site traffic last year was again a record, with an average of 1.5 billion minutes per month being spent on the platform. That's up over 15% on the previous highs set last year. The busy property market has created very different dynamics in our agency and new homes customer bases. Agency customers are very busy and focused on winning the right to sell properties efficiently. Our agency business continues to grow back from a year ago with nearly 200 branches added during the year.
Many of our new homes customers are forward sold until the middle of 2022, and therefore we saw a drop in new homes developments over 2021 and developers easing back on their marketing as they've less to sell. Although this fall did stabilize in the second half of last year. ARPA is up GBP 101 on December 2019. The growth in ARPA from December 2020 to December 2021 is the largest we've ever delivered in a year. This has been driven by a record agency ARPA growth of GBP 120 from a mix of price and product upgrades. The ARPA uplift and product upgrades have given us real revenue momentum at the start of 2022, which Alison will discuss later.
In the second half of 2021, we caught up some of the first half one-off cost savings, and we've got a little more to do in the first half of this year. As promised last year, we've been returning the extra cash we built up in 2020 with nearly GBP 239 million returned. Consistent with our long-established policy, we're increasing our dividend to 7.8p in total for the year. Beyond our KPIs, we've made much strategic progress this year. Rightmove's purpose is to make home moving easier in the U.K. We'll satisfy our purpose and drive growth through innovation. Our strategy has three reinforcing segments. Firstly, we're the place home hunters turn to and return to first. This, in turn, makes us the U.K.'s property platform, which delivers an unparalleled return on investment for our customers.
We are in a unique position to help both customers and home hunters by making this process more digital and create new revenue opportunities for us. This slide gives you some examples of our strategic delivery this year. I don't often talk about the underpinning segment of our strategy, being the place consumers turn to and return to first, but I thought it's worth highlighting how our continual innovation and brand investment yield dividends. Our unwillingness to accept the status quo with things like the ground up refresh of Draw A Search and Keyword Sort on mobile has led to a 22% increase in active app users. That's not just home hunters who download the app. That's people who use the app time and again. Our investment in our brand continues to ensure we're top of mind when people are looking for property.
84% of our traffic comes from people using the app or typing Rightmove into their browser on their phone or on desktop. The brand lead has real strategic value, but also, of course, it means the traffic is free. We continue to innovate in our heartland of advertising and tools for property professionals. For example, the secure video viewings platform we launched in 2020 delivered over 400,000 video viewings in 2021, and tenants requested over 340,000 physical viewing appointments via our appointment booking platform, which went live last year. Real innovations in the real world, delivering real time savings for our customers. We continue to innovate and deliver new efficient marketing products to our customers. We launched three new next generation products last year, which I'll talk about more later.
On top of this, we believe there's much opportunity in making the home moving process more efficient by being more digital. I'll come back and talk about progress in this segment later. There's much excitement for the future, but this is all built on our strong position today. Before I give a little more color on our strategic position, I'll hand over to Alison to talk about the numbers in more detail.
Thanks, Peter. Good morning, everyone. As Peter explained, and as we did with the half-year results, we are using 2019 as the comparative year as all the disruption of 2020 makes direct year-on-year comparisons more difficult. Relative to 2019 therefore, revenue has grown by GBP 15.6 million, 5% exceeding 300 million for the first time. That net growth number, however, hides a number of interesting underlying dynamics, and there are a couple of key points to understand about the drivers of that net growth. The first is the scale of the growth in product purchases and package upgrades, particularly in agency. The second is the impact of the drop in customer numbers in the year 2020 for agency and in 2021 in new homes. In estate agency, revenue growth was GBP 15.3 million.
That is the net of two numbers, the first of which is ARPA growth, where pricing actions and customers paying for additional products and upgrading their packages drove a record increase in ARPA and an increase in revenues of GBP 23.6 million. The quality of our vendor lead products was a key driver of this product growth, as was an uplift in the number of agents subscribing to our premium Optimiser package, up from 9% of our independent agent base in December 2020 to 21% a year later. As with the first half of the year, we continue to see agents increasing their discretionary spend on products. Partly offsetting this ARPA-driven growth, however, was a drop in the number of agent subscribers in 2020, which reduced revenue by GBP 8.2 million and meant that net revenue growth is GBP 15.3 million.
Customer numbers did start to recover in 2021, and we expect 2022 to see further new agencies and an expansion of existing branch networks. Within new homes, these dynamics are even more pronounced. We spoke at the half year about developments being very forward sold, resulting in developments being marketed for a shorter period of time and fewer developments being listed on site. Two new products for new homes developers launched during the year, however, Advanced Development Listings and Native Search Adverts, and they helped to drive strong product adoption, the result of which was revenue growth from product purchase of GBP 4.3 million. The fall in the number of developments being listed, however, had a negative revenue impact of GBP 6.6 million, and that was pretty much all in 2021.
As would be expected, some of our developers also reduced their transactional marketing spend, which reduced revenues by a further GBP 3.2 million. The net of all three of these elements was that new homes revenue fell over 2019 by GBP 5.5 million. Again, the product, the power of the new products is evident, and their value will continue to grow even as the demand supply imbalance starts to right itself later this year. Other revenues, what we refer to as our breadth businesses, have generally all shown strong and encouraging growth, delivering a combined GBP 5.8 million of increased revenues over 2019, with over half of that from our commercial real estate and data services businesses, each of which grew revenues by about 20% over that period.
Top of the funnel branding products such as Featured Agent and Local Homepage remain our strongest selling products, but the mix of product selection has also changed to address some of the opportunities from the buoyant market as agents compete to win their next vendor instructions. Vendor lead generation products such as Local Valuation Alert, Rightmove Discover, and usage of the Opportunity Manager product increased strongly, as you can see here. Bottom of the funnel closing products like Featured Property and Premium Listing were particularly effective for agents during the year. Sold By Me, our newest branding product and exclusive to Optimiser, was a key driver of so many of our agent customers upgrading to Optimiser 2020 during the year.
Overall, the proportion of revenue attributable to products rather than to core listings is now close to 60%, an increase of over 5% over the last three years. The effectiveness of these products for agents is clearly demonstrated in what has been a healthy but testing market environment for them, where the stock supply issues led to increased competition for each instruction. For us, seeing agents increased usage of our products to help them to win new vendors is very rewarding. As I've spoken about before, product revenue is sticky as the majority of agents retain our digital products once they start to use them and experience their effectiveness. For this reason, the discretionary purchase of products beyond those in an agent's subscription package remains strong. Beyond committed subscription levels, the revenue from discretionary product purchase is now approximately GBP 600,000 per month.
All of this has led to record ARPA growth, which has grown by GBP 101 or 9% since December 2019 to close 2021 at GBP 1,189. Within that, the growth in agency ARPA was even greater. Agency ARPA increased by GBP 120 or 12% since December 2019, driven by those Optimiser upgrades and product purchase, as well as the pricing actions we took both during the year and in the second half of 2020. 40% of the uplift came through pricing, with the remaining 60% from the combination of product purchase and package upgrades. In new homes, ARPA increased by GBP 24 or 2% on December 2019, reversing the decline that we reported at the half year and building on the agency momentum going into this new year.
As I mentioned in the revenue slide, product growth and pricing delivered strong ARPA growth, GBP 107. This uplift was partially offset by a fall of GBP 83 from reduced transactional marketing in much the same way that I spoke about at the half year results, with the net ARPA uplift in new homes being GBP 24. It was the growth in the second half of 2021, which is particularly impressive and worth some detail. In agency, the GBP 26 pound increase between July and December is the single highest ARPA uplift in a second half reporting period that we have ever had. It is over double our typical ARPA growth rate in a second half-year period. Second half growth in new homes ARPA was even more impressive. At the half year, we reported that new homes ARPA was GBP 14 down on December 2019.
We end the year GBP 24 up, meaning that GBP 38 of ARPA was added in the second half of the year 2021 in new homes. This obviously gives us great momentum in ARPA heading into 2022. The continuous growth can be seen here in the bottom chart on slide nine, and January has seen us maintain that momentum and continue to add to the December closing ARPA levels. Cost inflation since 2019 has been relatively limited at GBP 6.7 million. The only significant movement within that really is in headcount, which now represents GBP 42 million of our total costs of GBP 76.3 million. That's 55% of the cost base. People costs increased by a total of GBP 5.6 million, of which GBP 4 million is due to a mix of new heads and salary increases in our product development teams.
The movements in other cost items are all consistent with increased traffic to our sites and increased investment in training and recruitment, offset by ongoing savings from staff continuing to work from home for the majority of the year 2021. Costs overall are consistent with our first half results at 25% of revenues, and margin therefore remains at 75% in line with the guidance that we gave at the half year. For 2022, while we will continue to invest in our product and customer facing teams, we will also maintain our disciplined approach to costs and our focus on revenue growth. We therefore anticipate that our margin will be broadly the same as 2021 at that 74%-75% level. Operational cash generation remains strong at 105% of operating profit, a level similar to last year.
All of the cash generated in the year, along with GBP 50 million of cash generated in 2020, was returned to shareholders with GBP 176 million returned via the share buyback program and GBP 64.5 million via dividends paid in May and in October. We ended the year with GBP 48 million of surplus cash. We may reduce that a little further this year, but not materially, and we aim to continue to manage the balance sheet cash position to broadly this level now going forward. As Peter mentioned earlier, we are also announcing a 2021 final dividend of 4.8p, which will amount to about GBP 40 million and will be paid in May. We reiterate our policy of delivering dividend growth in line with underlying EPS growth.
Having paused our share buyback program for the closed period, we will resume it in March, and our policy of returning substantially all cash to shareholders post organic investment remains unchanged, as does the allocation within that of broadly one third's dividend, two third's buyback. We have made two adjustments to operating profit in order to increase the transparency of the underlying business performance. Consistent with the way in which we reported our first half results, we have excluded the cost of share-based payments, given the volatility in the share price over the pandemic. Those charges amounted to GBP 4.9 million in 2021, and excluding that underlying operating profit amounted to GBP 231 million.
We also reported in our first half results that we had not paid out a contingent consideration to previous owners of the Van Mildert business, which had been set at GBP 2.4 million and which was released in the first half of this year, keeping costs lower than they otherwise would have been. Backing that release out therefore, increases operating costs to the GBP 76.3 million I discussed earlier, with an associated underlying adjusted operating profit of GBP 228.6 million and an adjusted underlying margin of 75%. On ESG, we've made some real progress on our environmental targets during the year. Firstly, as you'll be able to see from the slide here, we have achieved, and in some cases materially overachieved, all of the three-year emissions reduction targets we set ourselves in 2019.
Secondly, we have worked with the Science Based Targets initiative to set targets going forward that will be consistent with the 1.5 degrees warming agenda. The commitment that we are making today is a 42% reduction in all of our Scope 1, Scope 2, and Scope 3 emissions by the year 2030, and a 90% reduction in all of our emissions by 2040, at which point we will become a net zero emitter. As we make progress towards those targets, we hope and expect to be able to bring that 2040 date forward, as it is largely only our indirect emissions that are preventing us from setting a net zero target year of 2035. The SBTi has given us a provisional date of September this year to validate these targets, and we look forward to making some real progress towards those now.
We have also adopted the TCFD framework for inclusion in our 2021 environmental reporting. It can be accessed via our sustainability report, which is live on our investor website from today. Unsurprisingly, our modeling shows that our exposure to climate change related risk events is relatively low, and that we expect there to be an opportunity as we continue to educate consumers and suppliers on ways of increasing the energy efficiency of people's homes. That's it from me. Thank you all for listening. I'll now hand you back to Peter.
Thank you, Alison. I'll start off by briefly covering what happened in the housing market in 2021. The frenetic activity, in part spurred by the stamp duty holiday, led to the most transactions we've seen in a year since 2007. The continued lack of stock coming to market, coupled with the insatiable desire of people to change their lives following the pandemic, has driven prices higher, with average asking prices up 14% since 2019. The higher number of transactions, a slightly higher commission rate, and record prices meant that the agency commission pools increased by over 15% in the last two years, even if one takes into account the catch-up transactions last year from 2020. January 2022's transaction numbers were solid, with 3% more than 2020 and 9% more transactions than 2019.
The big question many have been asking is what will happen this year with the looming interest rate rise and inflation? We can look forward using our unique leading indicators, which I've updated to the start of this week. Looking at the top graph, the orange line is our forward-looking measure of demand. This is the number of people actively looking to buy in the market. Looking at our most up-to-date data, despite the concerns over inflation and interest rates, we're running with demand at around 30% higher than early 2020. The teal line is the number of sales we believe are being agreed. At the moment, that's typically three to six months ahead of completion.
Perhaps reflecting the lack of choice on the market, this isn't ahead of 2020, but we are still seeing the same number of deals being agreed as we did in that early month of 2020. The dark green line is perhaps the best measure of how the market feels. It's the length of time a property is advertised as being for sale, i.e., before the deal is agreed. It's running at getting close to twice as fast as early 2020. I spoke last year about the lack of new stock coming to market. In 2022, we've seen over 10% more people sending valuation requests from our vendor lead tools than a year ago. After a slow start, there are some signs that the new stock position is climbing.
It would certainly seem that the supply and demand imbalance is gonna be with us for at least the remainder of the first half, and it's impacting the market in a few ways. The market is becoming more efficient. Typically, only around half of properties listed will sell. This has risen to over 75%, which is supporting that increased rate of sales being agreed. New agent formation is slower than one would expect at this point in the cycle as, of course, a new agent has to win all of their stock before they begin trading. New homes developers are also experiencing that record demand, with developments continuing to sell out well before delivery. I'm sure we'll have much more to hear about interest rates and inflation during the year, and I have no doubt that the cost of living will significantly impact many people.
However, at the moment, the data suggests that among home buyers, the availability of low mortgage rates and larger deposits from lockdown savings, combined with the desire to change their lives, is driving strong demand. Given that and the January transaction numbers, I think 1.1 million-1.3 million transactions this year is not unreasonable. Turning to Rightmove, I'll look at each of the following in turn. I'll lead with home hunters, our customer numbers, and package and product sales. I'll then wrap up by looking at some of the innovation we're delivering to digitize more of the transaction. Starting with our lead with home hunters. Time spent on Rightmove was up 15% on last year.
If you needed a demonstration of the instinctive place that home hunters turn to, we recorded our busiest day ever on the seventh of April with over 70 million minutes spent on the platform in a single day. You can see from the Comscore chart that our market share of time is stable despite quite a lot of activity from our competitors, and also Comscore have now begun tracking Boomin. All of this adds up to just one way we deliver value to our customers, quality leads, which were up over 25% year-over-year. Demonstrating the underlying value of our proposition to agents in both slower and stronger markets, we've had the lowest number of agency leavers since 2014, which has driven our retention rate to the highest it's ever been.
However, as I just mentioned, new agent formation has been slower than might have been expected, as the lack of new stock coming to market is making it very difficult for new agents to start up. Nearly 40% of the leavers in 2021 were businesses which had existed for less than a year and sadly failed. I don't expect this pattern to change in the first half of 2022 unless we see a sustained growth in new listing numbers. A question which a number of people have asked me over the last few months is: What has the pandemic done to Rightmove's market share of agents listing? The graph at the bottom right shows Rightmove's proportion of all stock listed on the Internet. You can see from the chart that the proportion of stock listed has stayed broadly flat in the mid 1990s.
As you can see from the data, the small number of agents who don't list with Rightmove tend to have very low stock levels, quite often because they're start-up businesses. At the moment, our proposition doesn't always work for them. It's an area I think we can do better with over the next few years. In new homes, as you would have heard many times already, developers are forward sold well into this year. It's simply a story of reduced supply and increased demand having to work through the system. In terms of the number of large new homes developer companies advertising with us, that hasn't changed.
I fully expect the number of developments will rise when we move out of this particular supply and demand imbalance. We saw the rate of decline slow towards the end of last year, so the indicators suggest we should see the trend slow and reverse in H2. I know you're all familiar with our overall strategy, but I thought it might be useful to talk about how we see revenue growth within that strategy. Firstly, we see an opportunity in helping agents and developers get buyers for property, the core property listing. For agents, this is where our like-for-like pricing actions happen. These tend to be focused on our Essential and Enhanced customers. There's a lot of detail in here, but despite having executed this part of the strategy for 17 of the last 21 years, there's more sophistication in our execution than ever before.
This is where our products for new homes developers fit, as Alison described earlier. The next segment is where our agency product suite focuses. All our products are designed to help agents find and win vendors. These products help them at various stages of the marketing funnel, from initial brand awareness through vendor leads to closing and retention. I'll talk more about how effective those products are and the direction we're headed in in a moment. We think there's a lot of headroom in this category, as winning vendors is the lifeblood of an agent's business, and Rightmove is still less than half an agent's marketing spend despite the breadth and depth of the value we deliver. The dotted line is very important. We know we can help customers reduce their operating costs with tools, services, and data. By doing this, we can increase the agent's marketing budget.
Not only can we win more of the pie, we can and are making the pie bigger. On top of that growth, we can see that by digitizing more of the rental and sales transaction, we can add more revenue from new revenue sources. The super thing about this segment is that by making the transaction easier, we can not only increase our revenue, but we can help agents be more efficient by removing admin, and we can make our home hunter offer even more compelling. That's the concept. Let's dig into some realities. I thought we'd start with an example of how we're helping our customers become more efficient. As I just noted, this is one of the ways we're ensuring our growth runway is long. Training is notoriously expensive to purchase and of variable quality.
We will be launching a more formal education program for our customers as part of their membership. At the end of the training, agents will be able to take an exam which leads to an NVQ level three certificate. I'd like to stress that the mix of on-demand learning and virtual tutorials will be free to customers as part of their membership. This is about helping them reduce their costs and prepare for the future. That enlarged middle segment of our growth strategy, digital solutions, which agents use to find and win vendors, only works if our products deliver value to our customers. That might sound obvious, but it's of critical importance to us. We have products which work across the consideration to instruction steps of the marketing funnel.
We introduced our first vendor lead product in 2012, Local Valuation Alert, and have added Rightmove Discover, the predictive product, in 2018, and we've continued to develop their efficiency and effectiveness ever since. As the middle chart shows, that ongoing evolution yields results for our customers and increases the available inventory for us, with the number of vendor leads sent in 2021 40% higher than 2019. Perhaps the simplest expression of whether our products work is the chart at the bottom. It shows the number of product units a customer purchases versus the number of instructions they win in a year. Our highest spending Optimiser customers purchase over 25 product units a month. As you can see, they win over four times as many instructions as a customer who just takes the core subscription.
Of course, we don't win those instructions to the agent. We create the opportunities and give them the tools. The process still requires their skill to convert that into an instruction. However, if one assumes the average agent commission is around GBP 2,500 per sale, it's very easy to see the value delivered. I think it's a pretty reasonable question following that to ask why I think we can keep generating products which deliver incremental value to our customers. I thought it worthwhile to share some of our thinking behind our next gen products, which began rolling out at the end of 2019 with Sold By Me. Rather than talk about the features of the products, I'd like to talk about the attributes which make them perform for our customers and leverage our unique position in the marketplace.
Perhaps most importantly, you'll see that our next-gen products are actually implemented as useful consumer features. I know a lot of companies talk about adverts being integrated, but we take that a step further. If the product answers a home hunter's need as a feature, it creates significantly greater engagement and therefore performance. I think Sold By Me is a great example. It's helping a potential vendor think about agents through the lens of who sells properties like mine, which we know from our research is a key criteria in deciding which agents to engage with. Smart targeting is probably self-evident. Using our significant first-party data, we can help our customers talk to more of the right consumers at the right time. Equally, customer need centricity is pretty obvious, but we can now go deeper and answer the needs of a specific customer group.
We are well beyond one size fits all. The GBP 4 million run rate for our Built for Renters product, introduced in Q3 last year, is testament to what happens when we get that right. First-party attribution is about us building for the future. You'll all know that data privacy rules are becoming tougher, and this is an area where our scale and audience gives us a significant advantage over other platforms which rely on third-party attribution. If I take the last two together, this is really about making it as easy and fast as possible to solve customers' problems with as little effort from them as we can manage. You can see from the list of products we've delivered on the right-hand side, we've covered a lot of ground over the last two years, and we're not stopping.
Our new agent promotion product is currently in design and due to launch in Q3. More about that as the year unfolds. If there's one thing I'd like you to take from this slide, it's that our product development is thoughtful and guided by a strategy. Looking to the future, the changes in the data privacy environment place us in an even better position. We're building a platform of components which allows us to produce product variants which are specific to customer type and needs. By doing this, we're able to rapidly deploy new products which have a very high chance of success and generate significant revenue growth. How do you see that manifest itself in ARPA? As many of you know, the main revenue mechanic for our product is via our flexible packages.
First up, I wanted to update you on where we are with the upsell of customers towards our Optimiser 2020 package. As you can see, we continue with upgrade success in the second half, ending the year with just over 1,400 upgrades to Optimiser 2020 at an average uplift of just over GBP 300. Two-thirds of the upgrades came from the older Optimiser 2015 package. I'm very pleased that we're seeing a significant number of upgrades from the Essential and Enhanced packages. We've taken the decision to retire Optimiser 2015, and we started working with customers to upgrade them at the end of last year. We expect the majority of that process to be complete in the first half of this year. To hopefully answer the question which is now forming, what next?
I'd like to talk a little bit about the graph on the left of the slide. As a reminder, our packages are actually a minimum spend within which customers can choose their own product mix. Customers can also choose to add products to their package as time goes on. The chart shows that after 12 months, Optimiser customers have, on average, added GBP 93 to their product spend. Customers are taking themselves off the top of our product ladder. Perhaps none of us should be surprised, given the value, the charts I showed earlier. As agents start to experience the value our products can add to their business, they buy more. Together, these form the first of our near-term growth opportunities.
Move more customers onto the Optimiser package and work with those customers who've taken the package in the last 12 months to see more value and therefore buy more units. The graph on the bottom left also leads to our second near-term opportunity. The behavior of sampling the value and then investing more to win more is not limited to our Optimiser customers. Two-thirds of our customers upgrade to the next package on the ladder after investing in product. What's interesting is the trigger spend, i.e., the amount customers spend while trying a product before upgrading to the next package, is surprisingly low, on average, around GBP 80. I think this is exactly the same behavior as one sees in Optimiser customers. Try a little before seeing the value and then commit more.
It's a very rational customer behavior and one which, given the success of our products, works well. As you can see from the bottom left, our largest single group of agency customers is the Essential base. This frames our second near-term opportunity, encouraging our Essential customers to try a little more product to enable them to see the value and then join the package ladder. I think this is going to be a multi-year focus, and we've already got some trials running to home in on how we achieve that. It's worth reiterating these opportunities are all on top of the like-for-like pricing growth focused on listings. We've already communicated the pricing changes to 20% of the customers in this year's plan, and the results are in line with previous years.
That's quite a lot of information on what we're doing to harness the significant opportunity in our core marketing business. I'll finish up this segment with an update on how our work to digitize more of the transaction is going, which will layer growth on top of this. We see opportunity in helping home hunters get financial certainty earlier in their search journey. The current process is inefficient and upsetting for buyers and sellers and wasteful for agents. When we are successful, this will also become a notable revenue stream for us. In 2021, we focused at the top of the mortgage conversion funnel. You can see from the bottom funnel at the bottom of the page that work has borne fruit with significant conversion increases in the steps we focused on, leading to tangible increases in leads to our lender partner.
For 2022, our next step is to focus on the mortgage in principle conversion rate. The mortgage in principle is a big and complex step, and we believe by providing a more integrated experience on Rightmove, we can significantly impact the conversion rate. Hence, we aim to have our first iteration of a lender that MIP on-site by the end of the first half of this year, which will be a first. This will be a baseline for us to begin optimization against, but will be a big step towards providing that certainty to more consumers. We're further ahead on our digital renting journey with good progress in the second half of the year and exciting deliveries lined up for H1. As I talked about in previous presentations, we've been focusing on improving the process of renting a property for the last few years.
We believe that because of our unique position in the market, with more people searching for rental properties than anyone else, we're the only company to be able to truly change the rental process for the better from end to end. In 2021, we enabled one-click reference ordering from Rightmove Plus. The streamlined flow from lead to keys is where our innovation for rentals is currently focused. The first phase of the digital tenancy workflow will launch in H1. For tenants who apply via Rightmove, an agent will be able to take a holding deposit via Open Banking, offer referencing, a fully compliant digital rental contract, and deliver the legally mandated tenancy documents electronically, all via a managed flow workflow from within Rightmove Plus. In its own right, this will yield many benefits for agents and tenants alike.
When combined with the new Open Banking-based reference, which we're rolling out at the end of Q1, the benefits will be further enhanced. The use of Open Banking reduces the information we need to collect for the reference and will reduce the turnaround time as more of the employment details will be checked electronically. By building this on top of our existing high-quality referencing process, we can ensure that agents and landlords can rely on a Rightmove reference regardless of the tenant's situation. In tests, the new system will reduce the time taken for a tenant to complete the referencing application form by around a third, and reduce turnaround time by around 20%. The reference itself is profitable, but we also see opportunity in landlord and tenant insurances.
Our scale and the quality of reference allowed us to launch two new-to-market landlord insurance products at the end of 2021, both of which are showing promise at the start of this year. We've much to do and much ambition. Bringing it back to 2021, let's wrap up with the outlook. The network effects at the heart of our business are stronger than ever with record traffic and leads. At the moment, the property market is busier than it's been for a long time. Whilst the level of impact of interest rates and inflation rises is hard to predict, the indicators we have give cause for optimism that the strong demand will continue. Agents continue to recognize the value of our unrivaled audience and products with strong offer growth being driven by a combination of pricing changes and the agents upgrading package to grow their business.
Looking forward, we see the momentum from the second half of 2021 continuing this year, and will benefit from the price changes we implemented in the last quarter of 2021. Mindful of the lack of new stock, I think it's prudent to assume we'll see a small growth in agency branches over the year. Equally, I think the good conditions will continue for new homes developers. For the rest of the year, I'd expect the number of developments on site to fall as they sell out and then flatten in H2. As you can see, there's no slowdown in our ambition to make home moving easier or our long-term outlook. Thank you for your time.