Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the presentation of Rightmove's 2020 Full Year Results. My name is Peter Brooks Johnson, and I'm joined for the first time by Alison Dolan, our CFO, who joined Rightmove in September and she'll introduce herself in a moment. This is today's agenda. I'm going to talk through the highlights of the year. Alison's going to go through some of the more detailed financials.
And then I'm going to spend some time giving you a little more color on the housing market and our strategic developments. One can't talk about 2020 without talking about how Rightmove has responded to the threats and risks from COVID-nineteen. As the pandemic struck, We acted swiftly to look after our people, support our customers and protect our liquidity. I'll talk about the first two and Alison will cover the last in her section. All our employees moved seamlessly to working from home on 17th March and remain so today.
I'd like to say a special thank you to all the right movers who have not only looked out for each other but our customers as well. Whilst you will be aware of the significant financial support we've offered our customers, I think the practical assistance we offered has also been important. This slide gives you a flavour of the practical assistance the team have delivered over the last year, so I won't repeat it. Moving on to the highlights of 2020. In 2020, COVID-nineteen upended the lives of everyone across the UK.
The Rightmove network effect has emerged stronger than ever as Home Hunters continue to turn to Rightmove 1st and customers begin to invest more in our digital solutions to aid their recovery. 2020 was a record year for traffic with total time spent on the platform of 15,900,000,000 minutes, 31% higher than 2019 and our enviable competitive position has strengthened. The first half of twenty twenty wasn't easy for our customers. With the temporary suspension of the housing market from the 23rd March to 13th May in England and later in Scotland and Wales. Advertisers on the 31st December stood at just shy of 19,200, a fall of 3%.
Our agency customers have been resilient with numbers rising in the second half of twenty twenty. Testament to their flexibility, our branch based agents have only reduced by just over 200 branches over the course of the year, despite everything thrown at them. The remainder of the drop in customers being the hybrid stock based agents and new home developments where all the units were sold. As previously announced, we offered a 75% discount for all of our Estate Agent and New Homes customers from April to July and continue to support the industry with a 60% discount in August and a 40% discount in September. The impact of that can be seen in the 29% fall in revenue and corresponding fall in profit and EPS.
Given the uncertainty which unfolded in the first half of last year, We chose to preserve liquidity and cancel the 2019 final dividend and not declare an interim dividend for 2020. I would like to thank shareholders for their support in this. We remain committed to our capital allocation policy. And given the strong trading in the second half of the year, We are resuming our share buyback program and announcing a final dividend of 4.5p. Beyond our KPIs, we have made much strategic progress so far this year.
Rytm's purpose is to make home moving easier in the UK. We will satisfy our purpose and drive growth through innovation. We continue to innovate in our heartland of property advertising with the development of the Home Hunter part of the website, products and packages. And we continue to innovate to help agents be more efficient. Helping agents become more efficient has always been part of our strategy as we see as a way of helping them reduce their costs, spending a larger proportion of their revenue on property marketing and still being more profitable.
And we innovate with data to support our customers too. In 2020, we rolled out new tools to help our Estate Agent and New Homes customers gain vital local insights to make their marketing more efficient. Whilst property advertising will be the core of our growth, we are also innovating to generate future growth. We believe that there is much opportunity in helping Home Hunters to be transaction ready and have completed Phase 1 of our digital rental journey. And we're looking to the future in the property sales market as well.
We're integrating online property auctions on the site. More on all of that later. 2020 has reminded us we're part of a much bigger community and we've redoubled our efforts to ensure Rightmove is playing its part. We continue to actively reduce our carbon emissions and offset those we cannot avoid. While we are also intending to use our platform for good, Alison will talk a little more about our climate goals later.
We deeply believe in opportunity for all. And I'm pleased that some of our longer term actions to reduce our gender pay gap paying off, but we have much more to do and will not rest until we reach parity. Again, we aim to do more beyond our immediate surroundings and I'm very excited at our new partnership with the charity Generating Genius who focus on raising the next generation of STEM leaders from Black and ethnic minorities and those from disadvantaged backgrounds. There's much excitement for the future, but this is all built on our strong position today. Before I give a little more color to what we've seen more recently and our strategic position, I'll hand over to Alison to talk about the numbers in more detail.
Thanks, Peter. Good morning, everybody. I'm Alison. I'm disappointed not to be able to meet you all in person today and I look forward to doing that as soon as possible. I joined Rightmove in September, having spent close to 4 years at News UK as Chief Strategy Officer, Where I was primarily focused on subscription growth for The Times, the integration of the newly purchased Wireless Group And the growth of News UK's audio products, particularly its podcast output and plans for the launch of Times Radio.
Prior to that, I spent 15 years at Sky where for 12 of those I was Group Treasurer. I did a number of divisional finance director roles, including the Your roles including the technology business and the B2B business, which I then ran for 4 years before I left in 2016, There are real similarities between Sky Business and Rightmove. The subscribing customers are using our product to market their own business to end consumers and to differentiate themselves from their competitors and our focus was to maximize the value of our proposition to our customers And this is one of the reasons that I was excited to join Rightmove. It has been a hugely enjoyable 6 months. I've been struck by Rightmove's clarity of strategy and ambitions for growth as well as the deep understanding of its market and the businesses of our customers.
One of the things that I'm really going to value about being out of lockdown is being better able to absorb some of this understanding Because not being able to be part of office conversations is one of the things that I found most frustrating about joining a new business during lockdown. So I'm looking forward to a more normal second 6 months. Now on to the results. As Peter outlined, Revenue for the year very clearly tells the story of the discounts we provided to our customers in the light of which our performance for the year has been very satisfactory. Revenue fell by £83,600,000 or 29 percent to £205,700,000 The revenue bridge on the right separates out the various elements involved.
The customer discounts we provided following the market closure on the 23rd March Totaled £89,000,000 and agency revenues were the biggest component of that drop at close to £70,000,000 Stripping out the discount, however, underlying ARPA grew, increasing revenues by £13,600,000 From a combination of earlier price rises, package upgrades and increased product take up as customers took advantage of the buoyant market in the second half of the year, New homes developers also spent more on products during the year. The financial impact of a drop in customer numbers was just over £12,000,000 And other revenues, which include our BRETT businesses and the Van Mildred's revenues not included in ARPA, grew by about £4,000,000 The largest of these gains was in 3rd party advertising, which grew by £2,600,000 Other gains included commercial and data services, But the overseas business fell by just over £1,000,000 due to virus related travel restrictions. Now there are a lot of moving parts making up The discount in ARPA numbers, the discount in particular, which includes non ARPA revenues. So if we look at ARPA itself, The underlying trend is a little easier to see. Year on year, including the discount, ARPA fell by 28% To £778.
However, because 2020 ARPA is so distorted by the effect of the discount And the fact that 20 nineteen's 12 month ARPA only included 3 months of Van Mildred revenues, 3 month trailing ARPA works better By October 2020, the discount had been fully unwound, making the final quarter of 2020 A truer picture for ARPA and also the final quarter of 2019 included Van Mildert in all 3 months. So on that basis, 3 month trailing ARPA for 2020 grew 2% on 2019. We expect a growth profile for 2021 to look more like 20 nineteen's growth, possibly a little softer than the 8% we saw in that year, but not And December 2020's monthly ARPA of £1103 is we think a pretty good starting base. ARPA growth for 2021 will also be driven more by product growth and package upgrades than it will by price. The cost slide is designed to illustrate the makeup of our cost base and to give you a sense of fixed costs relative to discretionary and variable costs.
Just over 50% of our cost base is headcount and 80% of that relates to our sales, customer service And product and platform teams. Marketing is our next most significant cost at approximately 18% of total costs. It's almost all discretionary and we did reduce our marketing spend in 2020 to preserve liquidity. Technology costs represent about 11% of the total. These are all of the costs associated with running the platform and the business, So hosting licenses, traffic costs, etcetera.
They are broadly fixed, although there are elements that grow as traffic to our sites grows And that will continue. G and A is also about 11% of the total rent, staff, travel, costs associated with referencing and rentals, etcetera. Depreciation and amortization are low for us as we capitalize so little, but represent a further 5% to 6%. The growth in costs over the last 3 years reflects investment in our sales and product teams and 2020 also includes a full year of van Mildred costs for the first time. Costs have been relatively steady at about 24% of revenues until 2020 when the increase to 33% is purely a function of reduced revenues in 2020.
We did make a number of one off cost savings during 2020 in the face of significant market Volatility and to preserve liquidity. Headcount savings were the most significant and were a mixture of furloughing some staff members, Voluntary salary costs on behalf of senior management and the Board and a pause in recruitment during the early months of the pandemic. In total, headcount savings amounted to £1,900,000 and these savings will not be repeated during 2020. Other staff related expenses such as travel, training and recruitment fees fell by £2,000,000 as people worked from home and were not paying recruiters. We also paused a number of outdoor marketing campaigns while people were at home, generating a saving of £0,700,000 Again, neither of these savings will repeat this year.
So gross savings of £4,600,000 All but £1,400,000 of which was offset by an increase in technology spend of £0,700,000 the majority of which was traffic related And a full year of van Mildred costs, the increase for which was £2,500,000 Unlike the savings, Both elements of the cost increase are likely to be with us for 2021. 2021 costs, therefore, will revert to a more normal profile and there will be an element of catch up costs in relation to recruitment in particular as we look to fill roles which have been vacant and to do that as quickly as we can. Filling the vacant product development roles is a key focus and will be particularly important in a year in which we will focus on product led growth. Over the past 4 years or so, our annual increase in operating costs has been in the order of £5,000,000 to £6,000,000 per year. You should expect that the 2 year profile of increases from 2019 to 2021 would be broadly consistent with this.
So ignoring the dip in 2020, a roughly £10,000,000 to £12,000,000 increase between 2019 2021. The fall in operating profit of 37% reflects the year's lower revenues And the natural gearing of the business and this has meant operating profit of £135,100,000 And an operating margin of 66%. Again, for 2021, you should expect to see operating profit returning closer to that of 2019 And the corresponding recovery of margin to 70% or slightly above. From profit to cash, there are a number of new elements to our cash flow this year. We started the year with £36,000,000 on the balance sheet.
And although operational cash generation was similar to last year's at 105%, the increase in balance sheet cash at the year end Reflects the absence of a dividend and a much reduced share buyback program for 2020. We ended the year with £97,000,000 of surplus cash and therefore have a couple of announcements for today. Firstly, we intend to continue to maintain higher levels of balance sheet cash than in previous years, approximately £50,000,000 which was the level at the half year. But we also feel that this is now an appropriate time to resume our share buyback program, which we will restart in March and to announce a final dividend for 2020 of 4.5p which will be paid in May. We will aim to end the year with £50,000,000 on the balance sheet once again.
We believe that this is an appropriate balance of ensuring additional liquidity to help To withstand any further volatility and our stated policy of returning surplus funds to shareholders, which remains unchanged. On the P and L, there is really only one element I would draw your attention to, which is the share based incentives charge, which is less than 50% of what it was in 2019. This is a function of a downward revision in relation to the assumptions On the extent to which performance conditions will be met for the earnings per share element of the 2018 2019 PSP awards And of the 2019 DSP award. Most of you will probably remember that in 2020, we decided to Move away from our previously used underlying operating profit, which excludes this IFRS 2 charge and use operating profit instead in our reporting. But we've had more than one conversation on the impact that this has had on consensus as it's really a charge which is difficult to predict and over which we have little control.
So for 2021, we will go back to reporting underlying profit operating profit and to using it as the performance metric for bonus and share awards For Exact Directors. On the balance sheet, the only noteworthy change really is the level of cash and money market deposits, Which I've explained. Working capital metrics remained remarkably consistent during the pandemic. We saw little to no increase in the level of bad debt. So although we increased our bad debt provision in anticipation of some increase, we've since unwound it again as we didn't need it.
Debtors days did slightly increase, reflecting support given to some customers to extend payment terms. We continue to pay our suppliers on the same prompt terms as pre pandemic, with average days payable for trade creditors remaining at around 19 days. Working capital has also benefited by £18,000,000 From the payment of the corporation tax liability in line with HMRC's changes, which require larger businesses to pay tax in the year in which the profit is generated. Now on ESG. We have increased our focus on all aspects of ESG during the last year and I will aim to update you at each reporting period on one element of our ESG agenda.
I'll start today with the environmental element Where there are both some new achievements and new commitments to talk about and where we have set ourselves some ambitious goals for the coming years. I'll talk firstly about these and then tell you some more about the frameworks under which we will report going forward. Rightmove achieved carbon neutrality in 2019, and we have retained that death status since then and will do so going forward. That has meant identifying and measuring our emissions and then offsetting them with 2 specific tree planting schemes, one in the U. K.
And the other in the Amazon. We're obviously happy to have achieved that, but our ambition is to reduce our emissions, not just to offset them. So we have made a renewed push on emissions reduction outlined in the table on this slide. The Sustainability Accounting Standards Board categorizes Rightmove as an Internet, Media and Services business with an already light carbon footprint, but challenge is to limit the footprint of our data centers and the resource consumption of our mobile staff. Our targets, therefore, focus on limiting power and water consumption for both our offices and our data centers, increasing the proportion of office waste that is recycled And increasing the targets for ultra low emissions vehicles between now and 2028, by which time we aim to ensure that our entire fleet is low emission.
We have also signed up to the 1.5 Degrees Science Based Targets initiative and have committed to work with the BTI scientists to ensure that the targets we have set ourselves are in line with the science behind keeping the planet at no We look forward to making really meaningful progress as we work towards net zero emissions. One of the features that these raters of businesses like about Rightmove is our ability to use our platform and our large audience in a system positive manner, aiming to lift all boats, if you like. For us, this could be about helping to create helpful content for consumers on how to increase the energy efficiency for their homes, and we have offered our help to government on this. We are also working with a number of mortgage lenders on the concept of green mortgages and what improved terms might be possible for borrowers with More Energy Efficient Homes. It's very early days, but we are excited about our ability to be a system positive business in this way and want to play our part in making meaningful change.
Lastly, on reporting going forward. Like others, we are preparing for the reporting requirements on the task force of climate related financial disclosures. The disclosures and impact assessment modeling required and we'll aim to use 2021 to get ready for the formal requirements in 2022. Our Board is also keen that we use this year to prepare for the TCFD. They are keenly interested to Sure that our environmental agenda is ambitious and they are being both supportive of our plans and challenging of us to ensure that we are adequately set up To make progress.
That's all from me. I'll now hand you back to Peter for a strategy and business update.
Thank you, Alison. I'll start off by briefly covering what happened in the housing market in 2020. The resilience of the housing market will surprise many. Despite being closed for nearly 3 months, Total transactions according to HMRC was still over £1,000,000 just over 11% down on 2019. The chart on the bottom of this page shows the shape of the transactions post the reopening of the market.
The market was strong in the second half of the year. Typically, transactions take around 3 months to complete, but COVID related processing delays extended this to over 4 months, which can be seen in the slow ramp up of transactions, which continues to build in the Q4. That's a backwards looking view. We're extremely fortunate that by being in the middle of the U. K.
Property market, we also have a unique forward looking view. I'll talk through the top chart first. This shows our proprietary view on demand and sales agreed in the market as well as the HMRC transaction data versus 2019. Starting with the most leading indicator, demand. This is the Light Teal Mine.
This is our measure of the number of unique buyers in the market inquiring about properties. You can see that this has been exceptionally strong since the relaxing of the first lockdown. You may be surprised to see that in reality, The announcement of the stamp duty holidays on the 8th July didn't materially increase demand. It was already running at 60% over 2019. Quite incredibly, despite the current lockdown, demand is rising and is again at around 30% higher than February last year.
Moving on to the next step in the process shown by the orange line, you can see that the demand translates into sales being agreed around a month to 6 weeks later. Sales agreed up to the 14th February this year were 20% ahead of the same period in 2019. It's very unlikely that sales being agreed in February will complete in time for the end of the stamp duty holiday, where if that happens at the end of March. I'm sure most agents are telling buyers and sellers this. So I think just as the announcement of the holiday didn't significantly change demand, It looks as if buyers are being motivated by more than potential tax saving and continue to want to move house for lifestyle reasons.
Our data suggests that there were around 630,000 transactions in the pipeline at the end of January 2021. With 1 in 5 of those transactions agreed in July last year still waiting to complete, that's around twice as many as a normal year. So putting the leading indicators alongside those 630,000 transactions, we expect to see strong transaction numbers for at least the Q1 this year. There will inevitably be some transactions which fall through post the stamp duty holiday, whenever that is, and I'd expect a quieter quarter after any announcement. Of course, as a platform, Rightmove is only loosely correlated with the and then only at extremes.
But from our customers' point of view, we've seen signs of a marginally increased commission rate and prices achieved for properties have also risen. So we believe that the agent commission pool would have grown slightly over the last few months. But before you get too carried away with the market, I'd like to sound a note of caution. If you look at the bottom chart, You can see that the available stock has fallen since the start of the year as a result of significantly less stock coming to market. It appears that lockdown is playing a role with COVID making potential sellers nervous about inviting people into their homes and also the impact of homeschooling, meaning potential sellers are preoccupied.
There's been a noticeable dip in the listing of family homes. And of course, the lack of choice reinforces this dynamic. A further listing impetus from an extension to the stamp duty holiday may be helpful. Whilst this stock reduction isn't impacting demand at the moment, lack of choice may well slow the market in Q3 if it doesn't start to reverse in Q2 as we exit lockdown. Whilst I'm cautiously optimistic, regardless of stamp duty deadlines, One must be mindful of a wider economic uncertainty in the rest of 2021.
I'm sure you're all familiar with our strategy, but I think it's always an important place to start. In simple terms, we will have the largest audience of Home Hunters If we continue to deliver a great user experience, leveraging both our 20 years of knowledge, but also keeping pace with modern technology. By combining virtually every home hunter in the UK with our deep relationships with agents, we can deliver products which perform and help our customers to be successful. And by innovating to create a better marketplace, we can create more opportunity for our customers and new opportunities for Rightmove and we will make home moving in the UK easier for everyone. I'll look at each of the following in turn.
I'll lead with Home Hunters, our package and product sales and ARPA and our cut number of customers. I'll then wrap up by looking at some of those new opportunities. So starting with our lead with Home Hunters. Alongside the record time spent on our platforms, For the first time ever, we recorded over 2,000,000,000 visits in a year, which is 31% up on last year. And we've just recorded another record with Wednesday 17th February being our busiest day ever with over 8,500,000 visits in the day.
Clearly, much of that is attributable to the rapid pickup of the market in the second half of the year. As you can see from the Comscore chart, Our market share has increased as consumers have turned to the site they trusted to deliver an impartial view on the marketplace. Rightmove is more than just search. We continue to extend our lead as the place consumers come to research the property market. With traffic to our research tools such as sold prices up over 20% on the year.
And Rightmove remains the only place to see more or less the whole of the UK property in one place. Taken together, I don't think there can be any doubt that Rightmove is the place consumers turn to 1st and engage with most. All of this adds up to just one way we deliver value to our customers, quality leads, which were up 27% year on year. We delivered a record 51,000,000 leads in the year and continue to be much higher quality than any other lead source. It's also pleasing that development work to simplify the process of registering with Rightmove and setting up an instant alert also bore fruit with a record number of Home Hunters registering with us in 2020.
The combination of this record and the rapidly changing marketplace in the second half of the year led to us delivering 24% more alerts than 2019. So not only did Home Hunters turn to us first, They heard about new properties on the market from us first too. I thought it might be useful to spend a moment talking about how that exposure helps agents win the right to sell a home. Those of you who know Rightmove well will be familiar that an agent's main priority is winning the right to sell a home as that is the route to their future income. Firstly, the leads we deliver are not only a source of tenants and buyers, we also ask buyers if they have a property to sell.
On top of that, Our products work to help agents from attracting potential sellers to securing that right to sell. Premium Listing was one of our first products launched in February 2007 and we've refined the design over the last 13 years. Premium Listing makes a property stand out by giving it a bigger listing with more photos in the results list. Agents often use this right at the end of the process to secure the right to sell a property and as you can see, agents know it works. Sold by me is our most recent product, which was launched at the end of 2019 as part of the Optimizer 2020 package.
Sold by Me operates right at the start of the sales funnel in the consideration phase. It highlights the properties which an agent has sold to help them demonstrate their success to potential sellers. Over half of sellers are looking to move out of an area. So where we know a potential seller's home address, sold by me uses dynamic targeting to show them properties from an agent who operates in their home area rather than the area in which they're looking. Of course, the majority of the lifting for an agent's brand is done within the Rightmove site.
But as you can see from the chart at the bottom, we're also driving traffic to agents' websites to let potential sellers get to know the agency better. And finally, we also have products which streamline lead generation. For example, Local Valuation Alert. This is designed to put potential sellers directly in touch with a local agent. It effectively allows agents to skip the consideration phase entirely and get straight to trying to win the instruction in the seller's home.
Because we have a whole of market view, we can track whether those sellers who are requesting valuations are putting their homes on the market. Last year, just looking at properties which actually came to market, Local Valuation Alert introduced sellers who were worth nearly £70,000,000 in commission to agents. By utilizing our consistent investment and extensive data, These and all our other products add up to unrivaled exposure for our customers, which in turn underpins our long term ARPA growth. As Alison mentioned, we expect 2021 ARPA growth to be marginally softer than 2019 and we expect it mainly to be driven by product spend. In order to win sellers, agents are aiming to differentiate themselves from their competition.
And as you can see, that's what our products do. With nearly 40% of our agency customers taking one of our packages, it's important that we maintain the differentiation for those customers. So our strategy is not to significantly grow the proportion of agents who are on a package, but to increase the proportion of customers on our premium package. Starting with the lower enhanced package, you can see the numbers have softened a little. Around 60% of that delta are customers upgrading to optimizer and the remainder fell prey to the difficult trading conditions in 2020 and shut their doors.
As I mentioned earlier, Particularly pleasing has been the continued sales of our super premium package, Optimizer 2020, with the majority of upgrades coming from customers on the cheaper Optimizer 2015 package. As you can see from the chart in Mizer 2015 package. As you can see from the chart in the bottom right, we've seen consistent growth in the second half of last year and that's continued into January with 60 upgrades in the month. So moving on to customer numbers. As I mentioned earlier, customer numbers fell in the year by 3%.
Within that fall, There are only just over 200 fewer branch based agents. The majority of these were small one branch agents with very low stock levels and therefore cash reserves. Given their size and the interruption to their cash flow, I think it shows just how resilient estate agents are. The graphs at the bottom of the page give you a sense of the dynamics in the agency market. They show joiners and levers indexed to 2020.
You can see from the graph on the left that in the second half of twenty twenty, we have more joiners than any 6 month period since the first half of twenty fifteen. This was a combination of some of the branches which were mothballed in the first half of the year being unfrozen and also a pickup in new business attracted by the vibrant market. A note of caution on those new businesses though, We're continuing to see a trend, which I suspect is common to most small business categories. The failure rate is around 50% in the 1st 6 months. So we shouldn't expect a rapid expansion in branch numbers just yet.
Turning to levers. The second half of twenty 20 again shows the resilience of agents. Across the last 5 years, we have only seen fewer agencies leaving the business in the second half in 20152017. Looking forward, we've had modest agent growth in January, but as earlier, I would counsel caution. The more established customers who tend to have a higher success rate at opening new branches are rebuilding their balance sheet after 2020 and are therefore hanging back a little.
In addition, the looming Stock Challenge makes it more difficult to successfully open a branch. Adding to that, the success rate of those new businesses, I think, suggests that we're likely to be around flat on new branch numbers for the year. Of course, if the stock challenge disappears, it may be different in the second half. As ever, the story with New Home's membership is a little simpler. To remind you, we count each development site as a member in our membership numbers.
This graph shows you the number of developments we've counted in our membership numbers as the black line and the number of developers, in other words, the companies, as the teal line. Social distancing restrictions means it's been taking longer to build new properties. Developers have worked hard to speed up their development rate whilst keeping their team safe and are just now getting back to a supply rate, which is similar to pre pandemic levels. The buoyant market in second half of the year saw the sales rate outstrip the build rate. Hence, we saw a reduction in developments listed.
Given the current pace of the market, I'd expect the number of developments on the site to continue to fall in the first half of this year as again, construction may struggle to keep up with demand. Indeed, many developers have already sold most of their planned property completions up to the middle of this year. We've refined our propositions for developments in the pre marketing phase. And I think in the second half of this year, we should see development numbers grow a little as the impact of the increased build rate starts to balance supply and demand. The audience on Rightmove is a vital part of the value we deliver to our customers and we're always looking for ways to improve our Home Hunter experience.
The new sold price section and the ground up rebuild of the property details page have been fully rolled out and then they're both delivering benefits to all customers and Home Hunters. The page has also been designed to allow us flexibility to tailor the experience for different property types and to create more bespoke advertising products for our diverse advertisers. I thought I'd give you an insight into 3 new products we're on track to launch this year, which build on the property details page. The first is a new listing specifically aimed at new homes developers. The new product is designed to enable cross sell and up sell between properties on a development once a home hunter has found somewhere of interest.
It's also designed to make it easier for our home hunters to visualize the whole development, not just the property they're looking at. This product is currently in beta test and we're seeing encouraging results and customer feedback. We will be launching it in April. The second is aimed at enabling more home movers to consider auction as a mechanism for either buying or selling their home. In a traditional auction, the buyer is usually committed to the purchase on the fall of the hammer.
In reality, this means that most people who require a mortgage are excluded from considering auction properties because of the potential abortive costs. Beyond being able to track an auction at home without the pressure of the auction room, Conditional online auctions open the auction up to those who need a mortgage to finance the purchase. The provision of an upfront sales pack and reservation fee also creates advantages for buyers and sellers. With the typical time to complete around half the usual time taken for a private treaty sale and reduced fall throughs. We will integrate the auction and current bid information on properties which are being sold in this way.
Critically, we're also integrating buyer and seller help information on the listing to ensure both understand the auction process and can determine if it's right for them. This is currently in development and we're going to beta test in Q2. And finally, we're going to leverage a new page to help build to rent operators. Build to rent is a rapidly growing segment with strong growth projections. Typically, a build to rent property offers more amenities such as common areas and bills included than you would see in a private rental property.
It's therefore more expensive. Our research shows that these properties are attractive to many prospective tenants, but the operators find it difficult to differentiate their proposition to those tenants. Given the market reach of the Rightmove platform, We believe we can help operators communicate more successfully to potential tenants and also help those tenants who might prefer a more complete offer find the perfect match. We expect our build to rent listing to enter beta test in Q3. I don't expect a noticeable revenue impact in 2021 from these products, but taken together, they will impact 2022.
Rightmove is still only between 6% 7% for typical agents revenue. As I said earlier, a key part of our strategy is helping our customers become more efficient so that they can afford to spend more on marketing products and still be more profitable. One way we do this is by utilizing our whole of market view to provide tools which give unique insights to help drive their businesses forward. Here are a couple of the tools that we released this year. The first is the Coming Soon tool for new homes developers.
It focuses on helping a developer refine the pricing and marketing for development shortly before launch. It brings together important up to date information on the housing market. Of course, there are other proxies for this information in the marketplace. But critically, the information we provide is near real time and whole of market. The lower tool is the lead location tool for agents.
Again, this uses our proprietary data about home movers gleaned from the 1,300,000,000 minutes per month they spend on Rightmove. This maps where people who are looking to move, Move to. This is important as it is these people who are thinking of moving who will form potential sellers for their area. As you can see from this real example, it's not unusual for the majority of sellers to be moving just outside an agent's area. Traditional marketing struggles to reach these sellers.
One of the things which frustrates many proactive agents is that all of their competition will get to know about these potential sellers who are moving out of area at the same time when the seller chooses to contact an agent. Of course, Sold by Me and Local Valuation Alert can help the agent find out before their competition. All of these innovations will help us grow in the near term, but we're also innovating for future growth. Rightmove is about making home moving easier for both Property Professionals and Home Movers. Helping Home Hunters be transaction ready is not only part of our purpose, it will help professionals be more efficient and creates future revenue opportunities for Rightmove.
The video viewing tool, which we launched as part of our COVID response, is part of the first phase of work to build a better digital tenant flow. I shared the flow at the top of this slide back in February. It shows the broad phases of the rental flow from search to living in the rental property. As you can see, Phase 1 is now complete, which covers the majority of the journey, bringing together the Rightmove tenant passport, Rightmove's viewings manager and Van Mildert. Phase 2 is in development this year, which will bring enhancements to each step and also add in the contracting process.
And this flow is already creating value for our customers and revenue opportunities for Rightmove. The whole flow makes the path to rental easier for agent and tenant. The first half of the flow has significant efficiency savings for agents. Online viewing videos bring greater benefits in lettings. Given the lower financial commitment, We're beginning to see some tenants willing to commit to a tenancy without a physical viewing.
Whilst this is a minority, a greater proportion of tenants are willing to use videos to narrow their Search. Typically, half the home hunters who request a video watch it and go on to request a physical viewing. It's a significant opportunity for saving agents and tenants' wasted journeys as we typically generate around 250 tenant inquiries a month for each branch. Following a successful beta, we launched our next version of the Tenant Passport and Viewings Manager in November. Since then, over 400 branches have signed up to these free tools.
The passport allows agents to simply and easily assess a property's affordability and suitability for a tenant, potentially allowing them to suggest something more suitable. Again, This saves agent time and tenant disappointment. Between November January, tenants created and shared 40,000 passports. Viewings Manager allows the tenant to request appointment times directly from Rightmove. But it's more than just appointment booking.
Once an appointment is confirmed, Viewings Manager coordinates the process, reminding the tenant pre appointment and gathering feedback and interest after the appointment. Tenants requested 18,000 appointments in January alone. And early data suggests that the appointment reminders and ease of canceling appointment reduces no shows by up to 50%, a further significant saving for agents. When these three steps are taken together, They have enabled some customers to reduce the number of viewings per let by up to 70%. We see revenue opportunity in the second half of the flow.
Referencing is a profitable business, and we see much opportunity in bringing more of our data experience to bear in this arena as part of Phase 2 of the digital tenancy journey. Van Millbrook reference ordering is now fully integrated in Viewings Manager, reducing rekeying and promoting speed. We've begun offering tenants contents insurance directly to tenants after their reference is successful. It's early days, but the initial results are positive. Having a good product offered in the right context at the right time leads to a positive conversion rate and successful reference indicates imminent move.
Content insurance isn't the only product we could offer in this way as we increase our experience in this area. Of course, the more references we deliver, the larger number of opportunities we have to offer products to tenants. We've got exciting plans this year, but it's still early days. Beyond the efficiency benefits we bring to agents and tenants, I think this will become an interesting revenue stream in around 3 to 5 years. We've much to do and much ambition.
But bringing it back to 2020, 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 at least 3 years. Agents continue to recognize the value in our unrivaled audience and our products with upgrades continuing to perform well. We are mindful of the uncertain economic backdrop and we are planning modest price rises this year.
With the strong market and the strong product sales I expect most of our growth in 2021 to be product led. However, we are cautious for the rest of the year, particularly with a lack of stock, which may impact branch numbers and the likely fall in development numbers in the first half of the year. I'm delighted that today we are announcing a resumption of our capital return policy with a dividend and such share buybacks. We have the intention of reducing our cash position to £50,000,000 by the end of 2021. I'd like to thank our shareholders for their support and understanding in 2020.
As you can see, there's no slowdown in our ambition or in our long term outlook. Thank you.