Great! So welcome to this Rightmove Investor Day. It's great to have you all, and thank you very much for attending in the room, and a lot of people on the webinar as well. So I think what we saw in that video is just what an impactful industry that we operate in, touching literally every personal life out there and most of our professional lives as well. My name is Johan Svanström. I've been in technology companies and leadership positions for the last 25 years, of pretty much an international career. I joined as CEO of Rightmove eight months ago, and that was on the back of a pretty turbulent, or at least volatile, backdrop for the industry, and certainly the markets overall. Now, what I've learned over this time is that Rightmove is an extraordinarily resilient company and business model.
We have evidenced that today through the trading update sent out on the RNS this morning, and I think you have all seen it, most likely. What I've also learned is that the business is formed and operated by a truly high-quality team, some of whom, mostly on the front bench here, you will meet throughout today in the presentations and the breakout sessions. What I plan to do, together with this team, is to continue to deliver a superb business and to progress even further the digital transformation of the UK property market. We have outlined a plan... Sorry, that was not supposed to happen there. We have outlined as a plan is to further raise the ambition across several fronts of the business, as you've also heard before. What we wanna do is ensure long-term growth prospects.
We have a vision that stretches many years out, and we will use our UK-focused scale and innovation to deliver exactly on that. We wanna continue to show compounding growth through economic cycles and certainly through a variety of industry events. Now, I'll ask a question: Who here in the audience had to remortgage their home in the last 12-18 months? Couple of hands. Don't worry, we got drinks after the presentation. Who here in the audience thinks that the combination of technology and property is a very interesting business and probably opportunity? Yes, it should be all hands. Correct. And we have drinks for everybody to continue exactly that conversation after the presentation. So speaking of tech, internet was, of course, a defining moment for this industry, as well as for many others.
It started to shoot in sort of a laser beam of innovation into the property industry, actually, right around the birth of Rightmove. Now, that beam has become a full flat light. Today, literally nothing gets done, nothing, unless it touches the internet in some way or the other. And Rightmove is a brand that is at the heart of that. It has an internet platform at the heart of that, going on for 24 years now. We're in a strong and resilient position. We have built network effects that we think are unassailable, and it's because this team obsesses about delivering value to both consumers and customers on our platform. And out of that, we will continue to generate great value to Rightmove as a company. The backbone of our strength is capturing 85% of all time spent on portals in the UK. This is where consumers go.
We get over 2.2 billion visits every year, and close to 90% of that comes organically. Users specifically looking for Rightmove, the brand. That is the definition of moat. Rightmove is the place consumers come to first and return to most. As a service, we're actually also relevant to the population of their entire lifetime. It's not true for a lot of businesses. So literally from cradle to grave, it's quite powerful. A certain portion of the 60 million U.K., 67 million U.K. population, is on the move to a new place at any given point in time. The average Brit moves eight-nine times during their life. Between the ages of 18-30, they move on average every 4 years. But of course, apart from moving, people actually shop for property all the time.
Some to build a portfolio, some because of a life moment coming up, some because an adult child desperately needs a new place to live in. Almost all of them shop for property because of aspirations, because of dreams, because of a seeming addiction to doing it. Let's call this a positive addiction. Now, that is also powerful, especially for a leading brand. The U.K. actually has one of the highest homeowning ratios in the world, and where you live is, of course, deeply connected to who you are and perhaps even more to who you want to become. So it's functional, and it's also very emotional. This builds strong relationships. Regardless of the underlying reasons, the audience of Rightmove is indeed strong. It's large, it's of high quality, and it is in an ongoing nurture mode. You'll get to see a lot of examples of that throughout today.
We're open 24/7, of course, for entertainment and shopping, but certainly, with the most useful information and the largest listings choice for serious home hunters, and that's where we're working particularly closely with our customers and partners. So look, if someone would happen to plan to try and come and build an audience in the U.K. efficiently, they might want to come and talk to our third-party advertising team. I'm just saying. Now, there's an enormous direct and indirect economic output from the property sector. Here are just some of the annual numbers to give a sense of the scale of the U.K. This activity goes on all the time, day in and day out, year in and year out, across many sectors, touching a lot of people and processes.
Our strategy and business goal for the next 24 years for Rightmove, I know that's a long timeline, is to engage even further with literally all of that economic output. We think there's a lot of value to capture, because digitization, it is not a moment, it's a movement. We are one of the catalysts, true catalysts of that movement. We intend to deliver more value through our products, and we will generate more value to Rightmove, the company. But it's actually not just an opportunity to capture from digitization what's already here. There's some long-term tailwinds in play here. So if you consider long time horizons, 10, 20, 50 years, the first four here, the population size keeps going up, lifespans keep going up, real estate values keep going up, and technology adoption keeps going up. That is actually a societal fact by now.
So you can look backwards and see all of them evidenced up. You can look forward and be certain to see them play out. What we get from them, importantly, is sort of a multiplying economic effect. It's a compounder of revenue and profit pools to do business in. Now, the fifth one here, a housing stock. There simply isn't enough homes for everybody in the UK, certainly not environmentally good homes. Too few new ones are built to catch up, typically way below government targets, and they were set a while ago to be 300,000 a year. Never reached to date, and this is regardless of the government in place, because that also changes.
Now, more stock would be a positive for consumer choice, likely also for transaction volumes, but the undersupply of housing stock also underpins some of the competitiveness in the market, and it does provide price stability on homes. So we put it as two arrows, but importantly, Rightmove operates well within both of them. Lastly, rates. Of course, we all look forward to the rate environment being a little bit more normalized and particularly getting into a more stable fashion. We had this very brutal burst of inflation and rate increases over the last 18-24 months, but we are clearly now heading in a better direction, not just in the U.K., but around the world. Lenders are positive. They have lowered their rates now for 17 straight weeks, and I think we have turned somewhat of a corner.
So let's talk about how we think about the opportunities ahead with that backdrop. Our vision is to give everyone the belief that they can make the move. There's quite a large strategic span in that vision, and that's the point. So we provide the window and insights for consumers, companies considering a move. We provide for our customers the best marketplace and a variety of tools coming with it, all based on our scale. But we also support the move of, say, an investor considering to invest in the property industry. We can provide them with data services of different kinds. Or the move for the lending market to perhaps finalize, finally digitize itself. The move for internal and external talent to work on quite inspiring projects with big impact, certainly over longer time periods.
So our vision is to give everyone the belief for their respective move, and it contains quite a lot of space for a long time. We have five business pillars to deliver that vision: consumers, core customers, and strategic growth areas. They're all underpinned by our platform and our people. In 2023, we also added to what we call big beliefs. Go greener, which is about enabling a more sustainable property industry. This industry, the built environment and construction, stands for some 25% of all CO2 emissions. It has to improve. And thanks to our reach, content data sets, we can play, we think, an active and quite unique role of providing insights here. We don't need to tell people what to do, but we can certainly inform them for it. It is already sought after by consumers, investors, customers, workplace talent, and many more.
Given where we are with this data world, we think that interest will only continue to go up. AI is, of course, a given opportunity for us as a scaled tech and data company. We've been using it already before. We laid out a little bit about this earlier, and now with generative AI, more opportunities definitely open up. We're leaning into this big time across the entire business. You will also hear more about this through the presentation. Our five business pillars and the two beliefs are linked to a successful operation, that we have a Rightmove now and in the future. 2024 years of category creation up until 2023, we built a fantastic business, and in very short words, that's where we are. Now, again, we think about the next 24 years, but we start with the next five years.
So we have our eyes set on a few things. For our consumers and customers, top two pillars here, we want to develop further products, even more digitized processes and workflows, and visibility in terms of what people can achieve. Simply enabling better moving experiences. We'll accelerate our third pillar, strategic growth, all existing today, but quite small. We will make much bigger use of powerful enabling technologies such as cloud and AI, and we innovate on that with very large datasets. It's all underpinned by the best people team in the industry. We are 800 strong as of today. We're based on strong values and a real passion for delivery. As I said, that is what I've experienced, and on top of that, we of course add new capabilities. Now, you might wonder what's coming out there beyond 2028.
Well, we don't know for certain, but we ask ourselves a couple of big questions. One such big question is: Why does it have to take up to 6 months to go from a sales transaction to closing in the UK? For the consumer, it's confusing, poor, costly, and can certainly drive quite a bit of anxiety. For agent customers, it's cumbersome, it's people intense, it's inefficient. In totality, it's waste. What if we could set a digital North Star and do closing in 20 days on average instead? I know that sounds very ambitious, but that's the point. A slick, digital, visible, and much faster process for everyone involved. Not to mention, of course, in that case, a hugely improved cash flow for agents, our customers. We think that will be possible one day. Now, that's just one big question, a digital North Star.
We have quite a few more, but for sure, nothing that far out and what we listed here is set in stone. They're purely possibilities. What we try to do over the next five years is build logically and profitably towards that optionality. That's the middle column. That's what we're gonna focus on today, and of course, we'll let our full market reach and data guide us. So we plan to deliver a great business during this journey. And in numbers, it looks like this. 2023, our confirmed consensus spells out GBP 360 million in revenue, GBP 263 million in underlying operating profit. Strong numbers, again, showing the resiliency, again, showing the opportunity for us to grow. And that is where we wanna be by 2028.
A medium-term target of GBP 600 million in revenue, and to be able to hit a double-digit growth number on an annual basis on both top and bottom line. Absolute profit generation is absolutely a key target for us. And again, don't worry, you'll get plenty more details about this in the numbers section. So here's how we frame the opportunity and the steps. This is what we call our strategic model for growth. I'll let you dwell on the matrix for 1 second, but let me also orient you. So on the y-axis, top to bottom, we've outlined the stages or the value chain steps, if you like, of a transaction and ultimately living. We call it Find, Afford, Transact, Move, and Life lifecycle, FAT ML.
On the y-axis, left to right, the various key segments of the property industry, and in which, again, we already operate to some extent. Residential, commercial, and more generally, data monetization avenues. So today, we have a market-leading, very powerful platform, really centered around the Find segment, illustrated by the horizontal bar completions here. In residential Find, particularly, we have literally all the listings, all the consumers, all the agent customers, and really a market-leading product set, where we deliver value and we generate value. 90% of our GBP 360 million sits here. But we think there's a lot of digitization opportunity across the industry. Software will eat lunches here, too. So we try to build into this opportunity, logically, and based on what we already have.
The brand equity, the reach, the position at the top of the funnel with consumers, the platform, all the established relationships and partnerships, and of course, the data power. So we try to go selectively and logically into this much larger opportunity. For revenue potential, expressed in estimated TAMs, it looks like this. It totals up to a pretty exciting GBP 1.8 billion revenue opportunity to go after. Not likely to be hit within five years. It will obviously go on beyond that, but we're about to put real good momentum and trajectory into it. Now, you can see some of the area quantifications here are left blank, and it's transparently just where we don't focus most imminently or, frankly, where we just know a little bit less. We will address them in the future, but we think that GBP 1.8 billion revenue TAM is quite appetizing.
So here in yellow then, are the four areas we explicitly invest against in 2024. You will hear more about them all throughout today. First, the core business in residential find. It is, and it remains, the number one pillar and focus for us. There's a lot more products to build and deliver on both sides of the marketplace, and thus, revenue to generate. Two, we try to go down that path of assisting the consumer in all the moving pieces of the journey, digitally filling in the steps in the value chain, together with partners, in many cases, and we're starting with financial services and more specifically, mortgages. Number three, for the residential rental market and those value chain steps, we have actually just readied a digital end-to-end solution for that market. It's improving life for agents, landlords, and consumers alike.
Number four, with our existing very, very strong marketplace and traffic position in commercial real estate, we'll invest there to maximize what we think in the U.K. is actually quite an underserved opportunity. And we're doing this with 800 people, a sole focus on the U.K. We're adding some 100-120 new people and resources next year. It'll take a lot of hard work, no doubt, but we think we're in a great position to do it. And of course, on the right side here, in terms of data monetization, we don't stop that. We continue with it. We have great momentum in that business as it is. Now, importantly, I think this is very important, none of these opportunities are sitting there completely by themselves or are done in isolation. They're part of one Rightmove platform.
It really is one Rightmove platform, but with many connected nodes. All of these nodes are powered, served, and developed around data. We are essentially a data business. There's a lot of data in there, about 1 petabyte in total, if that means something to you, but it's quite a bit, and it's wired and focused on the U.K. market. So in only, like, the last 20 minutes or so that I've been talking, hundreds of thousands of data signals were collected in these nodes, sent across to the core platform or straight on out to one of the other nodes. More importantly, maybe, or equally important, this is an enormous asset of first-party data. I'm just gonna give you one example of how this can play out. The Mortgage in Principle or MIP is our qualification tool for getting a mortgage. I think you've heard about this one.
We notified it in the RNS this morning as well. We already now collect tens of thousands of MIP applications. Each of those is a 45 x richer data signal compared to casual browser interaction. So of course, there's a direct revenue opportunity for us in what that lead is worth to a lender or a broker. We'll get to that later as well. But that richer data signal and all the interactions coming from it, also becomes an indirect or future revenue opportunity. It's a feeding engine into what information is going on out in the marketplace, a feeding engine of intent, of readiness, becomes data that goes into our own product development plans, sometimes at aggregate levels, sometimes at cluster levels, sometimes even at individual signal level. What's important to remember here, every single signal has economic value.
A user that has an approved MIP, MIP certificate from Rightmove becomes a richer data lead for an agent customer compared to a normal lead. That agent is always trying to gauge if a buyer is strong or medium or weak in terms of its intent, or who in the market potentially will provide them with a vendor instruction in the future. Even the user who actually gets a decline on their MIP is a richer data signal. If no mortgage is approved, it might mean that that person is still in the rental market, but that person might still need a larger space or indeed, move to Liverpool because that's where the new job is. We build these richer data signals in many ways, not just through the MIP. Again, you'll hear more about that later.
We have a strong platform and a first-party, what we call signal universe. We started building this a long time ago with our core advertising products. As we now expand the activity and potential in each of the nodes on their own, the network effects compound, and they speed up. Scale begets scale, and we start from large scale. Now, it's not all easy. There's a lot of data to be developed and tools to be built around it, but we're right on that, have been for a while, and we keep doing it. Perhaps you think I went a little bit techno theoretical with that network model, but it's very, very important to understand the strength of the business that we have. Just remember one thing: data is money, data is moat, and it's very high margin.
So I really don't think it's possible to replicate the value that we can deliver and the value that we can generate also in the future. Now, I will play you something perhaps even more technical-looking, sort of a mock-up glimpse of the future. What may lay ahead for agents and consumers at Rightmove, way out there in the strategic arc? Mind you, it's not real products. They're not about to launch. But also tellingly, perhaps, this video was actually put together super quickly. We prompted up an AI creative tool and got this thing together. Let's see it.
Estate agent, Ashley, receives a new progress manager alert from Rightmove AI. She turns on her Rightmove Plus heads-up display and accesses the property's details. Rightmove AI informs her the home information folder is complete, and with content capture permissions in place, Rightmove AI can dispatch a drone to fly around the home early afternoon. She approves this, and the drone captures every detail in an interactive 3D model. Rightmove AI then collates the photos and-
There you go. Believe it. Perhaps appropriate here. But again, just a little bit of a teaser. No representation of real products right now or about to come. But I think the point here is there is an opportunity to provide a digitally informed, better process, faster time to conclusions, and time is money, and we are definitely thinking about that, being, again, in the heart and in the middle of many such processes. Now, back to reality and just summarizing what I've gone through, because this actually does make me very excited about Rightmove's next couple of years. We have a strong fortress of a consumer position. We operate with many economical and structural tailwinds over time. We have a platform that is really built for resiliency and attract results at the same time. We're building some great products on the One Rightmove platform.
We're deepening the find segment for consumers and customers, but we're also going beyond that find segment into new revenue and new profit pools. We do target strong revenue and growth. We wanna grow absolute profit over time. Our capital policy is intact. And with that, I would just like to recap the agenda for the rest of the day, which I think, hopefully, you've also seen on all the handouts. More importantly, I would like to introduce parts of the Rightmove team who's gonna take you through more of these sessions. Can you please stand up, guys, so everyone can see? The fantastic bench here. So I'm just gonna go from this side. Take it easy.
Dave Cray, MD of Financial Services and Mortgages, Tara Lourens, our COO, Alison Dolan, CFO, Dave Anderson, CRO, Andy Miles, MD Commercial Real Estate, and Matt Bushby, our CMO, will also be joining our Q&A panel. We are also joined by a bunch of other senior leaders for the breakout sessions and demos, and you should interact with them as much as you want. So folks on the end, can you just raise your hands and say hi and hello? Two of them. There are a couple of others out in the wings, but, these are really the people who make everything happen on a day-to-day basis and lays out those exciting future plans. Now, the idea is that we're gonna go through the whole program, and we do Q&A consolidated at the end of it.
And again, we have drinks, whatever the reason is for the drinks, to continue the conversations.... There's one little admin thing that I was asked to update you on. At 4:00 P.M., there's a fire alarm exercise, which apparently couldn't be changed, and we only got to know about. So we'll pause whatever we're doing right then. We are not supposed to have to go out into the street, just sit here and wait for the signal to go over. But that's about it. So with that, I'm happy to hand over to Tarah. Welcome.
Thanks, Johan, and good afternoon. I'm Tarah, COO, and I've been part of the Rightmove journey for four and half years. Over my 20 years in the technology industry, I've worked in several sectors, including software services, retail, and fintech, and I'm delighted to have the opportunity to talk to you today about product, data, and technology, how these three things underpin our business today, and why they'll be instrumental in our future growth. Our success to date has been founded on a powerful network. We have the largest home moving audience in the U.K., and we estimate that this year alone, our users will spend almost 16 billion minutes on our site or in our apps, the equivalent of 30,000 years.
We provide that audience with access to the most comprehensive view of properties in the U.K., giving them one place to go to find the home of their dreams. And this is what drives the exceptional value that we deliver to customers, giving them one place to go to grow their business. On the customer side, we see over 50,000 users accessing our unrivaled products, insights, and industry-specific content every month. And at the heart of our network is our platform and data. Since its inception, the site has hosted over 80,000 listings. 80 million, sorry, listings. I thought it was a bit small. And accumulated over 1 PB of data. We have two decades of in-depth market data, an asset that's impossible to replicate. So today, I'm gonna take you through the three things we're doing to deepen and expand our role with consumers.
Then, I'll take you through the three things we're doing to increase our value proposition with customers. Finally, I'll touch briefly on how we're continuing to invest in the platform, data, and technology, and how that will make all of this a reality. Starting with consumer, and before we dive into our plans, I'd like to spend just a few minutes reflecting on this question: Why do people choose Rightmove? First, we're the best-known brand when it comes to property. 93% of the U.K. population know our brand. Three times more people say they'll turn to us to look for property than our nearest competitor, and that's driven by the strength of our brand, the quality of our experience, and the access that we give to the whole of market.
We see over 2 billion visits to our sites every year, and more importantly, 85% of those are direct. People aren't searching for property for sale, they're looking for Rightmove. We're not reliant on paid search, as many other markets or industries might be. In the U.K., Rightmove has become a synonym for property search. High traffic volumes are good, but the quality of traffic is critical. 85% of all time spent on property portals is on Rightmove. 34 million searches are run on our platform every day. On average, users spend 8.5 minutes on our site each time they visit, which is more than double the industry average. Our app users visit 21 times a month, more than twice as often as our nearest competitor, and they contribute over 40% of our leads.
Serious home hunters across the U.K. gravitate to our app. Turning to our current focus in consumer, acknowledging that considerable advantage we have when it comes to the scale and quality of our audience, we're focused in three areas that will both deepen and expand our role with them. First, knowing more about our users. This year alone, we've more than doubled the number of serious home hunters using the site logged in and captured more than 2 million enhanced profiles, giving us precise information about a user's current situation and their future goals.
This rapid scaling of both the breadth and depth of our user data gives us several opportunities, and one of those is to increase the relevance and personalization of the journey, turning our homepage into your home moving hub, delivering useful and personalized content, and making it easier for you to pick up where you left off, making our search tailored to your needs, letting you add in the places that are most important to you, so they can then form part of your search. And harnessing AI to improve the underlying data powering our search, creating a dynamic set of filters that will truly differentiate our search experience. And this is just the start of us leveraging AI to enhance the consumer journey. All of this will increase the utility of our platform, strengthen our brand loyalty, and create more reasons to choose Rightmove over any other platform.
The third and most exciting area of focus for us is starting to play a broader role beyond Find. As Johan mentioned, we're looking to extend our brand and its relevance, supporting our strategic growth areas. We soft launched a new feature, Track a Property, earlier this year, giving users the ability to get an instant online valuation using our industry-leading valuation model. And through purely organic traffic, we've already had over 150,000 properties tracked across the UK. We'll shortly be releasing new features to drive up engagement and bring users back to site. Looking across at our international peers as a benchmark, we're expecting to have around 6.5 million properties tracked across the UK in time.
This will become a powerful enabler for our mortgage business, because we know that homeowners looking to remortgage pay particular attention to the value of their home. And there's more. I'm going to take you through Lead to Keys in detail in a minute, but this product suite gives us a host of opportunity through capturing additional information and creating new consumer touchpoints. We're still in the process of building out the consumer experience here, but early experiments are showing promising results. And our mortgage proposition, which Dave is going to cover in detail later. In both cases, we can leverage our scale and the fact that users start their home moving journey with us, to present related products and services at the right time or within the Rightmove ecosystem.
Then, taking a look at the customer side of our network, again, we have three areas of focus, from providing ever-improving marketing solutions, to going beyond marketing to support our customers in their day-to-day operations. But stepping back for a second to reflect on the needs of our customers, we've always had a deep understanding of how they operate and the important activities that drive their success. Looking at just at estate agency as an example, our tools and products have been designed to give customers the platform to compete and win, whether that's building brand awareness and getting invited out to value a property, or helping them demonstrate their local knowledge and experience and historic success to win the instruction, and to generate interest in the property to secure the best buyer for a seller or the best tenant for a landlord.
Our inclusive tools help customers manage their day-to-day activities and provide valuable insights using the vast amounts of data that we hold. More and more, we're developing premium tools that go even further, maximizing a customer's chance of success and driving operational efficiency. This year alone, we've introduced two new products in that space and improved our most valuable tool, the Best Price Guide. What this chart also highlights is the areas that we've yet to lean into that will form part of our future growth strategies. We deliver exceptional marketing products that have a proven track record of driving unparalleled brand visibility and leads. Our products are built to harness the scale and quality of our first-party data and provide access to the single largest audience of home movers in the UK.
Underpinning this, we have three core design principles that guide our development process and maximize performance. Lastly, our products are backed by data-driven insights that demonstrate their value, that they deliver for our customers. And to explore each of these areas in a bit more detail. Through research, we know that at any one time around the U.K., 26% of the population would be open to a move, and only 8% are actively looking to move. Because of this, marketing channels like PPC, social media, and print are all going to be less efficient. In some cases, over 60% of spend will be spent targeting the wrong audience. In contrast, around 80% of the Rightmove audience is either open to move or actively looking to move, and these users are on our site regularly, with ever-increasing frequency as their desire to act grows.
Without the need for things like third-party cookies, our customers can use our data-rich products to deliver their message to those most likely to engage with it. We've developed several precise targeting methods to pinpoint the right person at the right time. As an example, we know that nationally, 59% of sellers are looking out of area for their next home. With our first-party data, we can pinpoint those users and their home location, and this alone can increase audience reach by up to 30%. This example underscores the importance of having a national audience when it comes to property. Seamlessly integrated ads improve conversion, so we treat our advertising products as features, making sure that their placement and content is relevant and useful to deliver an increase in engagement of up to 60%.
Through our experience, we know that ease of use is a key factor in product uptake. In some cases, our products can be set up to activate automatically to boost performance based on certain thresholds, and in others, we're able to generate a rich and engaging ad with existing assets like historic listings. For instance, in this example here, we've personalized that content to the user. In an increasingly privacy-constrained world, it's becoming even more important to build products in a way that means you can demonstrate value.
By designing experiences that keep users in our ecosystem when they engage with our customers' marketing, we can accurately measure the value of our products, and so this has become one of our more recent design principles. Over the past few years, we've started to build products that meet the specific needs of tightly defined customer segments, recognizing that not every customer will have the same goals or preferences. This represents a considerable opportunity to further differentiate our offering. Through deep customer research, we're now delivering uniquely tailored products for many of our segments. Just to share a couple of examples, data tells us that 45% of buyers purchasing a new home go on to select a different plot to the one that they originally inquired about.
Our Advanced Development Listing showcases the development as a whole and provides several opportunities to upsell to higher price points, delivering a 30% uplift in leads compared with our standard new homes listing. Next, our Build-to-Rent developers told us that one of their primary goals was to help educate tenants on the additional features and benefits of their homes, explaining the higher monthly rents relative to the local area. Our bespoke Build-to-Rent listing showcases the additional amenities that come with these developments, helping them stand out from the more typical rentals. Again, resulting in a 30% uplift in leads compared to a standard lettings listing. Looking at another example, our Native Search Ads product, which is the latest iteration of display advertising. These ads appear in the user search results and are seamlessly integrated into the experience.
We've developed several variants across a range of customer needs and across multiple customer types. It's worth noting that developing flexible products that meet a multitude of customer needs substantially increases our own return on investment, delivering a high yield for each product that we build. The third area I wanted to talk about is the range of services we're creating that go beyond marketing. The idea here is to embed ourselves and our platform into our customer's workflow, making us an essential partner for both revenue growth and margin performance. Importantly, these tools take advantage of our network effect to deliver substantial benefits while creating future platform value for Rightmove. There are two recent and quite significant examples I'm going to share today. The first is our Premium Price Guide.
It's built on top of the Best Price Guide, a tool used by over 90% of estate agents across the UK every month. It provides agents with a comprehensive view of both the property and its local area, helping to inform an agent's valuation and demonstrate their local knowledge to a potential seller. This year alone, 6.5 million Best Price Guides will be generated, and up until recently, those reports were printed off and shared with clients offline. But now they can be shared digitally through our platform. We launched a few months ago and have already delivered over 100,000 digital reports to potential sellers across the UK. A great example of how quickly our products and tools can scale. The paid for element, Premium Price Guide, provides access to a dashboard where agents can manage and reinvigorate their leads.
They're alerted each time a seller engages with the report, all of this substantially improving their lead nurturing capabilities. Importantly, through this tool, we're gaining valuable insights into the pipeline of properties being valued across the U.K., and we've created a new touch point with our users. The second area I wanted to touch on is the work we've been doing in the letting space. The rental journey is fraught with challenges for everyone involved. Agents receive, on average, 40 leads for every property that they advertise and spend an enormous 10 hours of admin time for each tenancy. Some manage the entire process on paper, others using several different systems, rekeying information over and over again. For tenants, the situation isn't much better, a lack of visibility, giving them limited control.
Our new suite of tools, Lead to Keys, solves these pain points by digitizing the entire process, and we're uniquely positioned to do this, seamlessly integrating our advertising platform into a new end-to-end digital rental experience. To give you a sense of what we've built, I'm going to share some of the marketing material that we've prepared for our customers.
Are you fed up chasing down paperwork? Tired of juggling multiple logins to manage your tenancies? Always feeling short of time? Introducing Lead to Keys to make your lettings life easier. Integrated directly into your Rightmove advertising, our innovative suite frees up valuable time that you can spend speaking to landlords and growing your business. Let's look at how it can help. Enquiry Manager is your daily dashboard, helping you qualify leads quickly and understand if potential renters are likely to fail referencing. All your Rightmove leads are easy to compare with enhanced information like move-in date, employment status, affordability confirmation, and any adverse credit history. Your applicants opt into a soft credit check at no cost to you, covering CCJs, IVAs, and bankruptcies, enabling you to clearly pinpoint the most suitable applicants. Next, there's Rightmove tenant referencing.
Data is seamlessly pulled from the lead into the referencing process from Rightmove Plus, reducing unnecessary steps and any duplication. This blend of technology and our exceptional customer service ensures a smooth experience getting your references over the line. Then Tenancy Manager streamlines the entire progression process. Whether you're dealing with offers, contracts, deposits, or references, now everything can be done in one simple online system that also ensures you're complying with all relevant legislation. Tenancy Dashboard gives an up-to-date status on all tasks, helping you see urgent actions that need to be taken. It also means you've got a central place for essential documents, giving peace of mind they're uploaded, compliant, and shared at the right time, as well as that all-important audit trail. And forget about faffing around with bank transfers.
Payments are processed swiftly without any fees, while tenancy agreements are sent securely and digitally signed, reducing the need for office visits. With Lead to Keys, you don't have to use different suppliers and software for every stage of your lettings operation. It's everything you need, all in one place. So believe in reclaiming your time and growing your lettings business. Request a call back and discover how Lead to Keys can work for you and your team.
Lead to Keys is a powerful suite of tools that delivers substantial value to both sides of the network. On average, customers can save an unbelievable 116 working days, or up to GBP 15,000 in wages a year. Coincidentally, this would more than cover the annual cost of the Rightmove membership. We've also expanded our role with tenants, helping them go from finding their next rental to arranging their tenancy and preparing to move in. At the same time, we're gaining valuable data about the transaction and creating new interaction points, which will support our rental services business. This is a big moment for Rightmove. It's our first meaningful step into building end-to-end software that truly embeds ourselves in the lives of our customers. So to summarize, when it comes to products that our customers will pay for, we see considerable runway for growth.
Our expanding data landscape will allow us to build ever smarter, hyper-targeted products. The customer-centric approach we adopt creates a major differentiating factor. In terms of going beyond marketing, we've done a lot to help our lettings customers. There's, of course, a ton of scope in sales. The final area I wanted to touch on briefly is what we're doing behind the scenes to strengthen our platform and execution. Over the past four years, we've more than doubled our pace of delivery. This has come from investing in and reorganizing our internal teams to harness their full potential, and we're going to continue this acceleration over the next few years. In part, we're increasing our capacity by over 50%, which Alison will walk through later, but also through improving platform capability, making it quicker and easier for our teams to deliver.
In terms of our current progress on that journey, we're over halfway through our migration to the cloud and expect to complete that within the next 12-18 months. We're already seeing benefits, including a 90% reduction in the time it takes us to deploy platform changes and improvements to page performance, in one case, reducing bounce rates by 15%. In parallel, we've been building out a new data platform to sit on top of that growing data asset. This is a critical step in enabling some of what Johan shared earlier, and we'll begin to scale that platform next year. Lastly, we're scaling our adoption of AI. And just to expand briefly on that one, we've used machine learning for a while at Rightmove.
For example, it powers our Automated Valuation Model, we use it to detect quality issues on site, and as Dave will share later, it's starting to play a role in our mortgage business. With the latest advancements in AI merging earlier this year, we've been exploring what it means for us. Given the scale of our data, we've already identified over 100 opportunities where AI could support our plans. We've already run over a dozen experiments, many showing promising results. One of those has already actually been rolled out, saving an incredible 75% of effort in one of our highest cost internal processes. Two more, including a developer assistant, are in the process of being rolled out.
We've baked several more of these into our roadmap for 2024 and expect AI to play an increasingly important role across both sides of the network and, of course, internally to drive efficiency. So let me just recap very briefly. We're on a journey to enhance the products, data, and technology supporting our platform. Our teams are developing innovative solutions for both sides of the network. These will strengthen our existing position and allow us to operate new revenue streams at scale. Thank you very much. I'm now going to hand over to Dave to talk about the core business.
Good afternoon. I'm Dave Anderson. I've been at Rightmove over 18 years, working across the core business, having held several senior sales positions. In 2015, I took responsibility for the new homes business, and in 2018, the agency business was added to my remit. Today, I'd like to give you an overview of Rightmove's core business, give you a better understanding of how it's made up, the market we operate in, the value of our product offering, and how we think about customers, products, and packaging. Let's start with the makeup of the core business. It currently makes up 90% of Rightmove's revenue and consists of two business units, agency, which includes sales and lettings agents, accounting for 75%, and new homes with 15%.
The other 10% of revenue is made up of smaller business units, some with great growth potential, and you'll be hearing about mortgages and commercial today. Though agents and new homes developers both use Rightmove to promote themselves to home hunters, their businesses and what they want from Rightmove differs. Agent businesses are about sales, marketing, and process, with low barriers to entry. Agents need to win stock from sellers and landlords, retain, and ultimately sell or let that stock to achieve commission fee income. Agent fees average around 1.25% for sold prices of sold prices for sales, and 10% of the monthly rent received in lettings. Agents are salespeople and marketeers, fiercely competitive, and repeatedly shown how resilient and adaptable they are to market changes, especially in the last few years. New homes businesses are complex.
They need to be adept at land purchase, navigating the complex U.K. planning system, and delivering construction projects in budget and on time. And that's before they get to sales and marketing, where Rightmove really comes into its own. Because of these complexities and the significant capital needed to compete as a new homes developer, barriers to entry are high. The shape of the agent and new homes businesses are also starkly different, with a large long tail of thousands, thousands of SME businesses for agents, whereas new homes is a smaller customer pool and dominated by large companies, with the top 11 U.K. new homes developers building 40% of the homes in the U.K. in 2022, and a combined market cap of over GBP 26 billion. The differences between our core customers means we have separate teams for each, and a differentiated customer and consumer offering.
These differences also play through to how these businesses utilize Rightmove in changing markets, and I'll highlight some of these in the coming slides. The core business operates in the U.K. residential sales and market, sales and lettings market, but these markets have quite different dynamics at play. The lettings market has seen a continuation and acceleration of pre-COVID trends, with an undersupply of rental stock being compounded by ever-increasing demand. Over the last 5 years, letting stock has halved. One cause of this is some landlords exiting the sector, but a bigger driver is the increased speed that new properties to market get let. Over the same period, we've seen demand double, so twice as many people trying to rent half the available stock. This has led to a 350% increase in leads per property.
This market backdrop is why we developed our Lead to Keys product suite, helping lettings agents manage huge levels of demand while also streamlining a clunky and unconnected process, allowing agents more time to focus on business growth rather than process and administration. In the sales market over the last 15 years, transactions have showed some volatility. Quite frankly, that's not really a surprise when you consider some of the events that have occurred, both positive and negative. But despite some once-in-a-generation events playing havoc with people's lives and the economy, the U.K. property market proved its resilience. The reality is, in all types of markets, people's circumstances change, life events happen, and people have to live somewhere. We estimate over 800,000 home sales transactions each year aren't discretionary.
This, coupled with the fact there's been an undersupply of new homes for as long as Rightmove has existed, contributes to the resilience of U.K. house prices and the housing market. As you can see, despite all the challenges faced, average house prices have always grown in the medium to long term, with house price annual compound growth rate averaging 4% over time, meaning sustainable growth in revenues and profits for agents and developers. This market resilience is the backdrop to our growth plans for the next five years and beyond. So we know the U.K. housing market is resilient, but transaction volumes can fluctuate with market conditions, and this does play through to our core customers. The differences I've already highlighted lead to them having differing needs that go some way to protecting Rightmove, too, Rightmove's exposure to market changes.
The period between 2016 and 2019, following the unexpected Brexit yes vote, saw three consecutive years of marginally reducing house sales, meaning we were in a slower market. In a slower market, agents must still compete to win instructions, but sales commission income will generally be lower, putting pressure on marketing spend. Overall, agency growth doesn't stop, it merely slows. In a slower market, for new homes, a slower market means a slower sales rate and a significant need to counteract this, with high-performing marketing products being preferred to drop in prices. There's also an inflationary effect on the number of developments advertised. Developments take longer to sell, so more developments are advertised on Rightmove at any one time. Plus, the higher number of active developments also needs additional marketing support.
Looking at the slide, you can see this period shows a reduction in the growth rate from agency, but this was more than made up for by a stark acceleration in new home spend. Then forward to 2021. We're still in the pandemic, but a surprise acceleration in the housing market is well underway. In this faster market, agents sell a higher proportion of the stock they list, driving higher commission income, plus increasing house prices support higher average fees. This allows many agents to invest more in marketing in their quest to compete fiercely to attract home sellers to instruct them to sell their home. In the same fast market, new homes developers continue marketing with Rightmove, but upward spend is lower, and developments sell more quickly, meaning on average, they're listed on Rightmove for less time.
This puts downward pressure on the number of developments advertised, even though many developers may have no more or less developments to sell. You can clearly see this period was more challenging for new homes growth, but agents wanting to compete spent more on our products to win, and growth rate returned to 10% in 2022. It's also worth mentioning that because we understand these cycles, we focused on new homes product development in the faster market of 2020-2022, meaning we had new intelligent marketing products built, tested, and trialed by many of our new homes customers in readiness for the change in the market cycle. And then, September 2022. With interest rates already rising and securing the market, we had the ill-fated mini budget, and we all know what happened next. Our focus on innovation of our new homes products paid off.
Developers suddenly had high cancellation rates and lower lead volumes, but we were able to support them with new, high-impact products to help counteract the slower market, leading to a stunning 32% uplift in new homes revenue in H1 this year. What we've learned through our history is our subscription model and the countercyclical nature of our core business means that we're only likely to be impacted by changing market conditions at the very extremes of the market. This has certainly been proven in the last 15 years, if not just the last 5. Let's look at future growth opportunity in the core business, starting with new homes.
New homes developers spend between 2% and 3% of a development's gross value on sales and marketing, and of that, we estimate 1% is spent on marketing, giving an annual marketing spend of GBP 330 million in 2022. In the same year, Rightmove generated GBP 53 million in marketing spend from new homes. It's easy to see there's much opportunity to play for. We understand how market cycles impact new homes and have a track record of delivering market-leading products that help them win. Over the coming years, we'll continue to get closer with our new homes customers, alongside continued innovation of our products and tools. In agency, we estimate sales and lettings commission pool for 2022 was GBP 3.8 billion and is likely to be around GBP 3.3 billion this year.
Agents spend around 15% of the commission pool on marketing, so total marketing spend of GBP 495 million. So with Rightmove generating GBP 240 million of revenue from agents in 2022, there's clearly still plenty of headroom left for us to compete for. But there are historic precedents of agents spending more than 15% on marketing. When we look at our agent customers, there are many that spend more than 15% now. The key to facilitating this more widely is to help agents be more efficient, and in turn, more profitable, with more firepower to compete through marketing. We estimate that people costs in agency in 2022 were GBP 1.6 billion, and our continued innovation with products like Lead to Keys reduce people costs, as well as offering us new revenue streams.
Importantly, they increased profit for agents, allowing them to spend more on marketing to do what they do best, competing and winning in their local marketplaces. As I pointed out earlier, house price growth rates average 4% over the medium to long term, meaning consistent and sustainable growth in agent commission, in the agent commission pool over time. As Johan and Tara already outlined, Rightmove is synonymous with property in the U.K. We have the vast majority of properties available for sale and rent, generating huge amounts of traffic and leads for our customers. An average month in 2023 on Rightmove saw 190 million visits a month, generating 1.3 billion minutes of time on site. That's 22 million hours or 25 centuries, give or take.
These are staggering numbers that prove how obsessed the U.K. population is with property, and the place that plays out is on Rightmove. Huge traffic, but how does it flow through to outcomes for customers? If we look at some data on outcomes for agency customers, it becomes very clear. For leads that turn into applicants registered with agents, we account for 83%, five times more than the nearest other portal. The lifeblood of agency businesses are instructions, so they have stock to sell or let. This is the next best portal competitor. We deliver four times more lettings landlord instructions and nine times more sales vendor instructions. When it comes to successful sales and lettings outcomes, we deliver six times and seven times more outcomes than the next nearest portal. When it comes to demonstrable value, Rightmove has a huge advantage in the U.K. property market.
Our place in the consciousness of consumers delivers vast, tangible value for customers, and it's that platform from which we plan to grow the business for years to come. Through our innovation and delivery of data-powered intelligent products, our core business growth has consistently been driven more by customers choosing to spend on additional products than by pricing actions. Currently, annual growth from products is around 60%, with price and lead at 40%. This demonstrates our customers' appetite for the products we build and gives us a healthy, sustainable position to build on. So let's talk about these products. We have a range that are tailored for specific customer groups or needs, both inclusive and chargeable. Lots of them are listed on the screen, but how do we think about these? At the top, we have the core proposition.
That's everything that all customers get access to by joining Rightmove. I'll cover more on this in a few slides. Then we have our paid-for products and tools, split into four categories that broadly cover what agents are looking to achieve. The first three categories cover enhanced property promotion, branded display advertising, that includes traffic generation, and then, for agents, direct valuation lead generation. Lastly, premium tools. This is a new category since 2020. These are sophisticated products and tools that help customers operate their businesses and generate new business more efficiently and effectively. I won't dwell on our products and tools. Tara's already talked about them, and you have the opportunity to attend some product demos in the break shortly.
The reasons our products are so effective for customers is not just the build quality, but also the first-party property, consumer, and customer data that underpins them. A unique set of products and services powered by unparalleled data, helping our customers analyze, compete, win, and run their businesses. Underpinning our products is a packaging structure that is repeatable and sustainable, offering customers choice and flexibility depending on their needs and their budgets. In the agency package structure on the current slide, the core element of each package is the amount the agent pays to post their properties on Rightmove, including inclusive products and tools. On the left, an essential customer subscribing to our entry-level essential package pays only for core access. They then have complete flexibility to purchase as much or as little additional products as they like, with no ongoing commitment, but a higher core rate.
The simple premise, as agents go up the package structure, is you have an increased minimum spend commitment on products. And for that product commitment, you're rewarded with a lower core subscription rate. When you reach our top package, Optimiser 2020, you pay no core rate at all, as you've committed to the highest minimum product spend. The more you engage with Rightmove products to help drive your business, the more efficient your spend becomes, as you're paying less or nothing to access the platform. Since 2020, we further incentivized the take-up of the top package with exclusive access to new products and tools.
In Optimiser 2020, you have access to purchase Sold by Me, a new display product with smart targeting and auto-generated content, as well as access to Opportunity Manager, a tool that uses a machine learning algorithm to surface sellers you already have contact with that may be about to list their property. Our package dynamics and the effectiveness of our products encourages many agents to buy more, with some 40% of agents spending 100 GBP or more above their monthly spend commitment. Many of these customers will eventually upgrade to the next package. Over time, we've replaced packages with a new, higher-value package at various points in the package ladder, and eventually, we retire the equivalent old package, migrating everyone to the new package, with a full package refresh taking roughly five to seven years.
Because our products offer so much demonstrable value, we see limited downgrades versus upgrades. In fact, in 2022 and 2023, we had over four times the amount of upgrades versus downgrades. If customers do want to drop down the package structure, they not only forgo the value in the product they lose, but the amount they pay for the core subscription also increases. In October this year, we released a new top package, Optimiser Edge, which has two new exclusive products on top of those in Optimiser 2020: Native Search Ads and Premium Price Guide, both of which Tara demoed earlier. In all markets, agents are keen to gain an advantage, and access to powerful products and tools, like those in Optimiser Edge, provide agents with that advantage. This has led to early take-up of Optimiser Edge being well above expectations to date.
I mentioned the core element of Rightmove subscription earlier. This area shouldn't be overlooked. It's a significant contributor to the overall value we deliver. We've invested in this area heavily over many years, and we continue to do so. Just to recap, the core subscription is the base cost for access to properties on Rightmove, plus a host of inclusive products and tools that add significant value to agent businesses. Essentially, it's what comes for free when listing your properties for all customers. I'll give you a quick overview of the three areas that deliver this additional value. Starting with data partnerships. We have a sales and account management team of over 120 people who hold meetings with all of our core customers, some of whom have built up strong relationships over many, many years.
We equip our sales team with a detailed consumer, customer, and market reporting suite, powered by our unrivaled first-party data sets. This reporting suite allows our account managers to share detailed insights with customers, helping them understand the competitive landscape, the effectiveness of their marketing, where and who they should be targeting, and much, much more. If you'd like a demo of these reports, Paul, one of our sales directors, will be in the breakout area during the upcoming break. A first-class sales team, coupled with industry-leading reporting suite, helping customers be more connected with their businesses, understanding opportunities and threats, leading to well-informed, value-generating business decisions. The next area is Rightmove Plus, the customer side of the Rightmove platform, where customers have a suite of self-service reporting tools to aid in the day-to-day running of their businesses.
Again, Rightmove Plus utilizes our vast first-party data to deliver unique insights and tools to customers. This includes unique data we've collated over 20 years that would be almost impossible to replicate, as well as reports that rely on our almost whole of market data for property, consumers, and customers. Rightmove Plus has been continually developed for over two decades and is used by almost all Rightmove customers, with 50,000 active monthly users. I won't go into any more detail on Rightmove Plus now, as James and Matt will be at the break in the breakout areas to demo in the upcoming break, so feel free to join them. The third section is education and training, which is delivered through a customer-only area called the Rightmove Hub.
The Rightmove Hub provides live, recorded, and on-demand video content for all levels of agency employees, from junior negotiators through to business owners. This includes accredited continual professional development, approved courses known as CPD, supporting agents with mandatory training requirements, and in the last 300 days, agents have viewed over 95,000 hours of video and completed 28,000 hours of CPD learning on the Rightmove Hub. We believe in helping raise standards in the U.K. property industry with our commitment to the Rightmove Hub, and 12 months ago, we went a step further when we launched CELA, the Certificate for Estate and Letting Agents, our NVQ Level 3 training course with qualification. CELA training is supported with on-demand video learning delivered by a range of industry experts.
Since launching a year ago, over 4,300 agents have enrolled on CELA, with some now reaching examination stage, soon to become Rightmove qualified at NVQ Level Three. The Rightmove Hub and CELA training is free to all agents, all as part of our commitment to raising the standards of qualifications - standards and qualifications across the U.K. property industry. I thought it might be helpful to hear what some of our customers think about the value we deliver. I have a short video a few customers have kindly recorded for us.
The webinars are so useful. There's so much information in there that just allows us to stay really at the forefront of knowledge, which means that when, you know, anything from mortgage rates to legislative change to what's happening in the marketplace, there's always something on that webinar that means that when our estate agents walk into somebody's house, they know more than the next estate agent that's coming that hasn't watched that.
Things like featured properties, when it's new and it's fresh, you know, brings it to the top of the rankings, brings it to people's attention. Premium Displays enables us to highlight a property.
The report that my team use the most useful is the Best Price Guide, and being able to use that digitally now is really useful.
It's very useful from our point of view to see what's sold in that particular postcode that we're going out to, and we can show evidence to people what's actually selling and at what prices they're selling.
The analysis is very useful. Being able to use reporting tools to analyze the information is very, very useful in helping inform decisions.
It's become the brand that's synonymous with the search, such as Google is for looking for something else.
You get out to many more people than the other portals. People in the street or when I go out to houses, they ask, "Are we on Rightmove?
I'm always impressed by, even though it's a big and growing PLC, how the quality of people at Rightmove is very, very good.
I really enjoy the contact I have with the account managers. I've had some great account managers over the years.
But I'm actually quite a difficult person, if I'm honest, because you protect your business interests. Yeah? But the truth is, a conversation happened over a decade ago, and that still steers a partnership that's been together for a very, very long time.
If you properly engage with Rightmove, and you take up all that value-added, featured property, premium listings, featured agent, all the microsite, all those bits that mean that you get your brand everywhere possible to the consumer, then it, it becomes a really, really useful product.
The thing that we want more than anything else is to promote our property to the widest possible audience, and I believe Rightmove is, is by far and away, the best platform to do that in the U.K.
So some of you may be thinking, "It can't be that hard to find three happy customers." Well, you'll be pleased to know we have many more than that. We conduct surveys across hundreds of our agent customers every month. The results on the slide show how agents score us versus the other main property portals. On the left, you can see we rank very strongly for the innovative nature of our products and services, and for the outcomes we deliver agents, which backs up the outcomes data I shared earlier. On the right, we ask customers to rank their overall sentiment towards us on a scale of one to 10, and the same for the other portals they use, then we track over time.
What the graph then tells you is the difference in scores of 10 out of 10 between us and the next nearest portal. In 2021, we had a 90-point lead in very positive sentiment, which has increased to a 150 over the last two years, despite the cost differentials that exist. This shows our strategy to increase value across products and tools is yielding wins with customer sentiment. And when value is helping deliver higher sentiment, agents are more likely to increase their investment. There's been a lot of talk about competition in the last few months, so it feels right I say something. Firstly, I'd like to share a quick infographic showing the competitive landscape over time, alongside snippets of our market share. When we launched in 2000, we weren't first to market.
There were property portals like Fish4, Property Finder, and FindaProperty already trading. Since, there's been an ever-changing competitive landscape from potential disruptors, large and small. We've even seen competition from the likes of News Corp, Tesco's, Google, Facebook, and many more. What's been consistent throughout this time is our approach: to focus on what we do, continuing to innovate, to stay where we've been for almost 20 years. The place U.K. consumers and property professionals turn to first and most often. We have a deep understanding of the U.K. property market, longstanding relationships with nearly all agents and developers, and in over two decades, have built a special place in the hearts and minds of U.K. consumers. We have no doubt competition will continue to be robust as ever for the next 20 years.
In summary, our core business is in great health, driven by a powerful network effect that allows us to innovate and increase the value we offer across the network. As we continue to harness the unique first-party data the platform generates, we'll continue our growth course for years to come. Thank you for listening. So we're now going into a 30-minute break. During that 30-minute break, we've got some product demonstrations and meet the team. Product demonstrations are in the forum, as you can see on the map. Meet the team is in the gallery. You'll see the guys. They've got. They're all set up when you get out there. We'll be back in here in 30 minutes, at 3:30 P.M.
Product demonstrations, two rooms are in that direction, and meet the team is over there, I think, by where you came in.
Thank you.
All right. Thank you. Welcome back. Just before we get into the second half, quick reminder, at about 4:00 P.M., there is going to be a fire alarm test, so that's in about half an hour. It is just a test. No need to evacuate. If one of us is talking at the time, we'll just try and style it out, and wait for it to pass. I'm Dave Cray, Managing Director of Rightmove Financial Services. Been at Rightmove for 9 years now, and prior to that, I was a management consultant for about 20 years, mainly working with FTSE companies on a combination of strategy and technology. I'm going to talk to you about mortgages today, which is one of our strategic growth areas and an area where we're investing more. It's also our youngest business unit.
So we became directly authorized by the FCA at the beginning of 2022, launched our first product in the middle of 2022, and we've now grown revenues to around GBP 2 million this year. We see a clear path to GBP 25 million, and I'm going to share our strategy and plans for how we're going to do that today. But before I do that, I just want to touch briefly on the U.K. mortgage market. So there's 8.5 million residential mortgages in the UK, with an outstanding value of GBP 1.6 trillion, and forecast lending this year of in excess of GBP 400 billion. And we see the market as two segments. So there's purchase lending, which is driven by the number of transactions in the market, and that accounts for around about 30% of the market today.
Then there's refinance lending, which is driven by existing mortgages, and that accounts for the other 70%. We see it as strategically important to serve both of these segments. But we're starting with purchase for a few reasons. Firstly, everyone looking to move is already on Rightmove. We also see first-time buyers as an extremely important segment. First-time buyers bring in new lending and directly contribute to market growth. Our early learnings show that first-time buyers engage really strongly with our products and services, so we actually think we can help the market as a whole. The U.K. mortgage market is mostly intermediated, which means 85% of people choose to speak to a broker, and 15% choose to go direct to a lender. Now, the lender market is highly concentrated. The top six lenders provide 72% of lending.
The top 10, 85%, and then there's a long tail. The broker market is pretty much the polar opposite. It's highly fragmented. It's over 5,000 companies, of which around about 2,000 mortgage brokers, 2,500 independent financial advisors, and there are no real market leaders. The largest has a market share less than 5%, and in our research, consumers can barely name a single broker brand. So for consumers, there really is no easy way to find or choose the right help for their mortgage needs. We're also very aware that many of our agency customers also make revenues from mortgages. I think it's fair to say, pretty much all of the corporate agents make significant revenues, and most own a broker.
Also, 72% of our independent agents have some form of mortgage income, and of those, 10% directly own or employ a broker. The other 90% refer to a third-party broker. So it's really hard for consumers to know what to do. Most ask friends or family. Many actually do get referred by their estate agent within branch, and our research shows that where branch staff do refer, typically one-third of leads get referred to a broker, and then one-third of those convert into an active conversation.
So we see a really big opportunity here, a big opportunity to help consumers, to help consumers speak to a lender or a broker, a big opportunity to help our agency customers grow their financial services revenues, and to do all of this in a way that allows branch staff to focus on what they do best, which is selling properties. So the way we're going to do this, we're going to focus on lead generation and build on our core strengths. So if I think about what we've achieved over the last 24 years, we've become the destination for property, and we've built a huge leads engine. So as you've heard from Johan, Tara, and Dave, our scale and reach with consumers is unparalleled, and it is the reason we can build out a large digital mortgage product offering.
But also, there's a lot of love for the Rightmove brand. And I'd like to pause on that for a moment because I think it's useful to touch on how our brand extends into mortgages. So a few years ago, we did a survey. We asked a few thousand consumers to rank a variety of brands that they'd trust to provide mortgage services…. The survey included portals, aggregators, and large, well-known retail brands, and we outranked pretty much everyone, and we weren't even doing anything in mortgages. So I think that tells us a lot about the level of trust that the U.K. have in the Rightmove brand. We're already the turn-to first destination for property, and we aim to become the turn-to first destination for mortgages, too.
Connecting consumers with property professionals, just as we do today, but also with brokers and lenders, and we see big opportunities for all four groups. For consumers, it's about access to lenders and brokers, all in one place, and integrated into your search journey. Really importantly for us, for agents, it's about more opportunities to grow. For those that have financial services revenues, the opportunity to grow those revenues, and for those who refer, the opportunity to do more. For lenders and brokers, as we continue to digitize more of the process, we'll provide access to all of the borrowers in the U.K., which they don't have today. And we'll do that via qualified leads, enhanced with financial and lifecycle data, and we'll provide smart targeting options to ensure lenders and brokers can reach the segments they're most interested in.
For Rightmove, we see it as further deepening the network effect, the network effect between consumers and customers, but also extending it to brokers and lenders, and building our all-important platform value by expanding the data we gather and using that data to drive products and innovation that help both our customers and consumers. Of course, we see significant revenue opportunities, too. Johan mentioned earlier the TAMs. We value the lead generation TAM at about GBP 250 million, and in our modeling, we've assumed that the market remains mostly brokered. It's also worth noting that the unit economics for purchase and remortgaging are the same. Then on the left-hand side, the product transfer TAM looks low because we've modeled it as mostly non-introduced. We've assumed all lenders are probably pretty good at reaching out to their existing customers.
Our target here is to achieve 10% market share of lead generation in the next five years. Let me explain how we're going to do that by taking you through our product roadmap, and I'll focus on the three cornerstone products, each of which serves a different need, and I'll touch briefly on how each makes money. Our first product was launched in the middle of 2022. It's aimed at helping the 15% of people who want to go direct to a lender. Our central thesis is that consumers don't know how much they can borrow until far too late in the process. That results in fall throughs, frustration, and wasted effort for everyone involved. Our Mortgage in Principle answers this question with a lender-backed decision.
And by the way, every single mortgage starts with a Mortgage in Principle, whether you know it or not. So here's how it works. You can access the Mortgage in Principle from a number of places throughout the website. The one I've shown is the property detail page, which is one of our higher volume pages. You then answer a series of questions on Rightmove, on average, 45, but it can be as much as 70 for complex cases. Your data is then passed into the lender's decisioning systems, and you get a result direct from that lender. An accept, which means you can borrow the amount you've asked for, or a decline. If you get an accept, then you can download your Mortgage in Principle certificate to show agents you're proceedable. The Mortgage in Principle gives you a really high degree of confidence in what you can borrow.
If the lender says they'll lend to you, then they will lend to you. To our knowledge, the launch of the Mortgage in Principle on site, integrated with lender systems, was a global first among property portals. We've done this in partnership with Nationwide, who are the second-largest lender in the U.K., with 12% market share. To give you a sense of our run rate, we're now introducing around GBP 1.3 billion of potential lending every month. We're really pleased with the product's performance so far. We've doubled MIP volumes since the beginning of the year, and we've created a journey on Rightmove that converts 10 percentage points better than the equivalent native lender journey. The way we make money is we, by getting paid for every MIP accept.
When we saw market uncertainty during this year's interest rate rises, we also saw consumers turning to our Mortgage in Principle in increased volumes, and that translated directly into revenue. Also, Johan mentioned earlier about the enhanced data signals from mortgage journeys. I want to give you one example, just based on what people do pre- and post-MIP. They typically increase their time on site by 12% in the next 7 days, and that increases up to +30% in the next 30 days. Average views increased by 30%, and over 50% go ahead to send a property lead. In short, they turbocharge their search. And we've used this data to train our machine learning model that can predict the propensity to fill out a MIP. We've done some trial email nurturing campaigns, and the results are really encouraging.
So we've seen a 4x uplift in people starting a mortgage in principle, a 10x uplift in people completing a MIP, and then a 20x uplift in people getting an accept. And the way we're going to grow is we're gonna focus on driving MIP submissions. We plan to bring more people into the top of the funnel by launching our machine learning driven nurturing campaigns to our audience, and we plan to expand the funnel to help more people submit a MIP. We also plan to bring more of the lender journey onto Rightmove, extending the mortgage in principle into a digital full mortgage application, and using our property listing and valuation data to streamline the process. And I think it's worth calling out that our growth plans are predicated on driving more volume to one lender.
We think we've got a really strong partner in Nationwide. They share our vision for digitizing and simplifying the process, and we also know that to expand our MIP to other lenders would be dependent on lender tech and agility. So we believe the best strategy and the best consumer experience is to go deeper with one lender, driving digitization of the user journey. However, we do know that Nationwide won't be right for everyone, and we know it's important to offer choice. So our second product does exactly that. So I'm delighted to say we've just launched our first broker product, which is aimed at helping the 85% of people who want to speak to a broker. We've launched with a broker called Finantly, who are owned by one of our customers, and others will follow soon.
This is a really important milestone, as we can now start to offer consumers choice while also helping our customers. So the broker product provides choice by offering people an onward journey to a panel of brokers, and that panel will be powered by our customers. Where our peers and competitors send leads to large independent brokers, we will send leads to our customers' brokers. And those leads will be qualified leads, enhanced with data based on where you are in your buying cycle, and MIP data if you've submitted a MIP. We'll also have a return data flow to Rightmove so that we can execute on our Consumer Duty, making sure that consumers get good outcomes. We see the broker product as a huge opportunity for our customers. And as we go through 2024, we'll grow lead volumes.
Today, the broker product sits at the end of the Mortgage in Principle flow and is offered to anyone getting a decline. Over time, we'll introduce it to high volume areas of site, and as we grow lead volumes, we'll grow the panel. With more mortgage brokers owned by our agency customers, offering a mix of national and local coverage. We believe the broker products will be really valuable for consumers who want choice, but will also be meaningful for our customers who want to grow their financial services revenues. And we believe it's important to align our interests with our customers' interests, so our commercial model will be based on a hybrid revenue share arrangement. Today, the proposition looks more like the picture on the left.
As we grow, the panel will expand, and the proposition will start to look more like the picture on the right, with consumers being offered multiple brokers. Finally, we also have plans to help the 8.5 million people who already have a mortgage. Tara told you earlier about how we're going beyond find with our Track a Property product, which is already gaining traction with consumers. We plan to build on this to launch our remortgage proposition next year. This will be powered by the 6.5 million people we expect to track a property, and the 2 million people who've already told us their moving situation. We'll use data and AI to offer deals that might suit, with an onward journey to our broker panel or our lender partner.
We plan to launch late next year and scale during 2025, generating more leads for both our lender and our customers' brokers. So we think we have a really clear plan. During the next year, we'll layer up and scale products that meet the needs of each segment of the market. For direct to lender audience, we'll open up the funnel to help more people and continue to digitize more of the lender journey. We'll also look at how we might serve a broader set of segments, such as buy to let or helping renters get onto the property ladder. For the broker audience, we will continue to scale the broker panel and drive lead volume by adding entry points into high volume areas of site, offering more opportunities for our customers to grow their mortgage revenues.
For refinancing audience, we will launch and scale our offering based on the growth of core products like Track a Property and My Rightmove. We're confident that we can grow the mortgages business to be a GBP 25 million business by 2028. Alison will take you through the revenue model in a little more detail later. Beyond revenue, our mortgages business will also generate a huge amount of platform value. Data on the mortgage choices of our consumers and the progression of their purchase, opportunities for our agency customers to grow their financial services revenues and deepen their relationship with us, and more reasons for consumers to register and log in. And, of course, more ways that we'll be able to deploy our AI and machine learning capabilities to drive nurturing campaigns at both a scale and quality that no other portal will be able to do.
We can see broader opportunities beyond lead generation. So the broking TAM is over GBP 1 billion, which rises to GBP 1.5 billion if you add in insurance sales. We've estimated the lending TAM to be well over GBP 4 billion, based on customer acquisition alone, ignoring lifetime value, ignoring the size of lender back books. The main opportunities we see are digital, asset light, and where we can leverage our data. First and foremost, we'll explore more opportunities to help our customers grow and improve their broker offering. Perhaps offering digital front-end services and property listing data to brokers to help them be more efficient. Or digitizing more of the lender flow, ultimately offering a full digital end-to-end lending journey, with Rightmove owning the consumer experience and backed by a lender.
We see opportunities to use our data and AI to help drive lender innovation through the manufacture of more personalized products that can be offered to the right people at the right time, such as green lending products for people who have a property with a lower EPC rating or personalized pricing based on individual circumstances. And finally, we see opportunities to help build the rails for the industry, helping consumers, customers, brokers, and lenders operate in a faster, more joined-up way, with deeper integrations across the industry and seamless digital data flows. So in summary, I suspect the question in everyone's mind here today is, why will Rightmove succeed? So let me give you five reasons to believe.
We have the biggest and most engaged audience in the U.K., who turn to Rightmove first, spend the most time on site, and send the most leads on the most properties. And so we have the distribution at near zero cost of acquisition that nobody else has. We have fundamental economics that are unrivaled in the industry. We have a clear roadmap for the products that we're going to create and for how we're going to help consumers, and how we're going to do that while adding value to our customers. And we are experts in data and digitizing journeys. We've done that over the last 24 years. I think we've shown that in the Mortgage in Principle, and we have phenomenal teams who march on data. And finally, we believe we'll be upstream of any other website or service for anyone in the U.K. interested in a mortgage.
Every mortgage starts with a property, and every property journey starts on Rightmove. So, look, so we started. We know we've only scratched the surface. We're really excited about the opportunity. I personally am really excited about the opportunity, and thank you for listening. I will hand over to Andy.
Thank you, Dave. Good afternoon, everyone. Great to have the chance to talk to you today. I'm Andy Miles, and I run the commercial business at Rightmove. Today, I'm going to talk about the huge opportunity in commercial real estate for Rightmove and how well positioned we are to execute on it and win in this space. There is work to do to achieve potential, but we have a strong track record of accelerating our product lines, and we have a great plan to deliver. I joined Rightmove four months ago, but before this, I worked in the commercial property market for 14 years in FTSE 100 and NASDAQ-listed businesses and co-founding a successful marketplace startup, which we exited. I also have experience in residential real estate and real estate data. I've spent nearly 10 years now focused on digitizing this industry.
I'm very passionate about it, and I have total conviction that commercial is a high-value market to serve, and we're only touching the surface of it today. Rightmove Commercial is currently doing GBP 12 million in revenue, and we think there's at least 10x potential for growth... There is a common misconception in the UK that only small tenants, like high street retail and small businesses, search for space online, but that categorically isn't true. Some of the largest tenants in the world are searching on Rightmove every day. Later on in their search process, they will usually retain a broker, but more often than not, the discovery process starts online, just as it does for every other product and service. And it's not just limited to tenants. Thousands of investors from the U.K. and around the world search for commercial buildings to buy.
This is a high-value market to serve, and it's looking on Rightmove. When a shopping center is let up, or a huge industrial unit, or a large office in a major city, the rent rolls are very high, often millions GBP of rent and sometimes tens of millions GBP. If you capitalize this, a big letting can add GBP 100 million or more to the building value. Today, we're selling advertising on these types of buildings for GBP 30 a month, give or take, and in some cases, we're selling it less than GBP 15 a month. There is so much potential to do more. In the U.K., commercial is a circa GBP 1.4 trillion asset class. Our internal estimate of TAM is GBP 150 million.
We've done this bottom up based on commissions and being mindful of what Rightmove has achieved in residential, and we believe this TAM will grow over time as the market further digitizes. There is a huge amount of suboptimal marketing spend in this industry, including small fortunes spent on individual building websites and paper brochures with often low or no ROI. We're going after all this suboptimal spend. There is international context for larger scale or more mature CRE portals. In Australia, in an economy a quarter the size of the U.K. Sorry, half the size of the U.K., with a much smaller institutional property market, Real Commercial has built a business nearly four times the size of ours, and in America, the leading business does over $200 million a year in revenue.
So there is good precedent for growth and no fundamental reason why the U.K. should be so small. The market just hasn't had the focus yet that Rightmove is about to give it. Rightmove Commercial is in a good position today, with approximately 70% share of portal visits. There's clear headroom between us and competitors, and this headroom has been pretty consistent over time, despite the arrival of new entrants and the failure of old ones. Furthermore, we have very high levels of direct and organic traffic, about 85%, and virtually no paid-for traffic. We have very high brand recognition, thanks to our 20+ year track record in residential, and nearly 200 million visits a month in residential. With such enormous resi traffic, we only need to pull across. There we go.
Your attention, please. Your attention, please. This is a fire test broadcast. End of broadcast.
Right. Thank you for that. So, to pick up, with, with such enormous residential traffic that Rightmove has, we only need to pull across a small fraction of these users when they have a commercial property need, and that's the genesis of the GBP 12 million of starter revenue that we have today. Lastly, behind the scenes, we're gathering exceptional current data on supply and demand, which we're only at the very early stages of using to its full potential. We have an excellent existing customer base on which to grow. You'll think of commercial as a small part of Rightmove, and it is, but we still have over 900 very diverse customers. These are mostly subscription customers. We have a good mix of agents and owners across all the main sectors.
We serve all types of customers, from small offices and small retail units to large fund managers, for example, portfolio companies of Blackstone Real Estate. With some of these larger customers, there is great opportunity to deliver more value to them and, in turn, generate more value for Rightmove. Just to recap, we're in a great position today. Strong traffic leadership, high brand recognition, large and diverse customer base, great synergies with our residential business, and proven execution across the pillars that matter. We start the acceleration of this business from a good place with strong moats. We need to do more from here to grow into that TAM. A bespoke product will unlock the next phase of growth... and there is headroom for sales and marketing investments, which we'll deploy in a disciplined fashion, as Rightmove always does.
In order to grow into the TAM, we must evolve our product to serve the market better and to serve its needs, which are different to resi. I'm not going to talk about all of these differences, but I would like to go deep into a couple, as I think it's important. There are several major asset classes: offices, retail, industrial, leisure, and hospitality. They have some distinct and non-overlapping features, which are important for search. For example, number of desks in a serviced office, Zone A rents in retail, eaves height, and also loading and unloading facilities in industrial, as well as common features like rates and service charge, which is still different to resi. There's also a different and wider range of personas that we need to serve, like tenant representatives and professional investors.
Thus, we need a data model and a search architecture which is bespoke to the needs of these main sectors and personas. As we improve our user journey and product suite, we will ultimately look to serve all personas. I would say we only serve a subset of these personas well today, perhaps the agents well on the supply side, and there's loads of headroom for growth with the others, particularly owner customers. The playbook we're looking to execute is very similar to the one we executed for New Homes. We've shown before that we can take a successful side business, focus in on it, and turn it into a major component of the core business, now doing well over GBP 50 million annually in revenue.
The only difference with commercial is we will go much faster this time and try to do in five years what we did in 10 years with New Homes. We can go faster because we have a much larger and deeper product and data team today than we did back then, and we're going to invest more strongly in the opportunity. Alison will go into more detail on the investment program shortly. So to touch on some product goals for 2024, the new data model should be built and finished in 2024. As I alluded to earlier, it's a critical foundational task from which everything else flows, a better consumer experience and new products. We need to commercialize the language across the site and create commercial content, including dedicated news, blog posts, and user guides. We've started all this work.
Lastly, we need to create a dedicated landing page and consumer flow. Rightmove started 2023 with no dedicated commercial property product people. We now have seven, and the team is growing. The team is a mix of internal experts and new hires, and it's also supported by Rightmove's wider tech team of over 200. This is just a simple mock-up of a new landing page. We're gonna give more prominence to commercial, not just a button buried at the top of the page like it is today. Lower down the page, we'll show commercial-specific images and content, including high-quality news and data, to engage and inform the audience. As we move into 2025 and beyond, we will create new and high-value products for high-value buildings and customers where there is high willingness to pay.
Top products on Real Commercial in Australia cost over AUD 10,000 per building per month in markets like Sydney and Melbourne. Where there is very large amounts of value at risk across many floors or spaces, in this case, millions of GBP of rent, customers will pay tens of thousands of GBP to advertise a single building on the best site. This is somewhat analogous to Build to Rent and new homes developments, where at the top end there is high ability to pay and high willingness to pay for good products. The other side of the coin to this is back-end tools. We will improve and customize Rightmove Plus to commercial to show ROI more clearly and show deeper levels of market data to customers. So just to summarize, it's been said commercial real estate is one of the last great frontiers for digitization.
While that is hyperbole, there's definitely some truth in it. We're perfectly positioned with track record, the right knowledge, and exceptional platform leverage. Search is not the limit of the opportunity. The work we're doing with Lead to Keys in residential is directly relevant to commercial, particularly at the volume end of the market, and we're thinking about how to build that into our future plans. Thank you for your time, and I look forward to taking questions at the end. Now I'll hand over to Alison.
Right. Fun's over. It's the finance bit. Hi, everyone. Good afternoon. I'm Alison. I've been the Rightmove CFO for just over three years now, and I did 20 years at News Corp prior to that, across a mix of Sky and News UK. And I think there has been no more exciting time to be at Rightmove and look ahead... because all of the plans that you've heard about today will mean that by 2028, Rightmove will be a very different business to the one it is today. Now, hopefully, you've all had a chance to read the trading update that we put out this morning, confirming once again that the range of market conditions in which Rightmove can not just operate successfully, but thrive, is wide.
It has been one of the noisiest and most volatile periods in the U.K. housing market, in a number of years. And yet, once again, we're on track to deliver revenue growth, ARPA growth, and profit growth, of about 8%. As our customers continue to use our site and our products to navigate the market, to win new vendor mandates, and to sell new homes. So I'm not going to talk much about current trading today. Today is all about the future. But what I will say is that the stability and the subscription-based nature of our business is such a solid foundation on which to build our investment plans, and you will really start to see that come through in the numbers that I'm going to take you through. So let's have a look at them.
The plans you've heard today mean that by 2028, we will have materially increased the size of Rightmove. With revenues of over GBP 600 million, we will be 170% the size of the business we are today, with profit generation also materially ahead of today at GBP 420 million and growing. You heard Johan declare our ambition to generate double-digit revenue and profit growth, and these plans not only achieve that, but they are just the start of our journey on the way to early, and then mid-teens % growth for both. That is while spending 3 of these 5 years increasing what we invest in the business, where cost growth will at least equal revenue growth.
So the acceleration in revenues, once those investments are finished and start to deliver, will see a big step up across 2027 and 2028, delivering not just a bigger and more profitable, but a more diversified Rightmove five years from now. When we reported our half-year results in July this year, we set out that the core business will grow going forward by between 7% and 9% per annum. And you can see here that we expect that to remain the case, and I will set out in a moment what the drivers of that growth will be. The double-digit growth will come from an acceleration in the growth rates of a number of other business units.
The strategic growth areas that we've set out here in the table on the right, and which many of you have heard us talk about previously as being opportunities, and which you've heard the plans for today. This table shows the growth rates we expect from these business units and their overall contribution to group revenues. Really strong, double-digit growth in every area. So much so, that by 2028, our strategic growth areas will represent 20% of group's revenues and will have grown at an aggregate CAGR of in excess of 25% over the coming five-year period. Even more importantly, though, by 2028, we will have multiple routes for that accelerated growth to continue and to increase from 2028 onwards. The core business, which today represents 90% of our revenues, will represent 75% five years from now.
As we look at how revenues build to that all-important GBP 600 million, you can see here the revenue contribution from each business unit. What's also clear, though, is how important the core business remains and the critical part that it will continue to play in ensuring that we deliver those revenues. Not only will the core Rightmove business remain the engine room of Rightmove for some considerable time to come, you've heard from both Tara and Dave today about the extent of our audience and the engagement of our audience, and the operational and data advantages that that gives us. The core business will be what drives the growth of the other business units, and it will remain the source of our critical audience advantage to set us off on the right path to growth in each of these earlier stage business units.
The way we will ensure that the core business will continue to grow is all about ARPA growth. You will have seen this morning that we raised guidance for 2023's ARPA growth from previous guidance of GBP 105 to between GBP 112 and GBP 116. At that level of growth, ARPA will end 2023 at just under GBP 1,430, up about 9% on 2022, and about 10% compounded since COVID recovery began in 2021. In 2021, we increased our then ARPA growth range from its previous GBP 75 to GBP 85 a year, to a new range of between GBP 95 and GBP 105.
As this graph shows, we are now increasing that range still further to GBP 100-GBP 110 for 2024, and to GBP 120 and GBP 135 from 2025 onwards, a compounded annual growth rate of 8% across those five years. But behind the headline growth, the blend of growth between product spend, package upgrades, and price increases has also been shifting, driven more by discretionary spend on product and package, and driven less by pricing. 2023's growth will be over 60%, driven by incremental product purchase and package upgrades, all of which is discretionary on the part of our agency customers, but for us, it remains subscription revenue.
Of course, the more that agents upgrade their packages, the more efficient that spend becomes, as the reduction in core listings acts as a powerful incentive to remain on that higher package. You also heard from Dave earlier that 40% of agents spend at least 100 GBP each month, more than the cost of their subscription package. Proof, if any, was needed, of the value that our customers derive from our products. We expect this to remain the case going forward. The ARPA growth we are targeting here will be product-led. As you heard from Tara earlier, our increased ability to tailor products to discrete subsets of both the agency and new homes bases, the increased sophistication of our products and the data they contain, and the outcomes they drive for our customers, will command a premium price. Recent years bear this out.
Within 12 months of launch, the Native Search Ads and Advanced Development Listing products that Tara showcased earlier were tracking to annual run rates of GBP 5 million. Sold by Me, which was launched in November 2019, was tracking to GBP 3 million within 12 months. We are getting better at maximizing the financial returns on our products. So it will be the products, the efficiency tools, and the packages that we will continue to create around them that will be the ARPA drivers, and the increased value that they deliver will continue their appeal to both agents and developers. To be clear, our policy on like-for-like price increases will remain unchanged. That is to be steady and compounding.
Finally, also to be clear, we are assuming no growth in customer numbers in either agency or development numbers in this plan, given the current landscape in the housing market. So any increase in customer numbers will represent revenue upside to the numbers that we are targeting here. So let me talk now about the growth drivers for our strategic growth areas, and let's start with commercial. To confirm, the way that we can we monetize commercial real estate, sorry, is the same as we do in residential. So it's pay to list, it's free to search, and the important metrics are the same as those in the resi business, where growth is a function of ARPA and customer numbers. As Andy set out, 2024 will be a year of investment in the site.
We're investing GBP 3 million in 2024, and a further GBP 6 million across 2025 and 2026. The majority of which is investment in our product teams, who will customize the site to commercial and create the same sort of data-led, value-driving products for commercial agents as we do in residential. So growth in the short term will come from increased customer numbers, where our huge audience and the extent of its engagement will continue to drive returns for agents from a commercial listing. Now, you'll notice, and quite rightly, that the investment amounts, not just in commercial, but across the other areas also, look relatively small, and they are, both in absolute terms and relative to the cost base itself. The reason that is possible for us is because of the assets across the core business that we are able to leverage across all of the investment areas.
Our enormous audience, our product teams, and their years of experience of building products that have identified an unmet need and deliver value, the data that we can leverage right across the business, our sales expertise and relationships that allow us to talk to anyone in any agency. And of course, the fact that these are already revenue-generating business units. We are enhancing them. We are not starting from scratch. And underneath them all is the powerful One Rightmove platform that Johan described at the beginning. So the investment for commercial is to build a comprehensive product team dedicated to the commercial business. We are also increasing our sales capacity, and we're adding to our marketing. For context, a full product team is between 10 and 15 people, a mix of engineers, analysts, and designers, and costs annually about GBP 1.5 million.
We're also adding to our sales team, and obviously, we have brought in Andy to run the business with all of his years of experience across commercial real estate and marketplaces. On the marketing investment, we are leveraging the existing Rightmove audience, not having to build a new commercial brand or to pay for search traffic, and so the marketing we will do will be to increase the association of the Rightmove brand with commercial real estate. Across the medium term, the products that we will develop will then add materially to ARPA growth, and you can see that we are targeting a three-year CAGR of 25%-30% from 2026 onwards. These products will then enable us to develop the same sort of package structure for commercial agents that we have in residential.
And of course, it will be the perfect opportunity to apply everything we have learned from our 20 years of building and then evolving these packages, mixing efficiency tools with data, insight reporting, and digital products to capture this large market as it continues on its digitization journey. As Andy also set out, our five-year revenue ambition is to accelerate from GBP 12 million or so in 2023 to GBP 35 million by 2028, a five-year CAGR of close to 25%. But importantly, it is the step up in CAGR across 2027 and 2028 that will mean that we exit 2028 with both momentum and headroom to continue to drive towards that GBP 150 million TAM. Now, you've heard from Dave about the ways consumers look for a mortgage and why we are uniquely placed to succeed in this market.
Right now, we earn revenues solely from consumers who are able and prepared to apply digitally themselves, direct to lender. We're partnered with a single lender, Nationwide, and we earn a number of basis points of the principal amount of the mortgage in principle every time a MIP is accepted by the consumer. We will continue to offer this direct route, and revenue growth here will come from providing more leads and better leads to our lender partner. Even with the direct-to-lender model, though, we will have monetization choices. We can add another lender, driving increased lead volume, or we continue with one lender, further qualifying the lead to make the application process easier and the lending decision quicker and more friction-free, helping to increase our fee per lead.
The green part of the column in the chart here shows the sort of lead volume growth that we anticipate from the direct-to-lender route. The alternative journey is to apply via a broker, and you've heard from Dave that we know that 85% of mortgage applicants want to talk to a broker. To help us to deliver a good consumer experience here, we are, as Dave said, starting the broker journey with those consumers who drop out of the MIP process. We're deliberately starting with these small volumes to enable us to learn as much as possible about the journey in the same way that we did with the Nationwide partnership. Ultimately, of course, we will widen the funnel to include any consumer wanting to apply for a mortgage via a broker.
Here, the monetization model is twofold: We charge the broker for each lead, and we also earn a share of the broker's commission on the completed mortgage. The yellow part of the column here shows our anticipated broker lead volumes from 2024 to 2028. We're investing an incremental GBP 1 million here in 2024, which doubles the size of the product team serving the mortgages product and will allow us to continue to evolve the broker product that went live last week, as well as to complete the various integrations of further brokers as we proceed through 2024. As with commercial, we are able to leverage our search audience, avoiding the hundreds of millions of GBP each year spent on consumer acquisition costs by others.
We are also, of course, both able to leverage our consumer data and to add meaningfully to that data with these mortgage data, a self-reinforcing data set that, over time, will add materially to our competitive advantage. As we continue to scale both the direct application and the broker journeys, turning Rightmove into a really valuable source of leads for brokers and for lenders, our 2028 ambition is for revenues of GBP 25 million and to continue to grow from there. More lender leads, more broker leads, as Dave says, but also better, more qualified, more data-driven leads. GBP 25 million is not a new number for us. When we launched our mortgage proposition, we set it as our ambition, but we are now much clearer as to how we deliver it, what the unmet consumer needs are, as well as what is involved in direct lender and broker integrations.
Across lenders and brokers, we now offer increased choice to consumers, and we create choices for ourselves around monetization options. So this will now enable us to continue to grow beyond that first GBP 25 million and into the much larger mortgage TAM that Dave highlighted. Importantly, both with mortgages and with commercial real estate, once these business units are at scale, they have margin profiles very similar to the core business and will be in no way dilutive to overall margins. Now, rental services is also a large opportunity for us to continue to grow into. As you heard from Tara this morning, this afternoon, even, apologies, our Lead to Keys flow will make the renting experience better for tenants and will allow agents to be more efficient, binding both sides of our network closer to us.
Lead to Keys is truly a game changer for agents, and a game changer for us, too, as it is how we will deliver GBP 20 million worth of growth in our lettings business. As with both mortgages and commercial, both we and the agent have the huge advantage of the tenant starting their search journey on our site. We make revenue in four ways from rental services. We sell the Lead to Keys product that Tara described, Enquiry Manager, and Tenancy Manager, and here the current monetization is between GBP 75 and GBP 150 per branch per month. The agent then pays for the tenant reference separately, an average fee per reference of around GBP 12.
If we've done the reference, we can help the agent to sell the landlord our rent protection insurance policy, and then knowing that the reference has been passed is a critical trigger point, where we can then help the agent with their contents insurance, TV, and broadband, where we earn an ancillary fee from our provider partners. So there are three key levers to achieving our financial goals in rental services, and they're all about volume. We will increase the penetration of Lead to Keys across our agency branches. We will increase the number of references we deliver, as references generate both direct revenue, and they create the opportunities for us to sell the ancillary products. And then we will improve the attachment rate of the insurance and other products we sell to landlords and to tenants.
As with mortgages, we are investing an incremental GBP 1 million in 2024 across product development and sales, to both continue to develop the product and to embed it into agents' Rightmove Plus systems, and then to increase our capacity to monetize this investment with additional sales heads. Our revenue target is to deliver GBP 25 million, also by 2028. For context, rental services will deliver about GBP 4 million in 2023. So we've set out here the product roadmap that will enable these increased sales volumes. So in addition to BAU cost growth, we will add an incremental GBP 10 million of investment costs in 2024, as you've heard. I covered GBP 5 million already of the 10 across commercial, mortgages, and rental services.
In addition to that, we will add a further GBP 3 million into the existing product teams to deliver the consumer and customer work that Tara set out earlier, and we'll then add a GBP 1 million into marketing and a GBP 1 million into data. As a result, the 2024 underlying operating margin will change from 73% in 2023 to around 70% in 2024, and it will remain there for at least the life of this business plan. What specifically we will invest into each area in the later years, we will set out at the time. But for now, that level of margin is where we plan to run the business going forward.
The growth in both revenue and in profit that will follow will do what I set out at the beginning: deliver a bigger, more profitable, and more diversified business, with multiple business units contributing meaningfully to growth and with multiple further routes to growth beyond 2028. So as we think about five-year financial targets, we have strong conviction in our ability to deliver across the range of initiatives we've set out here today. We are focused on revenue growth, not just at a group level, but ensuring that the strategic growth businesses deliver on their plans also, which is why we are setting targets for those business units today also. And of course, a massive focus on profit, GBP 420 million and beyond in 2028.
Although that will be a real milestone in Rightmove's story, it will, in reality, be the launchpad for continued growth beyond that. You've already heard how commercial and mortgages have significant addressable markets beyond the targets we're setting today, and we are determined to get the business to that early and then mid-teens level of profit growth that we have talked about beyond 2028, all at an incredible operating margin of 70% and our continued strong cash generation. It's also worth confirming that throughout this entire period, our capital allocation policy will remain unchanged. We will retain our progressive dividend policy. We will continue to assess M&A only in the context of its capability to accelerate existing plans, and we will continue to return all surplus cash via the share buyback program and dividend, as we do currently. There is so much for us to go after.
These targets are ambitious, but we have complete confidence that we can and will deliver them, and we will transform Rightmove over the coming five-year period. It's a very exciting time to be on board. So that's it for me. Thank you, all. I look forward to taking your questions later. I'll now hand back to Johan for his closing comments.
Thank you, Alison. I am not miked up, but I hope to be able to use my voice. Oh, there we go. This will be short, I promise. In summary, I hope you've heard a compelling and convincing and also inspiring story today, both about the Rightmove that we built for a long time, but the Rightmove that we're planning to build over yet a long time. We're starting with what it says here, a superb and unique consumer position. We are delivering very strong value to our customers. There are quite a few structural tailwinds. Some certainly bob a little bit in and out during the course of cycles and industry events, but again, the overall revenue and profit pools in this industry actually tracks upwards over time.
We have already a very resilient platform in our business model, several different segments that cater well to a market that is fast, to a market that is slow, and certainly with a lot of upside from the many small parts that we have today. Speaking of that one, we continue to focus a lot on our core business, consumers and customers, the way we define them, where 90% of our business sits today. That is never gonna go out of the picture for Rightmove. But as I've come into the business and heard this amazing team talk about the business, we should give more oxygen to some of the smaller business units that we have today. It'd be a cardinal fault not to go after some pretty obvious growth opportunities sitting there. None of them are new. We're in them already. We have knowledge, we have capability.
Now we're adding, so we can actually pace them up. And finally, we intend to continue to build a nice compounding growth on both top and bottom line for Rightmove. That is very exciting, at least over a long time, and I think a lot of you agree, having been with us for a long time. So with that, I think we are actually in better time than we were supposed to. Isn't that amazing? There you go, for pace and ambition. But we are happily going into Q&A with all the presenters, plus Matt on the panel. So let us just shift up on the stage, and we will go into that. I think there will be some mics passed around. And Alison will be a little bit of emcee here, taking in the questions and give them out across all of us.
Okay, let's start. Will?
Hi. Hi, it's Will Packer from BNP Paribas. Three questions, please. Firstly, implicit, or at least my assumption, is implicit in your guidance, is that no major acceleration marketing spend is required in the context of the new ongoing competitive threat of OnTheMarket / CoStar. Could you just give us an update as to why you think that's the case? Clearly, there's an impressive history of being resilient to new competition, but your latest thoughts there would be helpful. Secondly, in terms of the longer term margin resilience at 70%, there's a quite significant change of mix in the business, in particular, some new lower margin areas. To me, rentals would look to have different unit economics to the classified segment.
Could you just kind of help us understand how that margin can remain so resilient in the context of that, that material shift in mix? And then finally, on the mortgage business, specifically, many classifieds globally have looked to accelerated mortgages, and most of them who've scaled fast have had to buy things. REA in Australia are the most obvious example, or vertically integrated a bit more. Could you outline for us why you think the U.K. market structure is different and you won't need to do that? Thank you.
Sure. Right, I will ask Dave, maybe Dave Cray, if you could answer the mortgages question first. I'll take the piece on margin, and Matt will explain why no major acceleration in marketing is needed. So Dave, maybe you can start.
Sure, I will. So I think, so it's a useful comparison against what REA have done and perhaps what Scout have done. They have both pushed hard into mortgages. I think they've had very different strategies, and they do face into different markets. So REA sort of done a similar thing, I think, which is have a relationship with a single lender, but they have acquired, I've forgotten who it is. Is it Mortgage Choice? Anyway, large broker, they've scaled a large operation. And that seems to be working for them. I don't think it's the sort of route that we would necessarily go into.
For us, there is a really clear opportunity around driving leads, and, perhaps, the most important thing here is that rather than driving leads to a centralized broker, whether one acquires it or whether one simply, you know, refers leads into a centralized broker, that is very different to what we're doing. We are really committed to helping our agency base, many of whom make significant revenues. I think I said, you know, the corporates, corporate agents make very significant revenues from mortgages. All of our agents do, pretty much, I mean, at least three quarters, and we're committed to helping them. Structurally, that's really important. Driving leads to a panel of brokers is absolutely critical, I think, to the way that we go to market in providing choice.
Thanks, Dave. On the margin, Will, this mix of business units all have very similar margin profiles. So I've already, you know, acknowledged that with both, both mortgages and commercial, once they're at scale, once the this little two or three years of investment is done, then pretty much every business unit, with the exception of rental services, will have a very similar margin profile. Rental services will be lower. It's quite people-intensive as we look to sell more references, although we are taking as much cost out of that as possible. But it's that business unit will not impact the overall mix of margin, and so 70% is perfectly achievable for us. So I can confirm that no acceleration in marketing spend beyond what we had already planned is in this plan.
So it goes up next year by about GBP 1 million, but the detail of the answer is quite interesting. So Matt, can you please talk us through?
Of course, yes, and I probably should just introduce myself, as I'm not the one—I haven't, as the others have. I've been with Rightmove for about 15 months. Previous to that, working for about 20 years in digital businesses. Previous to Rightmove, at Just Eat, where around marketing in the U.K. and Ireland. In answer to your question, Will, I think there are a couple of component parts and reasons for that. I think we start from the scale and resilience of our traffic. I think with as many visitors as we have coming into the site, we talked about sort of 2.2+ billion visitors, we have a huge resource to pull from, and I think that is where we're thinking, and we've been building the team slowly to take advantage of that.
So building our CRM capabilities, working very closely around actually how we manage and monetize our product flows as well. So the scale of the traffic platform is a huge enabler for us to be able to take advantage. I think we've also got the strength of the brand, and I think just really sort of resting on that a little bit. We have the brand awareness, yes, we have preference and consideration, growing and continuing to develop. But we also have what Dave, I think, referred to, which is that trust and that sense that the brand can extend into these areas. And I think we've proven that by actually getting into these areas and starting to build businesses already.
But we've also, through the research that we've done, got a very clear sense that both customers and consumers see huge opportunity for us to move in. So I think that gives us reassurance that we can convert that traffic, and we can develop that traffic into significant growth in all of those different areas. So I think we feel very confident that we can do that with the team that we're now building and the team that we've built to deliver.
Thanks, Alison. Just very quick follow-up. In, as it scales, could you just give us a flavor for the underlying EBITDA margin of the rentals business? Very clear on the others. Thanks.
As it scales, it'll be, it'll be about a 40% margin business.
Thanks.
There was another question, Sean. By this lady here at the back.
Thank you. It's Jessica Pok from Peel Hunt, and I've just got three, please. The first is commercial real estate. You're obviously investing in the platform, changing the way the functionality works, the filters, et cetera, and the information. That's your side, you know, the product you're building, but is there an educational piece for the advertisers to change the way they give you the information, or the information's already there, and you just need to extract it differently? And the second one is, I know you've talked about, you know, you have the perception that for commercial real estate, it tends to be kind of smaller or less valuable real estate that is listed on Rightmove.
But when you look at the whole real estate market, are there parts of the market you don't think will be accessible for Rightmove in the future because of the way it's structured? The final one is just on, both on M&A, which you've mentioned, and, you know, following Will's question, I know that you're not interested in acquiring a broker, but, you know, what areas or capabilities could you look at the fill rate, the strategic growth areas.
Of mortgages specifically or more generally?
No, just in general. Yeah.
Okay. Andy?
Sure. I'll tell you your second question on which bits are less accessible for us in commercial. For starters, I think so much more is accessible than what we're addressing today. Particularly mid-sized and very large leases. So I wanted to a good analogy to understand this, because people always push back, and they say, "In commercial real estate, the transaction takes place offline. The discovery takes place through brokers." And that's only partially true. If you set out to buy a luxury product, let's take a Porsche or a Rolex. Like, the transaction for those products will typically take place offline in a showroom or in Watches of Switzerland, for example.
But a lot of the discovery, while people are thinking about what they want to buy, looking at car extras, you know, choosing, looking at the range of Rolexes online, they will look online. And that's why Rolex has an absolutely fabulous website, why all the premium car manufacturers have fabulous websites. And that, that just hasn't really been recognized to anything like its full extent in commercial real estate. The discovery will take place online, and it's just catered for very, very badly today. So I think the, the opportunity to, to sell those sort of very high-quality discovery products over and above the GBP 20-30-a-month adverts we have today is, is absolutely huge. You ask what's not accessible, probably very, very high-end investment sales is, is less accessible, certainly in the near to medium term.
So if someone's selling a GBP 200 or GBP 300 million pound building plus, particularly if it has debt on it, so it's a structure on it, then that will typically, that probably won't hit the internet. That is gonna be brokered like an investment bank, selling a business, frankly. But that really is a small part of the market.
The first question about the information that's included in the listing and the way that we ingest that.
I guess the current data model, off of which we're running the commercial business today, is really just the residential data model tweaked, and as a result, we can ingest commercial real estate data, and we do. We ingest from all the major CRMs, but we don't ingest it in an optimal way, and a lot of the nuance and quality is lost in the way we present it today. So that's one of the reasons why we're embarking on this very critical foundational task of building a new data model, 'cause it will allow us to get much, much richer data from the market.
Thanks, Andy. Johan, would you like to take the M&A question?
Yes. All of what you've seen here today, and, and the plans are built on organic growth with our own resources. I think that's important, and certainly our default way of thinking. Now, there are, of course, opportunities for partnerships and potential M&A. There always has been and always will be. So our overall approach to it hasn't really changed. Organic is how we build our plan, and we continue to monitor the market for any other potential opportunities.
Rahul.
Good afternoon, Rahul from JP. I have three questions. In terms of our investment in marketing, especially for the new verticals like mortgage in principle and, commercial, it requires change in consumer behavior also, in especially on the consumer side. So do you plan to invest more in-- Obviously, you flagged GBP 1 million of marketing investment, but probably it requires more on top of the final marketing investment for change in consumer. So just wanted to understand your thoughts on those business first. The second, you talked about ARPA guidance of 100-110 next year, and then talking about 125 year after. It seems that you have launched Optimiser Edge in Q3, Q4, sorry, October. So just wanted to understand what's driving at ARPA acceleration 2025 and not 2024. Just want to understand the mix between 2023, 2024, and 2025 acceleration in ARPA.
My final question is on, again, in the margin sides. Obviously, some of the investments might require a step up in certain point in time in future, if possible. So do you prepare to invest more in business and probably go be below 70% margin if needed? Thank you.
Sure. Okay. Well, the answer to your third question is pretty short, which is that these financials involve us investing what we think we need to invest in order to achieve the revenue growth that we've set out here. So certainly as, as of now, we see absolutely no need to take the margin down. If the context changes some years from now, you know, we'll address that at the time. The margin would be one of a number of choices that we would have, however, so, so as things stand, please be clear that we have no plans to take the margin below 70%. On, on 24 ARPA versus 25 ARPA, I think your question was what's driving growth from, from one to the other? So Optimiser Edge will obviously be a large part of that.
If you look at the way in which the Optimiser 2015 versus Optimiser 2020 migration went, we saw about a third of the customers that had been on Optimiser 2015 upgrade to the higher package within the first year. And so that is what we will expect to see in 2024, and then a larger wave of upgrades in 2025 as well, of course, as all of the BAU product uptake. And there'll be some pricing in there as well, but that is what will drive the growth across the two years. And then, Matt, would you do you want to take the question on marketing and the consumer, and particularly with respect to mortgages and the choices that we would have about y eah on the placement on the site?
Of course. I think I'd make two points with regards to how we take our marketing forward and how we scale it out to build on business areas such as mortgages. I think the first is that continued investment in our brand. I think what hopefully you've seen around the place a little bit is some of the development of the new brand platform, and that's designed very much to give us that stretch beyond just the core find element of our business, and to take us into a lot of those adjacent areas that the team have talked about already. But I think the other natural advantage that we have, and this is sort of to build on Johan's point, is our data that we have on the platform.
I think a really good example of this is actually in the mortgage space, where we've just recently been undertaking a number of different machine learning tests to help us to understand how we can best leverage different parts of our audience to help to convert them into mortgage products. So I think one of the big focuses for us is gonna continue to be that understanding and development of our core data sets, and being able to take that and to use that to really define the best products and the best chances we have of selling products to different parts of our audience.
Okay, Sean, there's one just there.
Hi, everyone. So first one from me is that, related to the CoStar OnTheMarket situation, are there any parts of the current consumer value proposition that you think you might invest in slightly more as a result of this? And if there are, any idea of sort of roughly how much you would spend on that? Appreciate that that would be included in the plans you've set out here today as well. And then secondly, for me, maybe best directed to you, Johan, what stops you going faster down that transaction value chain? I think you had solicitors, conveyancers, and life, and lifecycle services as well on that slide. What is there a scenario where we get two, three years into this plan, and then you think, "You know what?
We could do a little bit more, a little bit more quickly?
Okay. Tara, would you like to take the customer value proposition?
Yeah. So I guess, you know, our view is that what we had planned to do, which I shared earlier, are the right things to focus on. We conduct a lot of research with our users all the time. In fact, this year alone, we've done about 2,000 separate research sessions with users, and they're telling us what, you know, would make the experience better. So kind of the core pillars around capturing more data so that we can personalize the experience, which we know would be very helpful for our users, making it easier to kind of undertake the activities they're trying to do, and also serving very relevant and personalized content.
So for example, we know most people in the U.K. find it very hard to actually understand the process of moving or rentals, so we've built a lot of content and guides that help people, and we're now looking at presenting that at the right moment when you're kind of in that stage, ready to learn about the next phase. And in fact, we've done that in mortgages recently, and the engagement with that content is really... It surprised us, actually.
Thanks. Johan?
All right. Yes. So can we go faster? Well, I think, you know, what's true is that you need to walk before you run, and I can tell you we're walking very fast. I think it's also true that you can be directionally correct, but precisely incorrect if you try to do too much at one point. The benefit of stepping into it on the back of, again, a big platform, a lot of reach, that gives a lot of feedback signal, right? If there was one thing I learned during 14 years operating at global scale in online travel, hugely competitive space, is when you have data, you actually don't need to spend too much time researching in labs and upfront and this and that.
You need to put together a product that is high quality and that you believe in, and then you put it out to the test. And of course, it's not just about the data signal back from the platform, right, but everything that we learn around the sales teams, the account management team, support, et cetera. But again, if you have the scale and the reach, that's what you wanna try to do, because it will actually lead you to better answers quicker than just rumbling down there. So we'll see if we get to acceleration quicker, but we think we're taking it at the right pace, and it's, it's definitely a pace up from where we are now.
Perfect.
Charles?
Thank you. It's Charles Thorne from Jefferies. First question's for Johan or maybe Tara. Back on the CoStar question, and just be interesting to know why you think CoStar's actions, which is to essentially fund massive brand awareness and drive up leads to agents, won't degrade the value of the core utility of the Rightmove membership, which is a buyer lead, why that won't happen? Second one is for Andy: You spent seven, eight years at your biggest competitor, or one of your biggest competitors in commercial. It'd be interesting to get your insights on why you think Rightmove proposition is going to be so much better than LoopNet.
Indeed, when LoopNet launched the brand here in the U.K., which was admittedly after you left, but it'd be interesting to get your sense on what they made a big show on, which is access to international buyers. Then finally, there was a question on mortgages for Dave. A mortgage is a big, important product that a consumer will take out. And providing the Nationwide product, which obviously is very efficient, but it's essentially a single product, single price. Why won't the quality of those leads be inferior to what Nationwide or any lender could get through a price comparison website, where, you know, we have a very efficient, very well-established behavior here in the U.K. to go and compare prices for mortgage products there? Any thoughts, that would be useful. Thank you.
Right. Johan, do you want to take CoStar's entry- relative to our offering?
Happy to do that. So look, I think it's what you need is a very big funnel at the top, and a funnel that, you know, repeats itself, has the credibility, or where you provide the credibility for that to keep coming back. And again, I think we've talked enough about that one. That is extremely hard to create. And look, we welcome competition generally, but we don't comment on competitor-specific plans. But that volume, what it leads to at the end of the day, as you go down the funnel, is an increased amount of quality and precision, and ability to do things that are specific to segments, to consumers, to different types of agents or new homes developers. So unless you have that whole piece, it's very, very hard to come and compete in a meaningful way.
We're not saying that, again, there isn't competition already today, and we know that there will be competition tomorrow as well, but we feel very confident with that data moat that we have, because we use it today.
The only thing I would add to that, as he said, that the utility of Rightmove is to provide a buyer lead. That is categorically not the case. Our brand building products are our most popular, highest revenue products, and it is all about winning vendor mandates, not finding buyer leads. Andy, CoStar.
Sure. I'm not going to comment specifically about what CoStar are doing, but I will, I will comment specifically about Rightmove's competitive position in commercial, which is extremely strong. You'll have seen from the slide we presented earlier, roughly about 70% market share of audience. Other competitors are a long way behind, and it will be a very steep path in terms of PPC spend to catch up. The other, key factor to mention is brand awareness, and with the exception of Zoopla, which isn't investing in commercial, and I, I, I don't think really is that interested in commercial, none of our other competitors have much brand awareness at all in the U.K. Whereas Rightmove has this enormous brand, which is associated with property search, and, it's very, it's very, very transferable to commercial.
And mortgage as well.
Yes. Hello. Thanks, Johan. Sorry, guys. So I think the key thing for me is that the Rightmove audience is, I think, very different to the typical PCW or aggregator audience, in that they are clearly invested in property, in all of its forms, whether it's researching or moving. But, you know, I would bring us back to the fact that Rightmove audience is a highly motivated, highly engaged audience, and that every mortgage is actually all about property. So, and Tara showed two donut graphs, I think, that showed, you know, the kind of the standard UK audience, which I would propose are more of the sort of aggregator style audience, versus the Rightmove audience, who are the majority, are seriously considering moving. So what we see is a highly engaged, highly motivated audience.
We can see that in their behavior, and we can provide that data to to Nationwide as part of the, you know, the Mortgage in Principle flow. So these are leads where these are people who really, really want to gain a mortgage, whether it be moving or whether it be through remortgaging.
I can maybe add to that. As a previous investor, I have a very, very clear theory about verticalization wins over horizontalization. And you can see this play out across a lot of industries. There are horizontal players, comparison websites, et cetera. They're around, and many of them are doing good business. Over time, though, the ability to actually atomize the different steps of what a consumer or a customer is facing, either remove friction or provide delight points, comes from being focused, much more focused than you're being when you are in a horizontal sort of playing field. And I think that's what we have for us here. We have a connotation with our brand, and we collect a lot of data and signals in terms of what happens in property, particularly. So we try to go down and solve that.
We do not need to compete with any and all spend out there to, for example, generate Mortgage in Principle applicants. It's gonna be a whole different quality game that we can play.
Good afternoon. It's Lisa Yang from Goldman Sachs. The first question, again, coming back to CoStar, I know you don't like to comment too much on competition, but I was just wondering if you can help us understand the key differences between the U.S. and the U.K. market, and why you think the barriers to entry in the U.K. are much higher. You mentioned there were a number of competitors who tried to come in the past, and they were unsuccessful. So just the, you know, the high level, you know, the key differences will be helpful. The second question is on the underlying real estate market and where you are today. Where is Rightmove today in terms of percentage of your real estate commissions? How does that compare versus historically, and where do you see that evolving going forward?
Cause I think some of the new revenues you're talking about will be basically charged to the agent. So you basically, where's the ceiling in terms of where Rightmove.com percentage of commission could go to? And lastly, I'd just curious to hear, Johan, your thoughts on, you know, potential rationale for, you know, cross-border partnerships, or do you see any, any synergies with, you know, potentially going cross-border, given, yeah, all the, the shift to digitalization, which is happening everywhere. That's... Thank you very much.
Sure. Thanks, Lisa. Well, I'm happy to start on the differences between the U.S. and the U.K., and then please add in. So a hugely different market structure, Lisa. Far more fragmented in the U.S. You start with the existence of the multiple listing services, which we don't have here, which tend to be very regional, but effectively, they serve as mini aggregators before then the MLS subscribing to a larger listing service like Zillow or Realtor. So far more fragmentation than we see, where the value of the subscription to the ultimate portal is much less than we have here in the U.K. because there's not the kind of the whole of market proposition that you get on Rightmove.
And then the other, which of course is causing a lot of noise at the moment, is the existence of both buyer leads, as well as vendor leads. And right now, the way the commission is shared between those two, I think, is being discussed and debated and may ultimately change the way in which the monetization of leads in the U.S. works. There are no formal buyer leads here in the U.K. It's all about vendor leads, and that is what agents do. They compete on our portal to put their brand in front of potential vendors, and use our site to win as many vendor mandates as possible. That's a completely different dynamic to the dynamic you see in the U.S.
Unless you're very familiar with that and the way that the market works in the U.K., it will be a completely different, you know, ballgame for somebody coming to the U.K. from the U.S., as it would be for anybody in the U.K. doing the reverse. I'll probably leave it at that, actually. In terms of underlying commissions, if you take the three component parts of the agency commission pool, the single most important one is transaction numbers. So, as Dave flagged, we're expecting 1 million to 1.1 million in 2024. Agent commission percentages themselves haven't changed very much. They're still 1.5%-2% or so.
And then the third component is house prices, which although they're still up on 2019, are a bit lower now than they were. So what we reported when we talked to you at the interim results was that our share of commission, which had gone down across 2021 and 2022, from about 7.5% to about 6% or so, has probably gone back up again, but by no more than the rate at which it fell. So broadly unchanged on 2019. Kieran?
Yeah, thanks. It's Ciarán Donnelly from Berenberg. A couple from me. Just in terms of when you're looking at the new strategic growth initiatives, internally, how do you consider how they may appear in terms of directly competing with your customer base, most notably, probably mortgages, and, and how you ensure that you clearly communicate to your customers that you're not going to be directly competing with them? And secondly, if we just look at the 2028 targets, clearly, you set them as greater than GBP 640 million. I'm sure you've got an internal blue sky scenario for these forecasts, so I guess could you give us a sense of what is the upside to those on that blue sky scenario? Thanks.
No. We
Maybe let me just ask then slightly differently.
Still no.
If you think about all the new strategic growth initiatives, could you give us which of those you see the most upside risk in from the current numbers you've got in there?
Well, look, I think they're all at quite different stages of maturity. Commercial real estate is probably what, the one that we have the greatest near-term visibility to growth and to accelerated revenue potential. And it really is... I mean, Andy gave a very good picture of the work that we need to do in order to really bespoke that site to commercial. And beyond that, it's a sales challenge and a volume challenge, so I think, you know, we're very clear about the path to revenue that we set out. And mortgages is much more nascent. And as you've seen, the growth rates are ambitious. But again, I think we're equally clear on what it is that we need to do.
I mean, the thing that I would say about these plans, and I'm not going to give you upside scenarios, but what I would say is to characterize these financials as being deeply grounded in real assumptions that don't involve, you know, the market swinging our way. For example, you've seen that we've talked about no growth in agency numbers or in development numbers. Given everything we've heard, you know, that probably is at the very low end of what you might expect over the next five years, particularly given all of the political will to accelerate development. And again, the growth rates of the core business and the growth rates of ARPA, I think, are really very grounded in realism, and don't involve, you know, a big step up. So I'm gonna leave it at that.
The mortgages piece, Dave-
Yes.
Will you take that, please?
So, so we started with the Mortgage in Principle, which by definition is direct to lender. So that is the audience that wouldn't have chosen to speak to a broker anyway. And I think the other thing is that as we started to look into how do we provide choice, how do we connect consumers with brokers, we didn't do that in isolation. We've been talking to our customers about this for quite a long time now, and we've been talking about the ways it might work. We've been talking about how we might add value. And so, you know, there's been many, many, many months lead up to this point where we have taken the decision and we've launched, sending leads to brokers that are owned by our customers.
So, you know, far from competing, we are driving more business to our customers and particularly to their brokers, and that's been done in conversation. We've been talking to small, medium, and very large agents about our plans, how they might work, and they've been both interested and very supportive.
Joe?
Thank you. It's Joe Barnet-Lamb. My first question is actually asking the margin question, but on the other side. There's been a few questions relating to margin, how are you gonna hold at 70%? But to me, it feels like you were at 75, you've rebased to 70. You're gonna have about 3% of your revenues in the rental side, which will be 40%, as you said, but your core revenue growth is gonna be well above sort of underlying cost inflation, and the new revenue areas are very high incremental margin. So is it fair to say that the cadence of growth through the forecast horizon, that actually you're baking in incremental investment into new business areas through that period? That's question one. And then question two is relating to package upgrades and downgrades.
I think you mentioned that you've seen 4 times as many upgrades as downgrades. Obviously, a lot of discussion in the market about sort of cyclicality. Can you talk a bit about what you've seen with regards downgrading of packages historically, when you have seen it, and how much volatility in downgrades you've seen previously? Thank you.
Yeah, sure. So I'll take the margin piece, and then Dave, maybe you want to give some color on, on upgrades and downgrades. You're, you're right, Joe. You are, you are right. I, I would probably nuance that by saying that we're very clear about the program for investment across the next 2-3 years. And we know both how much and where that investment is going and what it will deliver on the revenue side. Beyond that, we have taken the decision that a margin of 70% is, is still incredibly high, and although, as I said, we don't know yet what, though, what investment will look like in 2027 and 2028, we have no ambition or plans to take the margin up above 70%.
So on that cost slide, you saw a good chunk of that column on the right that just was unallocated cost, and that is for that reason. Upgrades and downgrades.
Yeah. So, if I take the historic question, the historic part of the question first. So penetration of packages has grown over time. So, so of course, when that happens, you see a higher proportion of downgrades or overall number of downgrades over time. Upgrades is happening at the same time. So, so it, it broadly works out at about, at about 4-to-1. We were expecting actually, that that would, that would narrow this year because it's a tougher market, but the surplus cash that agents come into the year with because it's such a good year prior, has helped keep momentum on upgrades. Then the power of the packages in Optimiser 2020 and the new Optimiser Edge has actually helped us fill the gap of upgrades to keep the momentum going.
So if we continue to do what we're doing, which is improve the quality and the value of the products, especially those in the top package, we think we can probably take a bit of the seasonality out of the upgrade, downgrade differences. Of course, that's agency. On the new home side, you see more volatility, because as the graphs I showed you show, you will simply see upspend and downspend from developers based on their need to get hold of buyers or not, whereas it's more complex for agents. Obviously, we had products ready to go for the change in market conditions, which happened back end of last year, start of this, and we've seen a rush of uptake of our advanced package alongside NSA, way above what we would have seen in any previous time.
So, going forward, more stability in agency than historically, and I think a continuation of the fluctuation in new homes, but that's the nature of the market.
Thank you.
Andrew?
Sorry, it's Andrew here from Barclays. I've got just two more to finish. The first one is on mortgages. I'm just thinking through it as a user. Given you're just gonna be working with Nationwide as a direct lender, and then I think brokers for part of the agents, is that gonna be enough for me to see kind of whole of market in terms of what's out there and just kind of how you're thinking about that and the user journey? And then the second one is, I'm afraid, coming back to CoStar. I'm sorry. I think everyone in the room kind of understands the moat around the business, your sense of confidence and why it makes sense to do nothing, to react now. This could be something that goes quickly.
It could be something that goes on for years, and there might be more follow-on deals. There are quite a few scenarios here. Can you just help us understand what KPIs you're monitoring around your network, and what would need to change for you to react?
Sure. Dave, will you take the mortgage user journey question, please?
Sure. So you're right, we send leads to one lender, Nationwide. And, you know, we had choice. We've been speaking to a number of Tier 1 lenders over the years. And Nationwide are second largest in the market, 12% market share. They're scaled, can handle the U.K. And they focus very much on kind of core residential prime lending, which we think is the heartland and the right starting point for mortgages. So we think they're a great lender, and for someone that wants to speak direct to a lender, you know, they're a great partner. We think that works well. But your question was also: well, how is that enough for those people who want to go to all of market? Absolutely not, which is why we've launched our broker product as well.
So anyone that does want to examine all of market, look at other lenders and get advice, then we'll pass them over to a broker, and a broker that's attached to one of our customers, so they can do exactly that. And that's what they're good at. So I think, you know, as a consumer, you really have that choice. Do I just want to speak to a lender and find a good, solid deal from a lender that I know actually will be achievable because I've gone through a mortgage in principle with them, or do I want choice, in which case I'll speak to a broker.
It might be a stupid question, but is there any difference between what a broker owned by an agent would offer in terms of kind of lender integration and what an independent would offer? I'm just checking that that bit of market you're missing with independent brokers doesn't change my user experience at all in terms of what offers I can see.
No, I don't see any difference at all. Sorry, I see-
I see whole of market, essentially.
Yeah.
Yeah. Okay, fine.
Johan, do you want to take the CoStar question?
Yeah. Thank you for the question again. Just one point of clarification, very important, 'cause you phrased it as, "We're not doing anything." We're doing a lot. A lot, a lot, a lot. Now, it happens to be our plans from already before and rather momentum from before, and we continue with that. The overall plan is about accelerating, not just new strategic growth areas, but a lot of it in the core. So the strong affinity and relationship and credibility that we have with our traffic already and built over 24 years, I think you picked up quite a few things around how we really, really have started to increase our CRM capabilities with them. And we do that by asking questions, by providing new products for which there is a need to be more closely related to Rightmove.
But we also play something back for that, right? So that becomes an even stronger moat than just, quote, unquote, traffic coming to the site. Now, I think, we will monitor, of course, any and all of thousands of, or at least hundreds of, of metrics in terms of how that, you know, traffic and the closer relationships and, and sort of, CRM-built profiles that we have, appear and conduct themselves on our site. But that goes without saying. We, we already do that. I think the other piece around, and you can see some of this in the US, there's a lot of talk about traffic numbers. And again, I've been in online travel globally for 14 years. You can buy traffic.
If you look, and I'm not quoting this, you can look at some of the traffic discussion that is happening in the U.S. between couple of months ago and this recent month, for example. I'm not gonna get into it. But that's relevant because it's really over time that the value and the quality that you get out of that means something or doesn't mean something. Now, again, we don't rest on our laurels, right? We realize that the dynamic has changed, but we've seen this number of times before. This may or may not be different. For now, we have an incredibly exciting plan and have come quite a bit. We're just taking even better care of and providing back even better value to the consumers that we have. So let's continue with that.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Sean, can I just ask for a mic to be passed to Rory, who was monitoring questions online, in case there are any that we haven't answered in the room?
Hi, thank you. You've got two questions online from Pete at Morgan Stanley. The first one: What has changed in your thinking with regards to commercial real estate? Presumably, this opportunity has existed for some time. Why is it more attractive now? The second question, how do you assess the decision between staying with one lender versus working with multiple lenders? How will you assess that in the future?
Thanks, Rory. Do you want to take the commercial real estate?
Yeah, sure. I think candidly, previous leadership at Rightmove was less interested in commercial, and just saw it as something to be milked opportunistically for some revenue. And now, new leadership, including me, thinks that it's actually, it's a much, much bigger opportunity that deserves more investment and more effort than a purely opportunistic approach. And that, so that's what we're gonna do. But actually, looking back, I wouldn't knock the past, because Rightmove has still taken commercial from zero to GBP 12 million in revenue, which is a tremendous base, over 10 years. And it's done that in an exceptionally lean fashion, really just by spinning up a sales team.
So the trajectory to get here is incredible in some ways, but the opportunity to now double down on the investment and properly grow into that big TAM is there, and we're gonna take it.
Dave, one lender versus others?
Yeah. So I mean, it's a really interesting question, 'cause I think it goes back to choice again, and how does one offer choice to consumers that want to effectively see all the market, see multiple lenders? Which is why, you know, we've gone down the broker route. We think that's the right route for that. If we were to look at multiple lenders, then it would be quite difficult, I think, certainly in the short to medium term, to layer up multiple lender mortgage and principal journeys onto site and not have that being a confusing journey. So, you know, we are really clear that introducing someone to a broker is probably the much more effective way to offer that choice.
I think there's also a harsh reality, which is, you know, lender tech and agility is a driving factor of quite how many Mortgage in Principle one could put on a site. And it wouldn't be that many today. But you know, all these things we will keep an eye on and see how the landscape evolves and how lenders evolve.
Okay, I think we will leave it at that. Thank you all very much. If you'd like to join us for a drink, we'd be delighted to have a chat.