Good morning, everyone. Good morning to those of you in the room and those of you who are joining us via webcast. My name is Peter Brooks-Johnson, and I'm joined by Alison Dolan, our CFO, and Ruaridh Hook, our Head of Commercial Finance. Hopefully, you've had a chance to see the presentation, which we posted online at 7 A.M. I thought I'd take a couple of minutes, only a couple of minutes to start off with, to give you a quick summary of all those words and pictures that are in the presentation. The network effects at the heart of our business are stronger than ever, with, as you can see, that we've delivered record leads yet again. In terms of our customer numbers, we're broadly flat. Sorry, got the wrong slide.
In terms of the customer numbers, we're broadly flat, and in terms of ARPA, we've had a great result with ARPA up GBP 127 in the first half of the year. We talked a lot in February about momentum, and you can see that coming through with our momentum delivering in product delivery and that leading to that ARPA growth and also in Optimiser upgrades, which have been a record again in this half. We've completed the migration of Optimiser 2015 to Optimiser 2020, but also added a record number of new customers to Optimiser from the other customer groups. We've got lots of innovations that we've delivered in the last six months, which I suspect some of you will have questions about, so I won't talk about too much now.
We're in a really strong position for the second half of the year, where we expect customer numbers to be broadly stable and also the ARPA to be returning to sort of the normal growth rates that we've seen in previous years. I won't go on, but if you've got any questions and/or you'd like to ask a question and you're online, please click on the Ask a Question button on the top right of your page. If you're in the room, please say who you are and the microphone will come to you. We'll do the room first. Will.
Thanks, Peter. It's Will Packer from BNP Paribas Exane. Three from me, please. Firstly, could you talk a little about how you're thinking about the next price rise cycle? Remind us of the sort of calendar cadence. When does it really get going? My memory is it's kind of all Q4, but could you just remind us of that? Then some of your peers or in other markets, we're hearing intelligence that the inflationary backdrop brings the potential for some greater than typical pricing action. How are you thinking about the role of inflation as we look into the second half of the year? Secondly, on the presentation, there were various comments around the outlook on membership, lettings agents reacting a bit different to sales agents.
Could you kind of wrap it up for us and remind us how we should think about that as we look forward into the second half of the year in the context of the macro developments? Finally, I suppose in what was a very solid set of results, the other line perhaps was a little bit weaker than expected. In the presentation, there was some references to changes in mortgages. Could you just talk us through that and how to think about it? Thanks.
Great. Thank you. Taking those in turn. Next, price rise cycle, you're right, Will . Through 2020, we slightly changed our cadence. We've completed about 90% of our price rise for this year. We have our sort of testing, if you like, for 2023 begins in Q4 for the 2023 cycle. And maybe I'll wrap up into that the how does one think about inflation on price rise. I think what's really important to us is that our price rise reflects the value we deliver, and we're very fortunate as a business, of course, that we don't have huge inflationary pressures on input being 100% digital.
What we will always do when we look at price rise is we look at the value gain that we deliver rather than sort of saying we take inflation plus X. It's very much not the way we think about the world. That's how we think about the price rise cycle. As we sit today, certainly it feels like it'll be a relatively normal price rise year next year. Talking about membership balance, which I think was your third question. What we've seen is interesting, and really it's probably. There's a couple of trends in there. If one takes just to cover new homes briefly, continuing decline in new homes developments as supply and demand remain in balance for new homes developers. That's now starting to slow.
In the presentation, you'll see there's a chart there that shows that the number of developments we're losing has slowed. Really encouragingly, number of development starts has increased. That's now starting to feed through into the market. I think we'll probably see a stable development number through the second half, and hopefully a little bit of growth into H1 next year. Talking about lettings agents, which you mentioned. Lettings agents, we've seen probably since the tenant fee ban a few years ago, if you just do lettings, it's quite a hard business now. We have nearly 3,000 agents who just do lettings.
What it means is to be a lettings-only agent, you either have to have quite a large book of managed properties, which means you get good income off the property management fee, or you have to do sales as well, because you can't charge tenants now for lettings. We've continued to see that in this half, a reduction in those lettings-only agents. Sort of to add to the challenge of being a lettings-only agent, we're seeing big supply and demand imbalance in lettings particularly. That means we've seen a reduction in those lettings agents. As I say, it's really a continuation of a trend.
The good news is we've seen an increase in the number of sales agents or agents who do both sales and lettings, and that's actually the largest increase we've seen, net increase we've seen since the first half of 2016. That's sort of a mixed bag, if you like, within those numbers. I think fairly reasonably, given the uncertainty, we'll probably see new agent formation slow again in the second half. My sense is that sort of around about flattish on agent numbers is what to expect for the rest of this year. In terms of other, well, first of all, worth saying, in terms of the core business, the core businesses in other, so the businesses in other, overseas, commercial data services, they've all grown really well.
Actually they've grown at about 20% in the first half. One of the things that we chose to do, which is, you know, I feel really lucky that we're in a position to do this, we chose to change how we get paid for the mortgages business. We've moved away from an advertising fee, so a flat fee for advertising, and we now are paid on number of mortgages, Mortgage in Principles completed. That reduces, short term, the income, but we've taken the decision because that means it's a much bigger opportunity in the long term. As I say, I feel really lucky that we're in a position to make that decision now, and that sets us up really nicely for the long term. Hopefully you'll have heard our new integrated Mortgage in Principle went live yesterday.
That's the first step. We've now got lots of optimization work to build on that to generate more Mortgage in Principles, which actually means now that will generate more revenue as we get that done. Wouldn't expect that to be exponential growth in the second half because we've got lots of learning, so don't get too excited yet, but I think for the long term, it sets us up really nicely.
Just a quick follow-up on the new home. Is there any structural reason why you can't go back to previous highs in number of members and grow beyond that? Has anything changed or has it just been the sort of cyclical context of the market?
Yeah, I think I still believe what we're seeing is a long-term trend where agents are either getting bigger or smaller, which feels like a sort of blindingly obvious statement, but what we continue to see is a little bit of consolidation in the mid-size, but actually at the small. I'd say that we've had a record number of new sales agents who are at a high since 2016. It's actually at the small, they're fragmenting faster than ever. Of course, you can work with fewer people. You can use technology and the services we deliver to be an agent. I still think we're on course mid-term to have more agents than we've ever had.
Sorry, new home developments?
Sorry, new homes developments, there's nothing to suggest that what we're seeing is anything other than the sort of supply and demand. In fact, new home start numbers now are higher than they were in 2017-2018.
Thanks.
Thanks. Yes, it's Ciarán Donnelly from Liberum. Three from myself as well. One, if we just talk about kind of the rentals, the rental opportunity and kind of market share and referencing, clearly you've had a bit of growth there. If you could just kind of give us some insight into what are the drivers of market share growth and kind of a sense of where you think you can get that to over the medium or longer term. And two, just on the additional revenue per reference, the 9% year-on-year growth, is that what we should expect going forward? And similarly, again, if you can kind of give some longer term outlook.
Then thirdly, I guess obviously with Peter stepping away in the not too distant future, I'd be interested to hear kind of your insights on how Rightmove broadly thinks about kind of continuity of strategy and how that's kind of integrated throughout the firm. Thanks.
Okay. Oh, that's a good set of questions. Talk about market share growth, where did it come from? Where could it go to in our tenant services. In terms of references, what's really sort of interesting is we've applied, if you like, what I would call our basics. Our sales skills so far, that market share growth has come from taking what is a great product. It's high quality, quick turnarounds, one of the things we really care about and one of the things that attracted us to Van Mildert in the first place is they have a high quality reference, and agents really believe in it and trust it. We get really good quality feedback scores, which is important. What we've done is we've taken our sales skills.
Obviously, we have about 150 people talking to estate agents every day, and we've got a trusted brand with estate agents. You might remember we rebranded Van Mildert, Rightmove Landlord and Tenant Services, in the middle of last year. That's really what we've done thus far. It's really been about just applying the basics and doing them well and the skill sets we have. We're now in a position with the releases in June with the Lead to Keys tenancy workflow, the Open Banking reference, and also the pre-qualification, which is gonna come in the second half of this year, where we're now starting to deploy our product muscle, if you will, into referencing. We think we can absolutely grow from here. Where can we get to?
Our estimations at the moment, we're targeting. I think we're being pretty conservative, but we're saying, well, 30% odd market share of referencing would be great. That's our sort of mental model. That's how we're thinking about the cost base. I think in the future, Rightmove could do better than that. We're being pretty conservative on that. In terms of the additional revenue growth, again, what's interesting there is that's partly about deploying some good discipline in terms of how those additional products are attached. We haven't really pulled the digital lever yet. Actually creating, one of the things we've done is we've innovated in insurance product in that marketplace, which again, it's new for us, and it's quite, so that makes it quite exciting for me.
We released right at the back end of last year a new landlord type of landlord insurance into market. Lower cost, which protects the landlord from their costs if a tenancy goes south. It also protects the agent from their costs if it goes south. But it's cheaper, so you get better take-up. That's what we're doing there. Again, I don't see that we can't keep deploying that and maybe pulling the digital lever. I don't think 9% growth on touch rate is an unbelievable number for the future in the next few years. Again, just a word of caution. I don't expect it to suddenly go exponentially in the next six months. We're doing a lot of work. It will pay out over the long term.
As you know, with us, yeah, we invest and we want it for the long term. We're not looking for the quick hit. Last question. I'll give you my answer, maybe Alison will have a different one. But how do we embed sort of what we're doing? Well, I think the management team, they're all in. It's not my strategy, it's our strategy. It's the board's strategy. We've just reviewed, as we do every year, we reviewed the strategy six weeks ago. It's perhaps different to some companies. Actually, it's quite a big document actually for what you will consider a simple business. It's that it's embedded in what we do, and it's embedded through the organization. The skill sets we have are embedded through the organization, in the business plans.
That's how we sort of make sure that we get the continuation, is it's not one person's strategy. It's a team strategy.
Yeah. I mean, the only thing I would add to that is that it, you know, that strategy has the buy-in of the entire management team and the board. From talking to shareholders, you know, it would seem that they are entirely supportive. I think in, you know, in all of the processes and the way in which we have developed the plans to execute that, you know, just have a lot of support from all stakeholders, really.
Yes. Thanks. This is Pete from Morgan Stanley. On new developers, for the volumes, is there some kind of like a mix effect for ARPA from the developers that are now dropping off? Are they higher or lower ARPA than the average? And then the second question is on mortgages and the change that you made. Is there a reason why you made it now? And why do you think that it's a better long-term opportunity? And have you had any kind of feedback from that?
Okay. The mix is probably worth being super-duper clear. What we're losing is developments from the same customers. There isn't really an ARPA adjust because it's a few fewer from the top 20 broadly rather than sort of some change in customer base. Why now for mortgages? I think now is a good moment for us as we start to deploy those tools, as I say, the integrated Mortgage in Principle from yesterday. As we start to deploy those, I think it's just much better that we are motivated now to really optimize that tool. Whereas obviously with the flat fee advertising, you say you're motivated, but it's not quite the same.
For us and our lender partner, we are entirely aligned now in terms of that. That made it a good moment. Probably frankly, it's also a good moment because let's do it early in the journey so there's not a massive delta as well. That would seem like you get addicted to advertising fees, you start to not want to switch, which doesn't seem a great motivation. The feedback I think is very early in terms of the flow. As I say, it was only yesterday. Broadly in terms of the model, I think it's a much better model for the future because in the end, any partner is only going to be willing to spend a certain amount on an advertising fee. It's quite difficult.
You then have quite difficult discussions about attribution and what was brand, what led to a mortgage, whereas this is really, really clean. It's also the way that the industry works. It is the way the mortgage industry works. I think for the future it could lead to much larger numbers if we deliver what we think we can.
Thanks.
Hi, it's Catherine O'Neill from Citi. I've got a few questions. The first one is on commercial and data services, the revenue opportunity, because I think you said they're growing at least 20%. I guess they're still relatively small now, so I'd just like to understand a bit more about what you're doing there and where you see the opportunities. The second one is, I think in the slide you mentioned about some new products in the second half, but also maybe products between tiers, or between enhanced and. So yeah, I just want to understand a bit more about what your new product plans are for the second half. And then on your 2023 conversations, which you haven't started yet, I think you said you expect to see like a normal ARPA uplift.
Is that normal, the GBP 95-GBP 105 that you'd talked about for 2022? Anything you worry about that might knock that off track, I guess, with the uncertainty in the market. One last thing is on inflation in the second half on the cost side, what kind of inflation are you seeing on wages or payroll?
Okay, well.
Sorry, quite a few questions there.
Well, Alison, do you wanna talk about?
Yeah.
Data services and commercial and inflation?
ARPA and inflation, sure.
I'll do the middle two.
Sure. In terms of commercial and data services, both of those business units are worth about GBP 9 million and both growing pretty strongly. 20% or so, particularly in commercial. The backdrop to that growth is that the commercial sector lags the digitization of residential by, you know, probably eight to 10 years. It's only really now, and the pandemic has helped to change some of this behavior.
It's only really now that we're seeing increased usage of portals like ours, both by owners of property and seekers of property, to be willing to carry out those searches themselves and to do it directly without, you know, as heavy usage of brokers and agents as used to be the case previously. What we're seeing then is increased both listings and increased search, which means that the value of the listings is increasing to the owners of property. They're seeing more and better leads coming from us. There's an awful lot of organic growth left to come in that business line. Specifically, we have a number of initiatives that focus on particular sectors within commercial.
You won't be surprised to hear that flexible office, for example, is one of the sectors in which that digitization is really changing, and we are investing sort of not terribly far ahead of that curve, but I think at the right time to really tailor the search journey and the user experience for seekers of office property. That will be, I mean, it really will be an organic growth story there in commercial. There's no reason why that 9 million can't become, you know, 11, 15, 20 million over the course of the next few years. Data services, the products that we sell right now have been geared towards surveyors and towards lenders.
You know, with the wealth of data that we collect, particularly on the demand side from users of the portal, it's looking to develop tailored products that use that data to increase the usage among commercial users of the site, really. There's quite a lot of data out there on the supply side, listings data, you know, that isn't necessarily unique to us, and our site does get scraped a lot. It's the demand side data where we have a very valuable asset. For us, the opportunity will involve focusing on that data and the users to whom that data would deliver some real value to their businesses, help them to make better informed decisions and make them quickly.
Can I just ask what the-
Sorry.
Oh, okay. Can I just ask what the revenue model is at the moment for those two aspects on the commercial side, the listings and search, and then on the data services side?
With listings and search, it's similar to the residential side. You know, free to list. Sorry, free to use to the seeker of property, and the owners of properties will list both directly and via agents. With data services, it is a different model. We have created specific products that we generally charge a license fee for, per annum license fee. That can vary based on, you know, the number of desks within an institution that uses it. Oh, sorry. Yes, inflation.
Well, look, I mean, we're a digital business, so the extent of our exposure to inflation is limited primarily to salaries, and to a few other areas that probably total GBP 3.5 million-GBP 4 million of annual costs that might have some exposure to inflation, largely around energy usage, data center hosting and storage, that sort of thing. Every year, we put through a cost of living increase for our staff. This year, well, sorry, at the back end of last year, in respect of 2022, we put through a 3% increase. The year before that, it was 1%. This year, that is a decision that we'll take towards the end of Q3, early Q4, given the economic backdrop.
You know, it is likely to be a bit higher than the, certainly the most recent increases. All in all, you know, it's entirely within the AOP for us, and I would expect it to have no more than a percentage point or so impact on the margin overall for next year. I think the overriding message is the limited nature of our exposure to inflation across the business.
All right. I'll just quickly cover off your product questions. New product we launched, we just launched in June to early adopter customers who are Optimiser. This is another Optimiser exclusive product called Native Search Adverts for estate agents. What's really exciting about that, it's the first time that we've allowed agents to use video on the platform, and it's video talking about them. There's been a real shift, and I think unsurprisingly probably driven by all the social media that we all consume in short-form video. One of the things agents are trying, always trying to do is generate what they call instinctive trust with their vendor. When a vendor's thinking about which agent to choose, they care, we all care about who you're dealing with.
Obviously, instinctive trust is a pretty tough thing to communicate with pictures and text. So video is coming. As I say, agents have started to do it, so that's why we've been holding off until they started to do it. I think also because we're all exposed to so much short-form video, the quality is getting exponentially better. So Native Search Adverts has just launched. That's the new product for second half, really in preparation for 2023, in terms of revenue. Between Essential and Enhanced, you may remember back in March, I talked about one of our near-term opportunities was getting more people onto our package ladder. So one of the things that we are experimenting with is a package that sits between Essential and Enhanced. As you know, we spend a lot of time thinking about package names.
Currently it has a working title of Essential Extra. We'll see whether that lasts or not, but that's what that is about, is can we make a smaller step? If you remember the data, once we get people, agents start to see product, they start to see the value of product, they typically then upgrade themselves through the package ladder. That's what Essential and Enhanced is about. In terms of 2023 ARPA, yes, you're right. I said last year, no, start of this year that I thought sort of GBP 95-GBP 105 is probably our cadence now. I would suggest that given all the unknowns and uncertainty, we'll probably be towards GBP 95 at the moment for 2023 would be my sense of where we would deliver.
I don't see that there are headwinds that would take us much below that. I think, as I say, one of the things that I have huge pride in the team, we've delivered more product in the last two years than we have in the last decade. We're really hitting an efficiency, and an innovation delivery. I think that sets us up really nicely for that sort of ARPA growth next year. Anyone-
Catherine, just to add to Peter's point about product in between the packages, I think we've talked about this on previous calls, but it's quite a valuable line for us now as agents spend more on product before they upgrade themselves. It's running at about GBP 850,000 a month in revenue, which is up about 10% on this period last year. It's quite material.
Will?
Hi, it's Will Packer from BNP Paribas Exane. Couple of quick ones. Firstly, could we have an update on the timing of the new CEO? Is there anything you can share on that? Secondly, could we just dig into the cyclicality of the Rightmove business and its end market a little bit? I suppose, could you just remind us how you see the cyclicality of your relationship with agents and new home developers if there is a potential macro slowdown? Secondly, to what extent should we expect there to be weakness in the underlying market, depending on the macro context? Finally, how should we think of your business today versus the last major recession in the financial crisis? What's different? Your monetization's further along, but maybe your market share of audience is higher, et cetera. Thanks.
Okay. Good questions. The first one's easy. As a reminder, I've said that I'll see us through till post the 2023 results in March. I haven't got anything to go to, so I'm still banking on that. The process itself is running according to schedule. No news yet, but feel really comfortable. Talking about cyclicality. If I zoom all the way out, it's quite interesting. Our new homes business and our estate agency business are semi-countercyclical. What do I mean by that? Well, I guess we were experiencing it, we've experienced it in the first half and maybe second half of last year. When the market is going really, really well, estate agents feel really confident and upgrade a lot.
New homes developers are selling a lot, so therefore don't spend quite as much on marketing. Again, sort of huge pride in the team that we've moved forward new homes ARPA, even though we have that situation. Obviously then when the market's switched and you get a switch. Broadly, we've got this really nice inbuilt hedge. I'd love to say we designed it. It's just how the market is, so I can't claim that. Second sort of thing that I think maybe leads on to your third point in terms of how is Rightmove connected to the market, I think we've demonstrated Rightmove is only connected to the market at the very extremes. At the very extreme good, which actually probably not as brilliant for us as you might imagine, and obviously when it gets so bad that estate agents go out of business.
Really those are the only places we're connected. The value in our product, and indeed in our upgrade products, both in very strong markets and weaker markets really shine through. The product mix changes slightly. Actually probably changes less than you might imagine when we do the analysis. The products have slightly different perspectives, so agents can switch. Again, brief reminder that our packages are minimum spend thresholds in which agents can choose the product mix that works for their current strategy. What we see is that product mix alter between our products, but it doesn't actually make any revenue difference to us. In terms of the underlying macro, what are we seeing right now? I think we are seeing a sort of return to normalization. I think I commented in the presentation.
Interestingly, I was talking to an agent. This is something he said to me that, yeah, we're now doing 20 viewings per property, not 30, but normality is eight to 10. The market in terms of demand is still strong. In terms of deals being agreed, it looks slightly ahead of 2019, so pre-pandemic. I think this year we'll probably end up at broadly sort of norms, so 1.1-1.3 million transactions, something like that. In terms of the underlying macro, I think we're okay for foreseeable because that data that we use is really a six-month predictor. I think the other thing in terms of estate agents, estate agents have had a really good 18 months. They've worked jolly hard. I think their pipelines are higher when we look at pipeline.
If you like, that's their visibility of revenue for the next six to nine months. Deals being agreed that have yet to complete. That's about a third higher than 2019. That looks positive. Then, as I say, when one casts that forward, it looks okay. I think that the macro clearly for some people is going to be really tough, is already really tough. Probably worth remembering that broadly speaking, I think the number of forced transactions in the marketplace as estate agents politely call them the three Ds, death, debt, and divorce, that's probably about 800,000 transactions a year. That's sort of baseline activity in the market that cannot be avoided. We've never in post sort of 2009 really been so far ahead of that at 1.2 million.
We're only arguing actually about quite a small number of transactions which are discretionary. Actually then when you look at the data in terms of affordability, and there's some really interesting data in the housing market survey, if you choose to go on a data hunt in terms of mortgage properties and the socio-demographic group they're in. I think that maybe is worth investigating if one wants to think about what will interest rates do to the housing market.
The summary answer is, I think we might see a slight reduction, but not massive. Mortgage Market Review, which again, I shan't repeat it, but Mortgage Market Review is really interesting in what it has protected the market from. Certainly brought down the number of transactions to 1.2, but as the borrowers are heavily stress tested. Your final part of the question, now versus 2008, yes, we're clearly more penetrated in absolute revenue terms. We're still actually slightly, embarrassingly, we're probably our share of agents' revenue has probably dropped by a few tens of basis points in the last six months. We're probably slightly under 6% of agents' revenue now, which is good for that.
I think we're a much more sophisticated organization than we were in 2008. I absolutely believe our products are more valuable and more vital to agents. Our market share with consumers is higher. I think now versus 2008, again, if we were to have a similar 30% of agents went out of business in 2008. If that happens, that's gonna happen. If that sort of market slowdown happens, that would impact us. Actually a slight slowing, I think we're probably more resilient than we've ever been.
Just a follow-up on that. I suppose one differential is the extent to which packages are a part of your offering today. Do you see much of a risk of spin down in an event of a, you know, not sort of Armageddon, but a slowdown?
I think it's a really logical question, and my base point would be March 2020. We didn't see spin down, which, you know, I think certainly for all our perspectives was probably as close to Armageddon as any of us want to experience and we didn't see spin down then. I would use that as my base point. I'm sure we would see a little bit, but actually much less than you might imagine.
Okay.
Sorry, yeah, just following up from Will's question, Ciarán Donnelly from Liberum. What proportion of your agents now are sales only agents versus in 2008? Or maybe you don't have that detail, but just broadly speaking.
The data I do have, and I can remember Ciarán , which has nearly answered your question, about 60% of our agents now do sales and lettings. What changed actually post 2008, around 2008, it's only about 30% did both. What happened was through that process, sales agents realized, unsurprisingly, if one remembers what was happening in 2008, that lettings was a good, solid repeating revenue stream. That reoccurrence from property management, agents still say that it pays the bills and then sales can be the profit. I think that change has made agents a lot more resilient compared to that sort of period.
It's one of the things that has now reduced the number of lettings only agents because they've only got one income stream, and they're fighting against what are normally considered to be more aggressive marketeers in the sales and lettings agents.
Brilliant. Thanks.
Yeah. Thanks. This is Pete again from Morgan Stanley. A bit on the potential slowdown and the behavioral aspect of agents. Did I understand correctly that basically the base case assumption in a, like, a modest slowdown is that there might be slight downgrading of subscriptions or packages? Because I'm asking this because some other classified names in Europe are actually at least, like, introducing the idea that it might increase the willingness for agents to spend more because they need to compete more to create sales.
It's really interesting, Pete, in terms of psychology. I think in terms of a moderate slowdown, we wouldn't see spin down. I think in an extreme slowdown one might, but I'd say in 2020 we didn't, so that's pretty extreme. I think what's fascinating if I describe what an estate agent might care about right now, I think fairly obviously, and we've talked about it a lot, when the market's really hot as an estate agent, you want to win the next mandate from a vendor 'cause that's gonna sell and that's gonna make you money. That seems pretty straightforward. What's fascinating is in a slower market, what an estate agent wants to do is they want to win the right mandate.
They want to win the mandates from the people who want to sell, who are pricing appropriately and not just testing the market. It's of no interest to an estate agent to carry properties with vendors who probably are gonna be really awkward because they're desperately trying to get this really outrageous price for their property, which is never gonna get achieved. Agents really care about winning the right mandate. Mandate acquisition becomes as important, if not more important. Of course, the products that we have which help them sell properties, get more interest, drive up price, become really interesting. Agents also then use them to help those vendors who maybe are a bit sticky on price and don't want to reduce.
They can use that to say, "Let's relaunch and let's relaunch with a Premium Listing Mortgaged Property." Yeah, I think in a moderate slowdown scenario, absolutely the chances are upgrades would probably increase. I was absolutely referring to that tough situation.
Thanks.
Hi, Fon Wassachon from RBC. Just two questions from me please. The first one on upper growth of GBP 95 that you mentioned. Could you help us think about what will be the main growth driver for that GBP 95? Would the majority still be the product and upgrade as we observe in the first half? As following your introduction of Essential Plus, do you observe any appetite for an opportunity to introduce maybe a more premium package versus Optimiser 2020? Thank you.
Thanks, Fon. So what will drive the GBP 95 next year? I think it'll be the same sort of combination. The proportions might shift from the 60/40 we're at, up or down a few percentage points, but I think it will still be mainly products, to answer that question. In terms of the Essential Extra, we're just testing it right now. That's interesting. There's clearly an opportunity as well beyond Optimiser. So at the top. At the moment, I think we capture that really nicely, as Alison said, because it's a minimum threshold, we see lots of customer spending over that. So that's definitely. There's definitely an opportunity there. It's just not one we're particularly focused on because the package structure already helps those agents spend more money, on products. But I wouldn't rule it out.
Thank you.
Okay. Questions online. We have a question from Lisa Yang, Goldman Sachs. You have cost guidance of 25%-26% of sales. It was 25%-27% at the FY 2021 results. Can you please provide some detail what's driving that? And how are you preparing for a macro downturn? Have you taken any actions or intend to take any actions on certain cost items?
Okay. Yes, in our RNS from the March full year results, we had cost guidance for this year of 25%-27% of revenues. We're bringing that in slightly now, given that we're halfway through the year. We just have better visibility on costs for the year, so there's nothing really more to it than that. You know, very limited impact beyond that for the rest of this year. As we think about next year and, you know, the impact that inflation is likely to have on the cost base, you know, again, we're pretty shielded, given the nature of our business from dramatic impact.
Of course, you know, we will have some, and we're already, you know, gearing up as to how we think about that, particularly in relation to salaries. We have a lot of discretionary costs that we can then use to manage any, you know, cost that might get out of alignment with the plans. Our ambition always will be to, you know, have an impact of no more than 1% or so on margin and to maintain a broadly stable margin at that sort of, you know, 73%-75% level. Within that, there are actions that we can take and we will look at that.
Those are primarily in the use of contractors in our product development teams, the extent to which we maintain those, and marketing spend would generally be something that we might look to think about how we might tailor it. As things stand right now, we don't see the need to take any of those actions, but they're there in the toolkit if we were to need them.
Just to follow on from that, when you're cautious about money, as we are, you're cautious about money in the good times and the not so good times. I think we haven't lost the muscle of being cautious about money. That just continues.
Question from Silvia Cuneo at Deutsche . Please, can you remind us of the incremental differences for agents who upgrade to Optimiser from Essential and Enhanced? And where do you see the penetration of Optimiser going in 2022 and beyond?
2022 and beyond. Right. What are the differences? Fundamentally, it's access to more of our products which help you win more vendors. That's what the package structure is. As I say, it's, they are minimum spend thresholds, so, at Optimiser, you're spending more on our product. There are two now exclusive products in the Optimiser. There's the Sold By Me product, which we've talked about before, which is allows you to advertise the properties you have sold to people who are buying. It also uses smart targeting, so advertises them to people where they live, not where they're searching. Then the new video product that I talked about, Native Search Adverts, that is also exclusive to Optimiser customers.
There's an exclusive tool which is called Opportunity Manager, and what that does is it helps agents think about people who've contacted them as buyers and how likely they are to be sellers. Which is really important because that's a great source of lead for agents. Again, particularly in this marketplace, it's quite difficult for them to distinguish who's actually not got a property to sell, whose property is already on the market, so therefore not accessible to them as a potential customer. Opportunity Manager leverages the behavior data that we have when people are searching to help agents think about who are the most likely people to be sellers in there. Those are three exclusive things. What it does, generally, is it gives you more access to all our product set.
Just a reminder that the revenue, the ARPA uplift for a customer who would move directly from Essential to Optimiser, is about GBP 550 a month of incremental ARPA. We had about 200 of those in the first half. It reduces a little bit as agents move from Essential to Optimiser, so that was an uplift of about GBP 350, and we had about 300 of those. Then the remainder of the upgrades to Optimiser 2020 came from the cohort that had previously been on Optimiser 2015.
Maybe just to cover off that last point, where might this go to? I think one has to think now in two ways about where Optimiser might go to. Overall, I think we'll see more Optimiser customers. Also, one of the things that we're aiming to do, and you can see it in those numbers Alison talked of, the number of Optimiser customers who are spending well beyond their threshold. If you're moving off the top of the package ladder, which might encourage us to follow Fon's advice, we also see that number increasing and, you know, maybe getting close to adding another couple of thousand customers spending over the top of their threshold. That's a really interesting arena for us in the next few years.
Question from Adam Berlin, UBS. Is there any sign of increasing number of sales falling through as mortgage affordability becomes more challenged?
Yeah, we're seeing, we've seen fall throughs, as I noted in the presentation, we're seeing fall throughs tick up a little bit, but it's really not material. They're still very low and very low in contrast to the number of sales being agreed. What we don't know, of course, is whether those fall throughs are about mortgages. When I talk to major customers, they don't see mortgage availability as being a significant hurdle to doing deals, and they're living it every day. I don't think mortgage availability is an issue.
That was it for questions online, unless anyone else has any more.
That's lovely.
Great.
Well, thank you, and have a lovely weekend.