Hello, everyone, welcome to the presentation of Rightmove's results for 2022. My name is Peter Brooks-Johnson, I'm joined by Alison Dolan, our CFO. I'm going to talk through the highlights of the year. Alison's gonna go through the more detailed financials, then I'm gonna spend some time giving you a little more color on the housing market and our strategic developments. In 2022, we saw three distinct housing markets. We began the year with a continuation of the frenetic post-COVID activity of the supply-constrained market. By the start of the second quarter, we began to ease towards a more normal market. The interest rate shock of the fourth quarter rapidly knocked that transition off course, causing the market to slow significantly.
Our results in 2022 again demonstrate the strengths of the model in all markets. Alison has some interesting detail on how that resilience played out in a moment. Underscoring that resilience, we saw standout ARPA growth of GBP 125, a record absolute amount for a normal year. The healthy activity in the early part of the year helped. The innovation over the last two years has helped drive ARPA growth to higher levels as the market has become more normal. Membership was flat on 2021. The detail is illuminating. Again, Alison will describe the moving parts in a moment. Combined with ARPA, this has led to 9% revenue growth.
As Alison discussed back in July, the increase in cost is mainly as a result of our success in catching up recruiting in the second half of 2021 and the first half of 2022. There's a small contribution in the year of us bringing forward our cost of living increases for the team and also giving most employees a special one-off cost of living allowance given the rapid rise in cost of living. For clarity, we've excluded the impact of the 2021 release of the contingent consideration for Van Mildert to show the adjusted underlying operating profit. Reflecting the easing back towards a more normal market, site traffic is down on 2021 as expected, but it's still 34% higher than 2019.
Consistent with our long-established progressive dividend policy, we're increasing our final dividend to 5.2 pence, taking the total dividend for the year to 8.5 pence per share. We've returned nearly GBP 200 million over the year, which takes the total amount we've returned since float to over GBP 1.6 billion. Beyond our KPIs, we've made significant strategic progress, both on the core business and newer initiatives. This slide gives you some examples of our strategic delivery last year. Even though these are highlights, there's still a lot. Don't worry, I won't talk about them all. Starting at the bottom of the slide and working anti-clockwise, being the place that consumers turn to and return to first underpins all we do.
We work hard to keep our property search best in class for both accuracy and speed, and we focus our innovation on features which home hunters value and come back for. Proof of the work the team do to keep Rightmove top of mind is the amount of traffic which comes directly to the platform. Over 85% of all visits reach Rightmove either by typing Rightmove directly into their browser or visiting the Rightmove apps. A good example of that detailed innovation is Property Lists. Property Lists allow home hunters to organize their journey in their own way. Since launch early in 2022, over 600,000 users have created over 1 million lists.
In doing this, we're not only making the search process more effective for home hunters, but the way home hunters are choosing to organize their lists is also generating useful data for future product development. We continue to innovate in our heart land of advertising and tools for property professionals. We successfully migrated the remaining customers from the old Optimiser 2015 package onto the current Optimiser 2020 package. This gives customers free access to Opportunity Manager. Opportunity Manager uses an algorithm based on home hunters' on-site behavior to help agents mine the opportunities they have in the leads they can already see, saving them time and money. Demonstrating the value they see in this, a third of customers who have access to this tool now use it at least once a week.
I'm really proud that we are helping our customers train their people and reduce cost by releasing our free to access, Ofqual regulated level 3 certificate in estate agency. In the two months following release, nearly 2,000 people who work in agency have enrolled and begun the training. On top of the core business, we believe there's much opportunity in making the home moving process more efficient by being more digital. In the second half of 2022, we rolled out our on-site mortgage in principle flow for single borrowers. The flow allows home hunters to get a high level of certainty about how much they'll be able to borrow. Adoption by home hunters has been better than I hoped, and we've just extended the flow to dual borrowers.
Following this launch, we expect the tool to be used by around a third of all home hunters who might be interested in going direct to a lender. We know that three-quarters of borrowers start their mortgage journey with a mortgage broker, so the next step is to investigate how we can help those home hunters. I'll do a deep dive into our progress on making renting more digital later. Before I give a little more color on our strategic position, I'll hand over to Alison to talk about the numbers in more detail.
Thanks, Peter. Hello, everyone. I'm delighted to present our full year results this morning. In what has been a volatile macro backdrop, these results stand out for the consistency of our revenue and ARPA growth and ongoing high margin delivery. Revenue has increased by 9% on December 2021 to GBP 332.6 million, with all areas of the business growing well. Estate agency revenues were GBP 242.6 million, an increase of 10% on 2021. Once again, the agency business has delivered double-digit revenue growth from a combination of price increases, uptake of digital products at all stages of the marketing funnel, and package upgrades. The chart here on the right shows how this ARPA growth drove incremental revenues of GBP 23.7 million in the year.
New homes, where revenue growth has been challenged over the course of the last 2 years, delivered growth of 5% to GBP 52.6 million and gained good momentum through the second half of the year. Revenue growth was all ARPA driven from increased uptake of products, notably Advanced Development Listings and Native Search Adverts. Customer numbers were a headwind in 2022 in both agency and new homes, reducing agency revenues by about GBP 1 million and new homes revenues by about GBP 2.5 million. We continue to expect the current momentum in new homes to change this for 2023. Within the other operating segment, revenues grew by 8% to GBP 32.8 million.
Within that segment, the strongest growth drivers were commercial real estate, which grew by 19% to GBP 10.6 million, and data services, which grew by 15% to GBP 9.3 million. This growth was partially offset by a revenue reduction of GBP 2.6 million in our nascent mortgages business. As a reminder, at the end of 2021, we chose to move from a fixed fee arrangement with our lending partner and into a commission arrangement, which has much greater long-term revenue potential, but as expected, has a short-term impact on revenue. 2022 was a standout year for ARPA growth. We added GBP 125 of ARPA in the year, growth of 11% on 2021, driven primarily by continued customer investment in digital products.
We exceeded the 2022 ARPA guidance we gave you at the half year, where in addition to the GBP 101 of H1 ARPA growth, we expected to add a further GBP 15 or GBP 16 in the second half. The actual H2 addition was GBP 24, driven by a stronger recovery in New Homes H2 ARPA than we had expected. The momentum that this has provided into 2023 means we are more optimistic on growth for the year, guiding towards the middle of our previous range of GBP 95-GBP 105 of growth. Within estate agency, the drivers of ARPA growth were the upgrades to our premium Optimiser 2020 package, strong uptake of products at all package levels, and the pricing actions we took both during the year and in the final quarter of 2021.
The ARPA growth profile, although it largely mirrored that of a typical year being heavily weighted in the first half, also delivered strong second half growth, as you can see in the chart. Within new homes, however, we recorded our highest ever second half ARPA increase, adding GBP 67 to the first half growth of GBP 79 and providing real momentum into 2023. Notable drivers of this growth were the upgrades to the top Advanced package and increased uptake of the new Native Search Adverts product. Within agency, the successful migration of previous Opti 2015 customers to our most premium Opti 2020 package continued in the second half. Over 1,300 agents and new joiners upgraded to Opti 2020 during the year, with over 40% of those coming from the Essential and Enhanced packages.
Top of the funnel branding products, Featured Agent, Local Homepages, and Sold by Me remain our best-selling digital products, now accounting for 55% of product sales within agency. Within new homes, as I mentioned, product uptake was strong. We are particularly pleased that the monthly revenue run rate for the new Native Search Adverts as we exited the year is close to GBP 700,000. Around 20% of developments now purchase NSA, and we have just made it available to our independent developers, therefore expect it to be a strong driver of revenue in 2023. 37% of developments were on the most premium new homes package by the end of 2022, Advanced Development Listing, which is a premium version of the listing itself, and we will continue to encourage upward migration to this top package.
Transactional digital media campaigns, which had dropped off significantly over the last two years, picked up strongly in the fourth quarter. For 2023, we expect the subscription products, along with an increased need from developers for digital media campaigns, to mean that new homes ARPA growth next year is more weighted in product than in price. As I mentioned, customer numbers were a challenge for the majority of 2022 and continued to reflect the themes of the past two years. Ongoing pressure on the agent base as market conditions made it difficult for new agents to establish themselves and a very forward-sold new homes market with development numbers falling as they were being listed for shorter periods. Overall, customer numbers increased by 45 on 2021 to close the year at 19,014.
Within agency, we closed with 178 fewer agents than in December 2021, driven primarily by a reduction in lettings-only agents. These losses were partially offset by some growth in new agents, particularly in the relatively new Build to Rent sector. Overall, market conditions remained a challenge to new agent formation. Both 2021 and 2022 have seen fewer agents leaving than we have seen since 2016. Those leavers that we do see tend to be the more newly established agents, businesses less than two years old, highlighting how challenging it has been to become established as an agent in the market conditions of 2020 to 2022. Over 80% of our current customer base has been with us since 2018.
They are a resilient group who have had to navigate Brexit, a pandemic in which the property market shut completely, followed by a couple of years of political turmoil and 2022's economic turmoil. Market conditions in 2023 may remain challenging for new agents. The countercyclicality between the agency and the new homes businesses became a factor in the second half of the year as new homes started to recover well. New development numbers are almost a mirror image of those in agency in this second half. We saw a net increase of 223 new homes developments in the year, and unlike agency, all of this increase came in the second half of the year.
The fourth quarter saw our highest ever Q4 increase in developments on the site and our second-highest quarterly increase ever, adding 153 new developments in the quarter to end the year at 3,082 developments on-site, the highest numbers since May 2021. 2023 overall, we expect customer numbers to follow a similar pattern with a small decline in agency offset by an increase in New Homes developments. Costs increased by GBP 10.9 million or 14% year-on-year. The main increase was in headcount, where payroll costs rose by 15%, GBP 5.1 million, driven by a mix of new heads and wage inflation, which together accounted for GBP 4.8 million of the GBP 5.1 million.
We added a net of 78 new heads during 2022, and the workforce is now 680 people, up from 609 in December 2021. Within that GBP 5.1 million increase, wage inflation amounted to about GBP 1 million and arose from a workforce-wide inflationary increase of 3%, up from 1% for 2021. The corresponding inflationary increase for 2023 is 5%. We also incurred two one-off charges. The first, a cost of GBP 700,000, as every employee, other than senior management, received an allowance of GBP 1,000 in October to help with increased cost of living pressures.
A further charge, also of GBP 700,000, was incurred when we made the annual inflationary salary increase for 2023 effective in October 2022, when in a more normal year, it would have been effective from the following January. These one-off charges reflected the extraordinary economic circumstances of the fourth quarter of 2022, and although they won't repeat, the 5% salary increase for 2023 will mean that headcount costs will continue to increase for the year. Headcount now represents 56% of total costs. The other increase worth drawing out was in general and admin costs, which are up over 30% on 2021 at GBP 9.5 million, largely reflecting all of the back to the office activity of staff travel as our account managers have returned to visiting customers and prospects more regularly.
Overall, the underlying operating margin was at 74% for the year, consistent with our guidance at the half year. For 2023, we will maintain our disciplined approach to costs and our focus on profitable revenue growth. We do expect full year costs for 2023 to grow given the inflationary backdrop and our ongoing investment in the business, we expect the impact to be a maximum of 1% of margin. We therefore guide to an underlying operating margin of about 73%. Operational cash generation was 101% of operating profit at GBP 244 million. All of the cash generated in the year was returned to shareholders with GBP 130 million returned via the share buyback program and GBP 68 million via the dividend.
Balance sheet cash was GBP 40 million at period end. We expect to continue to manage the cash position to broadly this level. As Peter mentioned earlier, we are announcing a 2022 final dividend of 5.2 pence per share, which will amount to about GBP 43 million and will be paid in May subject to final shareholder approval. This will mean a total dividend of 8.5 pence per share for the year 2022, 9% growth on 2021, and consistent with underlying EPS growth of 9% and our policy of delivering dividend growth in line with underlying earnings. There will be an impact on 2023's EPS growth from the substantial increase in the enacted tax rate from April onwards.
We are likely to use profit before tax in 2023 as the profitability metric on which to base dividend growth until the year-on-year EPS comparison normalizes. Our policy of returning substantially all cash to shareholders post organic investment remains unchanged, as does the allocation within that of broadly 1/3 dividend, 2/3 buyback. The share buyback program has delivered accretion of 3% in the year 2022. We have made some real concrete progress on a whole range of ESG initiatives in the year. Starting with E, I'm delighted to announce that the environmental targets we submitted to the SBTI in 2021 have now been validated by the initiative scientists, and both the targets themselves and the target dates have been approved as being in line with the 1.5 degrees global warming initiative.
In common with many other low-carbon digital businesses, our biggest challenge will be to work with our suppliers to ensure we succeed in reducing our Scope 3 emissions. On S, we continue to have exceptional levels of positive employee engagement with 87% of the workforce confirming that Rightmove is a great place to work. We are immensely proud that such a high proportion of our workforce are proud to work for us and are positive advocates for the business. Overall, we have set ourselves an ambitious program across environmental targets, gender diversity and seniority mix of the employee base, and governance standards that are best in class as we head into the final set of BEIS recommendations. I look forward to continuing to update you on our progress. I'll now hand back to Peter for his housing market and strategic updates.
Thank you, Alison. I'll start off by briefly covering what happened in the housing market in 2022. The U.K. housing market is around 2,500 separate geographical markets, to add to that, we're seeing different parts of the market move at different speeds. In the interest of time, I'll stick to the overall picture. As I described earlier, there were three phases to the market in 2022, this added up to 1.26 million transactions in the year, which while slightly elevated in the context of the post-2014 norm, it's not remarkable. What was remarkable was the continued growth in asking prices, up nearly 20% since 2019.
A slightly higher commission rate and rising house prices means the underlying agency commission pools increased by around 20% in the last two years, even if one ignores the impact of that increased transaction rate. The big question many have been asking is what will happen this year with the interest rate rises and hopefully slightly cooling inflation. I'm not given to predictions, we can look forward using our unique leading indicators, which are up to date as of the start of this week. The bottom left graph is the number of sales we believe are being agreed indexed to the same time in 2019. At the moment, that means typically 3 to 6 months ahead of completion. You can see that confidence took a step up over the Christmas break, with deals now gradually returning towards 2019 levels.
We're currently running at a deal level, which is around 11% below 2019. Using that data and adding in the sales agreed pipeline carried over from 2022, mathematically, I think 1 million-1.1 million transactions in 2023 is not unreasonable unless there's significant change in the environment. This isn't the first market inflection we've seen at Rightmove. I'll describe some scenarios and typically what it means for our customers and Rightmove in a moment. Much has been made of monthly mortgage affordability. Alongside the impact of inflation, mortgage rates obviously play a key role. Since over 85% of mortgages are fixed, we've plotted the average two-year fixed rate for an 85% loan-to-value mortgage and the average five-year fixed rate for a 60% mortgage against the base rate.
For borrowers with more equity, mortgage rates are returning towards the levels we saw before the mini-budget. I think we should see this data as encouraging on two fronts. It's probably helping that gradual rise in confidence and sales being agreed that we saw on the previous slide, and it gives a reason to hope this will continue to rise. Whilst base rate increases are undeniably putting the squeeze on the 15% of borrowers who are on standard variable rate and tracker mortgages, the Bank of England have given a sense they may not rise as much as previously imagined. It's also worth remembering that only around 45% of owner-occupied properties have a mortgage at all. Significant house price falls have historically been driven by financially forced sellers.
Given the relatively small segment exposed to interest rate rises this year, and hopefully some respites coming for those on variable rate mortgages, I don't think we're likely to see historically large volumes of financially forced sellers in 2023. Predicting house prices is not a science, but some of the larger falls I've heard predicted seem unlikely, and we saw asking prices rise again in January and flatten off in February. Given the significant rises in price since 2019, some modest falls are unlikely to be an issue for agents or home movers. I wouldn't want to paint a picture of unbridled positivity.
There are, of course, many who are feeling the squeeze as a result of increased rates, and those rates being slower to fall for those with slower, smaller deposits.This, in combination with the removal of the Help to Buy scheme, is likely to stifle prices at the lower end, which will have a drag effect on the whole of the market. The upside of this reduction in buyer competition at the lower end is it's making it slightly easier for those first-time buyers with a deposit to get on the ladder. We've seen early signs to evidence this in our sales agreed numbers, with smaller properties of two bedrooms and below tracking more in line with 2019 than those in the larger upper-end home sector.
Before I talk about what the property market means for Rightmove, I think it's important to cover our market lead with consumers as that's what the value we deliver to our customers is built on. I don't want to spend too much time here, as I think you're all familiar with the scale of Rightmove's lead with consumers. Perhaps there are just a few things to point out. Firstly, looking at the Comscore chart at the top of the page, to repeat what I said at half year, you can see a reversal of the methodology change in January 2022. None of our other tracking, internal or external, has moved, so we're confident that this change isn't a change in reality. The more usual levels of market activity led to the reduction in time spent on the platform versus 2022.
The traffic increase versus 2019 is remarkable, I think it demonstrates the strides we've taken with home hunters over the last few years. Finally, you may be surprised that given the more normal market, leads have increased a further 8% over last year. This is mainly being driven by the tight lettings market. As choice reduces and rents increase, each tenant is sending more leads to ensure they can find somewhere to live. As ever, we continue to innovate to make our consumer proposition stronger. We are already the U.K.'s turn-to place for house pricing information. Our sold prices section being far the most used with almost 650 million minutes spent on it in 2022.
As we become a greater part of the home moving process, knowing more about individual home movers will enable us to provide a better and more personalized experience. Equally, for some of our newer initiatives, such as mortgages, it'll become increasingly important to regularly engage with homeowners around property values. To address this, we'll be launching a new feature, Track My Property, in the next few months. Track My Property will leverage our best-in-class estimates of property values and also create a news feed of local market activity to allow a homeowner to stay in touch with their home's value. The feature has been designed to emphasize the strengths of an agent's valuation to ensure it brings benefits to our customer base too. Feedback has been positive in early trialing with homeowners and agents.
I'm particularly pleased with the agent response, as we know this type of feature can alienate customers if not implemented carefully. Moving on to the customer side of our network, many of you will have heard me say Rightmove is only connected to the market at the very extremes of market activity. Given we're passing through a market inflection with a level of uncertainty, I thought it worthwhile describing why this is the case. There are two drivers for this: the behavior of the agents in faster and slower markets with relation to our product suite, and the contrasting needs of new homes developers and estate agents in those two market structures. I'll explore each in turn. You may remember that our products are broadly split into three categories.
Those products which help agents promote their brand to attract potential vendors at the top of the marketing funnel. This is important as sellers often initially perceive that agents offer pretty much the same service as each other, which they don't. Those products which help agents by directly generating leads from potential vendors, and finally, those products which typically promote a specific property and generate more leads for that property. In the orange bordered area, we've laid out how agents use our products when the market is faster, the situation from mid-2020 through to the end of Q1, 2022. In the teal bordered area, we've laid out how agents use our products when the market is slower, the situation from Q4 last year. What might surprise you is that in both cases, the predominant need is finding vendors.
It's the type of vendors which they're looking for which changes. As the market slows, the differing needs of new homes developers and agents becomes particularly obvious. As Alison showed earlier, we've already seen the beginning of this shift in Q4 2022 ARPA, and we're seeing that momentum carry through into Q1 this year. We've seen this countercyclicality play out a number of times in our history, so I thought I'd highlight two cases in the recent past. In 2015, the transaction recovery post GFC suddenly stopped, and the market plateaued, as you can see from the transaction data on the right-hand side of the page. This sudden stop moved the market from an undersupply structure in 2014 to oversupply in 2015 as properties continued to come to market at an accelerated pace.
The impact of the Mortgage Market Review in 2014 meant that there were no longer an accelerating number of buyers. Looking at the graph on the left-hand side, you can see what happened to the relative revenue growth between our agency and new homes businesses. The undersupplied market of 2014 saw agent revenue grow quickly, the teal bar, as agents spent more on Rightmove products to take advantages of the opportunities and more agents opened. As we transitioned to an oversupplied market in 2015, agents continued to grow spend for the reasons I just explained.
The new homes developers spend, shown in orange, increased quickly as they had to work harder to sell the units they had either built or that were under construction, and the time taken to sell developments increased, meaning there were more listed. That was a good example of a switch from under to oversupply. The next example is what happens when a slower market is sustained over a longer period, the Brexit years. The political and economic uncertainty following the Brexit vote in 2016 saw the property market fall for four consecutive years. In this sustained slower market, we saw agency branches stay stable for the first two years and then fall by a total of 6% over the second two years. Against this backdrop, it's worth noting that agency ARPA rose by nearly 30% in between 2016 and 2019.
Hence, the continually growing agency revenue in the teal bar. Yet again, one can see the counter cyclicality in the new homes revenue in the orange bar. A combination of slowing sales rate leading to 30% more developments on site, and it's worth pointing out that even in this market, the developers did not stop bringing units to market, and developers spending more per development to ensure sales. Spend on our digital media campaigns in particular rose to record levels during this period. We had 11% fewer developments on site in December 2022 compared to December 2019, to give you a sense of how development numbers may grow over the next few years. I'm sure a number of you are wondering if the counter cyclicality in new homes is enough to offset agency revenue. This chart shows the core advertising business revenue since 2012.
Hopefully, you can see that despite those shifts from faster to slower markets, the revenue growth continues at a consistent rate. There are typically two reasons that this is true, despite the fact that new homes revenue is only around 20% that of agency. Firstly, the motivator to spend as the market calls is significant for developers. They know Rightmove marketing generates sales, and the marginal cost of increased marketing on Rightmove versus the sunk cost of a unit makes it very good value indeed. Also, the increased time to sell means the number of developments listed rises. Crucially, as I discussed, agency revenue doesn't stop growing in these years, the growth merely slows. Our products work regardless of market, and of course, in tougher markets, agents look to optimize their spend on the things which generate the best return.
As agents start to think harder about the efficiency of their marketing spend, I thought it would be useful to share some performance stats across the three categories of products we offer. Looking at top of funnel branding products, these increase the share of voice an agent has on Rightmove. Share of voice is the proportion of all brand views a particular agent gets in an area. It's a typical marketing measure of brand presence. Proving a causal link between a particular piece of brand advertising and a specific outcome is always fraught with assumption. Those with more than 20% share of voice in their local markets, typically Optimiser customers, win over twice as many instructions as those who don't do any additional brand advertising on Rightmove.
It's no coincidence that over 70% of branches who are ranked top 5 for market share in their area are also top 5 for share of voice. The chart on the bottom left shows the number of unique people who sent a lead to agents via our vendor lead products. Despite the cooling market in 2022, those products delivered a further 16% increase in leads over 2021. These products now generate leads which represent up to 13% of all new listings in the U.K. market. Turning to the closing products on the bottom right, agents tend to use these either to close the instruction or in tougher markets to relaunch a property at a lower price. We also give agents tools to explain the difference in performance to vendors.
Of course, these different listing types also give more exposure to agents brand and associates that brand with the better quality advert. Whilst all of our products work individually, it's when brought together that they become really powerful. We sell most of our products in flexible packages for our independent agents. Each membership tier allows agents to work with their account manager to create a set of products which suits them and offers exceptional return. The table at the top shows the three tiers within our package structure and the return on the package. As a customer goes through the package tiers, a bigger proportion of their spend goes towards those products which are going to help them win. Essential customers pay 100% of their listing rate, all products are at additional cost.
All Optimiser customer spend is on additional products, with the listings included in the package. The packages are structured to ensure that a customer who chooses to invest more on marketing on Rightmove gets an increased return. While this shows the return on an absolute basis, our customers also think about efficiency and value on a relative basis. The chart on the bottom shows independent data across a selection of outcomes. The bars show the proportion of various agent outcomes CRM software tracked from a Rightmove lead versus all digital leads, and the multiples show how this compares to our nearest competitor. I think the results speak for themselves. A totally reasonable and recurring question is: How can you keep growing your product revenue? There are three ways we do this.
All of our products are designed to create more value if an agent buys multiple units. The first route is to sell multiple units of a product which is already working for an agent. Secondly, we enhance our existing products and increase price. Finally, we create new products. To give a sense of how we can enhance products, in 2022, we focused on increasing the value of the Local Valuation Alert, which allows potential home sellers to send leads directly to an agent. One of the reasons we chose to focus on Local Valuation Alert is it's a product which performs particularly well in both faster and slower markets, as I described earlier. As you can see from the timeline at the top, we are restless in our product optimization. This optimization makes a significant performance difference.
By optimizing the product on mobile, the team have increased the number of leads delivered. They've also changed the flow to further increase the quality of the leads we send. We've also increased the amount of inventory available by 20%. The result has been an increase in revenue by over 1/3 in 2022, with more opportunity to go after as we've also repriced a number of terms. Following successful testing, we have just released the Native Search Adverts product exclusively for our Optimiser estate agency customers. Reflecting the evolving nature of online advertising, Native Search Adverts allow our customers to market themselves on Rightmove through video for the first time. The product uses smart targeting to help ensure the best return for agents.
The chart at the bottom shows that by continuing to innovate, both with new products and optimizing existing ones, we can continue to increase the adoption of our premium Optimiser package, and the average amount those customers spend with us has increased by 7% since January. To this end, we're working on a new top package to be introduced in the second half to accelerate the trend in 2024. It's important to talk about how we're positioned in the new homes market as the pendulum swings towards notable growth in new homes marketing spend. As Alison described earlier, we launched a new package and a new product for new homes developers in 2021 to be ready for the uptick in need.
You can see from the chart on the top left, the Advanced package sits on top of our New Homes package structure and not only gives the ability to upsell and cross-sell, it generates more leads too. The ARPA increase is about 20% between Gold and Advanced. As Alison mentioned earlier, these products give us a big opportunity to drive further upgrades to the Advanced package. It's worth noting that unlike agency packages, we see it as totally reasonable for the majority of developments to be on the top package. Alison described earlier that as we move towards a slower market, we are seeing New Homes developers investing more to sell their homes. Our digital media campaigns are ideal to help developers with generating interest in their developments or in specific products in a time-critical way.
We have an unparalleled consented audience for digital campaigns, which is currently over 6.5 million people. For all those people we know on a first-party basis, where and what they're looking for. Due to much of the other work we're doing, such as Property Lists and My Enquiries, this is growing at about 200,000 people per month. This audience works. One of our customers shared the graph at the bottom of the page. It shows their internal monitoring of traffic to their website. You can see on the chart that we broadcast a campaign for them on the 29th of December last year, more than doubling the traffic to their site. To give you a sense of the power of first-party data in our audience, this campaign cost approximately GBP 60,000.
Typically, this developer spends over GBP 100,000 per month on pay-per-click advertising. We've got lots of headroom in this product too. The revenue from this product was more than 40% lower in the busy market of 2022 compared to the more usual market of 2019. As Alison noted earlier, we saw developers rapidly returning to the product as the market slowed in the final quarter of 2022. The rental market is important for us. Around GBP 45 million of the revenue we report in the estate agency comes from advertising rental properties. Beyond that, we see further opportunities which might be another GBP 20 million in ancillary services which surround the rental journey. As I've talked about in previous presentations, we've been focused on improving the process of renting a property for the last few years.
We believe that because of our unique position in the market, with more people searching for rental properties than anyone else, we're the only people to be able to truly change the rental process for the better from end to end. The first phase of the digital tenancy Workflow entered testing in the middle of the year. This creates a streamlined flow from lead to keys. Tenants can now search, view, secure, contract, and pay their deposits on a property entirely from their mobile phone. For an agent, the whole process can be managed via Workflow within Rightmove Plus, which sends them alerts when the next step is ready for action. We estimate that many average size agents currently have around half an FTE just managing this part of the process.
We've also just introduced a new Enhanced Leads feature, which allows a prospective tenant to enter more information on the original lead to help a tenant stand out to an agent. This feature also helps agents cope with the increasing number of lettings leads. It's a great example of the benefits only we can offer as we are integrating the entire rental journey. Creating a more integrated digital process increases the attractiveness of a Rightmove reference. In the top chart, we've indexed the number of references we delivered in 2022 to 2021 to normalize the inherent seasonality in the market. Not only does this increase in references generate direct revenue, it creates more opportunity to sell to tenants and landlords. The graph at the bottom shows the number of active landlord insurance policies during the year.
As a reminder, we don't take risk on these policies, but are paid a commission by insurers. We've just over 10% of the market share of referencing, so we've got plenty to aim for. The use of Open Banking reduces the amount of information we need to collect for the reference, reduces the turnaround time as more of the employment details will be checked electronically. By building this on top of our existing high-quality referencing process, we can ensure that agents and landlords can rely on a Rightmove reference regardless of the tenant's situation. Importantly for us, it increases the referencing margin. Alongside the progress we are making with our Built for Renters customers, which Alison mentioned, the digital rental flow is setting the foundations for us to reshape our lettings proposition to be ready for any changes to the dynamics in the letting industry in the future.
Wrapping up with the outlook. The network effects at the heart of our business are stronger than ever, with the frenzied post-pandemic market having further strengthened our position as the place the U.K. turns to and returns to first for property. Predicting the property market in the U.K. is difficult, Using our unrivaled forward-looking data, it would suggest that some of the more negative predictions are likely to be overstated. Undoubtedly, 2023 will see fewer transactions an.d a level of house price pressure. Rightmove is resilient and grows regardless of the market structure, which products work for agents in both faster and slower markets, and the intrinsically counter-cyclical nature of our new homes business. Looking forward, I think it's reasonable to expect customer numbers to follow the pattern we saw in the second half of 2022.
I think it's prudent to assume we'll see a small reduction in agency branch numbers over the year, and equally, I'd expect the number of new homes developments on site to grow over the year. Agents and new homes developers continue to recognize the value in our unrivaled audience and products, with strong ARPA growth being driven by a combination of pricing changes and upgrading their package to grow their business. The final months of 2022 give us confidence that we are well set for the tougher housing market in 2023. We also continue to see healthy growth in our other operating segments. As you can see, there's no slowdown in our ambition to make home moving easier or our long-term outlook.
Before I wrap up for one last time, I'd like to take a moment to thank everyone at Rightmove and all our customers for making the last 17 years an amazing journey for me, and also to wish Johan the best on joining this incredible business.