Good morning everyone and welcome to the presentation of Rightmove's half year results. My name is Peter Brooks Johnson and I'm joined by Georgina Hudson, the interim FD. I'm going to talk through the highlights of the first half of the year. Georgina is going go through the more detailed financials and then I'm going to spend some time giving you a little more color on the housing market and our strategic developments. One can't talk about the first six months of 2020 without talking about how Rightmove has responded to the threats and risks from COVID-nineteen.
As the pandemic struck, we acted swiftly to look after our people, support our customers, and protect our liquidity. I'll talk about the first two and Georgina will cover the last within her section. All our employees moved seamlessly to working from home on the March 17. I'd like to say a special thank you to all the Right Movers who've not only looked out for each other, but our customers as well. Connections between Right Movers are key to how we perform.
Beyond the plethora of virtual team stand up meetings and virtual treasure hunts, to keep us all connected, we've delivered weekly live town hall webinars for the entire organization with no holds barred questions and updates from all corners of Rightmove. But full time working from home brings with it new health and well-being challenges, which for many have had the added pressure of caring and homeschooling. To recognize this, gave everyone with caring responsibilities the ability to take an extra ten days paid leave to help with balance. We supported all of our people with a series of webinars focusing on the new challenges brought by lockdown such as homeschooling and mental well-being. But we realize the challenges for people will continue, so we're investing in training to help everyone deal with coming out of lockdown and reestablishing a form of normality.
We're piloting a small scale return to the offices at the moment, and we expect that to increase as time goes on and advice changes. We recognize for some people being back in the office is important, but we aren't intending to rush the process. Whilst you will be aware of the significant financial support we've offered our customers, I think the practical assistance we offered has also been important. To give you a flavor of the practical assistance the team have delivered over the last three months, over 34,000 professionals have attended one of over 50 COVID related advice webinars. We've also created a special tool to allow agents to see up to date local market data which will help them with decision making in these uncertain times.
We're also well aware of how we can use our special position to provide safety advice and therefore give confidence to home movers. We've created a COVID advice hub for consumers and professionals and our new weekly updates are read over 800,000 times per week. In three months, we delivered a new tool to help agents be more efficient, which allows them to deliver video viewings to home hunters via a secure platform. This platform can automatically respond to home hunters on behalf of agents, saving effort. It also includes viewing metrics for agents and the ability for home hunters to indicate their continued interest, all adding up to a platform which reduces wasted viewing, saves time, and more important at the moment, reduces risk.
We also created a relaunch email to help agents and home sellers who've missed out on their property launch due to lockdown. This relaunch marketed nearly 300,000 properties to 1,200,000 potential buyers, again saving valuable time for our customers and helping their customers, the home sellers, get the exposure their properties deserve. Moving on to the other headlines from the first six months of twenty twenty. In the 2020, COVID-nineteen has upended the lives of everyone across The UK. As the lockdown has eased, the Rightmove network effect has emerged stronger than ever as home hunters continue to turn to Rightmove first and customers begin to invest more in our digital solutions to aid their recovery.
The 2020 hasn't been easy for our customers. With smaller low stock customers facing cash flow headwinds in the first few months of the year from the slowdown in the market in the 2019, and of course, the temporary suspension of the housing market from the March 23 to the May 13 in England and later in Scotland and Wales. Advertisers on the June 30 stood at just over 19,150, a fall of 3% from the start of the year. Despite everything, our branch based agency customers have been resilient with numbers only falling by around 300 since the start of the year, with a similar fall in stock based virtual branches, and the remainder being new home developments which have sold out. Trends since the reopening of the market have been positive, more of which later.
As previously announced, we offered a 75% discount for all our estate agent and new homes customers for April to July, and the impact of that can be seen in the 34% fall in revenue and corresponding fall in profit and EPS. Beyond our KPIs, we've made much strategic progress so far this year. Prime Minister's purpose is to make home moving easier in The UK. We will satisfy our purpose and drive growth through innovation. We continue to innovate in our heartland of property advertising.
You may remember me describing the new premium optimizer 2020 package back in February. Of course, lockdown has slowed customer adoption, but we've seen promising growth with 400 agents converting to this package as an average uplift of three sixty pounds in the first six months of the year. Encouragingly, agents bought more Rightmove products in July 2020 than in July 2019, and that's partly because we always believe we can make our website and products better. As an example, we further optimized our local valuation alert product this year and that has delivered lead growth which is outperforming the market. In another example of our steadfast rejection of the status quo, despite record traffic with visits up over 5% on last year, we've launched a new version of the property details page and we continue to innovate to help agents be more efficient.
Helping agents to become more efficient has always been part of our strategy, as we see it a way as a way of helping them reduce their costs, spend a larger proportion of their revenue on property marketing, and still be more profitable. In the months since the property market has reopened, we've seen a marked change in agents' interest in efficiency as they operate in a much busier market often with a proportion of their teams still on furlough. As well as the view video viewings platform, we started a beta test for integrated appointment booking functionality in rentals, and we innovate in the detail too. Lead quality is vital to help agents be more efficient. As a reminder, not only do we send around twice as many leads as the next largest source, each lead is already two and a half times more likely to turn into an outcome, resulting in five times as much business for our customers.
This year, we've rolled out a new Home Hunter email verification system further enhancing the quality of right move leads, helping our customers focus on these those people who are serious about moving home. Whilst property advertising will be the core of our growth, we are also innovating to generate future growth. We believe there is much opportunity in helping home hunters to be transaction ready. The next iteration of our tenant passport is integrated into the appointment booking flow, making it simpler and easier for both tenants and agents. As a proof of concept, we've begun to sell tenant contents insurance via Van Meldert.
While sports small at the moment, the progress is encouraging as it highlights the benefit of offering a valuable service at the right moment in the transaction flow. In February, I noticed we'd I noticed we'd started work with the Nationwide Building Society to investigate how we make the process of applying for a mortgage significantly easier for those who want to go direct to a lender. We've refined our tools in the last six months leading to a doubling of Home Hunter engagement, and we're just at the start of the journey with more ideas to come. More on all of this later. There's much excitement for the future, but this is all built on our strong position today.
Before I give a little more color to what we've seen more recently on our strategic position, I'll hand over to Georgina to talk about the numbers in more detail.
Thank you, Peter, and good morning everybody. So turning to some of the detail on the half year numbers and starting with revenue. Revenue is down 34% to £94,800,000 with the financial impact of the discounts provided to our customers offsetting the revenue growth in the first quarter. In absolute terms, revenues fallen by 49,100,000.0 year on year. Looking at the drivers of this, the impact of the 75 discount in agency and new homes and selected discounts for other business units resulted in a reduction in revenue of £50,500,000 This impact was partly offset by ARPA growth of £6,700,000 in agency and new homes, which was primarily in the first quarter with ARPA growth impacted by the lockdown from late March.
Average membership was down year on year due to reduction in agency branches resulting in a decline in revenue of 7,500,000.0. Other revenue, excluding the impact of the discount, increased by 2,200,000 as we benefited from growth of £1,600,000 as a result of our mortgage partnership with Nationwide, which started in September 2019, together with healthy growth in our Commercial business, which grew 28% in the first quarter. We also achieved growth in our data services business, reflecting the value our customers are finding in our real time market data during this period of uncertainty. We previously announced the impact on full year revenue of our discounts to be 65 to 75,000,000,000 for the period April to July and seventeen to twenty million for August and September. We now expect the discount impact for the period from July to September to be in the range of 35 to 37,000,000.
We ended the half with customers at 19,158, down 3% since the beginning of the year. We've seen a decline in agency branch numbers, down 580 branches to 15,767. But this decline just under half relates to the reduction in branch equivalents, so virtual branches based on the calculation of average property stock levels, which have fallen due to the overall decline in stock in the market at the end of last year and the start of this year and are typically hybrid agents. Over 90% of our customers are branch based agents who've been particularly resilient over the period. Branch based agents have fallen by 2% and these levers typically represent low stock and less established businesses whose cash flow have been particularly impacted by the restrictions in the property market.
Our new homes development numbers have also been robust with a decline of just 2% or 71 developments over the period to 3,391, with the vast majority of New Homes customers maintaining their presence on Rightmove throughout the lockdown period. And we continue to be the only place to see virtually the whole of The UK residential property market in one place with 940,000 properties. Turning to ARPA, ARPA has fallen by £365 to $7.12 as a result of the support we've provided to our agency and New Homes customers, partly mitigated by product growth and price rise activity over the period. Agency ARP has benefited from the impact of price increases with two thirds of our planned price rise activity having been completed prior to lockdown together with increased product adoption. In particular, growth at the start of the year was above expectations for our new Optimize 2020 package.
More recently, the trends have been positive with an increase in product spend since April. While some of our new homes developers reduced discretionary spend on our products to conserve cash at the start of the lockdown, we've seen a strong return of discretionary product spend in May and June following the reopening of the property market with particular demand for our digital marketing campaigns. We took early action to preserve our liquidity in the face of the unprecedented impact of the lockdown on our business. Recognizing the impact of COVID nineteen on our stakeholders, the entire board and group senior leadership team took a voluntary 20% reduction in salary with effect from the April 1 to the July 31. We suspended our share buyback program on the March 14 and took the decision to cancel our previously announced 2019 final dividend.
In light of the ongoing macro uncertainties, the directors are not declaring an interim dividend. We deferred 12,100,000.0 of VAT payments, which are repayable by the 03/31/2021, although we intend to bring forward the settlement of these tax deferrals to the 2020 if it's possible to do that. We also confirmed our eligibility to access the government's CCFF and extended the group's £10,000,000 committed revolving loan facility for an extra year to February 2022, although we note that we've not issued any commercial paper or draw down any amounts under the loan facility. From the April 6, we furloughed around one third of our people, predominantly those in customer facing roles. With the increase in activity since the housing market reopened, we've now brought our employees back from furlough and intend to repay the cash received under the furlough scheme in the second half of the year, being a repayment of just over £700,000 and we won't be taking the January furlough bonus.
We reduced marketing spend in the period due in light of the closure of the property market in late March. However, we plan to continue to invest marketing with our biggest evident national TV campaign in the second half, which you'll be able to see on air from tomorrow. We've also made some small savings from our staff working remotely with savings on travel accommodation and staff assistance costs. We were fortunate to start the year with a higher cash balance that we typically carry and it's given us the confidence to make some of the decisions we have in terms of customer support during the lockdown. We consider it prudent in the light of the current environment to run with a higher cash balance than we have maintained historically, so we'd expect cash levels to be around £50,000,000 going forward.
Moving on to costs, as we highlighted in our December results, in 2020, we've moved to presenting costs and profit on a GAAP basis, so including the IFRS two and NI charges, which were previously reported separately. Operating costs have fallen by £2,600,000 to £33,100,000 Costs have been stringently managed in the period, and I've just touched on a number of mitigation measures we've implemented to reduce operating costs from April and also to preserve cash. Costs were impacted by a reduction in employee costs of just over £2,000,000 due to a fall in average headcount and other people costs, offset by increased investment in technology and the full period of Van Beldert costs of 1,700,000.0. We've closely managed our costs over the period, but we've also ensured that we've continued to invest for the longer term and that we position ourselves strongly for the future. This particularly relates to our people, and during June, we restarted recruitment within our product development team, which had been paused at the start of lockdown.
Costs this year are likely to be slightly more weighted to the second half, reflecting the timing of recruitment and planned marketing activities, with full year administrative expenses reflecting the cost control this year and therefore expected to be unchanged compared to 2019, including the full year impact of the Van Mildert costs. We expect the IFRS two charge to be in the range of 1,000,000 to 1,300,000.0. Operating profit fell by 43% to £61,700,000 reflecting the fall in revenue in the period, although our operating margin has remained strong at 65%. And on to the P and L, the P and L continues to be straightforward. Share based payments are a credit of £200,000,000 as a result of the true up of performance conditions for existing share incentives, which are no longer expected to be met and a reduction in share based incentives granted in the period.
The NI charge is also a credit of 100,000.0, reflecting the reduction in the share price from £6.34 at December 2019 to £5.46 at the June 30. The tax charge of 11,600,000.0 is at an effective tax rate of 18.9%, which continues to be broadly in line with UK and active tax rate. We've maintained our strong balance sheet and remain debt free throughout the period. The net asset value of £60,500,000 is higher than a year ago of £47,300,000 and this reflects the changes to the balance sheet following our acquisition of Van Mildert on the September 30. We recognized goodwill and intangibles of £19,400,000 at the acquisition date, resulting in a significantly higher intangible asset balance than last year of 22,300,000.0.
Deferred consideration of 2,400,000.0 and a deferred tax liability of £900,000 in relation to intangibles were also recognized. Trade receivables have fallen reflecting the impact of the discounts provided to our customers and income tax payable has also fallen as HMRC have changed the corporation tax payable dates for larger businesses, bringing them forward so that all taxes paid in the year the profit is generated. This means that in addition to the final two installments relating to 2019, we've paid two installments in relation to 2020. Turning to the cash flow, we've continued our strong cash generation this half with cash conversion in excess of a 100 percent. Of particular note has been the positive cash collection trend.
As you know, we invoice our independent agents in advance, which gives us the benefit of the month of service to collect the cash. With particular focus on this over the period, we have had fewer than 225 nonpaying independent agents at the June, and this has fallen to fewer than a 100 by the July. Looking at the movements in the 2020, we've benefited from a working capital inflow of 13,700,000.0, mainly due to the lower debtors balance, and we'll see the reversal of this benefit in the second half as the discounts come to an end. We paid 29,900,000.0 in corporation tax, including half of the amount owing for 2020, and CapEx of 2,100,000.0 was higher this period due to investment in storage and servers as part of our usual replacement cycle as well as ongoing investment in our cyber capability. We bought back and cancelled 5,000,000 ordinary shares at a total cost of £30,400,000 prior to the suspension of the program on the March 14.
We incurred £1,000,000 of lease rental charges in the period and had a small cash inflow from cash received in relation to the exercise of share options. Whilst we haven't announced an interim dividend given the uncertain macro environment, we reiterate that our long term policy of returning all free cash flow to shareholders through dividends and share buybacks remains unchanged and we will consider the quantum and timing of future dividend payments and the share buyback program in due course.
Thank you Georgina. I'm sure you're all familiar with our strategy, but I think it's an important place to start. In simple terms, we will have the largest audience of Home Hunters if we continue to deliver a great user experience leveraging both our twenty years of knowledge and keeping up pace with modern technology. By combining virtually every home hunter in The UK with our deep relationships with agents, we can deliver products which perform and help our customers be successful. And by innovating to create a better marketplace, we can create more opportunity for our customers and new opportunities for Rightmove, and in total make home moving in The UK easier for everyone.
I'll look at each of the following in turn, number of customers, our package and product sales and ARPA, and our lead with HomeHunters, and then I'll wrap up by looking at some of those new opportunities. So starting with customer numbers, you might as you might imagine, there are a few moving parts to the story over the last six months. As Georgina has said, branch based agents have been resilient so far this year. To give you a sense of the dynamics in the market, I've divided out the branch based agents and those hybrid agents we charge based on their stock levels. The top chart shows the lever and joiner rate compared to last year.
Looking at branch based agents in the darker colors, one can see that fewer agents left the industry this year every month with the obvious exception of April when a number of small agents left the industry or closed branches due to the unprecedented uncertainty. It's surprising how quickly new businesses are starting up again as soon as some level of certainty has returned with the new joiner rate again above last year and the lever rate lower than last year. Hybrid agents are in the lighter colors. As a reminder, we charge hybrid agents a number of virtual branches, which corresponds to their stock divided by the average stock of a branch based agent. We rebase the virtual branches three times a year.
We entered the year with 13 less 13% less stock on the market and stock levels were falling during the first quarter. One can see the impact of the rebasing spread across January, February, and May, the lower stock for most hybrid agents. It's worth pointing out that this is based on stock and very few hybrid agent businesses have left the industry this year. It's little challenging to see the net movement from this detail, so to make it easier, the bottom chart is the net movement by month, and we've seen a continuation of the trend in July with a small net growth in agent numbers, again driven by the branch based agents. I think this reinforces how quickly branch based agency has returned to modest growth after lockdown and equally the hybrid agents have been steady after the stock based impact of the second half of last year.
A lot of caution on the outlook for branch numbers for the rest of this year. Depending on the general economic outlook, we think some of the low stock agents may face further cash flow pressure in Q4 this year as the furlough scheme ends. At this point, I think it's impossible to make predictions about how branch numbers will react if we do see a tougher Q4. I think the new homes development story is a little simpler this year. The buoyant market in the first part of the year saw the sales rate outstrip the build rate, hence we saw a reduction in developments listed.
As lockdown hit, the new listing rate dropped first as construction was hindered and developers didn't have sales staff on-site to warrant listing new developments with us. Through March and April, which have impacted April and May in the chart, pre agreed completions continued and we saw more or less the usual rate of developments being taken off Rightmove due to all the plots on a development being sold. One can see the impact of lockdown on these sites sold rate in May reported in the June data in the chart. Given the current pace in the market, I'd expect the number of developments on-site to fall a little in the second half as again construction may struggle to keep up with demand. Whilst there is caution particularly around cost for very small agents, a larger impact on our customers is the health of the property market.
Given our unique position both with the scale and timeliness of our data, I thought I'd share what we're seeing in the market right now. In a number of the following charts, I've included the most recent data up until the July. To give a sense of perspective in these charts, they all start in February. To make it a little clearer, charts where this is the case are in orange. The top left chart is the year to date cumulative view of sales agreed.
Most agents tell us when a deal is done, which is usually around three months before the transaction will appear in land registry. You can see the great start we had to the year and the obvious impact of very little activity in the March, April, and May. However, what is remarkable is the speed at which deals are being agreed post lockdown and therefore the rate at which the housing market is making up for lost time. In July 2020, there were 38% more sales agreed than 2019, meaning we're now less than 20% behind the number of sales agreed at this point last year, having caught up more than 15 percentage points since May. The rate of sales agreed has been accelerating over the last month and is positive across all segments of the market including the vital first time buyer segment.
Equally important for the future health of the market is the number of properties available for sale, which is plotted on the lower chart, again versus last year. We entered the year with a lower stock level, and one can see the impact of the lockdown as sellers withdrew properties from the market amidst the uncertainty. The speed of sellers returning to the market is encouraging with 35% more new properties this July than last. These factors are leading to increased asking and cheap prices, which will hopefully give confidence to more sellers to enter the market. Accessibility of mortgage finance is also vital to market momentum.
It's encouraging to see 90% loan to value loans return to the market, and we need to see more lower deposit finance options over the next few months. This data is undeniably positive, but I don't want to become carried away for the year as a whole as wider economic uncertainty and mortgage availability concerns hang over the Q4 market and combined with the cost of the impact at the end of furlough, it may impact. Turning to the other side of our revenue equation and an up to date view of the adoption of our digital solutions as the market has accelerated. As many of you will know, the main focus for an agent is winning the right to sell a home, and that's an area where a number of Rightmove digital solutions help. I thought it worthwhile highlighting a couple of products and how they performed in the year.
Featured agent gives an agent's brand enhanced prominence on the site. Brand perception is key to an agent being invited out to value a property by a potential seller. The top chart shows home hunter engagement with featured agent compared to last year. You can see here that as lockdown eased, potential sellers are engaging even more with featured agent, with total engagement up around 50% on last year. This is giving those agents who purchase Featured Agent an advantage right at the start of the process of winning an instruction by promoting their brand to The UK's largest audience of home sellers.
Local Valuation Alert targets those potential sellers on the site and encourages them to request a property valuation from an agent. Again, can see that as that's driving business to those agents who have it as part of their package. Over the last month, we've sent around 50% more leads than the same period last year. These and all our products add up to the unrivaled exposure for our customers, which in turn underpins our long term ARPA growth. I'm encouraged that we've managed to grow the proportion of agents on an upgraded package in spite of the turbulent market in the first half.
As I mentioned earlier, particularly pleasing has been the continued sales of our super premium package optimizer twenty twenty, which we launched in November to have made nearly 100 sales during lockdown bodes well for the future. The chart in the bottom right shows our estate agency product sales rates since February. As Georgina mentioned, our customers recognize the value of our products to help them emerge stronger as the market has returned. We have sold 7% more products in July than we did in July 2019. Again, this is encouraging for the future as long as the wider economic concerns hanging over q four don't significantly impact the property market.
This performance is all driven by the other side of our network, our audience. So a moment on the most recent trends in traffic. The amount of traffic on Rightmove since the February measured in minutes is shown on the top chart. The market in February was looking good. You can see that we set a new record for time spent on Rightmove on the February 19, nearly forty three million minutes in one day.
The impact of lockdown is clear. Many home hunters appropriately focused on other things. However, the impact of the market opening is also clear. Rightmove remains the place home hunters turn to first with traffic with the traffic rebound being quite incredible, leading to our busiest day ever on the July 8, the daily stamp duty announcement, with a new record of close to seventy million minutes in one day. Traffic's not really come off this peak, with all of the week since the June 24 having seen more traffic than our pre pandemic record.
This activity is turning into leads. Leads in July were over 50% higher than last year, and importantly, this appears to be more than just pent up demand. Search habits have changed, and it appears that new buyers and sellers have come to the market who weren't intending to move at the start of the year. The number of unique people who've sent us leads so far this year is already 6% higher than this point in 2019.
Looking at it from
a half year perspective, despite the pause from lockdown, time on-site remains the same as last year at six point five billion minutes, and as you've seen, the exit rate is much higher. Visits increased by nearly 5% to nearly 900,000,000 in a half, but Rightmove is more than just search. We continue to extend our lead as the place come to research the property market with traffic to our research tools as such as sold prices up 4% on the year. Rightmove remains the only place to see more or less the whole of The UK property market in one place. During the first six months of the year, our property listings lead grew.
In June, we had 50% more listings than any other UK website. For completeness, there's also the Comscore share of time chart. Taken together, I don't think there can be any doubt that Rhyme movie is the place consumers turn to first and engage with most, and this all adds up to one of the ways we deliver value to our customers, quality leads which were up 3% year on year. But as we saw earlier, our additional advertising products are also delivering brand exposure opportunities to win more motivated sellers. Let's move on to some of the innovation we've delivered so far this year.
The audience on Rightmove is a vital part of the value we deliver to our customers, And as I mentioned earlier, we're always looking to improve the home country experience. The ground up rebuild of the property details page has been fully rolled out to overseas properties and is in beta testing for rentals properties. The team has taken care to keep the field similar to avoid unsettling our regular users, but have improved almost every facet of the page. Amongst a number of changes, the new page has images which are 50% bigger, more prominent integrated video, and for the first time in rentals, property size where we have the data. Importantly, the page is also 40% faster to load.
Taken together, we've seen home hunter engagement increased by 40% for overseas properties. We expect the rollout to rentals and sales properties to be complete by the end of the year. Brightmove is about making home moving easier for both property professionals and home movers. Helping home hunters be transaction ready is not only part of our purpose, it'll help professionals be more efficient and creates future revenue opportunities. The two areas we see as most promising are mortgages and tenant services.
Our work with Nationwide has continued in the last six months. The main focus has been on developing the functionality and placement of our mortgage tools and advice to increase their relevance to Home Hunters. Being more relevant to Home Hunters increases their engagement and generates more high quality traffic. The great thing about working with a partner like Nationwide is that we can both see how engaged consumers are through the process so that we can optimize for outcomes which make a difference. The work so far has doubled the engagement from Home Hunters and we're excited about what the next year of the partnership will bring, and as you know we're also working in the underserved rentals market.
I shared the flow on the right back in February, it shows the broad phases of the rental flow from search to living in the rental property. The Rightmove tenant passport, Van Mildert referencing and insurance products will support agent efficiency, further enhance Rightmove's tenant proposition, and also create another stream of revenue growth. As a proof of concept, we've been offering tenant content insurance directly to tenants after their reference is successful. It's early days, but the initial results are positive. Having a good product offered in the right context at the right time leads to a positive conversion rate, and a successful reference indicates an imminent move.
Content insurance isn't the only product we could offer in this way as we increase our experience in this area. Referencing itself is a profitable business. One of the rationales for acquiring Van Mildert was our ability to integrate referencing with the search process, increasing ease of use for agents and tenants, and also increasing the referencing volume on Van Mildert. Of course, the more references we deliver, the larger number of opportunities we have to offer quality products to tenants. This is where the appointment booking flow with integrated Passport fits in, so I'll share a little more detail on that.
We've begun beta testing the integration of the tenant Passport in the new appointment booking flow. From within Rightmove, it allows tenants to request a viewing specifying the times they're able to view. If this is their first request, the tenant fills in the details for their passport. For subsequent requests, this will become prefilled. Based on the knowledge we've gained from the referencing process, we've optimized the contents of the passport to minimize the amount of data from the tenant but maximize its usefulness for the agent to determine the likelihood of a tenant being able to rent the property.
This saves both the agent and tenant time by avoiding avoiding wasted viewings. Once the appointment is agreed in the system, the tenant is automatically reminded via text message shortly before the viewing time, helping to eliminate wastage journeys for agents from no shows. Post viewing, the system automatically gathers feedback from the tenant and inquires if they want to apply for the tenancy. From the autumn, the process will be extended to allow agents to order a van mill that reference from Rightmead plus with one click, automatically passing the tenant passport and property details to begin referencing. With much to do and much ambition, Bringing it back to 2020, let's wrap up with the outlook.
The network effects of the Hartwell business are stronger than ever with record traffic and leads. At the moment, the property market is busier than it's been for at least three years. Trading in June and July has been positive, with the number of products sold in July exceeding July 2019. However, we are cautious for the rest of the year, particularly with branch numbers. As Georgina mentioned, our capital return policy is unchanged and we expect to return all free cash flow when it's prudent.
And as you can see, there's no slowdown in our ambition or our long term outlook. That brings the presentation to a close. Thank you for joining us.