KE - Q4 2023

Transcript

Operator (participant)

Hello, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by for KE Holdings, Inc.'s first fourth quarter and fiscal year 2023 earnings conference call. Please note that today's call, including the management's prepared remarks and question-and-answer session, will all be in English. Simultaneous interpretation in Chinese is available on a separate line for the duration of the call. To access the call in Chinese, you will need to dial into the Chinese language line. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. Today's conference call is being recorded. I would now like to turn the call over to your host, Ms. Siting Li, IR director of the company. Please go ahead, Siting.

Siting Li (Head of Investor Relations)

Thank you, Operator. Good evening and good morning, everyone. Welcome to KE Holdings, Inc., or Beike's fourth quarter and fiscal year 2023 earnings conference call. The company's financial and operating results were published in the press release earlier today and are posted on our company's IR website, investors.ke.com. On today's call, we have Mr. Stanley Peng, our Co-founder, Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer, and Mr. Tao Xu, our Executive Director and Chief Financial Officer. Mr. Peng will provide an overview of our strategies and business developments, and Mr. Xu will provide additional details on the company's financial results. Before we continue, I refer you to our safe harbor statements in our earnings press release, which applies to this call as we will make forward-looking statements.

Please also note that Beike's earnings press release and this conference call include discussions on unaudited GAAP financial information as well as unaudited non-GAAP financial measures. Please refer to the company's press release, which contains a reconciliation of the unaudited non-GAAP measures to comparable GAAP measures. Lastly, unless otherwise stated, all figures mentioned during this conference call are in RMB. For today's call, management will use English as main language. Please note that the Chinese translation is for convenience purposes only. In the case of any discrepancy, management statements in their original language will prevail. With that, I will now turn the call over to our chairman and CEO, Mr. Stanley Peng. Please go ahead, Stanley.

Stanley Peng (Co-founder, Chairman, and CEO)

Thank you, Siting. Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining Beike's fourth quarter and fiscal year 2023 earnings conference call. 2023 was a fruitful year for Beike, not just in terms of business growth, but more importantly, in our organization's strengths, which foster our team's deeper sense of purpose and inspire great dedication in us to move forward and embrace more possibilities. Over the past few years, we have made a series of proactive adjustments in our strategy and business operations in the face of challenges. We are gearing up for crossing the next mountain to capitalize on the promising residential market with a technology-driven, one-stop residential services platform for better living. These efforts have created more hope for our future. Scale-wise, a one-body business has substantially outperformed the market, which our new initiatives have taken off.

For profitability, a one-body business has reached historical highs, and the new initiatives have seen significant improvement in costs. We have achieved breakthroughs in at least five cities in terms of an integrated One Body, Two Wings business model with service consolidation and end-to-end appearance optimization. More importantly, our organization gained unity and cohesion. The synergistic development in 2023, guided by the One Body, Three Wings strategy, has laid a solid foundation for our company. It has fostered a shared understanding within our organization. We are more certain of the path ahead, and our steps are firmer. Now, let's take a more detailed look at our performance in 2023. Overall, we achieved strong results in a turbulent market. For full year 2023, we recorded a GTV of CNY 3.14 trillion on our platform, up 20% year-over-year.

GTV of existing home transactions grew by 29% year-over-year, with notable market penetration improvements in most of the Tier 1 cities. Full-year GTV of new home transactions rose 7% year-over-year, significantly outperforming the market as compared with year-over-year decline of 6% in China total new home GTV, according to the NBSC, and a decline of 18% in GTV of CRIC's top 100 developers. As for our new initiatives, platform-contracted sales of our home renovation and furnishing services soared over 93% year-over-year. The number of units managed by our Beike rental services surpassed 210,000, a full-year total revenue increased by 28% year-over-year to RMB 77.8 billion. It's the second-highest level on record, which is more than 20% attributable to our new initiatives.

Regarding operating efficiency, we have been reducing costs and enhancing efficiency while controlling risks over the past two years. It did cost a lot of sacrifices internally. These efforts paid off in 2023, as evidenced by the recorded high profitability we said across our existing and new home transaction services as well as for the group as a whole. We have also seen great improvements in our earnings quality and operating cash flow. Our achievements in 2023 have given us greater safety margins and boosted our confidence. Next, we maintain our solid strides in our one-body business in 2023 with some proactive actions to drive growth in the second half. By the end of 2023, our platform served a total of 43,800 connected stores, which of 42,000 active stores, up 12% year-over-year.

The number of agents connected on our platform was close to 428,000, and the number of active agents rose by 15% year-over-year to 397,000. Also, service providers on our platform achieved substantial improvements in efficiency and income, as well as a 44% per-store revenue increase for Lianjia stores, excluding Beijing and Shanghai, and a 31% increase for connected stores on a year-over-year basis. Moving to our new initiatives, at the heart of our achievements in scale this year, their progress reaffirms that we are headed in the right direction. We also get a clear picture of where we fall short and the vast potential for improvement in these sectors. Our home renovation and furnishing services achieved great breakthroughs in 2023. Beyond the numbers, what matters most is that we gained a much deeper industry understanding and knowledge base. First, we developed a deep understanding of customer mindsets.

Their happiness, pain points, and frustration deeply motivated us to iterate our business models in line with the customer perspective. Past industry practices emphasize a good-centric installation process with logic similar to assembling a computer. Understanding our customers allows us to take initiatives from a human perspective, evolving our business logic and restructuring processes based on real customer needs, thereby creating competitive barriers and stickiness. We also understand that a hunter-like sales model, commonly used at the early development stage of low-frequency industries, is not as sustainable. Only by deepening our roots in communities, winning long-term customer trust, customer recognition, and word-of-mouth referrals can we increase the transaction frequency and density. Now, turning to our big rental services, as it grew rapidly throughout 2023, new problems began to emerge at a faster pace, requiring a higher business activity and accelerated model iteration. We were successful on both fronts.

Our carefree rental model recorded over 200,000 managed units, up from 70,000 in 2022, and our centralized long-term apartment rental services have managed over 10,000 units by the end of 2023, from 5,000 in 2022. We are evaluating millions of rental orders on our platform every year, from conventionally lower-value-added rental brokerage services to higher-value-added long-term rental property management services. The core behind this is, first, our understanding of the added value, which are homeowners' and tenants' needs, and the ability to serve. Second, our ability to control risks, which requires high operation efficiency. In 2023, we upgraded rental products to enhance value proposition to homeowners and strengthen risk control, and we redefined the roles of our key service providers. All of these efforts helped create a sustainable business model to emerge. Only by advancing our understanding of the fundamentals can we truly drive industry progress.

For 2024, our goal is to achieve growth with stability, focus on quality and efficiency, and make decisions on long-termism. Striking a balance between business growth and risk control is a fundamental challenge for every organization. In our approach, we need to respect the law of the market in the same way farmers honor the law of nature. We also must protect our cities from storms to ensure a fruitful harvest. Over the past two years, we focused on mitigating risks and reducing uncertainties amid external turbulence. This has significantly improved our safety margins and deepened our roles in the industry. On top of that, our future developments will come from innovation. As we face a different environment now with new challenges, we need to find new solutions. The first challenge lies in shifting our priorities. For our one-body business, scale and agent's income were once the most important factors.

Now, efficiency and agent appearance have become more important, as knowing our agent resource allocation mechanism helps us retain a large pool of talent, which formed our competitive advantages in the past. However, going forward, this advantage in scale may not be the key to help us meet customer demand or benefit any stakeholders. As our agents mature, their needs are also changed from high income to work-life balance. As we navigate these challenges, we have already seen our frontline teams taking steps ahead. Let me share a few examples. Our platform showcases many distinguished home brokerage brands, large franchise brands like Fufang. They have expanded their store account from 100 to 1,000 within five years. Their strategy focuses on differentiated urban coverage and in-depth exploration in low-tier markets. Every aspect, from store location selection and development planning to internal communication and team building, follows a skillfully designed top-down approach.

We are also honored to connect with our boutique franchise brand like Youxingdao (Youjia Real Estate), who have achieved fivefold growth since joining Beike in 2019. Defining the market trend, their growth strategy emphasizes collaborating with store owners and agents with quality services and risk management, especially those having weathered hard times by efficiently leveraging brand resources. They are actively innovating service models. They served the first transaction under our You Xian Mai model, helping customers lock in new homes before old homes were sold. On the storefront, we place a strong emphasis on the large-store strategy, which demands excellent leadership and management skills from store operators, taking our Lianjia branch of Linglanqiao Ditiezhan Fenhang in Shanghai as an example.

The store managers set clear plans for staffing and operations, making each core business line led by the agent top in the corresponding business to ensure robust and comprehensive customer services. During key services stage, such as face-to-face consultations with homeowners, the manager also helps the team to cultivate awareness of delving into homeowners' needs and developing a methodology with it to further strengthen the leadership skill of store operators managing large stores. Lianjia has launched the Store Leadership Development Program, SLDP, this year, the three-year program aimed to reshape store managers' leadership model through operating planning, quality assurance, efficiency improvement, talent growth, team management, and so on. By setting up a comprehensive certification system linked to career development and award incentives, SLDP aims to incubate versatile managers for the industry.

On the agent side, our dedicated agents have been instrumental in introducing numerous innovation initiatives to enhance service quality and efficiency. We always say, "Closing a transaction is just the beginning of a service case." This is not just a slogan. Our agent from Shanghai, Lianjia, Zhu Peilin, set a good example. She delivered a special photo album for homeowners upon property handover. The album documented details of the apartment during this agent's house and maintenance period, helping homes get better, keep a good memory of their previous home, inspired by Peilin's idea. We have introduced the Peilin Album company-wide at Lianjia, honoring the handover of home with these precious memories. This is an example of our ongoing exploration of a new path for quality and efficiency. Growth with deepening our marketing presence. Going forward, the advancement and widespread adoption of technology may be the key.

As such, in 2024, we need to open our minds to understanding the relationship between agents and technology, embrace, and create changes. New media is another powerful force we want to better explore and leverage. Finally, business model innovation is another possible solution. In an effort to advance our one-stop residential services model for better living, we will explore initiatives such as membership systems and flagship stores. These mechanisms will foster deeper synergies under the one-body surveillance strategy, energizing our business holistically. Given that Beijing is our mothership and stands at the top of scale in many ways, we believe it boasts the best innovation ground, and we plan to conduct more efficiency and model improvement trials there. For our emerging business, our main focus in 2024 is on quality for home renovation and furnishing. The next step is to continually enhance our understanding of customer needs.

This involves deepening our capabilities in quality, products, process innovation, technology, and supply chain management, thereby cultivating customer trust and driving future business growth. For Beike rental services, there's a huge market demand. Operationally, we have established a solid foundation, and our next step strategy is clear: enhance efficiency through managing individual service capabilities, variants, improving occupancy rates, and profitability, and elevating service quality by various dedicated roles. What's more important for this business is to explore innovation models that balance risk and return better. Then we can replicate them, look to long-term growth prospects while self-guiding our bottom line. In terms of technology, we have the strongest data assets and the richest offline scenarios in the living industry. Digitalization and technology hold the greatest potential to solve the long-term efficiency issues for agents.

In 2024, we will further advance the digitalization across our business areas in the industry, conduct more in-depth exploration and practices around technology-driven initiatives. Regarding quality, for us, it sets up limits on how much we can be motivated by our customers and represents our business bottom line. In 2024, we are doubling down on quality, exploring ways to enhance our ability to improve quality and create value through products, services, operations, and commitments. For example, we are innovating supervisory systems and products to remove barriers between customers and our platform, making sure we are always open to hearing from our customers. These quality-centric products and capabilities represent the real value to our customers and the business, also namely long-terism. Capabilities lend the possible customer feedback to continually motivate us while turning customers' dissatisfaction into our driving force to improve and evolve our organization.

That's the real power of focusing on quality. Lastly, we never stop thinking forward. If we could stand in 20 years behind and look back to today, what strategies might not work anymore, and what new ways will? Opening up our mind to reflect and address these core long-term issues is a major task for us in 2024. We are on solid ground with ample opportunities to make our mark in the vast residential sector, backed by a team with unity and trust formed through battles fought together. Moving forward, we will continue to focus on the things at hand, encouraging, supporting, and learning from each other, and growing together by lending strength to one another. We are increasingly assembling an invincible team. 2024 is about welcoming new possibilities and challenges, each one guiding us toward more promising opportunities and helping us cross next mountain. Thank you.

Next, I would like to turn the call over to our CFO, Tao Xu, to reveal our first quarter and fiscal year 2023 financials. Thank you.

Tao Xu (Executive Director and CFO)

Thank you, Stanley. In 2023, the Chinese real estate market deepened with the transformation. So it started with a concentrated release of pent-up demand before moving to gradual normalization mid-year. A trend rebound followed in the second half of 2023, fueled by intensive support policies. The existing new home market showed a differentiated performance, with the latter being affected by the risk associated with the resolution of a developer's debt and the limited effective supply, resulting in continued weakness in supply and demand. In contrast, both GFA and GTV of existing home transactions increased significantly year-over-year, showing home buyers' preference for readily available homes. This is an inevitable trend as China's real estate market approaches maturity. Houses are returning to their original purpose of providing a comfortable living environment, bringing us closer to the vision of quality living. This is an evolving external environment.

Our performance in 2023 demonstrated remarkable resilience, guided by our goal of achieving high-quality growth. Our series of measures to reduce cost, enhance efficiency, and mitigate risk have brought us significant operating leverage. Our core revenue reached RMB 77.8 billion, up 28.2 percentage points year-over-year. Revenues from existing and new home transaction services grew by 15.9% and 6% year-over-year, respectively. Our home transaction services maintain steady growth with a solid foundation. Revenue from our home renovation and furniture, emerging and other services, become a new engine of growth, contributing 24.7% of total in 2023, an increase of 11.7 percentage points from 2022. Specifically, revenue from the home renovation and furniture business was RMB 10.9 billion, rising by 74.3% year-over-year on pro forma basis. Our profitability also increased substantially in 2023.

Contribution margin grew by 7.3% to 47.2% for the existing home transaction services, and 2.9 percentage points to 26.6% for the new home transaction services, both setting new historical highs. Our adjusted operating expense ratio dropped by 2.1 percentage points year-over-year, with an adjusted operating margin of 11.2% for the year. Our adjusted net margin increased by 7.9 percentage points to reach 12.6%, bringing our full-year adjusted net income to RMB 9.8 billion. Earnings caught improved meaningfully as well. We realized a net operating cash inflow of RMB 11.2 billion in 2023, 1.14 times of our net income for the year. DSO fell by 50 days year-over-year to 55 days. We believe we have delivered commensurate results in 2023. Turning to our performance in Q4, our top line and bottom line each grew by double digits on a year-over-year basis.

GAAP revenue for the quarter increased by 20.6% year-over-year to RMB 28.2 billion, beating the top range of our guidance, primarily attributable to the better-than-expected performance from our new home transaction services, home renovation, and emergency services. Our gross margin reached 25.5%, up 1 percentage point year-over-year. Our GAAP net income rose by 80.2% year-over-year to RMB 670 million, and our non-GAAP net income increased by 10.8% year-over-year to reach RMB 1.71 billion. For home transaction services, the fourth quarter witnessed a pronounced contrast of performance between new and existing home markets nationwide. The existing home market has seen a year-over-year increase driven by the lower base effect caused by the year of 2022's pandemic and increased activity in the existing home market in second- and third-tier cities.

Secondarily, the existing home market has been relatively stable since October, benefiting from favorable policies and increasing market maturity. Revenue from existing home transactions reached RMB 6 billion, up 14.6%, with GTV reaching RMB 468.1 billion, up 30.1%, both on a year-on-year basis. Notably, GTV sold by connected store shows even more robust growth at 41.1% year-over-year. Our strategy is functioning through more connected store and positive performance from the second-tier cities and below in the existing home market, fueled by the increased proportion of GTV sold by the connected stores. Meanwhile, this structural change contributed to a lower growth in revenue than GTV for existing home transaction services.

The contribution margin for the existing home transaction services reached 44.5%, staggering by 7.4 percentage points year-over-year, mainly attributable to the low base in the same period of 2022 when operations were nearly impossible because of the pandemic. The contribution margin fell by 4.1 percentage points quarter-over-quarter, primarily due to the extra bonus issued in Q4. In terms of new home transaction services, as I mentioned, the national new home market remained sluggish. CRIC shows the sales from the top 100 developers declined by 32% in Q4 year-over-year and increased by 12% quarter-over-quarter. The industry is still on the ongoing process of supply destocking and the risk being cleared. While maintaining our risk threshold, we proactively and strategically expand our channels in Q4.

Our new home GTV reached CNY 268 billion, dropped by 9.7% year-over-year and grew 23.9% sequentially, significantly outperforming the market. Revenue from the new home transaction was CNY 7.6 billion, down 8.5% year-over-year and up 28.3% sequentially, outpacing GTV growth. This is a reflection of our steady market position capability in a market downturn. The contribution margin for new home transaction services slightly increased year-over-year, maintaining a high level of 26.4%. Our ability to grow contribution margin despite the decline in the revenue is another testament to our operational resilience. In Q4, the percentage of commission income from SOE developers rose from 46% in Q3 to 53% in Q4. Projects with commissioning-advance model also remain at a high level, accounting for 53% of total commission revenue.

We'd like to emphasize that we have never and will never compromise on risk control to outperform the market. Revenue from home renovation and furniture, emerging and other services grew by 106.6% year-over-year in Q4, accounting for an increased portion of our total revenue at 32.6%, significantly increased by 13.5 percentage points from the same period of 2022. Our home renovation and furniture business continued to grow at a fast pace, with further breakthroughs in both skill and efficiency. In Q4, contracted sales reached RMB 3.9 billion, up 99.7% year-over-year and 19.7% quarter-over-quarter. Revenue reached a new high of RMB 3.6 billion, increasing 73.9% year-over-year. The percentage of contracted sales contributed by our home transaction services continued to increase to about 47% of total GTV in Q4, further demonstrating the synergy between our housing transaction and other residential services.

Moreover, our home renovation and furniture business has grown more diverse. With furniture and home furnishing sales reached RMB 1.15 billion in Q4, accounting for around 29% of total contracted sales, making a 3.4% improvement from the same period of 2022. In Q4, our net revenue from emerging and other services increased by 169.3% year-over-year and 21.2% quarter-over-quarter to RMB 2.9 billion, primarily propelled by the rapid expansion of our rental property management services. Our stock costs were RMB 727 million, remaining overall stable in Q4 compared with the same period of 2022. Other costs rose subsequently to RMB 548 million year-over-year due to the increase of human resources-related costs, maintenance costs of the rental property management services, and the share-based compensation expenses.

As a result of our increased operating leverage, our gross profit grew by 25.7% year-over-year, reaching RMB 5.1 billion. Our gross margin ticked up 1 percentage point year-over-year to 25.5%, while falling by 1.9 percentage points quarter-over-quarter due to lower contribution margin of existing home transaction and a smaller proportion of revenue from this business. In terms of expenses, our GAAP operating expenses for Q4 totaled RMB 5.3 billion, up 43.5% year-over-year. Specifically, G&A expenses rose by 47.7% year-over-year to RMB 2.6 billion, mainly due to an increase in provision for buyback from one single developer for new home transaction services and the increase in personnel costs.

With regards to the new home receivable provisions, we have conducted a more cautious assessment of the realization value of the single collectible assets provided by Sunac early for its unpaid amount to Beike. This asset is expected to be impaired by over 50%. Based on this, in the fourth quarter, we made additional provision for buyback amounting to around RMB 400 million, which represents an over 50% provision on such receivable and other outstanding amounts corresponding to this collectible asset. As a result, apart from the Sunac portion of secured receivables, the average provision ratio for the buyback related to receivables from 68 high-risk developers on our platform has exceeded 95%. Thus, the market expenses grew by 56.1% year-over-year to RMB 2.1 billion. The rapid development of our full-service renovation business led to a fast, parallel increase in our sales and marketing expenses.

Siting Li (Head of Investor Relations)

The increase was a result of the rising market expenses in our housing transaction service business. R&D expenses grew by 4.9% year-over-year to RMB 534 million, mainly due to the salary increase of the R&D personnel. On the profitability front, GAAP income from operations amounted to a loss of RMB 173 million in Q4 compared with RMB 387 million from the same period of 2022. GAAP operating margin was negative 0.9% compared with 2.3% from Q4 of 2022. Non-GAAP income from operations was RMB 856 million compared with RMB 1.34 billion from the same period of 2022. Non-GAAP operating margin was 4.2% compared with 8% from Q4 of 2022. The year-over-year reduction in operating margin was mainly due to a higher operating expenses ratio. In Q4, GAAP net income was RMB 670 million, up 80.2% year-over-year.

Non-GAAP net income was RMB 1.71 billion, a year-over-year increase of 10.8%. Moving to cash flow and the balance sheet metrics, we realized a net operating cash inflow of RMB 1.77 billion in Q4. New home DSO for Q4 was only 43 days, dropping below 50 days for the first time. This is a testament to our effective risk control. On top of the approximately $173 million we spend on the share repurchase each quarter, our total cash liquidity, which excludes customer deposited payable, still amounted to RMB 79.1 billion, remaining at a high level. While achieving excellent results in 2023, we also placed great emphasis on shareholder returns. We spent approximately $718.7 million in a strong buyback program and fully canceled all purchased shares. The total number of the repurchased shares accounted for around 3.7% of the company's total shares before the start of the buyback program.

We also initiated our first special cash dividend of around $200 million during the year. On the basis of such positive shareholder returns, we'd like to announce our first final cash dividend plan, which has been approved by the board at $0.117 per ordinary share or $0.351 per ADS to holders of ordinary shares and holders of ADS recorded as of April 5th, 2024, respectively. The amount paid for the final dividend will be approximately $400 million, which will be funded by our surplus cash on our balance sheet. As of year-end, our total shareholder return for 2023 significantly exceeded our net income, accounting for around 159% of our net income for the year. In addition, we are developing a long-term, proactive, stable total shareholder return plan aiming to share the value we create with our long-term shareholders.

In doing so, we aim to provide our shareholders with the certainty of returns in an uncertain external environment. Market confidence has yet to recover in 2024. Despite market uncertainties, we remain undeterred and will continue to strive for excellence. As our One Body, Three wings business developed at a fast pace, gradually forming a positive cycle of skill, efficiency, and quality while required to strengthen our financial prudence, improve resource allocation, and refine our operations. So, in terms of financial strategy, we will continue to enhance the financial infrastructure of each business and provide comprehensive support through our financial expertise. We remain unwavering in efforts to prevent risks and establish regulations. For our new home transaction services, we will proactively control risks and strictly follow developer ranking and accounts receivable management.

Regarding our new business, including home renovation and furnishing and the rental property management, as we seek rapid expansion, we will replicate our solid integrated business and financial system, management capability from our primary business to the new business. This will improve financial process automation rates and bolster data analysis and possessing the ability for those business lines. In addition to actively rewarding shareholders, we consistently prioritize the safety of our funds in cash management. We meticulously select underlying assets and establish clear investment strategy and the risk preference. Currently, the majority of our cash investments are in deposit-based products. We believe our excellent financial management capability will serve as a safeguard for the healthy growth of the organization, helping us to navigate through cyclical fluctuations and overcome challenges, enabling more organic and efficient business development.

Furthermore, our proactive shareholder returns will allow long-term investors who have accompanied us on this journey to better share in the fruits of the company's growth. Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. If you wish to ask a question via the phone, you will need to press the star key followed by the number 1 on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, we only accept questions on the English language line. For the benefit of all participants on today's call, please limit yourself to one question, and if you have additional questions, you can re-enter the queue. If you're going to ask a question in Chinese, please follow it with an English translation. Your first question comes from Timothy Zhao with Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.

Timothy Zhao (Equity Research Analyst)

[Foreign language]. Thank you, Mr. Peng, for taking my question. My question is regarding the home renovation and the furnishing business. I noticed 2023 you had a very strong growth year in this business line. Could Mr. Peng further elaborate what is the driver behind and what are the key operating metrics that you are focusing on? And in 2024, what is your key focus in the operation of this business? Thank you.

Stanley Peng (Co-founder, Chairman, and CEO)

Let me answer your question. Yeah, we achieved a big breakthrough in our home renovation and furnishing business in 2023. As for scale, our contracted sales, which are RMB 30.3 billion, up 93% year-over-year on pro forma basis, with revenue growing by 74% to reach RMB 10.9 billion. As for profitability, we have 11 cities reported operating profits in 2023, with four cities achieving operating profits of over RMB 10 million. On the operation side, around 43% of the total contracted sales were attributable to customer referrals from real estate agents in 2023, a remarkable increase of 9.9 percentage points from 2022. Our product portfolio is also more diverse, with our contracted sales of furniture and home furnishing reaching about RMB 3.6 billion in 2023, accounting for 27% of total contracted sales, showing a 5.8 percentage points increase from 2022 on pro forma basis.

These achievements were the results of improvements across our business operations. Our overall expansion was mainly driven by rapid expansion in core cities. In Beijing and Hangzhou, contracted sales exceeded RMB 2 billion, and Shanghai exceeded RMB 1 billion. There were also 6 cities that had contracted sales over RMB 500 million. Our breakthrough in scales for the home renovation and furnishing business was mainly. I think it's due to 3 reasons. The first, high efficient synergies between our core and emerging business. The second is more diversified product portfolio and higher deliverabilities. Yeah. So the business outlook for 2024, we achieve breakthroughs in scale in 2023. But for our business to be successful and recognized by customers, the more important thing is customer buy-in. And the key to this is quality. So in 2024, while ensuring steady scale expansion, we have chosen quality as our keywords.

High-quality delivery is a competitive advantage in the home renovation industry. For now, we can provide the customer guarantee when facing problems. Going forward, we plan to take preventive measures to reduce problem frequency, finally offering customers a truly hassle-free experience and creating a positive cycle of quality. Right now, the main problem regarding renovation, including construction delays and response, is slowness and so on. We will take serious measures to address these pain points in 2024. The first is shortening the construction timeline by completing more steps simultaneously. The second is we will establish roles in charge of quality control with online and web services to identify and resolve problems as early as possible. While enhancing quality, we aim to achieve further breakthroughs in the scale and operation model in 2024, then replicating our model in more cities going forward. Yeah, that's my answer to your question. Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. Your next question comes from Harry Chen with Citi. Please go ahead.

Thank you.

Siting Li (Head of Investor Relations)

I think there's maybe a disconnection or something wrong with Harry's internet. Maybe we can go ahead to the next question.

Thank you, Harry. If you could register for a question. Your next question comes from John Lam with UBS. Please go ahead.

John Lam (Managing Director and Head of Asia Property Research)

[Foreign language]. So what was the Beike penetration rate in the existing home market for 2023? And also what is the overall focus for the company existing home business for 2024 this year? I also noticed that the company's plan to expand the store network. Can you share more color on this? Can management also share some insight regarding this year's strategy for the connected brokerage brands and stores? Thank you.

Stanley Peng (Co-founder, Chairman, and CEO)

Thank you, John. In 2023, we did quite well in the new home business, achieving significant improvements in scale, efficiency, and profitability. In face of the steep market adjustment, we managed to retain quality service providers. That's been a big reason why we could jump on when the market rebounded at the beginning of last year. On top of that, we actively connect with more quality brands, stores, and agents in the second half of last year, while refining our operation strategy and infrastructure for better efficiency. In 2023, our existing home GDP was up 29% year-over-year, and the revenue was up 16% simultaneously. We also significantly increased our market penetration in most cities, including Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing, Hefei, Hangzhou, Jinan, Changsha, and Qingdao, so on and so forth. Specifically, we focus on a few key areas to boost our existing home business.

In 2023, we expanded our store and agent network. By the end of 2023, the total number of active stores on our platform reached over 42,000. This is an increase of 12% year-over-year. The number of active agents on a bigger platform was over 397,000, an increase of 14% year-over-year. We also enhanced our operational efficiency through the following refund strategies. First, in the face of lots of new and previously inactive listings, we are developing the ability to identify the top listings. We aim to create a virtual cycle of securing high-quality listings. By establishing efficient matching tools and cooperation between the buyers and the sellers' agents, we ensure the quick sales and achieving high customer satisfaction, leading us to secure more high-quality listings and boost our efficiency. Second, we adopt diverse online tools to optimize efficiency.

For example, we introduce an AI assistant to help agents improve their responsive time to the clients and their ability to accurately recommend the listing. As a result, the store and agent productivity on a bigger platform improved very well. In 2023, the average GDP per store increased by 29%, and the GDP per agent was up by 25%. The average income per connected store increased by 31% year over year. Except our popular brand Lianjia in Beijing and Shanghai, the store churn rate decreased by 34%, and the agent churn rate decreased by 21%. Our focus in 2024 is on growth and ecosystem. Even with ongoing uncertainties in the market this year, we are growing our business very confident. For growth, we see big opportunities to expand our network in many cities in the year of 2023.

We are expected to connect over 5,000 new stores in this year. In a few cities where we have a longer operations history like Beijing, we have attracted more customers and increased our market penetration since adjusting our commission rules last year. This year, we will expand our coverage for the first time for buyers in the city and also seeing the starting point of the chain of the home upgrades. In addition, we will also continue to grow through the refund operations. We will transform our agents from just making sales to becoming experts who truly understood what the customer needs. We are looking to increase our presence on the customer side by exploring different channels to bring in more online traffic. For service providers, we are working hard to create a more harmonious ecosystem. We are moving from a strong focus on profitability to providing more targeted support.

This change aims to help less efficient stores start making deals and ensure higher productivity. Stores receive better return. We will foster collaboration and share management with the store owners, improving the operational environment for stores and also increasing their satisfaction with our platform. Also for our self-owned business, Lianjia, in terms of the store strategy, we will respond with a large store model. We'll also open some small stores in the key areas to increase our service coverage and ensure our penetration in these hotspots. Simultaneously, for our Lianjia agent strategy, we have launched an old soldier plan to bring back the former agents and are opening up to recruiting for the experienced agents from the industry to strengthen our Lianjia team. In 2024, we will focus on improving agent expertise through the training and talent nurturing, building a talent pool for our one-body, three-one business strategy.

Thank you.

Siting Li (Head of Investor Relations)

Thank you. Your next question comes from Griffin Chan with Citi. Please go ahead.

Griffin Chan (Director and Equity Research Analyst)

[Foreign language]. Thanks management for the opportunity. Congratulations first on the solid 2023 results and improving shareholders' return. So my question is that how do you view the overall real estate market in 2023? How did the market perform recently with a notable outperformance of the existing housing market compared to the new home market? How does the management think of the underlying reasons, and how is the trend expected for the new and existing housing market in 2024? Will they continue to differentiate? Thank you.

Stanley Peng (Co-founder, Chairman, and CEO)

Thank you, Griffin. Regarding the market situation in 2023, there was a lot of trouble in the real estate market, and overall, it is still in the middle of the deep adjustment. Here is what we observed. The market is shifting towards existing homes at a fast pace. Full-year existing home GFA nationwide rose by around 20%-30% year-over-year. Official data showed existing homes accounted for nearly 40% of the full-year real estate transaction volume. This is the historical high. The new home market recovery fell short. According to official data, national new home sales declined by 6% year-over-year, while for the new home sales of the top 100 real estate developers, dropped by 18% year-over-year.

New home sales saw some mild recovery in the first quarter of last year, but then it dropped again and has been hovering there at a very low level ever since. Housing prices continue to adjust. Fourth-tier cities' home prices saw a fast decline in the first quarter last year, but overall, fourth-tier cities' existing home prices were still higher than in the year of 2019. New home prices are stable on hold, primarily due to the structure shift towards high-tier cities. The market supply and demand continue to evolve, leading to what we observed, the polarization of the market. For demand side, demand structure keeps changing. Demand for the home upgrades becomes dominant, making up 60% of total housing demand, with the first-time home buying demand at 30% and the investment demand narrowing to around 10%. Consumers are more inclined to purchase existing homes.

Our survey showed customer preference for existing home purchase grew from 23% in June 2022 to 35% in December 2023, while interest in new homes dropped from 31% to 18% over the same time period. Basically, existing homes are meeting the rigid first-home buying demand, and the people who want to upgrade their homes by selling one property to buy another also enter into the existing home market first. For new homes, there is a lack of demand due to the location and project delivery issue, as well as the pre-sold model and the product design, which doesn't align with current consumers' needs. Nevertheless, buyers are still interested in the properties located in scarce areas or with good designs. The demand for large-sized and higher-priced new homes is most stable. Overall, the demand is resilient, but it didn't translate into the transaction.

There is still a wait-and-see momentum among home buyers. In 2023, the total number of clients viewing the properties exceeded the total number of newly listed properties on the Beike platform, indicating there is a number of people looking to buy homes. In cities where the solid foundation, such as Shenzhen and Hangzhou, we observed a situation where there was a solid home purchase demand, but consumers hesitated to enter into the market. In the market with abundant home listings or downtrending prices, there is need for the restored confidence among home buyers. Overall, in the first quarter, home prices were lowered, while people were still willing to make a transaction, indicating the resilience of the demand. Regarding the supply side, we noticed investors are paying attention to the number of existing home listings, concerned about the high inventory.

The number of existing home listings did reach an all-time high in 2023. It is a natural result of the growth of the existing home market. It also reflects the accelerated release home upgrades demand and the policy encouragement. In first-tier cities, more than 70% of sellers were also the buyers. An increase in home listings is typically the early sign of the growth in demand. In addition, not all home listings are the real supply. Some homeowners list their homes just for a give-it-a-try manner. Moreover, a portion of the old housing stock remains listed through the year with a very low liquidity, leading to a continued increase in the total volume of existing property listings. For new homes, there is still a mismatch between the supply and demand.

New homes with prices lower than the neighboring existing homes in the core areas of the top cities are still favored and contribute to the majority of the sales. But for new home supply, in these key areas, it is unlimited. The supply is more concentrated in faraway suburbs, while demand is weaker. So in high-tier cities, more demand was fulfilled by existing home supply. The overall lack of demand for new homes also caused a prolonged inventory clearing period on the supply side. For recent market updates, the policies continue to support the market stabilization. Recently, multiple cities have continued to optimize their policies in terms of purchase restriction loosening, like today's news for the Hangzhou cities. And more financial support. On the supply side, funding conditions could improve, and the mortgage rate lowered down.

Although the efforts of the policy boosts sometimes are marginal in short-term, the massive buildup of the easing policies since 2022 should bolster the relative stability of today's existing home market. For the existing home market, the overall GFA of existing homes has been very stable since October 2023. During the Chinese New Year, average daily transaction volume of existing homes on our platform rose over by 70% year-over-year. For example, after the Spring Festival, in first-tier cities such as Shenzhen, the second-tier cities like Chengdu, Chongqing, Hefei, Dalian, and Nanjing, the average existing home sales in the two weeks right after holiday exceeded the weekly average from December to January. This aligns with the historical trend, indicating that the existing home is operating relatively stable.

On recent leading indicators, the daily average home showing and transaction volume showed a parallel change during the Chinese New Year. The weekly average ratio of the showing-to transactions performed better than the same period of last year. The Beike Prosperity Index, based on the listing and price adjustment behavior of homeowners on our platform, has been bulging out at the beginning of the year with fluctuations. The Frontline Brokerage Managers' Confidence Index has been steadily recovering since this February. In terms of the housing prices, the month-on-month decline in the existing home price index for the key 50 cities from January to February in 2024 continued to narrow to reaching 1% in February. The number of cities experiencing a decline in home prices also reduced.

For the recent new home market, according to CRIC, the sales of the top 100 developers declined 49% year-over-year in January to February, with a 60% drop in February alone. So continued weak demand for the new homes has led to a low enthusiasm among developers to promote their projects. Looking ahead into 2024, the real estate market in the second- and third-tier cities accelerates its transaction to existing homes. Overall, existing home transaction volume will gather momentum for the structural environment. Here, we believe existing home GDP will remain relatively stable. As for the new homes, demand remains the key, and the market will continue to fluctuate at its bottoms out. On the supply side, under an uncertain environment, we believe developers will take active measures to adapt and focus on enhancing product capability and the sell-through. Thank you.

Siting Li (Head of Investor Relations)

Thank you. Your next question comes from Thomas Chong with Jefferies. Please go ahead.

Thomas Chong (Managing Director and Regional Head of Internet and Media)

[Foreign language]. Thanks, management, for taking my question. My question is about a housing rental business which has experienced rapid growth in 2023. Could management team please provide more color on what we have accomplished in this business during the last year, and how are we managing the risk while expanding our scale? What is the development plan for the year 2024? Thank you.

Stanley Peng (Co-founder, Chairman, and CEO)

Yeah. Thank you, Thomas. Let me first summarize the business in 2023. Our goal is to provide homeowners with carefree rental services and reliable property management services, also provide tenants with safer and more reliable living experience. 2023 was a key year for establishing our fundamental capabilities. We prudently expanded our operation scale with our decentralized rental management services, Carefree Rent, growing from 70,000 units by the end of 2022 to over 200,000 units by the end of 2023. We also enhanced our assets' operation efficiency and rental service qualities. By the end of 2023, the occupation rate of Carefree Rent increased by 6 percentage points compared to the year of 2022, reaching 95.1%. The increase in sales and the last-time rental property management operations placed a new demand on our operating capabilities. In 2023, we made the following iterations.

Number one, we made a significant upgrade to our Carefree Rent business model, which greatly reduced seasonal fluctuations and the risks associated with failure to re-lease. It also better resisted the risk of continued market downturn on rental prices. Number two, we implemented refined operation by redefining core roles along the full cycle of rental management, ensuring proper staffing to smooth out our operation process. Number three, we comprehensively enhanced the service quality around the seven major pain points of the tenants, continually improving our standardized service capabilities. We enhanced our service team's response time and encouraged preemptive problem-solving. So in 2023, our apartment business also saw an in-store efficiency with more than 10,000 housing units under our management. For 2024, first, we have ambitious goals for the scale we manage. Our focus will be primarily on the core cities.

Beijing, Shanghai, and Chengdu will be the key targets for the major goals. Second, we aim to robustly establish our business at all levels, including achieving operational break-even in these core cities and continuously improving overall operational efficiency and quality. This requires building and strengthening a range of capabilities. Improving efficiency, we are aiming for operational break-even in the leading cities, and we also target to increase productivity. In 2023, the average property standup productivity per manager had reached 100 units. In this year, we aim to reduce the capability variance and have more rental property managers achieve that level. In addition, we will also solidify the quality. First, we secure the safe bottom line by identifying the potential risks in advance and establishing a mechanism for handling the process. Second, we work on making our service both standardized and customized.

We do this by clearly defining the distinct roles and enhancing our online capability to keep our rental service reliable and standardized. We also pay attention to the community demands and customer needs based on their demographics so we can offer them right-fit services. We will also build the technology and service capability around the five key strategies. They are unit setups, unit occupation, rental management, operations, and the reputation to make sure our business can achieve sustained growth in the long term. Thank you.

Siting Li (Head of Investor Relations)

Thank you. Your next question comes from Eddy Wang with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.

Eddy Wang (Executive Director)

[Foreign language]. Thank you, management, for taking my question. My question is regarding the new home business. So we have seen that our new home business has been significantly outperforming the industry performance. So what's the reason behind? And considering that the sales of the new home have been more difficult going forward, do we expect the penetration rate of the brokerage channel to keep going up? And what's our strategy and outlook for the new home business in this year? Thank you.

Tao Xu (Executive Director and CFO)

Hi, Eddy. Thank you for your question. As you said, China's new home market faced a big trend in the year of 2023. In such a tough market, Beike achieved around 7% growth in the full year of new home GTV, significantly outperforming the industry. Our operating metrics also reached historical highs. Throughout the year, we deepened our insights into the new home business as the market evolved, and our efforts in the operation and the business management also paid off. Operationally, the industry is still on a strong move shifting to a buyer's market. Consumers now need more professional services. In the past, with the home pricing always going up, agents got used to just focusing on listing and then finding the suitable buyers. This approach is not effective anymore because there is a lack of understanding and insight into the customer needs.

To boost the sales conversion, it's the key for agents to think from the buyer's side, identify who is buying the new homes and what they are after. Meanwhile, on the developer side, with weak demand, traditional promotional methods such as price cards are not working anymore. Developers have a stronger need for the brokerage services. In the 20 key cities we monitored, the proportion of the projects that developers chose to cooperate with the brokerage sales channel reached 82% at the second half of 2023. This is an increase of 11 percentage points compared to the first half of last year. Given this context and in line with our group strategy adjustment, last year, we have shifted our new home strategy from a defensive to a proactive manner with a focus on growth and its quality.

We deepened our online consumer coverage and insights and established a better online presence with initiatives like live streaming for quality homes. Based on our consumer insights, accumulated user data, and close connection with existing home customers, in the second half of 2023, we started to build a new type of partnership with developers. We introduced innovative services on the marketing and sales. This helped boost our coverage of the high-quality new home projects. In 2023, our new home cooperation project coverage ratio improved significantly to 51% in Q4, up by 10 percentage points from Q1 in the same year. We remain committed to strengthening our ecosystem development. In 2023, more than 6,500 new projects have been covered by the commitment with both developers and the platform to transparent operations. Over 3,500 cooperative new home projects have embraced private phone number protection services.

On our financial management, in the first half of 2023, our focus on risk control and the profitability as core KPIs, strictly managing receivable collection and financial safety. In the second half of 2023, while maintaining a strict risk baseline, we specifically emphasized the commission advance model and collection management for the high-risk developers. Thanks to these efforts, our new home DSO shortened to only 43 days in Q4. Commission advance model accounted for 53% of total new home revenue in Q4 last year. The percentage of commission income from SOE developers reached at 43% level. Our new home commission rate in the fourth quarter also increased modestly. Based on our outlook regarding the new home market in 2024, we will take the following steps to improve the operations.

Number one, on supply side, we will further promote new strategy collaborations with high-quality developers to secure higher-quality new home supply for our channel services. On sell-through side, we aim to empower our service providers and boost their productivity and job satisfaction. We will properly raise the commission rate for downstream brokers. We will also enhance operation for our external new home sales channel and optimize our product offer to brokers. Number three, we will also strengthen our infrastructure, including our new home housing dictionaries, ecosystems, and online new home content development. Giving our richer and higher-quality new home listings, deeper customer understanding, and stronger sales capabilities, we believe our new home business will consistently outperform the market. Thank you.

Siting Li (Head of Investor Relations)

We are now approaching the end of the conference call. I will now turn the call over to your speaker host today, Ms. Siting Li, for closing remarks.

Thank you, operator. Thank you once again for joining us today. If you have any further questions, please feel free to contact Beike's investor relations team through the contact information provided on our website. This concludes today's call, and we look forward to speaking with you next quarter again. Thank you and goodbye.