This affects the timing of our repo and sale. With that being said, and canvassing and benchmarking the market, we believe our repo and sale timing remains the best in the industry regardless of where we’re at in the recoveries. Another great collection trend for us that we saw towards the end of the year is our Pots Group. That’s our potential delinquencies 1 to 29-day bucket, had its best performance in two years. This is important because the better you do in the Pots, the better you do in the later buckets as the roll rate is consequentially affected. Another good trend we saw in our collection practices is our right party contact has gone from 4% to 8%. This correlates to more promises to pay and the more promises to pay you have, the more dollars you collect.
So that’s a very good trend. We also put in a new outreach program early in the collection stage where we introduce ourselves to our customers. But the main thing we’re trying to do in this introductory is to get our customers to sign up for recurring payments. This has been an initial success as we’ve seen a 25% increase in our recurring payment sign-ups. This very much helps our collection performance. As Brad alluded to, we definitely beefed up our collection staff in 2023. We took it from 287 collectors to 423 collectors. This has lowered the accounts per collector from 675 to a much more comfortable 515. This allows the collector to have more time to work the accounts and equally important skip trace problem accounts manually. One of the final things we did is we also beefed up our nearshore operation.
We didn’t necessarily add more nearshore collectors, but we reassigned our strategies. So what we’re doing is we’re putting the nearshore collectors on the power dialer, which frees up our domestic collectors to do more manual collecting. All of these servicing tactics are unique to us. And we think that but for the unique approaches we’ve taken are servicing the performance would have been slightly worse. So we’re happy with our servicing performance. Switching to originations. The fourth quarter remains solid as we purchased $301 million of new contracts. That compares to $322 million in Q3 of 2023 and $428 million during the fourth quarter of 2022. For the year, we did $1.3 billion in new contracts, which compares to $1.8 billion in 2022.
The pullback from 2022 to 2023 was purposeful and intentional and definitely a function of our consistent credit tightening, which we think we began first in the market in March of 2022. We continued that tightening in 2023 and actually continue tightening as we head into 2024. Specifically, we tightened the LTV, we capped payments, which is important in certain program segments. We tightened job stability and residence requirements, and we made less exceptions on deals that were declined. While this has lowered our overall approval percentage, more significantly and more importantly, we’ve knocked down the LTVs, which is a leading metric to predicting losses. While 2022 was a record year for us and certainly, we were excited and pleased, despite the pullback in 2023, it actually ended up being the second best originations year in our 30-plus history.
So all things considered quite a good year on the originations volume. To that effect, and again, despite the pullback, we were able to grow the total managed portfolio, which now stands at $3.195 billion, which is an increase from $3 billion at the end of 2022. So we’re pleased with that. The slight uptick quarter-over-quarter reflects strong demand in the subprime auto business space. Actually, we received more applications in 2023 than we did in our record year of 2022. One of the worst things that we could say in this call is the subprime auto market is downsizing that’s just not true with our applications volume. The subprime auto market is certainly very strong. One of the things that we’re looking at in terms of portfolio performance and in our originations is affordability for our customer.
We continue to hold firm on our payment to debt, I’m sorry, our payment to income and debt-to-income ratios remain the same and have remained the same over the last five to seven years. That’s good. Our monthly payment remained relatively low for our space at around $535. This compares to the average subprime payment of around $600 and of course, the new car payment around $775. So we’re keeping an eye on affordability in our space. We continue to hold a strong APR in the fourth quarter as we registered an average APR of 21%, which is about on pace for where we were at the end of 2022. In terms of competition, there’s more than enough business for everybody in our space. One interesting thing that we see is we don’t necessarily lose business to our direct competitors that sit on top of us in the space, but we actually lose business to credit unions.
But what we’ve seen is a wave of credit unions come into the space. They see that with their low interest rates, they don’t make money, they get killed on CNLs and then they exit the space. And then a whole new wave of credit unions come in and learn the same thing. But we have seen in the last three months is more and more credit unions are actually leaving the space, which is firing up more business for the rest of the normal competitors in our market. Turning to a couple of technology updates. We put in our brand new Generation 8 machine learning-based AI model in October of 2023. This model is a fresh — is an update and a refresh of our Gen 7 model that launched in 2021. We remained on schedule with refreshing our model every 18 months or so.
