But for new home supply, key areas are limited. The supply is small, concentrated in far away suburbs where demand is weaker. So in higher-tier cities, more demand is more fulfilled by existing home supply. The overall make of the demand for new homes also caused a prolonged inventory clearing period on supply side. For recent marketing update, the policies continued to support the market stabilization: Recently, multiple cities have continued to optimize our policies in terms of process restriction loosening like today’s news for the Hangzhou City, and more financial support. The supply side, funding conditions could improve and the mortgage rate lowered down, also the efforts of the policy boosts sometimes are marginal in short term. The massive build-up of the easing policy since 2022 should bolster the reliability of today’s in-home market.
For existing home market, overall GTV of the existing home has been very stable since October 2023. During the Chinese New Year, average data transaction volume of existing home on our platform rose over by 70% year-over-year. For example, after the Spring Festival, in first-tier cities such as Shenzhen, to second-tier cities like Chengdu, Chongqing, Hefei, Dalian the average existing home sales in the 2 weeks, right after holiday, exceeded the weak average from the December to January. This aligns with historical trend, indicating that the existing home business is operating relatively stable. All listings are leading indicators. The daily average home showing under transaction volume exhibited parallel changes during the Chinese New Year, with average ratio of the showing churn transaction performed better than the same period of last year.
The Beike prospect index based on the listing and the price adjustment behavior of homeowners on our platform has been bolting 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 continue to narrow to reaching 1% in February. The number of cities experiencing a decline in home prices also reduced. For this reason, the new home market, according to CRIC, the sales of the Top 100 Developers declined 49% year-on-year in January to February, with a 50% 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, to real estate market in the second and in the third-tier cities accelerates its transaction to new homes. All existing home transaction volume will all gather momentum for structure environment. Here, we believe using home GTV will remain relatively stable. As for new homes, demand remains the key, and the market will continue to fluctuate as it bottoms out. On the supply side, on the uncertain environment, we believe developers will take active measures to adapt and focusing on enhancing product capabilities and sell-through.
Operator: Your next question comes from Thomas Chong with Jefferies.
Thomas Chong: My question is about home 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 year, last year? And how are we managing the risk about expanding our scale? What is the development plan for the year 2024?
Tao Xu: Yes. Let me first summarize the business in 2023. Our goal is to provide homeowners with careful rental services and reliable property management services, also provide tenants with safer and more reliable living experience. And 2023 was a key year for establishing our fundamental capabilities. We prudently expanded our operations scale with our decentralized rental management services. Carefree Rent growing from 70,000 units by end of 2022 to over 200,000 units by end of 2023. We also enhanced our asset operation efficiency and rental service qualities. By end of 2023, so occupation rate of tariff free rent increased by 6 percentage points compared to the year of 2022, reaching 95.1%. The increase in the sales and the lifetime rental property management operations placed a new demand on our operating capabilities.
In 2023, we make the following iterations. Number one, we made a significant upgrade to our Carefree Rent model, which greatly reduced the seasonal fluctuations and the risks associated with the failure to release. It also better resisted the rate of continued market downturn on rental prices. Number two, we implemented a refined operation by redefining core roles around the full cycle of rental management, ensure proper starting to smooth out our operation process. Number three, we comprehensively enhanced the service quality around the 7 major pain points of tenants, continually improving our standardized service capabilities. We enhanced our service team’s response time and the encouraging pre-emptive problem solving. So in 2013, our — in addition, in 2023, our apartment business also expanded in SKU and efficiency, with almost than 10,000 housing units on our management.
For 2024, first, we have ambitious goals for the scale we manage. Our focus will be primarily is core cities, Beijing, Shanghai and Chengdu will be the key targets for the major growth. Second, we aim to robustly establish our business at all levels, including achieving operational breakeven in this core cities, and are continuously improving overall operational efficiency and quality, just requiring building and strengthening a range of capabilities. Improving efficiency, we are aiming for operational breakeven in the leading cities, and we also target to increase the productivity. In 2023, the average property signed-up productivity per manager had reached 100 units in this year. We aim to reduce the capability values and have more rental product managers achieve that level.
In addition, we will also solidify the quality. First, we secured the safety bottom-line by identifying the potential risks in advance and establishing a mechanism for handling process. Second, we work on making our service both standardized and the cost revised. We do this by clearly defining the distinct roles and enhancing our online capability to keep our rental service variable and standardized. We also pay attention to the community demand and customer needs based on their demographics so we can offer them right-fit services. And we will also build the technology and service capability around 5 key strategies. They are unit sales, unit occupation, rental management, operations and the reputation to make sure our business can achieve the sustained growth in the long term.
