simple parsing question?

I am using the getQuote function in the Quantmod package to retrieve the % change for a stock as follows:

getQuote("aapl",what=yahooQF(c("Change Percent (Real-time)")))

Trade Time %Change (RT)
aapl 2012-10-11 03:41:00 N/A - -1.67%

How can I extract the numeric "change %" which is being returned as a factor so that I can use it in other calculations?

Thanks.