FirstService Corporation (FSV) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good day, and welcome to the Second Quarter Investors Conference Call. Today's call is being recorded. Legal counsel requires us to advise that the discussion scheduled to take place today may contain forward-looking statements and involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties. Actual results may be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements contemplated in the forward-looking statements. Additional information concerning factors that could cause actual results to materially differ from those in the forward-looking statements is contained in the company's annual information form as filed with the Canadian Securities Administrators and in the company's annual report on Form 40-F as filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. As a reminder, today's call is being recorded. Today is July 23, 2026. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to turn the call over to Chief Executive Officer, Mr. Scott Patterson. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, Lisa. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining our Q2 conference call. I'm on today with our CFO, Jeremy Rakusin. I'll kick us off with some high-level comments. Jeremy will follow with more detail. Let me start by saying that we're generally pleased with our Q2 results in an economic environment that continues to be quite challenging. We're also pleased with the progress we made during the quarter on a few fronts that we believe puts us in a position to achieve a stronger second half of the year and gain momentum into 2027. Total revenues for the second quarter were up 2% over the prior year, half organic growth. the quarter was up 3%, reflecting a consolidated margin of 11.2%, up 10 basis points over the prior year and better than expectation primarily within our brands division. Jeremy will walk through the detail in his prepared comments. Finally, earnings per share were up 2% over the prior year, in line with top line growth. Looking at our divisional results. FirstService Residential revenues were in line with expectation and up 5% organically. The reported revenues were slightly less at 4% and reflecting the sale of our residential pool maintenance operations early in the quarter. We separated and sold residential accounts that have accumulated over the years to focus solely on commercial pool maintenance and management. Our core property management business continues to perform solidly on expectation, and we expect similar results for the balance of the year. Moving on to FirstService Brands. Revenues for the quarter were up 1%, with strength at Century Fire, tempered by approximately flat results at our restoration and home service brands and largely offset by revenue declines within our roofing operation. I'll walk through each of the segments. Revenues for our two restoration brands Paul Davis on first Onsite were down slightly from the prior year. As we pointed out at the last two quarter ends, we entered the year with a weakened pipeline due to the mild weather experienced in Q4 of last year, which has impacted us in the first half of this year. towards the end of Q2 and into July, we made significant progress in signing work and bolstering our pipeline back to historically healthy levels. In particular, we won a number of large loss projects across North America that will convert to revenue over the next 12 to 18 months. In addition, we're seeing opportunities for specialty construction projects that have arisen through our restoration work with certain customers and in certain verticals. Looking forward, we expect to show approximately 5% year-over-year growth in the back half of the year for our restoration brands. It's a modest outlook relative to the uptick in activity as it's difficult to forecast how quickly the recent backlog additions will convert to revenue. Our experience suggests that scoping, permitting and insurance navigation could create delays in generating revenue. Storm and hurricane activity in the coming months could add to the backlog and improve this growth outlook. Moving to our Roofing segment. Revenues for the quarter were down approximately 6% on a reported basis and 10% organically, lower than our expectation. There are a few factors that impacted our top line during the quarter. First and foremost, the market remains stubbornly weak and ultra competitive both the new construction market outside of data centers and the reroof market, and the market conditions are particularly acute in two of our larger branch regions, Las Vegas and Southwest Florida. In both markets, we have intentionally moved away from certain low-margin work that was in our pipeline. The other factor during the quarter was the delay of a few large reroof projects that we expected to complete during the quarter. The delays accounted for half the miss relative to our expectation. All the projects remain in our backlog. The roofing market has been a challenge for us in the past year. It's been a difficult environment and with ongoing macroeconomic uncertainty it's unlikely to improve materially in the near term. That said, we strongly believe that the long-term thesis is unchanged. Roofing is a huge market and an essential service with long-term tailwinds. We believe in our team and are focused on continuing to build the platform. As evidence of our ongoing belief and the opportunity we closed on the acquisition during the quarter of Sheplers Roofing in Kansas City. Sheplers is a leader in the market, serving customers throughout Missouri and Northern Arkansas and strengthens our presence in the important Midwest region. Looking forward to Q3, we expect our roofing operations to be down slightly with organic growth off in the mid-single-digit range. Moving to Century Fire. We had another strong quarter that was right on expectation and mirrored our Q1 results. With revenues up over 10% versus the prior year, including high single-digit organic growth. During the quarter, we announced the acquisitions of Titan Fire Protection based in Tampa, Florida and GSC fire and security based in Austin, Texas. Titan is a sprinkler installation company, serving commercial customers across Central Florida. GSC is an alarm installation and service company serving the Austin and San Antonio markets. In both cases, Century will look to partner with the management teams to broaden the service capability and provide both sprinkler and alarm install and service across the respective customer bases. Looking forward for Century finished the quarter with an improved backlog sequentially and expect similar strong 10% plus year-over-year growth for the third and fourth quarters. Now on to our home service brands, which as a group generated revenues that were up slightly versus a year ago, modestly better than our expectation. As a reminder, our home service brands include California Closets, CertaPro Painters, Floor Coverings International and Pillar to Post Home Inspection. Activity levels at these brands are closely tied to the housing market and consumer sentiment, both of which continue to hover around 10-year lows. The teams continue to do a great job driving increases in close ratio and average job size to eat out revenue gains. We're not getting any helpful market improvement, and we're not expecting any over the back half of the year. Market indices and economic forecasts all suggest continued weakness in the housing market and consumer confidence. Looking forward for our home services group, we expect the teams to continue to take market share to drive similar results for the third and fourth quarters with revenues that are slightly up year-over-year. Let me now hand off to Jeremy.

Thank you, Scott, and good morning, everyone. As always, I'll provide details of our segmented financial performance. Summarize our cash flow, capital deployment and balance sheet position and close out the commentary with a look forward. But first, a recap of our consolidated financial results. Revenues for the second quarter were $1.45 billion, up 2% year-over-year, and we reported adjusted EBITDA of $161.7 million, up 3% versus the prior year. Adjusted EPS came in at $1.75, a 2% increase over Q2 2025. This brings our year-to-date consolidated financial performance for the first half of the year to revenues of $2.77 billion, an increase of 4% over last year. Adjusted EBITDA of $267 million, representing 3% growth over the $260 million last year, with a margin of 9.7%, down 10 basis points year-over-year. And adjusted EPS for the first half of the year sits at $2.69 versus $2.63 in the prior year period. Our adjustments to operating earnings and GAAP EPS to calculate our adjusted EBITDA and adjusted EPS, respectively, have been summarized in this morning's press release and remain consistent with our disclosure in prior periods. Reviewing the second quarter segmented financial performance, I'll lead off with our FirstService Residential division. Quarterly revenues came in at $617 million, up 4% over the prior year, and as Scott mentioned, up 5% organically. EBITDA for the quarter was $69 million, a 6% year-over-year increase with an 11.2% margin, up 20 basis points over the 11% margin in Q2 of last year. For the first half of 2026, our division EBITDA margin sits at 9.9%, up 30 basis points compared to the equivalent prior year period. During the remainder of the year, we expect margin improvement to continue at similar pacing to the year-to-date performance as our teams continue to extract efficiencies in various areas of the enterprise. Shifting to the FirstService Brands division. Our financial metrics for the second quarter were relatively comparable to last year's Q2, including revenues of $832 million and EBITDA at $96 million, both up 1%. Our margin during the quarter was 11.5%, down 10 basis points with the quarter-over-quarter performance better than both Q1 and our expectations heading into the current quarter. In particular, home services margins performed relatively better as we continue to optimize the balance of marketing and promotional investments in support of lead flow. Turning to our cash flow profile. We generated $112 million in operating cash flow during the second quarter prior to working capital movements and in line with the prior year. Cash flow after accounting for working capital changes was $130 million for the quarter and sits at almost $220 million year-to-date. Our capital expenditures during the quarter were a little over $30 million and with our year-to-date total at $60 million, we expect our annual CapEx to be roughly $130 million less than our initial target of $140 million we provided at the beginning of the year. Acquisition spending on tuck-under deals during the quarter was just over $40 million. The combination of our recent free cash flow performance, together with conservative debt levels on our balance sheet, supported our decision during the second quarter to also execute share repurchases under our normal course issuer bid. During the quarter, we purchased more than $1.8 million shares at a total cost of almost $250 million or an average price per share of USD 135.91. With these buybacks, our leverage, as measured by net debt to EBITDA increased modestly to 1.8x from the 1.5x level at the end of Q1. Our leverage remains conservative, and we still have ample liquidity with more than $800 million of cash on hand and undrawn bank credit facility balances. This current financial flexibility allows us to continue opportunistically repurchasing additional FirstService shares under the buyback program. When we see the valuation of our large diversified enterprise trading at a meaningful discount to smaller private market businesses in our respective industries. At the same time, we are focused on building our tuck-under deal pipeline to deploy growth capital when we see acceptable acquisition valuations and target return thresholds. Concluding with an outlook, our FirstService Residential division will deliver growth in the balance of the year largely mirroring recent quarters. Mid-single-digit top line growth with modest year-over-year margin improvement. For the Brands division, Scott has provided top line growth indicators for each of the operating businesses which aggregates to mid-single-digit revenue growth in the back half of the year. This performance will be skewed to the fourth quarter and influenced by the amount of restoration backlog to revenue conversion from the increased pipeline activity levels that Scott referenced as well as capitalizing on any additional potential seasonal spikes in weather activity in the coming months. Putting it all together on a consolidated basis for the upcoming third quarter, we expect both revenue and EBITDA growth to be similar to the second quarter in the low single-digit range. For the full year, consolidated revenue growth is expected to be similar to or modestly better than our year-to-date top line growth, and we are anticipating mid-single-digit annual EBITDA growth over 2025. That concludes our prepared comments. Lisa, you may now open the call to questions. Thank you.

[Operator Instructions] our first question will be coming from the line of Stephen MacLeod of BMO Capital Markets.

Thank you. Good morning, guys. I just wanted to just circle around on the roofing business. Obviously, the backdrop is quite weak. And you referenced continued competitive environment. I'm just curious if you see any -- I mean, I know you gave the outlook for the balance of the year, but just curious kind of what factors you're looking for to potentially see a light at the end of the tunnel with respect to some of the reroofing projects that have been delayed and how your backlog currently looks?

Yes. Let me start with the backlog, Stephen. -- it's down year-over-year, but it is up in June sequentially over May, and May was up sequentially over April. So we are moving in the right direction, but slowly and I would say battling headwinds. The misses in Q2 were really, as I suggested, from some jobs that were delayed. They all still remain in our backlog, but the -- but we don't have start dates. They've been -- there's a -- there's a number of factors associated with each. The largest is an insurance claim relating to hail damage, and it's caught up in negotiations between the owner and insurance carrier. It it will take place. It's just a matter of when. And then as I suggested, we've intentionally moved away from jobs that were in our pipeline due to the tight pricing, which was beyond our comfort level, particularly in Southwest Florida.

Okay. That's helpful. And I guess you noted that one of the largest sort of project in the backlog was related to an insurance claim. How much of the delays you're seeing are attributable to factors such as that versus the macro backdrop and companies just saying, we'll do this next year when we have better visibility.

I think the delays are primarily related to delays in construction and whether that's other contractors finishing their bid on time and pushing it out or insurance-related issues. Because all of these projects -- the projects I'm referencing were in our pipeline, and we expect it to complete. But in terms of building the pipeline more quickly, we're seeing softness in the market.

Okay. That's helpful. And then maybe just one for Jeremy. Just on the NCIB, you're obviously very active in the quarter. And I know you talked a little bit about the balance between funding M&A as well as being active when the stock price is materially dislocated from fair value. I'm just curious how you prioritize those two things. And how you -- how much -- how active do you expect to be on the buyback in the back half of the year?

Yes. I mean, we've been buying at current levels, and you can be sure that we will continue to do so just given our balance sheet is still quite conservative under 2x. I mean, we feel comfortable going at least to the mid-2s level, like 2.5x would be a strong comfort level for us. We're always going to look at our pipeline. So if we see imminent deals that are of size and provide attractive returns that would take priority. But we think we can do both with our current balance sheet and the $800 million plus of liquidity we can do them in tandem. So a lot of flexibility to use the buyback program as well as not compromise our tuck-under acquisition prospects.

The next question is coming from the line of Stephen Sheldon of William Blair.

Scott, I wanted to dig in a little more on restoration in some of your comments in the prepared remarks. It sounds like sales activity pipeline has picked up there in the quarter. and not tied to big storm activity. So can you just refresh us on the progress building out relationships with larger, more national accounts? Is that becoming more impactful to the trajectory of the business? And then I would also love more detail on where the team is finding success with more specialized and complex restoration services like you kind of alluded to in the prepared remarks.

Right. Well, certainly, we've been talking about it for a few years, how hard the team has been working in terms of developing and enhancing the national account roster, but also at the same time, really developing expertise in a number of different verticals, health care and government. And generally developing a reputation for large loss claims. And just really the last 4 to 6 weeks, I'd say, we've signed, as I said in my prepared comments, a number of large loss projects that will benefit us over the next 18 months or so. The projects that are not related in any way. They're all tied to various regional weather events or specific fire or water damage claims. They factories, large warehouses, government buildings, big box retail, multifamily across North America. So it's a significant sort of rally for us that certainly is enhanced our backlog. And as I said, not likely to help us materially in these projects that are still being scoped. The sizes are not clear. We'll see some in Q4, but it's certainly going to help us in 2027. And you had a question right at the tail end, Stephen, can you repeat that?

Yes. I think you answered it just with like health care and government, but just, yes, where you're seeing, I guess...

Yes. You asked about the -- I made a comment about specialty contracting. And that really has evolved from our expertise and depth of experience in the health care sector. We have a number of team members that have specific certification and training around the mitigation and construction in a sensitive health care environment this expertise and reputation has led to other construction opportunities in health care. And then beyond that, other contracting opportunities in general. And talking about retrofits and capital improvements and some new construction opportunities. So we've been asked to submit bids on unique situations based on our experience, and we have a few wins with some pending and I would say, momentum building.

Got it. Very helpful. Maybe just following up on restoration then. I think you talked about 5% growth in the back half of the year. So I want to make sure I heard that right. And then I know you don't want to talk about next year, but I guess if some of these things are starting to pick up, I mean, I know a lot can happen to flow with big storm activity, but excluding that, I guess, are we -- as we think about heading into next year and especially the first half if some of the stuff picks up, would we be in line to have even better growth, I guess, and potentially even more than a storm activity gives you opportunities as well. I guess, just how you're thinking about it in the next year?

Yes. I mean, we should. It's -- we're feeling good about our restoration because the pipeline where it is, today, and we're just heading into storm season and who knows, right? But we do feel good about the position we're in heading into the back half and into '27 for sure.

And the next question is coming from the line of Daryl Young of Stifel.

I wanted to touch on residential and your new cross-selling initiative that you announced, I think it's called Resilience first that looks to be a concerted effort to cross-sell restoration with residential. Could you maybe expand on what that is and the opportunity and whether there's any other cross-sell opportunities you're pursuing expressly?

Yes. That effort and program is between FirstService Residential and our restoration brands and roofing operations. It is cross-selling, but I really think about it as a focus on bringing value to our managed communities and differentiating FirstService Residential from its competitors. And the goal is to reduce the frequency of loss events. And then -- so prevention and then minimizing the severity of losses. So we're talking about complementary inspections, training, education, storm preparation, most of the losses we see in our communities are water losses and simply educating residents and property managers around water shut-off certainly when they leave on vacation or you get water into 1 unit, it seeps into neighboring units, and that's the typical loss scenario in our communities, and they can be prevented. And that's what we're focused on, access to a proprietary detection program for our communities. If we're successful, it will reduce the number of claims, reduce the severity of loss and drive down insurance costs for our communities. And again, the focus is on differentiating FirstService Residential.

Got it. Okay. And then just moving to margins, performances I'd say, continue to be quite strong despite maybe a softer organic growth environment. So I'm wondering if when organic growth recovers, can you hold the existing benefits? Or will there be some costs that maybe come back as activity levels pick up, I guess, said differently, is there operating leverage still to come from here?

Yes, Daryl, you got to look at it business by business, property management, it's a lot of variable costs as we grow. And that business is performing right down the fairway. We've got a little bit of margin expansion built in, as I said in my prepared comments. On the brand side, pretty well every business, and we obviously speak about the optimistic outlook for growth in restoration. -- those businesses do generate good operating leverage when you get the top line growth, even if there are some investments that come in support of that growth, it's a net positive to the margin.

Our next question is coming from the line of Erin Kyle of CIBC.

I just wanted to go back to the Roofing segment and maybe a follow-up on an earlier question. But maybe in your view in terms of what's impacting the segment from a macro perspective, what would you say is most meaningful or substantial to customer decisions there? Is it rates, inflation? Is it the Middle East complex and oil prices? -- all of the above, like what would you say really needs to change for a warrant activity to really start converting there?

Well, remember, Aaron, that first of all, the new construction outside of data centers is down. year-over-year. And that's a big chunk of the market. So that's a driver. And a lot of new construction-focused roofers have turned their attention to the reroof market -- so the reroof market is probably flat nationally, but the level of competition around reroof has increased significantly. I think that everything you mentioned now interest rates, Mid-East war, inflation all of that is impacting in both of those markets. And -- but reroof could be deferred, but longer term, they're nondiscretionary. So it is a matter of time. And I think that the competitive environment will normalize because some of the pricing is not sustainable and particularly in a few of our markets that I've referenced. Southwest Florida is a unique situation right now. I mean we know from our major suppliers that the markets particularly weak relative to the rest of the U.S. And in fact, the data we have, we're off less than the market in general. And a lot of that -- there's a couple of things going on in Hurricane -- in effectively pulled forward a few years of reroof work and our businesses benefited at the time. But -- the last 2 years, we've seen declines of those peaks. And post-hurricane, there were a number of roofers that expanded to Florida to capitalize on the surge -- so right now, there is overcapacity in that market, and every job is ultra competitive. We have a very strong position. And we'll be fine. We just need to let the market settle out and the capacity will normalize. We know operations are pulling out and closing their doors. So it's -- it will just take some time, but we'll be fine in Florida.

Okay. That's helpful there. And then maybe just on the M&A side. Just looking at the spend year-to-date. Last quarter, I think you slitthere's been fewer bidders as some funds have pulled back in this environment. But FirstService M&A spend remains modest compared to historical it's in line with 2025. So just looking back here. As you think about your capital deployment here, are you taking a more conservative approach as you're evaluating targets? Or how should we think about the M&A spend on a go-forward basis?

We're not necessarily taking a more considerable approach. We're sticking to our discipline being patient -- frankly, we're not seeing many quality companies come to market. And certainly, we're seeing fewer companies come to market. So I think there are fewer opportunities -- we're being very patient focusing on the right partnerships and ensuring that it's a fit both in terms of service line, geography and culture. So I'd sort of confirm that we expect this year to be similar to last year at this point based on the opportunities in our pipeline. But nothing's really changed for us. It's just the -- it's the number of opportunities that we're seeing.

Next question is coming from the line of Himanshu Gupta of Scotiabank.