Hovnanian Enterprises, Inc. (HOV) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Deutsche Bank's 32nd Annual Leveraged Finance Conference. My name is Andrew Casella. I run the U.S. High Yield Research Team. In New York and today, we're excited to have the management team from Hovnanian Enterprises. On my left is Brad O'Connor, Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer; and Jeff O'Keefe, VP, Investor Relations. And with that, I'll turn it over to Brad.

Good morning. Thank you. Thank you, Andrew. So today, I'm going to just cover a little bit on the U.S. housing market and where it stands today, and then I'll get into specifics on our company, Hovnanian and how we're performing recently. So to start out, if you follow the homebuilding industry, you know it's a very cyclical business. And if you look at this slide, going all the way back to 1959, you can see the ups and downs. The horizontal dash line is the long-term average for housing production or housing starts for sale and rental, and it's averaged 1.4 million starts over that time frame. And you can see that since the great housing recession, we've been well below that level. Finally, during COVID, it got back above the average for a couple of years, but we're below at last year and trying to [indiscernible] to be below again this year. So continue to have undersupply on the new [indiscernible] in addition to having low average reduction on [indiscernible] we have historically [indiscernible] home owners are locked-in [indiscernible] but this slide shows you that the long term average of [indiscernible]. Right now, while it's come up just a little bit recently as rates have come down, it's at 1.2, so still almost 900,000 below the average. And then the second line, the gray line just adds in the homes under production, about 300,000 homes on average. So if you put those two together, you can see we're well below supply of homes for sale. So production is low and listings are very low as well. As I mentioned, that's partly due to the mortgage rates, a significant increase everybody knows about that happened in 2022. You can see it there. And then we bounce around up and down over the last couple of years and now trending down. And we'll see what continues to happen with the Fed decreasing rates and likely decreasing rates further. We'll see how that impacts the margin. And if it unlocks any of that existing home supply, people start listing homes remains to be seen. So because of that environment and the low supply of homes, we have had a really strong performance over the last few years, really from the beginning of COVID through now. Our performance, you'll see has been quite good, improved our balance sheet significantly. We are among the top 20 builders in the U.S. in revenues and deliveries. We serve a broad product array intentionally. So we target first-time move-up, active adult, active lifestyle and luxury home customers. On the bottom left, you can see the states that we operate in by our different -- 3 different segments in the East, Southeast and West. And on the bottom right, you can see where we have our lots controlled positions. And you can see in the Northeast is where we have significant number of our lots at 47%, the West is 36% and Southeast is 17%. When looking at that, though, that doesn't necessarily mean that that's where you're going to see our revenues come from going forward. The Northeast, especially New Jersey has a long entitlement period. So we have lots under control for a lot longer in that market, which is why we have a higher percentage there. It doesn't necessarily tie and you can see on the bottom left, the revenues by segment are broken out differently of how you can buy lots and how quickly you can get from controlling a lot to actually being able to build homes and deliver on those lots. So going into this fiscal year, our contracts, including our unconsolidated joint ventures, our sales have been choppy throughout the year. What this will show you is that for year-to-date for us, year-to-date, this was through July, which is through our third quarter. We were up 8% year-over-year in contracts. But you can see that by quarter, it was -- it swung quite a bit. So in Q1, we were up 43%, Q2 up 9%, Q3 was down 13%. And then when we presented this, this is from our third quarter earnings release. So when it says last 5 weeks, that was last 5 weeks as of August 22 or 23, something like that. So early August, late July, we saw a pickup in the market, and we were up 23% year-over-year. So the point -- and that corresponded with rates coming down a little bit at that same time frame. So we've seen a bounce back from Q3 going into the beginning of our Q4. And I think you heard from others that have reported that sales have stayed pretty good in August and into September. As rates increased and home and our customers needed to have homes available to move into within 60 days of purchase, which allowed them to lock in their mortgage rates, we move to having more what we call quick move-in homes or spec homes in our communities. Traditionally, we have been more of a to-be-built builder, so we would start the house after the home was under contract with rates jumping the way it did, it became clear that what customers wanted was certainty and what their multi-payment was going to be and needed homes that were going to be deliverable within 60 days of contracts. So we started building and starting more homes that had not sold intentionally. And so you can see that all the way on the left-hand side, our average QMIs were 4.5% over this whole time period, but we significantly increased that recently intentionally and are targeting around 7-ish per community at quarter end, we're a little above that at the end of the third quarter. But that's allowed us to be able to serve those customers that need homes, lock in their rate. We also are able to use as an incentive for our customers buying down their mortgage rates with rates increasing as much as they did, we can offer at the moment right now and for certain homes and certain communities will offer even a 3% and 3.5%, 30-year fixed rate. So and it varies, we can offer that all the way up through 6%. And then whatever that customer needs and the home in terms of where it is in deliveries, time frame, et cetera, is to drives how much incentive we can give. And we typically will allow that incentive to be used either for rate buydown or for something else of the customer for whatever reason, doesn't need a rate buydown, but would like to apply the value of that rate buydown to a price reduction, we'll do that as well. Our community count has been increasing. You'll see as we get to later slides that we've spent a lot of our time and effort over the last 5 years paying down debt. We were over levered coming out of the great housing recession have been for a long time. So we've been chipping away at our debt, but we're now at the position where we don't have to do that any longer, and we're going to start investing for growth, and you're starting to see that come through in our community count. Our community count jumped from sequentially from 132 at the end of second quarter to 146 at the end of the third, and we're expecting that to continue to grow. This slide demonstrates where that growth is coming from. So first, you have to control the lots, get them through approvals, get the land developed and then you can open for sale. So this slide really demonstrates what we've done in the last 12 months in terms of adding to our lots control position, which is then going to drive that community count growth I just mentioned. So if you look at Q3 of '23, we were at 29,487 controlled lots. We ended the third quarter of this year, so 1 year later at 39,500. So significant growth in our lots controlled. The other nice thing to see on this slide is we continue to move towards continuing to push towards asset-light. We've been a big user of a land-light strategy for a long time, but many builders now have moved in that direction, and we continue to push that as well. The blue section is the lots under optioned -- better in control. You can see that keeps getting bigger and bigger our lots owned is shrinking. That's a good combination. We're increasing the amount of land-light or asset-light structures that we're doing. You can see what's happened with our percentage of option lots over the time frame. So we're now at 82% of our lots controlled under option back in 2015, we were at 46%. So gradual increase, and we're continuing to push that going forward as well, we'd like to see that continue to go up. This top chart on this slide shows you our peers and us and how many lots are controlled via option. You can see at 82%, we're basically third highest of the peers listed here. But many of the peers have started to go this way as well, and you'll hear Lennar and Horton talk about it. The benefit of that is on the bottom of the slide, the inventory turnover that comes with that land-light position. And you can see we're basically tied for second, third highest at 1.7x on inventory turn. That's important because as I'll show you in a minute, that really helps our return on investment. So our ROE compared to our peers in the last 12 months were actually the highest even exceeding NVR. Now we have the benefit of leverage. We also have relatively low equity because during the great housing recession we actually flipped to negative equity. We've become positive a few years ago. It's growing rapidly. But the good news is we actually are returning higher equity than any other builder in the industry at the moment for the last 12 months. But if you take away the leverage take away our lower equity value and just look at return on investment using EBITDA, return on inventory -- EBIT return on inventory, we're second highest. And that's driven by our operation efficiency, but especially by that land-light strategy as we continue to push having more of our lots under option and asset-light that will continue to help us push our ROI higher. Now looking at our metrics of our share price compared to our peers, our price-to-book a little above median at 2.09, so not unreasonable here, but you can see that NVR, very high, but Dream Finders as an example, who is very similar to us in terms of asset-light and isn't quite as high as us on return on investment is trading higher than our price to book. But on PE, we're actually second lowest. And we really feel like we're undervalued. Our performance, our return performance demonstrates that we're one of the top builders in the industry, but our PE ratio doesn't show that. And I think that's partly due to the historical position of our overleverage and we haven't gotten people past realizing our improvement there and really understanding our performance and how it ranks versus others. And we think that there's a long way of runway in front of us for our share price to continue to increase. This slide just plots ROE versus price-to-book. And you can see -- imagine the regression line between all those builders and then look where we are, we're clearly undervalued on this scale. I could do that for the ROI chart. I could do it for the PE version the same story. We are clearly undervalued compared to our peers based on our return performance. And it's a message we continue to try to get out to the market. We target -- given our debt position, we have $125 million revolver. And then we have to use cash, obviously, to run our business. So over this entire time frame really since the great housing recession, we've targeted to have between $170 million and $245 million of liquidity, including the value of that revolver at quarter end. Cash in the homebuilding business in and out throughout the quarter as you buy the lots, et cetera. And most of -- many of our deliveries happen at the end of the quarter. So we end up with an influx of cash towards the end of the quarter. You can see that we've been well above that target for a number for basically this whole time frame at this point. And during COVID, we were well above it. We were also paying down debt during that time frame and still had excess liquidity from what we wanted. It just means we weren't able to find land deals fast enough to use all our liquidity. We would much rather be in our targeted range and fully invested on communities that will pencil to our low 20% IRR range. The good news is, as you see that lots controlled chart increase, we have been starting to grow, and we've got our liquidity now just barely above the high end of our range in our most recent quarter. From a debt side, this looks -- for anyone that's been following us for a while, this looks significantly better than it did a couple of years ago. And certainly, if I go back even further, much, much better than it did 10 years ago. You can see we have just very little debt coming due in Q2 of '26, $27 million. And then the revolver actually comes due, but we should be able to refinance that without any issue. I would expect us just to pay the $27 million off. And then we have the 3 bars of different levels of secured debt. And I would anticipate with our improving balance sheet and when the prepayment penalties on that secured debt comes down to a more reasonable level, we would refinance all that secured and go back to unsecured debt, which would be a nice change for us. We've been living in a world of secured debt for a long time. Thought we get back to unsecured, I think we could do that today, but the prepayment penalties on the secured debt is just too much to make that worthwhile at the moment. So that is what I've been referring to a little bit. You can see the improvement on our balance sheet. This goes back to 2019. You can see we had negative equity of $490 million. It's now grown with earnings. We also had a deferred tax valuation allowance, so we reserve against our deferred taxes that got reversed in 2021. So that flipped us back to positive equity. And we've been growing on top of that with earnings since and we're projecting to be at the end of this fiscal year at $794 million of equity and our debt down to $1 billion, down from $1 billion -- almost $1.7 billion in 2019. So significant reduction in debt, good growth in equity, and that leads to the bottom chart of net debt to net cap finishing the year at 42% from 146% when this starts in 2019. So this is what I was talking about. We've really changed this company. The balance sheet is significantly better, much healthier than it was even 3 or 4 years ago, and our returns, our operating performance is one of the strongest. So we should start to get the recognition we deserve and our share price should start to increase or continue to increase. Lastly as I talk about the guidance for our fiscal '24 full year and on here, we did increase our guidance from the prior guidance at the end of the second quarter. So you can see that in the middle column, and then on the left side, you can see what the actuals were for fiscal '23. So for revenues, were projected to be up from $2.75 billion to between $2.9 billion and $3.050 billion. Homebuilding gross margin is projected to be slightly down from last year. Midpoint is 22% compared to 22.7%. So we have had some margin pressure this year compared to a year ago. A lot of that is coming from the incentives we're offering on the mortgage buydowns, et cetera, but it's driving sales and driving that top line. So well worth it to give up a little bit of that margin for that purpose. SG&A basically right where we were a year ago. We did start giving guidance on income from JVs in the most recent quarter because that's become a more significant portion of our P&L. So you can see that for the year, we're expecting to be between $55 million and $65 million versus $43 million last year. And I would expect that will continue that JV business. We've got a number of JVs underway. So that will continue to be a meaningful part of our business. So as a result of those, adjusted EBITDA is a little above last year at the midpoint, we'll be up $8 million to $10 million. Pretax is up more than that with the benefit of less interest expense. So we'll be at between $300 million and $325 million compared to $283 million last year. And then you can see what that does to diluted EPS. And then our book value per common share, again, grows dramatically as a result of the additional earnings. That's what I have to cover today. So I will take any questions.

Yes?

Your inventory overall [indiscernible]

Yes. No. So what I was talking about, the question was, is our inventory where we want it to be. What I was mentioning is the 82% of our lots controlled by option, we would love that NVR, who's the poster child for that business approach is at 99%. We'd love to be at 99% if we can get there. So we're going to continue to push to increase the amount of lots we control through option versus owned.

We can focus [indiscernible]

The Southeast. Yes, so I would say that the -- as I mentioned, it's a little bit different by market because of the entitlement period. So you have to have lots longer in the Northeast than you do for other markets. I would agree that at the moment, the Southeast, we look -- we're under where we would like to be. But we're not currently constraining any market. We want them all to grow. So we're not putting any governors on the West can't grow, I want the Southeast to do it. At the moment, we're focused on growth. And if the land teams can find deals that pencil, we haven't turned any down at corporate land committee because we didn't want to allocate capital there. So what you're really seeing is, some of the other markets have been better historically of finding deals. I will say that the Southeast has picked up their pace. So we're hoping to see that start to balance itself out. I don't -- our land spend number. What was our land spend last year? I know we give it every quarter. So what we do year-to-date?

Year-to-date was $677 million, $459 million last year.

Yes. So we're up significantly this year in terms of land spend. So that -- and that land spend includes the deposits on the option lots as well as we take down the land and then any land development. We spend if it's a wholly owned deal. So you can hear the increase. So we're averaging each quarter 220-ish, something like that a quarter. I would expect that to continue at that pace, if not go faster next year.

[indiscernible]

Yes, it's a great question. I think what we do -- I'll answer -- I don't know exactly what will happen, obviously. But what I will say is when rates increase -- so if you go back and we looked at that mortgage rate slide and recently, over the last 2 years, it will go up and down, what we would see is when rates ticked up, traffic tends to slow and when rates started to come down, traffic picked up. And we saw that again in August as rates came down. So I would anticipate at least based on that, that if rates continue to come down, the traffic should pick up. Now there is the possibility, although we haven't seen this yet, that if people anticipate rate declines, the Fed's going to keep dropping rates that they actually sit on the fence and wait, we haven't really seen that. And I think that's for a couple of reasons. One, we and the other homebuilders are offering rate buydowns. So they -- we can get them into a rate that's below where they might even think rates are going to end up. That's one thing. The other thing is they can generally -- if the rates do come down, they can refinance if they think rates are going to come down. When we first started offering the rate buydowns when rates had jumped, many customers didn't take the rate buydown, they actually took the price reduction, thinking, I believe, thinking that rates were going to come right back down and they were going to be able to refinance. What happened over time as rates didn't come back down, more and more customers started taking the rate buydown because they came to the realization rates aren't going to come back down quickly. So all of that's going on psychologically while a customer is considering buying a home. I think the benefit of rate is coming down, though probably gets some people who don't think they could afford at all, so they don't even come into the store, so to speak. They start coming to check it out. So I think that will help in that way. So I do think you'll see a pickup in activity if rates continue to come down. And then ideally, we would have to offer less in terms of the incentive on the rate buydowns. So we may still offer them, but the cost is less as rates come down.

[indiscernible]

I would say, well, there's a few things in there. So a couple of comments. Yes, affordability continues to be a challenge, there's no doubt about that. And so you do tend to see less options purchased. We, in many of our markets have gone away from the traditional model of having sell to home and then have a bunch of options that you pick, and we've gone to what we call looks. So it packages up a particular look like a farmhouse look, and you get all of the things in that farmhouse look. The benefit of doing that is we now buy the same fixtures for that farmhouse look across all of our national -- all our communities that are offering nationally. So our buying power gets better. So we've been able to buy for less for options like that than we used to. So that's helped on the affordability side to drive the cost down per foot. So that's one thing that customers can come to us and get a benefit of, they can still get options, but potentially for less than they could get it a toll where they still have to pick the a la carte version. The other -- but that said, what you do see, generally speaking, in our communities that are open, you have 4 or 5 different floor plans customers can pick from. What happens when affordability gets stretched or rates go up because -- and that stretches affordability, people stop buying the biggest one and they now have to buy the middle or the smaller square footage. Taking that to the extreme, you can also try to add plan types at even lower square footages, but that takes approval through the town and can take time. So typically, we don't do that unless it's absolutely necessary to try to drive affordability down. But what you do start to look at is the next community that you're underwriting, you want to make sure that you're positioning it with the right plan types so that you can help on the affordability side. So I think our ASP, I'll ask Jeff to confirm it for you, but our ASP in the most recent years, down just a little from a year ago or flattish. So while pricing is still going up, our mix is changing to your point, and we're keeping ASP basically flat.

[indiscernible] what are some of the constraints [indiscernible]

It's a great question, and I'm going back to the slide just to show the point. So housing starts, as you can see since the great housing recession have just kind of gradually been increasing other than it really jumped during COVID. And during that time, we felt a lot of strain on both labor and material supply partly because of people not being able to work because of COVID, but partly because it just grew so dramatically. We've got that under control as production came back down a little bit. So one of the benefits of a slower growth come more gradual than a big spike is exactly what you're pulsing on. We don't run into labor issues. We don't run into material issues and the industry can manage that. If rates drop, let's pretend for a minute, that rates dropped down to 4%. Just I think that would cause a big boom in sales, and we would be back in the COVID example where we would be struggling with material and labor supply, and that would be a constraint. Currently, that's not the constraint. I would say the constraint right now is land and having developed lots timely. We've controlled a lot more lots, as I showed you, but we've been missing our open for sale dates that we originally had projected because land development is taking longer than it has in the past. So that's been a constraint. And a big part of that has been utility companies not getting electric service to the communities as quickly as they have in the past, and that's caused us to miss open for sale days. So that's been a challenge. And I know I've heard other builders talking about that as well. So to me, that feels like the bigger constraint at the moment than material or labor. Okay. Any other questions? All right. Thank you all for your time.