M/I Homes, Inc. (MHO) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the M/I Homes Fourth Quarter and Year-End Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] This call is being recorded on Wednesday, January 28, 2026. I would now like to turn the conference over to Phil Creek. Please go ahead.

Thank you, and thank you for joining us today. On the call with me is Bob Schottenstein, our CEO and President; and Derek Klutch, President of our mortgage company. First, to address Regulation Fair Disclosure. We encourage you to ask any questions regarding issues that you consider material during the call because we are prohibited from discussing significant nonpublic items with you directly. And as to forward-looking statements, I want to remind everyone that the cautionary language about forward-looking statements contained in today's press release also applies to any comments made during this call. Also be advised that the company undertakes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements made during this call. With that, I'll turn it over to Bob.

Thanks, Phil, and good morning, and thank you for joining us today. As I begin, I'd like to take a brief moment to acknowledge an important milestone for M/I Homes. 2026 marks our 50th year in business. Over the past 5 decades, our company has grown to become one of the nation's largest and most respected homebuilders. Looking back, we've been through a lot, but we've experienced disciplined growth and certainly our fair share of success is navigating through multiple housing cycles. Through it all, we have maintained unwavering focus on quality, customer service and operating at a high standard. As we look ahead to celebrating this milestone, we're proud to report that we are the best financial condition in our history, have a group of leadership teams that are as strong as we've ever had and that we are well positioned in our 17 markets. With that, we'll turn to our 2025 performance. Our full year 2025 results reflect the economic conditions that we and frankly, our entire industry experienced throughout the year. Despite choppy demand, affordability challenges, economic uncertainty and other macroeconomic pressures, our performance remained very solid. Though new contracts were down slightly for the full year, we were pleased that our monthly new contracts during the fourth quarter showed a 9% year-over-year increase and that we successfully increased our 2025 average community count by 6% versus our guide of about 5%. In 2025, we delivered 8,921 homes, recorded revenue of $4.4 billion and excluding charges of $59 million related to inventory and warranty items we generated pretax income of nearly $590 million, which was down 20% compared to last year's record $734 million. Our pretax income percentage was a very solid 13% before the charges and 12% after all charges. Our Financial Services segment had a record capture rate of 93%, record volume levels and a very strong year, achieving pretax income for the year of $56 million. Our full year gross margins, excluding the above-mentioned inventory and warranty charges were 24.4%, 220 basis points lower than 2024 and down primarily due to higher incentives and higher lot costs versus the same period a year ago. As you all know, our primary incentives were and continue to be mortgage rate buydowns and we will continue to use these incentives as necessary on a community-by-community basis. Our net income was $403 million or $14.74 per share with a very strong return on equity of 13.1%. Our shareholders' equity increased 8% year-over-year and reached an all-time record of $3.2 billion with a record book value per share of $123. The quality of our buyers in terms of creditworthiness continues to be strong with average credit scores of 747 and average down payments of almost 17% or just over $90,000 per home. Our Smart Series, which is our most affordably priced product continues to have a very positive and meaningful impact not just on our sales, but our overall performance. Smart Series sales comprised 49% of total company sales in the fourth quarter compared to 52% a year ago. And as I previously noted, we ended the year with community count growth with 232 active communities, which was an increase of 5% compared to the end of '24 and on average, an increase of 6%. In terms of our various markets, our division income contributions in 2025 were led by Columbus, Dallas, Chicago, Orlando and Minneapolis. Our new contracts for the fourth quarter in our Southern region increased by 13% year-over-year and by 4% in the northern region. For the year, new contracts decreased 1% in the Southern region and 9% in our northern region. Deliveries increased 1% over last year's fourth quarter in the Southern region, and represent 57% of the company-wide total. The Northern region contributed 981 deliveries, which was a decrease of 8% over last year's fourth quarter. For the year, Homes delivered slightly increased in the Southern region, but decreased slightly in the Northern region. Our owned and controlled lot position in the Southern region decreased by 11% compared to a year ago, increased by 9% compared to a year ago in the Northern region. We have a tremendous land position. Company-wide, we own approximately 26,000 lots, which is slightly less than a 3-year supply. Of this total, 30% of our owned lots are in the Northern region with the balance of 70% in the Southern region. On top of the lots that we own, we control via option contracts an additional 24,000 lots. So in total, we own and control approximately 50,000 single-family lots, which is down 2,000 lots from a year ago, and this equates to roughly a 5- to 6-year supply. Most importantly, 49% of our lots are controlled pursuant to option contracts, which gives us continued flexibility and important flexibility to react to changes in demand or individual market conditions. With respect to our balance sheet, we ended the year in excellent condition with cash of $689 million and 0 borrowings under our $900 million unsecured revolving facility. This resulted in a very strong debt-to-capital ratio of 18% and a net debt-to-cap ratio of 0. Before I conclude, let me again state that we are in the best financial condition in our 50-year history. Despite the current challenging conditions, we feel very good about our business remain very confident in the long-term fundamentals of our industry and are well positioned as we begin 2026. And I'll now turn it over to Phil to provide more specifics on our results.

Thanks, Bob. Our new contracts, were up 18% in October, a 9% -- excuse me, up 6% in November and up 4% in December for a 9% improvement in the quarter compared to last year's fourth quarter. . Sales pace was 2.8% in the fourth quarter compared to 2.7 in 2024's fourth quarter, and our cancellation rate for the fourth quarter was 10%. As to our buyer profile, 48% of our fourth quarter sales were to first-time buyers compared to 50% a year ago. In addition, 79% of our fourth quarter sales were inventory homes compared to 67% in last year's fourth quarter. Our community count was 232 at the end of 2025 compared to 220 at the end of last year. During the quarter, we opened 17 new communities while closing 18. And for the year, we opened 81 new communities. We currently estimate that our average 2026 community count will be about 5% higher than 2025. We delivered 2,301 homes in the fourth quarter and about 40% of our quarter deliveries came from inventory homes that were both sold and delivered within the quarter. As of December 31, we had 4,500 homes in the field versus 4,700 homes in the field a year ago. Revenue decreased 5% in the fourth quarter of 2025 to $1.1 billion. And our average closing price for the fourth quarter was $484,000, a 1% decrease when compared to last year's fourth quarter average closed price of $490,000. Our gross margin was 18.1% for the quarter, including $51 million of charges which consisted of $40 million of inventory charges and $11 million of warranty charges. Excluding these charges, our gross margin was 22.6%. The breakdown of the inventory charges is $30 million of impairments and $10 million of lock deposit due diligent costs written off. The majority of impairments in the quarter were in entry-level communities with average selling prices below 375,000, and the warranty charges were due to 2 communities in our Florida market. For the full year, our gross margins were 23.0%, excluding our $59 million of charges, our full year gross margin was 24.4%. And our fourth quarter SG&A expense is flat compared to a year ago and were 11.6% of revenue compared to 11.0% last year. Interest income, net of interest expense for the quarter was $6 million. Our interest incurred was $9.5 million. We had solid returns given the challenges facing our industry. Our pretax income was 12% for the year, and our return on equity was 13%. During the fourth quarter, we generated $129 million of EBITDA. And for the full year, we generated $608 million of EBITDA. Our effective tax rate was 21% in the fourth quarter compared to 22% in last year's fourth quarter, and our annual effective rate for this year was 23.5%. We expect 2026 effective tax rate to be around 23.5 billion%. Our earnings per diluted share for the quarter decreased $2.39 per share from $4.71 per share in last year's fourth quarter and decreased 25% for the year to $14.74 per share from $19.71 per share last year. During the fourth quarter, we spent $50 million repurchasing our shares. And for the year, we spent $200 million. We currently have $220 million available under our repurchase authority. And in the last 3 years, we have purchased 13% of our outstanding shares. Now Derek Klutch will address our mortgage company results.

Thanks, Bill. In the fourth quarter, our mortgage and title operations achieved pretax income of $8.5 million, down $1.6 million from 2024, and revenue of $27.8 million, down 20% from last year, primarily as a result of lower margins on loans closed and sold and partially offset by higher average loan amounts and more loans closed. . For the year, pretax income was $56 million and revenue was $126 million. The loan-to-value on our first mortgages for the quarter was 83% in 2025 compared to 82% in 2024's fourth quarter. 65% of the loans closed in the quarter were conventional and 35% were FHA or VA compared to 59% and 41%, respectively for 2024 same period. Our average mortgage amount increased to $414,000 in 2025's fourth quarter compared to $409,000 in 2024. Loans originated in the quarter increased 1% from 1,862 to 1,874 and the volume of loans sold decreased by 1%. Our mortgage operation captured 94% of our business in the quarter, an increase from 91% in 2024's fourth quarter. Now I'll turn the call back over to Phil.

Thanks, Derek. As far as the balance sheet, we ended the fourth quarter with a cash balance of $689 million and no borrowings under our unsecured credit facility. We continue to have one of the lowest debt levels of the public homebuilders and are well positioned with our maturities. Our bank line matures in 2030 and our public debt matures in 2028 and 2030. Total homebuilding inventory at year-end was $3.4 billion, an increase of 9% from prior year levels. And during 2025, we spent $524 million on land purchases and $646 million on land development for a total spend of $1.2 billion. This was up from $1.1 billion in 2024. And at December 31, 2025, we had $900 million of raw land and land under development and $1.1 billion of finished unsold lots. We own 10,500 unsold finished lots. And at the end of the year, we had 1,030 completed inventory homes, about 4 per community and 2,779 total inventory homes. And of the total inventory of 1,116 are in the Northern region and 1,663 in the Southern region. And at December 31, '24, we had 706 completed inventory homes and 2,502 total inventory homes. This completes our presentation. We'll now open the call for any questions or comments.

[Operator Instructions] The first question comes from Ken Zener at Seaport Research Partners.

Positive order growth, pretty impressive. And can you address the 13% growth you had in the South. Can you bifurcate that into Texas and Florida? Because I think Texas last time -- you talked about Texas is a little bit more of the volume, and we've been seeing that Florida is actually doing a little better than Texas. Could you address the split in that -- those market in that region?

In general, we had pretty solid sales everywhere. Our Carolina markets, Charlotte and Raleigh have done very well. In Florida, our Orlando market has actually held up pretty well, and Tampa also has improved as we've gone through the quarter. When you look at Texas, Dallas has stayed pretty solid for us along with Houston. Weaker markets have been Austin and San Antonio. So it's been spread around a little bit. But like you say, we were very pleased that our Southern region was up 13%, and our northern region was also up 4%.

The only other thing I'll mention, Ken, it's a good call out. Just to build on what Phil said is as we're getting now some traction in our newer markets in the Southern region, specifically Nashville and Fort Myers Naples, that will slightly skew upwards some of the percentages. But we felt very good about our fourth quarter sales. And I would simply add that as we begin 2026, we certainly have seen, and I think some of it's clearly seasonal, we're beginning the selling season right now as opposed to leaving the slowest time of the year in the fourth quarter. We've certainly seen an important improvement in traffic. .

I appreciate those comments. It's -- and they are reported too today, and it's -- our margins are under pressure, the demand seems to be there. Could you comment -- given the intra-quarter orders and closings, could you comment on the margin differential between your intra-quarter closings and your backlog or spread, if you will, as well as are the majority of those intra-quarter closings, I assume they're coming from the lower-priced Smart Series. If you could address those 2 questions.

Well, I'm not sure I completely understood the question, and you may have to ask again.

Okay, sorry. I'll make it clear. Orders and closings per unit that were intra-quarter, so what I call spec, how are those margins compared to the homes that came out of backlog? And I'm assuming most of those intra-quarter orders which were closing for the Smart Series.

Well, yes and no. The Smart Series point. The one thing I'll say is, over the last 12 to 24 months, our business has changed quite noticeably in terms of the significant contribution of spec sales month in, month out. About 10 to 3/4 of our sales are now coming from specs. . And if you go back 5 years ago, it would have been less than 50%, in some cases, less than 40%. So that's been a pretty significant change. And is likely here to stay as long as we're in this situation where we're needing to use rate buy downs to promote sales because, as you well know, the ability to provide a favorable rate buy-down at any kind of a reasonable or at least acceptable cost is one of the conditions is that you can get the home closed within 60 to 90 days of the purchase of the buy-down money, which means it's only going to really work for specs. So having said all that, the majority of 60% to 75% of the closings quarter-to-quarter-to-quarter, all coming from spec sales. Phil, I don't know if you want to add anything to that.

Yes. I mean, our closing GPs in the fourth quarter were 22.6% for getting the charges. We were pretty pleased with that. Are there continued pressures? Yes, we do feel good that our construction cost last year came down about 2%. We were also pleased last year that our cycle time grew by about 5%. So we're making some progress on some of those key areas. Spec margins in general are lower than to-be-built homes. But the last couple of months, we have seen a slight pickup in our to-be-built business. But we just continue focusing every day on everything we can do to hold those sales prices stable or increase them and also keep margins as high as we can.

The next question comes from Alan Ratner at Zelman. .

It's very impressive, impressive and I'm sure we've got 50 more out ahead of us. So looking forward to it. My first question is on the order strength in the quarter. I was looking and your fourth quarter, obviously up year-over-year, but your fourth quarter orders were actually fractionally higher on a sequential basis as well, which, as far as I can tell, that's the first time that's happened in 2001. So I was hoping you could just talk a little bit about kind of your incentive and pricing strategy through the quarter. Would you say that order strength, at least kind of seasonally is a reflection of improving demand? Or was it more of a concerted effort by you guys to kind of clear through some inventory ahead of year-end, maybe with some higher incentives.

Well, that's a great question. It's actually probably one of the most important questions that as we look week-to-week in terms of our sales activity, I feel like it's little bit of both. I think we wanted to push to get as many completed specs of the -- out to the buyers as we could. I feel like demand is slightly picking up. And I felt like not every market, but in many of our markets, we were we were somewhat pleased with the level of traffic through the fourth quarter. And that is continuing. I think it's too early to make a call. But look, we've been winning for the last number of years about all the pent-up demand and housing is underperforming and on and on and on and on, and more articles have been written about that almost than anything other than affordability. But it feels like we may be starting to see a slight improvement in demand. And I also think, and we'll know when we know we expected our margins to drop at least 200 basis points last year. And of course, they did that and then some. And the margins are likely to remain under pressure, but it's not clear to me at this point that the pressure in '26 will be as much as it was in '25. So hopefully, the things are starting to level off a bit. Again, we'll know when we know. But all things considered, pre charges, we made almost $590 million last year, brought 13% to the bottom line by historical standards, that's pretty good performance. And just putting things in context, we've all seen a whole lot worse. And I think that I'm optimistic about the first 4 or 5 months of the year in terms of demand in the selling season, so we'll see.

Alan, one thing I would add is that we talked about the impairments came primarily from entry-level communities with an ASP under $375 million. It was led by our more challenging markets in Austin and San Antonio. So in general, we've seen a little more pressure on prices and margins on the real entry level, lower price for us, hope that it's going to get a little bit better. We tend to buy at a little higher price point, but that's kind of where things are. .

Got it. No, I appreciate all that detail. And Phil, you kind of touched on the second question I had, which was on those impairments. I guess the first one is a little bit of an accounting nuance. But I'm just curious, if I look at historically, when you've taken charges, they're almost entirely in your fourth quarters. I mean you maybe have some minimal charges thorugh the year, but it looks like fourth quarter is kind of where you generally take larger charges. So I'm curious if there's any accounting reason why that is, at least compared to other builders. And b, I don't know if you disclosed like a watch list of communities that had maybe potential indicators of impairment. But is there any indication that impairment should continue here over the next handful of quarters just based on where some of your margins are trending in your lower price point communities.

Yes, Alan, I appreciate that, and I'll try to get all those points. But to us, it's a business issue. I mean if you look at our business goals, we're in the subdivision business. That's what really matters to us is how we operate the business. And if we're not getting -- we try to get a pace of 3 plus, we try to get margins at 22 plus. And we try to make sure we're focusing all the items, product, presentation salespeople, make sure those levers are working at all times. But we're not getting acceptable pace over a certain period of time. We make the business decision oftentimes to go to price. Of course, the way the accounting rules are basically is that once you get down to about a 10% GP, you kind of get to the point where carry costs, disposal costs exceed that. So the accounting rules kind of force you to do an impairment. But again, to us, it's a business decision. We do look harder at things towards the end of the year for sure. So that's why the majority of those charges in the past have been that way. Although this year, we did a small impairment. So I think it was in the third quarter. But if you look at us today, we own about 25,000 on so lots. We always have a couple of problem subdivisions. Our impairment covered about 1,000 lots. So about 1,000 of the 25 lots. And again, it was in the most affordable stuff. We could have continued grounding through these communities. It may be 1, 1.5, 2 months, maybe at 10%, 12% margins. But our view is when you look at the landscape of the business and the difficulty, especially at those lower price points, we decided to go to that last lever of dropping price that triggered those impairments. But again, we think that's a really good business decision. We expect that pace to pick up. We expect the margin to get back to closer to normal levels, and that's why we did it.

The other thing I'll say, because I've been to the movie that was a long time ago, but back during the Great Recession, when every quarter, you were sort of holding your breath as the builders reported because how many more impairments are coming. And we also felt like there was more coming. This is very different. . I'm not going to say there's no more coming because no one knows that. But what I will say is, as we got towards the end of last year, it was sort of -- let's start 2026 with all cylinders as strong as they can possibly be, whatever thing we think might be a problem, let's deal with it now and let's into 2026 with as many items controlled and behind us as possible.

And Alan. I appreciate that. $10 million was a combination of lot deposit write-offs, prepaid like due diligence write-offs on deals. We're not pursuing anymore because we think to do those deals, it would take a pretty significant cost reduction or other changes in terms. So we walked away from those deals. But again, on average, when you take a $30 million charge on 1,000 lots, if you're looking at $30,000 per lot, which is pretty significant. And hopefully, that's going to increase our pace in margins as we go into this year. .

The next question comes from Buck Horne at Raymond James.

Congrats on navigating a challenging environment and appreciate those -- the color on all the charges as well. I was also -- I was kind of cure about the acceleration in land purchase activity and some of the lot development spend in the fourth quarter. It was up both sequentially and year-over-year. I guess first kind of wondering if any particular markets or regions are getting the bulk of that new spend that you're targeting and is -- should we read into that acceleration if there's -- is that an indication of your confidence levels of kind of the demand that's out there and your growth trajectory? Or how should we interpret that pickup in the land spend?

No, nothing really special. Again, some of our markets are impacted by weather when we get black topping done and those type of things. I mean, we own about 25,000 lots, as Bob said. We try to have about a 1-year supply of finished lots. In that way, we don't go dark, et cetera. And we ended the year with a little over 10,000 finish lots. And again, with our current run rate at 9,000, we feel good about that. So no, nothing really special. We're continuing to do a lot of land development. We self-develop about 80% of our own land. But as far as any strategy or direction, that's just kind of the way the dollars were. We did spend a little bit more money last year toward the end, but just the way it kind of fell.

Okay. That's helpful. I was curious about your Florida trends in particular. I was just wondering because we've seen some signs that resale inventory to start the year in Florida here. It seems to have flipped negative year-over-year. I think you mentioned that Tampa started to improve a little bit. Orlando seems to be steady. Are you sensing that we may have I don't know -- is there any signs of improving traffic demand? Any signs that the stabilization of the resale inventory is helping?

When we look at the 4 Florida markets that we operate in, Orlando, Tampa, Sarasota, Fort Myers Naples. Fort Myers Naples is really new for us. We're very bullish about it. And there, we had significant growth because we went from almost 0 to over 100 and some units last year. but -- and we're expecting pretty meaningful growth there over the next several years. As far as the other 3 where we've been a while, Orlando clearly held up the best. And over the last I would say, 30 to 120, 150 days demand in Orlando has been stronger than Tampa and Sarasota, Tampa was the toughest market for a while, had probably, for whatever reason, the hardest hit for us is Florida, clearly. Tampa business has picked up very importantly. It's not as strong as Orlando at this point, but we're encouraged by what we're seeing. That's for sure. And Sarasota is just sort of so. I think that market is -- it's a very good market, but it's sort of trending along and maybe C+, B-, that kind of thing. So look, we're very interested in Florida, very committed to Florida. It's a huge part of our business. Candidly, we have some of the best leadership teams in our company in Florida. And it's -- so we've been there a long time. And I mean, as was noted, we've been in business 50 years, the first market outside of Columbus, Ohio that we expanded to was Tampa. And the second one after that was Orlando. So we've been in Florida for a long time since 1981 in Tampa and 1985 in Orlando, and we're not -- we're -- we've had a very strong leadership position in those markets. We'll continue to as well as the operation in Sarasota and Fort Myers Naples.

One last one if I can sneak one in. I was curious about just how you're structuring the mortgage rate buydowns right now in terms of what type of program or structure seems to be resonating and getting consumers over the hump. You're kind of a sweet spot target mortgage rate that seems to work best with those buy-downs.

This is Derek. We've been going with a 4, 7/8, 30-year fixed. And we think getting a sub-5 is the key, and that's what really seems to attract the buyers. And on top of that, in some divisions, we offer temporary buydowns. So we get buyers with the first year payment in the 2.875 range. We've run that for quite a while, and that seems to be successful for us, just that sub-5% rate.

That's clearly been our most successful. Recently, we've been tinkering with the 71 arm that other builders have been using a lot, it's -- everybody has their own experiences, to Derek's point, what seems to work best for us is the very straightforward 30-year fix 4 7/8 FHA, VA or conventional. And that's -- in many instances, it's supplemented buydown that Derek mentioned.

And 1 thing to address also is that our mortgage and title operations is very important to us. They only serve them M/I Home customers. We're able to deal individually with customers. And depending on if it's a first-time buyer, there may be a real big need for closing cost assistance. Some people out there that do want to do to-be-built homes that do want a longer-term rate program. So we're able to customize whatever we need to do with an individual customer as opposed to throwing all kind of money to every customer that may or may not need that. So being able to individually deal with customers, we think it's very important to our business.

The next question comes from Alex Barron at Housing Research Center.

I wasn't sure if I missed it. Did you guys give any guidance or outlook for margins for next quarter? Do you feel like go down sequentially? Or is these impairments you took this quarter are going to help stabilize margins?

Alex, you know us. We don't give guidance on things like that. We were pretty pleased with our margins in the fourth quarter. We did deal with problem, communities that thought we needed to with the impairments don't give any guidance. We are working hard on construction costs and cycle time and all those things. We are opening a number of new stores. Again, this year, we did give guidance. We expect the average community count to be up 5% this year. But no, we did not give any guidance as far as margins.

Okay. Did your incentive levels or -- go up in the quarter versus the previous quarter in your orders?

I mean our margins were down a little bit. So are we doing a little bit more on closings in the fourth quarter? Yes, we did. Again, that's reflected in our margins, trying to do the best sub, we can opening all these new stores. We opened 80 stores last year, and anticipate open more than that this year. So that's a big opportunity for us. But hopefully, spring selling season will be a little better than it has been.

Okay. And also, any shift in your strategy as far as what percentage of spec homes you guys are started versus going back towards build-to-order?

No. it will likely -- it's Bob Schottenstein, Alex. It will likely remain about what it's been, which is about, like I said earlier, 2/3 to 3/4 of our business, our spec sales. And I don't see things changing there or on the rate buydown side to incent sales. I don't see any of that changing anytime soon. Obviously, we're all reacting to -- a daily basis to what's happening in the market. As we did mention, we've been encouraged by early traffic improvements here that we've seen through the latter part of the fourth quarter and certainly as we begin 2026.

The next question comes from Jay McCanless at Citizens.

And just to kind of follow on what you were saying there, Bob, are you all seeing similar traffic pick up in both the North and the South? Or is it a little stronger in one region versus the other?

I think that it's not every single 1 of our 17 markets, but certainly most. And I would not say it's particularly regional. Now the last 5 days, things aren't very good anywhere because most people are frozen solid or they're snowed in, including here in Columbus, it's been pretty rough. But in general, we've seen traffic start to pick up. It always does this time of the year, it feels a little better than even a year ago, though to me. .

Okay. That's great. And then Phil, could you talk about in the fourth quarter, your ending gross margin in the backlog, how that compares to what you reported for closing 4Q?

Right now we're doing, as Bob said, 75%, 80% specs. In general, the margins in the backlog are higher than specs. Are the margins at year end, a little higher than you're in a year ago? The answer is yes, that's about 100 basis points difference. But hopefully, we're getting a little better we continue to focus on how we can improve the margins on the specs. So again, we're doing all we can. We did at 22.6% margins in the fourth quarter. So we're hoping margins held up pretty good. .

That's great. And then the next question I had, just thinking about the sales pace for these newer communities you're opening, are you all trying to push a similar sales pace as what you got in '25 or are you trying to be a little more cautious and not wanting to give away too much margin at the beginning of these communities?

Well, we always try to focus on getting that pace at 3 plus. Our store count is up about 5%. But again, you got to be a little more careful opening new stores as far as if you're super aggressive on price and margin, again, you can feel that benefit for a while. So there is a lot of opportunity with these new stores. Hopefully, we've got the right product and the right price to move through there. But we are focusing on trying to keep this pace. It hopefully around 3% or a little better.

Okay. That's great. And then the last one for me, and thank you for the detail on the specs. I guess how are you feeling about MHO's inventory right now and maybe some broader commentary on what you're seeing in the industry? Does it feel like some of the excess spec inventories being drawn down? Or how -- what are you hearing from the divisions on that?

I think we feel really good about where we are. Not to be silly. I mean, if we didn't, we change. But we go into this year, again, a lot of it's community-specific, but we want to be very aggressive in making certain that we have the product, standing product in the field, the inventory, if you will, so that we can take advantage of what should be hopefully, a decent selling environment here over the next 3 to 4 or 5 months. And so I think we feel our strategy is the right strategy. We don't feel we need to do any significant shifts and other than community by community specific things, in general, I think we're very well positioned. .

That's great. And just any industry commentary you've been hearing from the field?

Relating to what issue? .

Relating to inventory, back inventory specifically?

You mean, our people like deep discounting just to move specs or have discount slowed down or are more incentives being paid to third-party realtors or things like that. .

Yes, things like that, that would be great.

Yes. You hear a crazy story now and then about once every 2 days. So I don't think that's anything new. I mean people do what they need to do. Look, I think that knowing on a look back, knowing what 2025 was. If you just said to me, we're going to bring 12% to 13% to the bottom line for the full year. I'd say I'll take it. Well, that's what we did.

Jay, we pay a lot attend to our inventory levels. We do have about 1,000 finished specs, which is a little higher than last year's 800. We do have 5% more stores. We have a few less houses in the field today than we did a year ago. But again, we benefit by better cycle time. We're just trying to be very focused a lot of times, execution doesn't get discussed, but now execution really matters. We're trying to be careful not to put too much inventory in the field, too many finished specs. Again, it depends on is it an attached townhouse community? Is it a higher priced community, is it a higher-priced community? Is a little bit different. But again, I mean, doing 70%, 75% specs, I mean we're relying on sales every week a month, and that's what we have to stay focused on. We were very pleased. If you look at it last year, we closed almost the same number of houses as we did the year before, which was our record 9,000 homes. And obviously, our hopes and plans or we hope to close a few more houses this year than last year, we have more stores. But again, we're staying focused. We try to run a conservative business. We're not trying to put inventory out there too far ahead of ourselves. But again, we feel pretty good about our results.

Absolutely. And one question I forgot. Could you talk -- or can you -- if you talked about it, maybe repeat the commentary on what the margin and new community profit margins on new communities look like?

As far as what the margins are on new communities we're opening versus older communities. Is that your question? .

Correct. Yes. That's it.

Again, that's really a hard question. Last year, we opened 80 stores. I would say, in general, they're pretty close. We have some of these stores that are doing really well and some that aren't doing so hot, it's an individual situation. But overall, we feel pretty good about the new stores we're opening. We're trying to make sure we have the right product and the right price and all those things open the right way. But that's just a really hard question, Jay.

The next question is a follow-up from Ken Zener at Seaport Research Partners.

I wonder if you could comment on the flexibility of the business. So obviously, mortgage buydowns for, let's say, 2/3 of the communities that you have product. You're trying to protect the community, price point, et cetera. But for new communities, given that the communities opened last year and conversely are opening this year, how much of a change to the product type or how you open it up at wet price points? Can you talk to the dynamics that you employ when making those choices on new communities in terms of resetting the let's say, home size or the specs that you're building are? I don't want to use word despec, but they're more simpler in terms of price points. How much flexibility do you really have there when you're coming into opening a community 6 to the months out vis-a-vis the product construction cost type?

I think a lot more flexibility, I think that most people might realize. Look, so much of it is determined by zoning. And so you have to stay within the confines of the permissible zoning parameters. Having said that, usually, those parameters give you a fair amount of flexibility. The amount of internal debate, discussion, analysis, strategy, if you will, that goes into each community planning from the very earliest stages when we think there's a site and I'll use this as an example in Charlotte that we're looking to tie up from the moment that we think that site might be available, the debate occurs within the division. Sometimes it's all the way up to corporate conversations. But what are we going to do with that? If we get that deal done and that becomes a new store for us, what is that store going to look like? What are we going to merchandise in that store? Who is the buyer? And there's -- that's a lot more art and science. I'm not thinking it's rocket like building a rocket ship to the moon, but it is a lot more art and science and you do have some flexibility. And we're -- there is a fair amount of tinkering that takes place we have projects, many of them that will be coming on this year that when we first started planning them, we might have planned to do large homes and now we're looking to do smaller homes, that's a very simple example. But while we may be replanning in a way that the density stays neutral, but we've now -- we're now going to develop it with smaller-sized lots or perhaps the opposite, larger sized lots to take advantage of maybe lot premiums. So that's a huge part of what goes on. And of course, every new land deal in this company before we are in a position where we've made a firm commitment must get approved at the corporate level through our land committee process and the valuation process, which is a discussion involving the specific division and of course, a few of us here at corporate. And even in that, after this thing has been batted back in at the division level, we'll quite often have questions about the product and the product line, what we're really trying to do here. And should we adjust this or that. And certainly, on larger deals where there's multiple product lines or they have a long tail, we may have 2 or 3 land committee calls along the way what are we thinking? How does it look now? That's reconvene in 90 days. So there's a whole lot that goes into that. We're as good as our stores. We're a retailer. We're a very unusual retailer because we reinvent ourselves about every 3 years. The stores that we have out there today 3 years from now, 90% of them will be completely different and because we'll sell through and replace with new. And as Phil mentioned, we're poised to open a whole lot of new stores this year, and we'll be closing out of a number of them, too. So what those stores look like and what we choose to sell, hopefully, meeting the market where it is, who is the buyer, what are we targeting? That's a huge part of the business. huge part of the business. And we've made our fair share of mistakes. So hopefully, we've learned from some of them. And there's times when we've absolutely shifted to a strategy that has turned something that might have just been average into something really good. And so we see something that works in 1 market, we -- that maybe it's a little bit off-the-wall thinking. We'll also try to apply to that in other markets if it makes sense to do so. So it's a very, very big part of the business. doesn't often get a lot of conversation. But it's a terrific question.

There are no further questions at this time. I'll turn the call back over to Phil Creek for closing comments.

Thank you for joining us. Look forward to talking to you next quarter.

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes your conference call for today. We thank you for participating, and we ask that you please disconnect your lines.