Tribe Property Technologies Inc. (TRBE) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Thank you, everyone, for joining us today. My name is [ Vithursanga ] and I will be the operator for today's call. Welcome to the Tribe Property Technologies Fiscal First Quarter 2024 Financial Results Conference Call. This call is being recorded. We will be having a question-and-answer session at the end of the call, which will be limited to analysts only. I would now like to turn the conference over to Jennifer Laidlaw, Vice President of Marketing and Communications. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator, and good afternoon, everyone. Thank you all for joining us. On our call today, we have Tribe CEO, Joseph Nakhla; and our CFO, Angelo Bartolini. I trust that everyone has received a copy of our financial results press release that was issued prior to this call and is also available on our website. Listeners are also encouraged to download a copy of our quarterly financial statements and management discussion and analysis from SEDAR+. Please note, portions of today's call, other than historical performance, include statements of forward-looking information within the meaning of applicable securities laws. These statements are made under the Safe Harbor provisions of those laws. Forward-looking statements that are based on management's current views and assumptions and that this discussion is qualified in its entirety by the cautionary note regarding forward-looking statements that is appended to our news release. Please review our press release and Tribe's reports filed on SEDAR+ for various factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from the projections. We use terms such as gross profit, gross margin, adjusted EBITDA and MRR on this conference call, which are non-IFRS and non-GAAP measures. For more information on how we define these terms, please refer to the definition set out in our management discussion and analysis. In addition, reconciliations between any adjusted EBITDA and net income are included in the press release. The company believes that adjusted EBITDA is a meaningful financial metric as it measures cash generated from operations, which the company can use to fund working capital requirements, service future interest and principal debt repayments and fund future growth initiatives. Adjusted EBITDA should not be construed as an alternative to net income, loss determined in accordance with IFRS. Please note that all financial information is provided in Canadian dollars unless otherwise noted. Following the prepared remarks by Joseph and Angelo, we will conduct a Q&A session, during which questions will be taken from analysts. And with that, I will turn the call over to Tribe CEO, Joseph Nakhla.

Thank you, Jenn. Pleasure to be with all of you, good afternoon. I'm here with the Toronto folks for the last couple of days and until tomorrow. But for all of you joining us from all across the country, thanks for making the time and taking interest. We're thrilled with the results of our Q1. It's highlighted by a 27% improvement in our adjusted EBITDA. It's certainly driven by a reduction in -- and optimization and integration of existing or current -- previous acquisitions and current processes. We obviously finished -- we closed on the Meritus Group acquisition in January, which was really our landing in the GTA market with our condo products. It's been a tremendous acquisition. We're quite pleased to be working with that group, and it's been a great step forward for us. We've obviously announced a large transaction and acquisition of DMSI Holdings earlier in the week. Upon closing of that transaction, which we hope to have completed very shortly, this would actually propel us to approximately $31 million of recurring revenue, annualized recurring revenue coming out of the closing of the acquisition. We're pretty excited about this. It kind of puts us on the national footprint. I'll be speaking a little bit more about this and shortly as well as obviously the announcement of a private placement that was led by one of our biggest shareholders, PROPELR. Outlook of the company looks very, very strong. We're still incredibly excited about the new builds and the movement of buildings coming our way. And now with DMSI, excited about the new verticals that actually opens for us, which I'll be speaking about shortly. I'll hand this over to Angelo to take us through the numbers, please.

Great. Thank you, Joseph. Since joining Tribe, I've been extremely impressed within the business with the potential of its growth and an exciting trajectory and how it can transform the property management industry. It's -- every day is a validation for me. Despite market challenges, Tribe once again delivered a strong financial performance in Q1 with revenue of $5.34 million, an increase of 14.6% compared to 4.7% last year. Revenue growth was positively impacted by the acquisition of Meritus in the fourth quarter. Gross profit for the quarter was $1.84 million compared to $1.44 million in Q1 of '23, representing 28% increase. Gross profit percentage improvement was primarily accomplished through the restructuring and cost reduction efforts. Gross margin percentage was 39% in Q1 compared to 38% in Q1 of last year. Adjusted EBITDA for the first quarter was an outflow of $1.36 million, an improvement of 27% compared to an outflow of $1.86 million first quarter last year. We are very proud of having achieved this 27% improvement in our adjusted EBITDA. Our cost-cutting and restructuring measures are having an impact and continue to do so. I would like to take a deeper dive into the company's revenues. Q1 revenue was up 14.6% on a year-over-year comparison compared to Q1 of last year. Revenue growth was positively impacted by the acquisition of Meritus in the fourth quarter and larger growth is expected with the previously mentioned DMSI acquisition. Furthermore, when we make an acquisition, we often inherit a wide range of property management contracts from the predecessor company. Over the past 3 quarters, we have been reviewing a number of these contracts and have chosen to transfer some of the lower-margin producing contracts to other management companies. So what we've done is essentially traded off some revenue growth for margin improvement. This is reflected in the company's overall gross margin improvement over the past year. Moving to the graph on the right. Average MRR or Monthly Recurring Revenue per community. I am pleased to note that in Q1, our MRR per community was $2,791, which is an improvement of 12.7% compared to our MRR per community in Q1 of last year. Just as a reminder, when we acquire companies, they often do not generate as much revenue per customer as we do. We basically take these assets, we digitize them, and we start delivering tech-elevated service, which allows us to increase the revenue per door. In addition, we have a number of tools and services in our digital marketplace that allows us to generate even more revenue per door. Revenue generators, as a reminder, include the following. We have software and service, which is our MRR and very sticky recurring revenue. Software and service accounted for 84% of our total revenue in Q1 of '24. Software and service fees were $4.49 million in Q1 '24, an increase of 7.1% as compared to $4.19 million Q1 of last year. We have transactional fees, partnerships and digital services, whereby we generate revenue in-person or in-app purchases. This year, we were focusing quite a bit more on our banking services and financial transactions. We have approximately $250 million of funds that we now manage on behalf of our customers. Transactional revenue was $846,000 in Q1 of 2024 compared to $467,000 in Q1 of last year, an increase of 81% year-over-year. From a profitability EBITDA stand perspective, we are taking significant measures to get to profitability. We are, this year, dedicated to improving profitability by reducing costs and optimizing efficiencies within our operations. Tribe's commitment to achieving profitability is unwavering as strategic steps are being taken every day to position the company for sustainable financial success. We have implemented additional cost reduction strategies, which include employing process improvements, cost optimizations, head count reduction and consolidation of back office systems. We are confident about the company's growth prospects and continue to be committed to improving our profitability while increasing revenues and strengthening our market leadership position. That includes my financial update for now, and I'll pass it back to you, Joseph.

Thank you, Angelo. So, we've announced the acquisition of the DMS Group, and it actually constitute 3 organizations within one under the same heading. DMS Property Management is a well-known multi-residential rental property management company, essentially works with institutional rental as we call it, certainly one of the best in the country, operates mostly in Ontario out in the GTA market. And we see a tremendous opportunity, especially with its leadership and operators and great staff to expand their footprint outside of the markets they currently operate in. Del Management Solutions is a company that has deep government contracts with project management services, an area that we actually don't play in. Tribe Property Management, traditionally, has not been involved in government contracts, especially in the residential housing. There's quite a bit of expertise and know-how and actually compliance is required for us to qualify for these transactions. Historically, we haven't played in there. And it's pretty darn exciting for us to be bringing that expertise in-house where we can actually take that and just not leverage it in the GTA market, but actually start leveraging that across the geography that we have in other markets we operate. And Delcom Management Services, a commercial management company, again, in the GTA market. We do have probably surprised a lot of people that we actually have, Tribe has a commercial management muscle that it has needed to do a lot of the residential community, especially the mixed users, rental communities that we actually manage will have some retail, some office. So, we actually developed that skill set essentially in-house to add. And again, it all runs on our tech stack. It's a stratified unit, whether it's commercial or residential, still acts the same way. It has the same rights and has to see arguably the same complications. What we're excited about, obviously, is the profile of the company. It gives us a good bolster of the revenue, a great customer base, solid EBITDA profile or net income profile as indicated in our press release, and it really propels us to this $31 million annual rate, run rate including the acquisition, which we anticipate to be closing shortly. You did want to touch a little bit more about the deal structure. Again, it's in the press release. I do want to say that we obviously thank our great bank partner, The Bank of Nova Scotia for -- and Roynat and their executives for working with us through this transaction. We obviously financed the transactions through $7 million of debt that was announced a while ago, $3 million in cash. That's a part of our $3.5 billion private placement that we just announced concurrently with the transaction and $3 million in the vendor take back that's related to the performance of the business over the next couple of years. We're quite pleased with this transaction. I'd like to maybe even take an extra second and just speak to the quality of the executives that we're actually taking on here. The 2 gentlemen, Paul and Rob, that run that organization are great human beings with known people to us. Most importantly, incredibly strong business people in the industry, incredibly well respected as well with a tremendous brand. It may not be acknowledged to everybody, but half the company was owned by the Tridel Group. The Tridel family is a family that's been a supporter of ours for years and it's just a first-class organization, not only a first-class condo development company, and they don't need me to tell them that. The world knows all of that. They were building condos before anybody else even knew what a condo was. So, we're very pleased with this transaction, and I look forward to giving an update on that as we go ahead. One of the great questions -- one of the many great questions that I receive when I travel, tell the world what our story is, well, explain to us a little bit more different metrically about how your buildings do against other buildings. And we've finally been able to accumulate for the year of '23 and Q1 as well, a great set of data, thanks to a report that's been generated by a company called Eli, which uses the -- it has artificial intelligence stack of data sets that allows you to benchmark different line items and expenses associated for every condo corporation in the country. And what you'll see here is some very really good information that can highlight and speak to the ability for us to really make for healthy buildings. You'll see on the top left-hand side, because we influence a significant number of the developers that are working and building brand-new communities, we've been able to see here. And again, this is against across all the population. This is the spend per category, per square foot. And you'll see -- what you're seeing here is our buildings tend to be running significantly more efficiently than others. You'll see on the right-hand side, the revenue from reserve fund, which is essentially the ability for a building to generate more revenue on its own via its savings and this is obviously a function of what Angelo spoke to earlier by us really paying quite a bit of attention and working really hard to partner with best-in-class bank and services here to be able to generate more revenue for our buildings. And it's also an indication of how healthy our buildings are. We've always, from day 1, promoted the importance of condo corporations to save for a rainy day. It was always a tough sell when the market was flipping every day and people weren't really thinking of their building or their condo as a home. They're thinking of it as just a stepping stone for a short stint. That's changing as obviously, interest rates go up and people really need to start treating this building and taking care of it. And that's why a lot of our buildings, as you can see, are in much healthier shape. And you also see that, that doesn't go too far and applies itself in the insurance per square foot. For those that live in Western Canada, especially in BC, know how big of a problem this has been in the last 3, 4 years. And as you can tell, a significant amount of discounts that our buildings receive compared to other buildings in terms of the actual envelope insurance and that's just purely a function of having data showing that a building that's better managed is more attractive for the underwriters. And then finally, which probably would be obvious to most people, buildings that we manage run lower cost. On the admin side, our apps are highly engageable. The ability for us to suppress paper and be able to have communication and activities around the building, all happen through the application. Obviously, it goes a long way in allowing us to see every building a significant amount of admin per square foot, as you can see here. So, what's next for us? We're still steadfast in our commitment to the goals that we've set for this year, increased monthly recurring revenue. Obviously, in this particular case, it's going to be very strongly aided organically. And with the acquisition complete, additional acquisitions to augment organic growth. We've definitely delivered an incredibly healthy company to us. That also plays a major role in the EBITDA line, drive efficiencies in the business and improve profitability. As I always say, we're not tone-deaf. We know what the market is requiring for us to do. And we've built a national infrastructure. We built the infrastructure that allows us to make big acquisitions. We feel very, very strong and quite pleased with where we are as a national player in both institutional rental and the condo space across the country now and we are just head down, really focused to get to profitability, and we're getting very, very close and continue to innovate. At the end of the day, what differentiates us is our technology and our tech backed services that we've been able to enhance and we'll continue to be investing in that, not necessarily at an expense to the EBITDA, but just really by identifying more and more features that are very specific to the needs of our customers. So, with that very specific despite inflation and obviously, interest rates, from our point of view, we do not see any slowing down in existing buildings coming to us. We'll continue to add brand-new communities and existing communities. I'm not going to tell you that there's no slowing down in new construction. Of course, there is. But anything that broke ground and aim to be delivered in the next 2 to 3 years is going to get delivered. The money is already in and the investments have already been made. So, we're -- we still stand really strong in the backlog that's going to be coming in. And now that with arguably one of the biggest national footprint and scale in the country, we're starting to really take advantage of our digital services and really deliver value. I shared with you a slide that shows how our buildings are lowering their insurance cost, lowering the admin costs. We're going to keep driving towards that. Anybody that fits within our ecosystem, these homes that represents probably now closer to 130,000, 140,000 people. We're going to continue to negotiate deals that they couldn't get on their own, whether it's financial services, insurance services, I can go on a long list of items. And you'll see us make more and more moves towards sustainability of buildings with EV demands on the rise, EV charging demands on the rise and most of the buildings are not there and obviously, lowering the carbon offset. And that's going to be this concept of healthy building that we will be pushing out more and more, we'll be vocal more about. And then we have a very healthy pipeline of proposals and we had a great year last year in terms of generating through our digital content strategy, generating a very, very strong pipeline of leads in the markets that we're in and that's obviously a big part of what we do. We have a very strong digital content team and ability to go out there and engage intellectually with a solution purpose, different condo corporations around Canada and they reach out to us and ask us for more solutions. And we've been very fortunate to be able to deliver them solutions across the board and it's all reflected in the organic growth that we've been able to experience. And again, expect record revenue in Q2 '24 boosted, obviously, with DMSI. We'll hopefully have the closing shortly here and we'll be able to benefit at least a couple of weeks of their increase of the revenue line, but obviously, we continue to still stand strong in our own feet. And we'll continue to be very active in the acquisition space. We won't take too long of a breather. There's a lot of opportunities within the organization, but we'll continue to be looking at accretive solutions and companies that can add to the bottom line. I'll pause. I see a few hands up. So, I'm happy to take some questions. Me and Angelo.

Thank you. And with that, we'll open the call to questions. Just a reminder that questions will be limited to analysts only. The first question comes from Suthan Sukumar of Stifel.

Congrats on the acquisition. Joe, maybe first question for you. How are you thinking about the organic profile of the business on a consolidated basis? And what do you see as potential levers that could drive upside?

Yes, absolutely. We really like our organic opportunities. We're not massive fans of the closing cycles. Our business is sometimes can be finicky in terms of the speed we close some of these deals, just by way of some of the buildings require AGMs or what have you, but I'll spare you the gory details. We're quite pleased with our backlog. Very, very healthy. We've never had a bigger backlog than we currently have both in brand new construction that's waiting, that's waiting to be completed, so we can take it over for our software licensing and support and management support. So, we feel really good about that. What we're really excited about as well is how we leverage this great acquisition of DMSI. And that's really a function of going out to some existing customers of ours, especially on the institutional rental side and even on the government side. And then they know about the expertise that we acquired and bringing in these very strong execs to come in and help us bring these deals over the line because of their expertise and knowledge. I think one of the most obvious places is I said it from day 1, our goal is to be the go-to company when it comes to residential living. If you live anywhere, you should be thinking why I might not be managed by a Tribe or why I'm not using a Tribe solution. And this acquisition really created multiple new sandboxes, essentially in residential living that we want to be playing in and we even didn't discuss it. I didn't bring it up, but one of which is obviously student housing, which we have -- we've been courting for a couple of years now.

Angelo, maybe a question for you here on the financials. I saw the note on the breach covenants. Is that something that you're in negotiations to explore relief? Or is that something that could be addressed with the new profile of the business here?

Yes, it's all being reset. It wasn't a surprise to anybody. It was forecasted it was part of the plan in terms of how would we reset the lending facility and the covenants. So, it is being reset. And going forward, there's similar metrics, similar type metrics, and we're in good shape.

And then just when you kind of look out here for this year, next year, what sort of goals do you have for deleveraging the business?

Yes. Well, we're planning on exiting Q3 becoming EBITDA positive and hitting positive EBITDA in Q1 -- or sorry, Q4. And then by Q1, we should be getting into a phase where we are free cash flow positive. So, we'll be generating proper -- like the cash flow that will enable us to operate and then reinvest in the business and in acquisitions.

Congrats again. I'll pass the line.

Thank you, Suthan.

Next question is from Gianluca Tucci Haywood Securities.

Perhaps just the follow-up question on the organic growth. So, considering the acquisition that you just announced, like how should we be thinking about cross-selling opportunities or synergies on the revenue line to supercharge that organic growth?

Gian, look, thanks, you're calling me out because I actually didn't answer the full question that Suthan asked about the organic numbers, which I think is fair. And it was unintentional, but thanks for recalibrating me with the analyst union making sure to keep me honest, which is great. I think the rule of thumb for us is moving forward. Probably or organically, we should be aiming for about 15% increase, just to be very specific, metrically. In terms of cross-selling, we don't have too many customers with the acquisitions that we've made. We do have 1 or 2 common customers, whereby we don't overlap in the asset, obviously, which is -- or even the geography. So, it kind of is a natural place for us to start expanding our footprint, the things that the customers of ours that love about our solutions that we couldn't do. We didn't have the geography or the strength in the GTA market, we can now double down on. And in the case of DMSI, they're really just operating in the GTA. So, the world is oyster, taking some further products and services that they've worked on quite a bit and actually pushing it out to coming out where we actually are very strong, for example, in British Columbia and Alberta. So, I'm not ready to give you full a bit more of a guess work. If I was to say to you, absolutely, we could take these customers and increase these types of products. We've done quite a bit of a deep dive into the product composition and how they all fit within our footprint from both customer sets and we're pleased about it, let's just say that. But that's going to be the work and the heavy lifting that we're going to be doing as soon as we close on the transaction.

And perhaps just on M&A. So after this one, how should we be thinking about the pace of -- and so, a, the pace and b, the capacity for Tribe to continue acquiring this year? Like how long of a digestion process should we be thinking about the company having with DMSI?

Great question. I love the term digestion, it's really what it feels like some times. In this particular case, I do want to make a strong point that is, DMSI is an incredibly healthy and well-operated company. So really, this isn't a function of us coming in and trying to fix a whole bunch of stuff. It's really more of a collaborative approach of how to broaden the product sets across the board and actually expand deeper into the relationships we have and the geography that we've acquired. But to answer your question specifically, we have always said, we've always wanted to strengthen our position in the GTA market. I think the last 2 acquisitions illustrate how serious we are about this. I've always also said that we're working our way up the pyramid. But it doesn't take a rocket scientist to know that we've got some limitation in terms of how we can do this in terms of the dollar and cents and ensuring that we have the dry powder to get it done. And we've got plans for this and we're feeling pretty strongly about our ability to get it done. But we won't be slowing down too much. There are assets that we really like and we're always constantly looking at different assets in the market, but there are some stuff that we're closer to making decisions on and we won't be taking our foot off the gas too much, but we will take a breather and ensure that we get to that profitability line in a really good shape.

Next question is from Kiran Sritharan of Eight Capital.

Congratulations again on that large acquisition. And maybe that's where I'll start. Can you maybe compare the Tribe portfolio to that of DMSI's. Tribe, especially up H2 has a -- that typically has a higher quality, higher ARPU building. How does DMSI compare there and expand your capabilities with the type of clientele you service?

Yes, that's a great question. Thanks for that, Kiran. So, just to remind everybody, not everybody is in our day and live and breathe what we do. The DMSI 3 companies do not do condo management. So, our condo population cannot be compared to anything they have and vice versa. But the ARPU dollar revenue and the quality and the gross margin on the revenue is of the highest quality of DMSI. That's frankly, the most attractive thing about that business is that the executive team, the way they've gone about building the business and their ability to generate the revenue that they can across the different product lines that they have. So, to give you an exact number, we're a little early days, but we'll be able to communicate that in the next quarter. But I would say it's either similar to our rental portfolio or I would even argue, in some cases, even better from a revenue per door.

And then for my second one here. Angelo, you touched earlier on some of the profitability targets for the year entering next year, any assumption on how the DMSI integration should flow for you to get to those targets? And maybe also it's a good opportunity to get an update on some of the package integration and the optimization methods, measures that were progressing on our last call.

So look, I mean, their net income, $2.4 million, slightly higher on an EBITDA basis. That helps us significantly to achieve our targets. We plan to grow that number as well because there's going to be additional revenue synergies combined with Tribe. So, as we progress through this year and into next year, we'll see more and more benefits of this combination starting with the top line, but then hitting our bottom line. And then with our existing business, we have been -- we started a program last year. You started to see the results of the improvement on the EBITDA line and on the gross margin. That continues on, but we're also amping it up. There was a dozen acquisitions done in the course of the last couple of years in Tribe and that comes with different systems and different processes. And although, the journey had started to kind of bring those together, it's really started in earnest bringing it on to one platform, combining everything on the Yardi platform. early last fall. And we're still -- we've just now gotten everything integrated properly, and we're starting now to translate the IT part of that into workflows and starting to drive the synergies and the efficiencies that have been on a single platform. And so that's going to allow us to amp up the efficiencies and the savings and it's going to hit the bottom line. So, it's a combination of what we're doing on our existing business and just with where we're starting off with DMSI and how we're going to grow together and achieve greater profitability together is what's really driving those margins. And really, you're going to start seeing really the full impact of that kind of into 2025. It doesn't happen just overnight. But these are some of the early day benefits that we get and then it will continue to amp up throughout 2025. So, that was the first part of your question. I'm not sure I got the second part of your question completely.

I think it was on the background integration, and I think that was well answered as well.

There are no further questions, so I'll now pass the call back to Joseph Nakhla for closing remarks.

Well, thank you, everyone. I want to just really put a word of gratitude to the group that worked incredibly hard to get this most recent transaction over the line, our banking partner, our bankers who have unwavering, believing us and our staff that's been working incredibly hard and DMSI and their team and their shareholders, first class groups to work with and we're really excited to be working with them right through the process. So, we thank you for your support. We never been more excited about where the company is at. It's finally at the point now from a national point of view, national footprint point of view as well as revenue run rate to start seeing its unlock in its potential. So, we thank you for the support to get us here.