UMH Properties, Inc. (UMH) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Joining me today on NYSE Floor Talk is Sam Landy. He is the President and CEO at UMH Properties. Sam, it's wonderful to have you here. Thanks for joining me today.

Great to be here, and thank you for having me.

So congratulations are in ordering. You just rang the opening bell to celebrate 55 years in business. It's an amazing milestone.

So Sam tell me, what I think is driving that kind of longevity and enabling you to remain in business for such a long time.

Part of it is the necessity of affordable housing, that manufactured home communities are hard to build, it's hard to replace them, but we've had 55 years' experience finding good acquisitions, renovating the communities. We've adjusted to whatever economic conditions we had to adjust to. There was a time it was easy to finance our customers, then that became difficult. We went to rental homes, and we're now renting out 1,000 homes per year.

So now over the years, you've acquired a lot of properties. Tell me what's enabled you to be successful with your strategy of buying turnaround properties, making the needed improvements and how you're able to add value?

Originally, we try to stay in the same geographic footprint because it was easy management; Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana. We specialized in communities near each other because that was very efficient. But after COVID, we sort of discovered how great our business was. As good as we thought it was, it became even better when through COVID, we maintained 95% rental home occupancy and 98% collections. And we realize people will do anything in their power to keep this house. They're renting 1,000 square foot, 3-bedroom 2-bed house on a 5,000 square foot lot. And even if they lost a job during COVID or couldn't work as a waiter or waitress, they found other jobs and found the way to pay the rent because they didn't want to lose these houses. They have their own drive way, their own shed, no common wall neighbor above, below or beside them. And we realized how desirable our product is and how cost competitive we are and realize we can go to new locations. So when we went to Dothan, Alabama, originally, we might not have gone there because housing is not that expensive in Dothan, but as a rental product, we're competitive against any other form of housing, and we started to geographically move, and that's worked incredibly well.