Anywhere Real Estate Inc. (NYSE:HOUS) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Anywhere Real Estate Inc. (NYSE:HOUS) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript February 23, 2023

Operator: Good morning and welcome to the Anywhere Real Estate Year End 2022 Earnings Conference Call via webcast. Today’s call is being recorded and a written transcript will be made available in the Investor Information section of the company’s website tomorrow. A webcast replay will also be made available on the company’s website. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Anywhere Senior Vice President, Alicia Swift. Please go ahead, Alicia.

Alicia Swift: Thank you, Dennis. Good morning and welcome to the year-end 2022 earnings conference call for Anywhere real estate. On the call with me today are Anywhere, CEO and President. Ryan Schneider; and Chief Financial Officer, Charlotte Simonelli. As shown on Slide 3 of the presentation, the company will be making statements about its future results and other forward-looking statements during this call. These statements are based on the current expectations and the current economic environment. Forward-looking statements and projections are inherently subject to significant economic competitive litigation, regulatory, other uncertainties, and contingencies, many of which are beyond the control of management, including among others industry and macroeconomic developments.

The impact of such developments on consumer demand and the incurrence of liabilities that are in excess of amounts accrued in connection with the pending litigation. Actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied in the forward-looking statements. Important assumptions and factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements are specified in our earnings release issued today, as well as in our annual and quarterly SEC filings. In October 2022, the company initiated a plan to integrate Owned Brokerage Group and Title Group however, based on industry and business developments during the fourth quarter of 2022, the company has determined that its reportable segments will remain consistent at December 31, 2022 with prior period For those who listen to the rebroadcast of this presentation, we remind you that the remarks made herein are as of today, February 23 and have not been updated subsequent to the initial earnings call Now I will turn the call over to our CEO and President.

Ryan Schneider

Ryan Schneider: Thank you, Alicia. Good morning, everyone. Over the past few years, Anywhere has made powerful progress on our transformation. We entered 2022 with real momentum and even as the housing market worsened in the year, we leveraged our unique advantages, stayed focused on our priorities and took quick actions that enabled us to deliver $6.9 billion of revenue and $449 million operating EBITDA We accelerated our cost reductions from a target of $70 million to realize over $150 million of cost savings in the year. We rigorously prioritized our growth investments in CapEx and we capitalized on the improving competitive environment. We remained committed to growing our advantaged positions in our existing businesses, especially franchise, luxury and transaction services along with simplifying the transaction for agents and consumers.

Now looking back on 2022, it was a rapidly changing year for housing with substantial declines in the market that got worse every single quarter. Effectively all the market decline was from a drop in unit transactions culminating with Q4 market volume down more than 30% Higher mortgage rates continued to put pressure on affordability and these higher mortgage rates are hurting this new supply of inventory as many homeowners are locked into their current home with low mortgage rates. I am incredibly proud how our great agents and franchisees are taken care of customers, even in the midst of this tough housing market as they continued to demonstrate their value in the marketplace.2023 looks like a volatile year where the housing market will be meaningfully lower than 2022 driven by a substantial drop in unit transactions.

Industry 2023 forecast for transactions are typically in the 4 million to 4.5 million unit range down 10% to 20% from 2022 and remember, unit transaction declines have a disproportionate impact on our business as unit declines also impact our mortgage and title opportunities and we’ll see what happens on the price side of the volume and we expect Q1 2023 market volume to be down around 30% versus 2022 where we expect those year-over-year quarterly in comparisons to improve throughout the year. And I still believe the outlook for housing over the decade is strong and most importantly and potentially excitingly right now, we may be at or near a bottom already. We have all seen a number of the housing indicators in the macro economy exhibit more stability.

In outlook, from December 2021 to November 2022, our year-over-year volume comparisons all showed open volume lower than our closed volume, effectively showing housing results decelerate, that flipped in December 2022. Both in December 2022 and January 2023, our open volume comparisons were higher than our closed volumes. So even with the tough and likely volatile 2023 market ahead, I’m increasingly optimistic about our position and the opportunities in front of us. So first, we are laser focused on change in how we operate our company to deliver greater efficiency and enhance our value proposition. We realized $150 million in cost savings in 2022 and later in this call, Charlotte will share the equally powerful efficiencies we are expected to drive in 2023.

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Our excitement in this area is not just about lower costs, it’s about re-architecting our business for greater success in the future. We are reimagining our real estate brokerage offices to be more efficient, flexible, and integrated with transaction services like title and mortgage, which means we can provide fewer but more impactful agent and consumer support costs. Building on our past investments to digitize our operations, we are automating processes across brokerage and title, removing work in friction for agents and consumers and while we’ve lowered our marketing spend for 2023 given market conditions, we are excited, how we’re using a more digital marketing mix to deliver greater value for agents and franchisees. Second, we are rigorously prioritizing our growth investments, which include continuing to expand our powerful franchise business leaning into our luxury leadership position, and driving innovation in our nationally scaled title and mortgage businesses.

Most importantly, we like the better competitive environment that we have seen evolve in 2022 and the competitive differentiation we are achieving. We believe our results demonstrate a flight to quality and that there will be growth benefits for us when the market rebounds. We experienced record franchise sales of 2022 bringing in substantial new companies and helping our existing companies grow via M&A. We continue to have strong growth in our Anywhere Advisors agent base up 4% year-over-year organically and most excitingly in this better competitive environment, we were able to recruit at better economics than in the past few years. And as we’ve been sharing with you throughout the year, we continued to have record high agent retention in our Owned Brokerage business.

Finally, we recently brought to market a new innovative multi-franchisee title joint venture opportunity as part of our franchise value proposition and are in the process of launching the first three in Florida and California. Even in a challenging market, we like the flight to quality that we’re seeing in the better competitive environment and our growth vectors which together, we believe will pay substantial dividends for us when the market recovers. Now I will turn it over to Charlotte to discuss our results in more detail.

Charlotte Simonelli: Good morning, everyone. 2022 was a challenging year for the housing market, but we are excited about the progress we’ve made and the position we are into further our leadership in this industry. We continue to deliver meaningful operating EBITDA and have taken the necessary steps to improve Anywhere’s financial and operational performance with our accelerated cost reductions and prioritization of our investments to drive growth. Now, I will highlight our full-year 2022 and Q4 financial results. Full year revenue was $6.9 billion and operating EBITDA was $449 million. Q4 revenue was $1.3 billion, down 33% in line with our transaction volume decline. Q4 operating EBITDA was $12 million down versus prior year due to lower transaction volume, higher agent commission costs and various other items like the sale of our underwriter business offset in part by additional cost savings.

Our business delivered well above that number in the quarter but operating EBITDA was reduced by several specific items booked in Q4, including write-offs in our franchise business and at our GRA JV, as well as additional legal accruals. Cash on hand at the end of 2022 was $214 million and full year free cash flow was negative $159 million due to a large negative working capital use in Q1 2022. This was driven by our 2021 outsized performance, which drove sizable accruals by year end ’21 which were paid in Q1 2022. We ended the year with the senior secured leverage ratio of 0.77 times and a net debt leverage ratio of 5.1 times. We are pleased with the progress we have made on our balance sheet, we have a long-dated maturity stack and have lowered our cost of capital.

We redeemed the 2023 notes in November and now have limited debt maturities until 2026. Now let me go into more detail on our business segment performance. Our Anywhere Brands business, which includes leads and relocation generated $670 million in 2022 operating EBITDA. Operating EBITDA decreased $81 million year-over-year primarily due to lower revenue related to transaction volume declines, partially offset by decreases in operating and marketing costs. Our relocation business substantially outperformed 2021 and even exceeded its pre-COVID 2019 full year performance driven both by cost efficiencies and new client signings. Our Anywhere Advisors operating EBITDA was negative $86 million, down $195 million versus 2021 However, this business generated $287 million in operating EBITDA before intercompany royalties and marketing fees paid to our franchise business.

Our agent base was up 4% year-over-year, like-for-like and commission splits were up 203 basis points year-over-year. And for 2023 even as overall market volumes are anticipated to decline, we expect continued split pressure driven mostly by continued agent mix as the higher producing agents who earned the highest splits will continue to drive more of our volume. We will also have pressure from previous recruiting amortization. That said, 2023 split pressure is expected to look more like what we experienced in Q4 2022 where splits were about 130 basis points higher year-over-year. Anywhere Integrated Services delivered $9 million in operating EBITDA in 2022. Operating EBITDA declined $191 million year-over-year due to lower mortgage JV earnings lower purchase and refinance volumes and lower earnings due to the sale of our title underwriter business.

As you have already seen in our 8-K, December open transaction volume was down 35%. Our January open volume was down 31%. And we expect our Q1 closed volumes to be down about 30% year-over-year, which will drive our Q1 operating EBITDA unusually negative. Consistent with industry forecasts, we expect the quarterly volume numbers to improve throughout the year but estimate that our annual transaction volumes will decline about 15% to 20%. With this range of volume declines, our 2023 operating EBITDA will be below 2022. But despite to weak housing market, we expect our operating free cash flow to be modestly positive driven by favorable working capital, robust savings programs, focused investments and judicious cash management. As Ryan has mentioned, we have a relentless focus on driving efficiency in this challenging housing market.

In 2022, we once again demonstrated our ability to rapidly change with market conditions delivering efficiencies and executing a $150 million in cost savings. These are comprised of the original $70 million in savings we targeted at the beginning of the year and another $80 million we proactively drove in the back half as market conditions eroded. For 2023, we expect to deliver about 200 million in additional cost reductions, including carryover of approximately $50 million of actions taken in 2022. Let me give you more detail on how we are thinking about these cost savings programs. The largest part of our cost structure today is tied to our operational real estate footprints, this includes the physical brick and mortar of both our brokerage and title operations but also the other support components like staffing, tools and resources and other non-agent activities.

As Ryan said, we are transforming our physical space locations both in quantity and in the way we deliver services to agents and customers. We are also advancing our technology and product solutions, which not only drive cost efficiencies for us, but also improve the agent value proposition. Second, we continued to reduce our operating cost to better match the housing market demand and changing how we work. We have lowered our headcount down 11% from June 2022, as we right-size for this market. Other examples of our savings programs include our ongoing efforts in procurement ensuring our marketing spend is positioned to deliver the highest ROI, identifying software synergies and prudently managing other corporate expenses. As much as possible, these actions should not impact our agent and franchise partners, nor our plans to transform the consumer experience, however, these savings will be offset in part by inflation in our people costs, software costs and litigation costs driven by two class action jury trials, which are scheduled this year to name a few.

And while the housing market remains a challenge, we continued to prioritize investing for growth while driving efficiencies for today and tomorrow. We have made progress against the goals we shared with you at our Investor Day, both on our savings targets and in creating an improved agent experience and look forward to sharing further progress against these goals in future calls. Now let me turn the call back to Ryan for some closing remarks.

Ryan Schneider: Thank you, Charlotte. Anywhere responded to the challenging 2022 for housing with agility. We reimagined how we operate and strengthened our financial profile while continuing to make strategic progress and invest for growth. In 2023, we remain committed to growing our advantaged positions especially in franchise, luxury and transaction services and simplifying the transaction for agents and consumers. Standing here today, in February, we really like what looks to be a better competitive environment for us, and potentially most excitingly based off the data in our book from December and January, we may have reached the bottom of the housing downturn. We really like our positioning to win, especially as the market rebounds. With that, we will take your questions.

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Q&A Session

Operator: Your first question is from the line of John Campbell with Stephens. Please go ahead.

John Campbell: Hi, I want to check back on the rule of thumb you guys have provided in the past around the 1% volume swing kind of equating to $15 million of EBITDA sensitivity. Is that still a good measure to consider? And then also on the $200 million, how should we be thinking about the net impact for the year?

Charlotte Simonelli: Yes. It’s a great question, John. I think, the $15 million is still pretty close, I think what I would say is when the volume declines are more heavily based in size, that can impact our business little bit more, because there is a knock-on impact to title and mortgage. So you can — it’s there. It’s definitely still a good analog to use. As far as the $200 million, I don’t think that’s the flow-through is going to be different than what we’ve seen in other years. As you know, most of it flows through, however, we do have those offsets that I mentioned in the script like enhanced people costs and some inflation around software and litigation. So I can’t give you an exact percentage, but the flow-through is pretty consistent with what we’ve seen in previous years.

John Campbell: Okay. That’s very helpful. I’m sorry, Ryan,

Ryan Schneider: John, if I can build on that a little bit, I wanted to just double down on a couple of things there. One is Charlotte’s point and I said it in my script, when the decline is all units, it is a disproportionate hit on us because it hurts the mortgage and title opportunities, right, and we clearly see that in our 2022 results, when units were down pretty dramatically, both in the market and for us, right? So that’s a big thing. The other thing on the cost thing is, it does give just the question how volatile 2023 is going to be, right, in terms of what happens on the cost side, because obviously 2022 is a pretty wild housing market right? We had all those unit declines. We have the rate environment change, political stuff, high inflation, et cetera, and I chose the word volatile in my script for a reason.

The biggest uncertainty is the housing market itself, right, and lower unit transaction forecast and we’ll see what happens on price and depending on what happens with that, we will probably drive some of our cost base also, right? We’re rooting for a stronger year but that would probably mean we’d bring some cost back, if it’s a more challenging year, then obviously we keep looking there but there is also the uncertainty on the competitive side. I said we like the competitive environment that we’ve got, that’s evolved and I think there’ll be some real questions about which companies are going to prosper and which ones are going to struggle in a kind of type of year and so we like our relative position, what we’re seeing on the growth side, we’ll see if there’s any opportunities there that might create for us that would change our spending potentially and then another area of volatility for 2023 is litigation, right, Charlotte mentioned that, that’ll be a cost headwind for us.