Ryan Schneider: Well, look, first off, we’re very happy to mitigate the risk with the nationwide settlement and obviously protecting our agents and franchisees from that. Exposure was a really important thing, and we feel glad we’ve accomplished that. And then obviously we can spend our management time and dollars on growing the business and supporting those folks. We’re not going to speculate on anything related to the DOJ. We do believe in the world that we need fewer mandatory MLS rules. We love the value agents provide and we are always thinking through different strategic ways that markets may evolve. But we were excited to get our settlements done, get the preliminary approval back in November and we look forward to the final approval on May 9th. And beyond that, I don’t think we’re in the speculation business.
Matthew Bouley: Yes. Got it. Okay. That’s helpful. Secondly, maybe just kind of zooming into the more recent kind of market trends. I think you said January, excluding the extra day was sort of up 4%. It sounds like you had a good result there in December as well. So just kind of delving into that a little bit, kind of what are you seeing regionally? Rate volatility has been extreme as always, these past few weeks, so kind of any additional kind of unpacking of those trends over these past few weeks? Thank you.
Ryan Schneider: Yes. So look, it’s obviously any time that you’re up versus down is good, and so that’s a good thing right there. You all see the same rate stuff we see, so I won’t try to read you too much of that. The geography mixes are different out there. Florida remains quite strong. We wish we had more inventory to sell in Florida. That is just kind of an awesome market that’s doing great. New York is kind of lagging. New York, both Q4 and full year volume was down more than the market, national numbers and more than our portfolio. It’s a big market for us. We love it. I’ll bet on New York coming back. But it’s been a little bit of a headwind. And then like I said on the call, we’re seeing listings taking be about flat basically, maybe a little bit positive year-over-year, but the places where listings are the best is actually in the luxury area we’re the leader, and we like that.
We’re seeing cash offers at pretty much historical high levels. As I said in the script, we’re seeing home selling in the first two weeks in our portfolio historically high levels. And so end of the day there is more demand than there is supply. Lower rates is going to help unlock more supply, obviously and we’re rooting for that. And then the geographic mix out there is definitely different by part of the country, but we’re excited that it’s a little better than last year.
Matthew Bouley: Great. Thanks Ryan. Good luck guys.
Ryan Schneider: Thank you.
Operator: Your next question comes from Tommy McJoynt with KBW. Please go ahead.
Tommy McJoynt: Hey. Good morning. Thanks for taking my questions. Hey Charlotte, can I start with you? So can you help us walk through the available cash resources you have about $1 billion of capacity under the revolving credit facility. And it looks like you tapped into that in January. Can you just help us think through how much you might need to tap into that in order to get through to the spring when cash flow dynamics naturally improve? And then is the plan to pay that down quickly? Or will priorities be focused elsewhere, perhaps on other debt or other areas of investment? Just how do you think about that?
Charlotte Simonelli: Yes. So I think it’s highly correlated to how well the housing market does, how quickly we are able to sort of satisfy the revolver. We ended the year at a pretty low position on the revolver, and it’s kind of normal that we would use cash in the first quarter in even a decent housing market. So I think what we’re seeing now is actually a little bit better than our own internal forecast as far as revolver use. Yes, and it’s likely to build like it does throughout the first quarter. We – even like I said, in a good year we start generating free cash flow, positive free cash flow in a meaningful way in sort of like the May time period. So yes, the revolver balance is likely to go up due to the normal Q1 seasonality, but also due to the unusually soft housing market that we’re in.
As far as like our plans for the future, you know that we’re always opportunistic on our capital structure. We’re always evaluating things. We’re super mindful of the small stub on the Term Loan A that’s also becoming due. As you point out and as I said in the script, we have a $1.1 billion facility, and you can see that where we have tapped in so far. But like I said, we’re prudently managing our cash as well. I feel very proud of the accomplishments of the team to really hone in on every bit of cash that we spent last year. I mean, it was sizable and like I’m very proud of the economics we had both on agent recruiting, but also on franchisee renewals and retention. So I see a lot of that continuing into 2024. We really love our liquidity.
We feel very comfortable with the liquidity that we have, and we’re going to continue to watch the markets and be opportunistic. There’s quite a few different avenues we could go, but the quicker the housing market comes back, you can expect the faster we’ll be paying down that revolver too.
Tommy McJoynt: Got it. Thanks. And then next question, with all the media attention that the commission litigation has received, have you started to see any increase in innovation around agent commission structures, whether it be flat fee or smaller service offerings? Or has there really been no discernible shift away from the standard roughly 2.5% rate that’s out there?
