Charlotte Simonelli: I think on a like-for-like basis, that’s a good rule to consider. I think if you would extract out some of the one timers last year, we were at the high end of that last year, but I did point out we do have one timers coming this year, and they’re sizable. So you have to think about it with or without the potential litigation settlement, as well as what will or won’t happen in this California legacy tax matter from literally 1999. So if you extract those one timers, the range definitely still holds. It’s just the timing of those payments and if they will happen or not. It’s very subjective, and so that’s why I couldn’t really give you a number, but we’re trying to give you the piece part so as things evolve, then you can kind of do your own math.
John Campbell: No, that’s very helpful. Thank you.
Charlotte Simonelli: Sure.
Operator: [Operator Instructions] Your next question comes from Ryan McKeveny with Zelman & Associates. Please go ahead.
Ryan McKeveny: Hey, good morning. Thank you. So if I go to Slide 5 in the deck, you’ve got kind of four pillars, leads, brokerage and franchise, settlement and mortgage. Can you give us an update on the leads category? And I guess just thoughts there on ways that’s expanding, either through maybe more traditional referral approaches or maybe even some kind of online lead gen efforts there?
Ryan Schneider: Yes. So thanks for pointing that out. It’s funny, one of the things that happens when the housing market is really tough, like it was in 2022 and 2023, is you actually get some return to basics, right? Taking on cost and being really sharp and reengineering your business, like Charlotte talked about a lot, becomes really important. Another thing that became really important is lead generation like the number one thing our agents and franchisees want is high quality leads in a market when there’s obviously much fewer transactions than there is in a normal kind of housing market. So we think kind of the high quality lead ecosystem we have is one of our competitive advantages and that we were able to continue to utilize it.
And so we focus more on high quality referral leads. Our relocation business has always been a source there, but recently a lot of our expansion has come from a couple of places. One is mortgage partners. We built a stable of mortgage partners over the last four or five years to bring kind of high quality real estate leads to us, and that’s worked out well for them and for us in the ecosystem. And so that’s been one place that we’ve kind of expanded. Second, we continue to invest in with AARP, who just has such a track record of successful programs with their members across different financial and non-financial products. And we really like that. We still play in certain things kind of from an online lead standpoint, but we’re not as interested in kind of the low quality leads that converted a 1% to 2% rate.
We’re more interested in much higher quality, higher conversion leads that you get from affinity sources, relocation sources, et cetera. And we are excited to keep expanding that anytime we can.
Ryan McKeveny: That’s helpful. Thanks, Ryan. And last one, just any updates on Upward Title, maybe just kind of uptake thus far, interest from franchisees et cetera? Thank you.
Ryan Schneider: Yes, yes. We’re really enjoying it. It’s an important thing for those of you who don’t know Upward Title well. It’s a way basically for our franchisees to join a title joint venture with multiple franchisees and doesn’t have to all be in the same brand to help our franchisees who don’t have access to title directly expand their revenue and expand their business in the real estate ecosystem and leverage the assets they have. We have national title presence. We’re good at running title companies, so that’s what we bring to it and we bring them together. We introduced it in 2023. We’re now up to six states. So we started obviously with one state and then went to Florida and California was two states.
Now we’re up to six states, Florida, SoCal, we’re in Texas, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Utah. We’ve got over 20 franchise partners in these things, more to follow and we’re getting frankly, some of our big franchisees are joining, as well as some of the more medium sized ones who can’t do title on their own. So we like it. It’s the kind of thing of when you strategically want to grow your very high margin franchise business. We’re going to do the international and domestic expansion of brands like Sotheby’s International Realty and Corcoran for example. But another way you’re going to grow your franchise business is to help them just grow their revenue and also create stickiness, right. We love the long term kind of 10-year average contracts in franchise, but this is another way to create a strong connection to our ecosystem for franchisees.
And so we’ve gone from nothing to six states, and we’re excited to keep going.
Ryan McKeveny: Sounds great. Thanks so much.
Ryan Schneider: Thank you, Ryan.
Operator: There are no further questions at this time. This will conclude today’s conference. Thank you all for joining us today. You may now disconnect.
