Century Communities, Inc. (NYSE:CCS) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Alex Barron: Great, great. Good to hear. And then on the subject of costs, obviously, at the beginning of last year or first half of last year, everybody was up, up and away in terms of home prices and home costs. And so I imagine a lot of those specs that were started had high cost and as you are mentioning, you are now starting to achieve lower cost on the new stuff. But I’m just kind of curious, how far along do you guys think you are through flushing out the high cost inventory, such that you don’t need to focus so much selling that, but can focus more on selling the lower cost stuff going forward?

David Messenger: If we have homes listed for sale, we are focused on selling them. I think that you are going to see in the first quarter, we are still going to have some of those older homes that we started last year at higher direct costs. You are going to see those coming through and that’s what’s weighing on our gross margin, such that we think that Q1 is going to be in a similar range compared to what Q4 was. And so we will get through a lot of them probably in Q1. But I think you are going to see them bleed into Q2. It’s just going to take us some time to work through all of that inventory. But we are definitely focusing on building new homes that have better costs, affordable, better pricing and will produce better margins for us in the latter half of the year.

Alex Barron: And if I could ask one last one. So you guys mentioned that pretty much all the homes, new starter, specs, that cycle times are going to be down I think I just heard you say, close to 60 days or something on the new stuff.

Dale Francescon: That’s the projected, yes.

Alex Barron: So what about the ranging of those houses or the average? What about the average price or the average size of those of that inventory that you’re creating? Is that generally speaking, smaller, cheaper houses? Or is it the same type of stuff as before?

Dale Francescon: Generally, it would be smaller or similar, but generally just a little bit smaller. And how we are doing that is, in our plan library, we may not be building the largest plan in a particular series or whatever to get it down from the square footage standpoint, affordability standpoint. So as a trend, it would be smaller homes at a lower price point.

Operator: The next question is a follow-up from Mike Rehaut with JP Morgan.

Michael Rehaut: Just wanted to get any more granular sense, if you’re able to provide it on the level of improvement that you saw in terms of describing November in December well above October and further improvement in January. If it could be either on a year-over-year, what the year-over-year declines have done, or even sales pace? Any additional color would be helpful there.

Dale Francescon: Mike, some of it is just anecdotal, from a standpoint of where our focus is. And, as we’ve made it very clear, our focus is on completing, completing homes. And if something is further downstream in terms of delivery, we’ve not been incentivizing those homes. So it’s — when we look at it, it’s really more a function of have we been able to sell all the homes that we’ve prioritized for sale. And that’s how we’re really quantifying it, that and really the traffic and the amount of incentives that we have to provide. And so as we’ve said, as the quarter progressed, things improved, which means that we were selling more of the near-term delivery houses, and we were doing it with less incentives. Same thing has continued into January. So from our standpoint, it’s not really a focus on the number of houses that we’re selling, but it’s making sure that we’re selling the proper homes.

Michael Rehaut: I guess, secondly, you’re saying that you expect incentives to moderate a bit. Any way to how to think about that from a quantification standpoint? I mean, you talked about incentives reaching 900 basis points as part of your 4Q deliveries, so up 600 basis points sequentially. Is that expectation for incentives moderating a bit, something that you’ve already seen in your January orders? And moderating a bit, would that be a couple of hundred basis points or something a little more than that, or less than that?

Dale Francescon: As we said, our historical norm has been around 300 basis points. It spiked to 900 basis points in Q4. And a significant component of that were the forward commitments that we were purchasing really across our entire company. So when we look at it, we’ve taken that away. And so, that’s probably somewhere that impacted our margins somewhere between 1.5 points and 2 points. So, we don’t expect to get back to 300 basis points of incentives overnight, but we’re moving in that direction. So to say we’re down a couple of hundred basis points is probably where we are.

Operator: This concludes our question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Dale Francescon for any closing remarks.

Dale Francescon: Thank you, operator. I’d like to take this opportunity to once again thank all of our team members for their incredible work and continued dedication to our valued homebuyers. I’d also like to thank our investors for their time today. We appreciate your continued support and investment and look forward to speaking to you again next quarter.

Operator: The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today’s presentation. You may now disconnect.

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