D.R. Horton, Inc. (NYSE:DHI) Q1 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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Buck Horne: Hey, thanks. Good morning guys. I wonder if I could dive in a little bit more on the incentives that are out there, the tools that you’re using out in the field, it sounds like a lot of builders are having some success with a mortgage rate buy-down program. where you’re buying down or fixing the mortgage rate below market for sounds like for the life of the loan, it seems to be popular out there. I’m wondering if you could maybe elaborate on — are you using mortgage rate buy-downs? How does that mechanically work? And kind of what does that cost you in terms of upfront margin hit or as a percentage of sales?

David Auld: Yes, Buck, we do, as an ordinary course use mortgage rate buy-downs and many of those are for the life of the loan. That’s been a program we’ve had in quite place for quite some time. The costs do vary from time to time, depending on market conditions and timing of when you tie up those positions. But that’s something that we try to make sure that we have in the toolbox for our salespeople is to be able to offer an attractive mortgage rates to buyers who come in.

Buck Horne: Okay. Would you say that that’s the most effective sales tool at the moment is a buy-down or are you using some other level of incentives?

David Auld: It’s going to vary community-by-community and over time as to what the most attractive incentive is, and we try to put a lot of tools in our division operators’ hands to make the best decisions about what’s going to motivate and drive their realtor and buyer traffic in their communities and excite our sales agents with a reason to call and a reason to drive some traffic this week. So, it might be a little bit of a pricing adjustment on a few homes. It might be the rate buy-down, some mortgage financing incentives have been very popular, very heavily utilized. And it might be that supply chain is working back out that we’re back to a washer-dryer Wednesdays. I mean there’s plenty of incentives out there that we’re going to use to drive a pace to hit a return we need to hit at every given neighborhood.

Buck Horne: Okay. Thank you. And one quick separate topic on single-family rentals and the — it sounds like the guidance quarter-over-quarter is slightly lower in terms of projected sales of single-family rental homes. I’m wondering if that’s strategic to hold back the pace of those sales. And just curious what the demand is like in the marketplace for and/or the pricing for stabilized SFR homes these days?

David Auld: It’s just timing of projects and when they’ll be ready — completed and ready and through a sale process. We’ll just have fewer this quarter ready to close than we had this past quarter.

Mike Murray: The first quarter benefited from a few projects that were lined up to close in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2022 had some storm impact and delayed some timing of a few closings there. So that 1Q number was probably a little higher than the original production sales schedule is set up for.

David Auld: The business model is still complete lease-up market and so.

Jessica Hansen: And you’re starting to see some level of closings each and every quarter, but it is still choppy here in the earlier stages, and we would expect that to become more consistent over time as we get further along with the lots and the houses we have under construction.

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