Legacy Housing Corporation (NASDAQ:LEGH) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

I think since like over the last probably 3 to 6 months, traffic at those dealerships has picked up, but the conversions to home sales are not as high as we’d like to see them. On the community side, there’s just a lot of people – there’s a lot of capital that came into the space. And so we continue to see pretty good demand from a lot of our large historical customers that are either developing new communities or doing some infill or expansion. But overall, I think demand is certainly slowing. That said, we feel pretty good with three plants about being able to have the orders to keep these things going at, say, similar production capacity.

Mark Smith: Excellent. Thank you.

Duncan Bates: Sure. Thanks, Mark.

Operator: Thank you. And our next question coming from the line of Tim Moore from E.F. Hutton Group. Your line is open.

Tim Moore: Thanks. Congratulations on the very strong sales quarter beat in December and for the year, very impressive margin expansion. I know the team is working and putting in a lot of hours. Duncan, I was just wondering, you briefly mentioned the backlog. What is the current backlog you think in terms of visibility on monthly sales is something like 5 months going out maybe?

Duncan Bates: Tim, we don’t publish a backlog. We have – we do have several months of backlog. I think one of the challenges going forward is having customers actually accept their orders. And so even though you’ve got backlog, we’re pushing people, we’ve ordered homes to get them scheduled and take the homes when they come offline. But again, small manufacturing footprint, even if things slow down, I think we’ll be able to continue to cut deals where we’re selling 20, 30 or 100, 200 homes at a time and keep these facilities close to capacity.

Tim Moore: That’s helpful to hear. How should we think maybe about the gross margin possibility for this year? I saw that the – it looked like the fourth quarter gross margin was 40%. Should we kind of go off of that? Just kind of thinking about modeling going forward and if your prices have held up pretty well. Just trying to get a sense of maybe what you’re thinking for utilization and the margin profile for the year?

Duncan Bates: It’s tough to say. I think there’s a lot of dynamics that are in play right now. We have been able to hold prices firm. And we have, I think, started to benefit from material prices coming down. That said, if demand really does slow down, we’ll have to think hard about pricing. But certainly, we’re trying to buy materials for as cheap as we possibly can, and we’re trying to hold pricing firm. So I think I’ll have a better view kind of by end of next quarter when we talk about that. But I’d say for now, it’s about the same.

Tim Moore: Good. Good. That’s helpful to hear. You mentioned which I think we’re all aware of, but the independent dealer channels had some destocking going on, and we’ve seen the walk-in traffic fall, I guess, the last few months, just in general for the industry. How is the walk-in traffic holding up at your company-owned retail locations? And are you guys doing anything to maybe create more digital leads or digital generation to kind of get more consumers in your stores?

Duncan Bates: Yes. A couple of thoughts on that. I mean Kenny and I spend a lot of time talking about foot traffic and conversions at the retail stores. We have seen an uptick in foot traffic. Really, the issue is on the converting that foot traffic to sales. And I don’t think it’s something that’s necessarily unique to our retail stores as it is across the industry where given the price of our product, people are interested in it. But they – I think a lot of people are hesitant to pull the trigger right now given so much uncertainty in the overall economy. So foot traffic has picked up. We’re working on things to convert more of the traffic to sales. Historically, we have not had a big online presence. And we’ve certainly on the heritage side, ramp that up with an additional hire who’s working on marketing for heritage.