MGIC Investment Corporation (NYSE:MTG) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Timothy Mattke: Yes. I think, Doug, it’s really — it’s a matter of our view is that home prices are actually falling right now. I think we’re all hopeful that unemployment doesn’t spike up, but we are in a more stressful environment. We think our premium rates should reflect that. And we’re okay if we lose some share because of that. Ultimately, we want to make sure we’re getting the right return in our views of what we need to have to cover that risk. MiQ gives us a great ability to do that and do that in a real-time basis. And so we feel very comfortable with it. And again, it’s for a company that has a lot of strong customer relationships, we want to win as much business as we can, but we also want to be very disciplined about making sure that we’re getting the appropriate return for deploying that capital.

Operator: And our next question comes from Geoffrey Dunn from Dowling.

Geoffrey Dunn: A couple of questions. First, with respect to your guidance on the core premium rate being stable for ’23, if we look at your disclosure on the MRA charge on new risk, it was climbing over the 4 quarters coming up to Q4. So I would guess that there was a mix shift benefit to your premium rate that’s helping that stabilization. But this quarter, it dropped down as you — it looks like maybe it became tighter on your credit. If that rate stays low below 7%, is that something where as it builds throughout the year, we’d expect the core premium rate to then decline again in ’24? How does that mix shift and MRA charge act as a bit of a guidance for where that core rate might go?

Nathaniel Colson: Yes, Geoff, it’s Nathan. I think you’re calling out a really important factor there that the mix does matter a lot for the overall in-force premium yield. I think one factor that may cause it not to have as big of an impact next year is just that we don’t expect that the market will be as large, so we won’t be writing as much volume. But I think — I would think about that guidance as kind of indexed to maybe the back half of 2022 business, so maybe somewhere in between the mix of business that we wrote in the third and fourth quarter, so something around that 7% level. So if we were writing business that was well below that or well above that. But I think even the third and fourth quarter is at 10, 20, 30 basis points on either side of that 7%, I think that’s still kind of within the range that we’d be comfortable with that flat guidance.

Geoffrey Dunn: Okay. And then I was wondering if it were possible to help simplify the impact on credit from the equity build-up in the portfolio. Obviously, a number of people, including myself, I think we’re heading into some sort of recession type of scenario in which you would normally see notices go up, incidence assumptions go up, claim severity assumptions go up. If I painted in an environment where it was a 10% incidence assumption, but then you adjusted that for how much equity is built up in your existing book, is that something you can help frame up all of a sudden, if that 10% become 9.5% or 10% become 9% simply because of the benefits from the equity?