PulteGroup, Inc. (NYSE:PHM) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Ryan Marshall: Yes. So in answer to the first question, I think we, on average, been buying 3 to 4 years of land. When you add in development time lines, land is going to be hanging around 4 — in the neighborhood of 4 years. And so if you think of that, pre-pandemic land would be kind of working its way through the system now. In response to the impairment question, obviously, we do impairment reviews every quarter. We are coming from a pretty strong margin position, but we always look and, for instance, in this most recent quarter, we actually looked at 16communities for impairments and impaired 4 of them for about — it was about $2 million in costs that flow through the quarter, the other 12 did not. And so I think, absent some real structural shift in the market, I wouldn’t anticipate a widespread kind of remark of our book.

I think you will continue to see us as we look at this, evaluate communities one by one. And depending on the market conditions for that community, if we are in a position like we were with these four communities in the quarter, we’ll adjust.

Operator: Our next question comes from Mike Dahl with RBC Capital Markets.

Mike Dahl: Good morning. Thanks for taking my questions. Ryan, Bob, appreciate the color so far. A couple of follow-ups here. In terms of the incentives, I think — and maybe I’m mistaken, but I think the incentives, given we are on closings, the increase to 4%. Can you just help us understand, you talked about the improvement in demand, but also making further adjustments on price incentives. What’s your current incentive load on orders, if you can give us that?

Bob O’Shaughnessy: Yes, Mike, we haven’t. And to the comment that Ryan just made, I think he said it well. Pricing is dynamic in the market, right? And so if you adjust base pricing, it doesn’t show as an incentive, it’s just a lower sales price. And so on a relative basis, over time, we are in a position where we haven’t given a guide on margin. We have given you what the incentive load went to, which was 4.3%, which is almost double, but there were price changes embedded in that, too, right? So all those things factor in, so the guide we’ve given for Q1 margin reflects everything that we’ve done to this point, and I think we will leave it there.

Mike Dahl: Got it. And then in terms of the improvement through the quarter, I appreciate, like to get into the specifics here, but since you gave the commentary about orders progressing through the quarter in January, can you just enlighten us on a year-on-year basis? Where did you — where have you stood month-to-date in January? Help us understand the magnitude of improvement versus what you saw through the fourth quarter?

Ryan Marshall: Yes, Mike, we don’t — we’ve never kind of given that type of kind of inter-quarter trajectory. So we are going to leave it probably where we’re at, which is we are optimistic and encouraged, not only based on what we saw things kind of progressed through the fourth quarter, which, as I mentioned, is pretty atypical to see the fourth quarter build strength, but we’ve certainly seen that strength also continue into January. So cautiously optimistic and rates in that period have certainly been lower. So we think that has contributed. We will see kind of what the Fed does here in the next meeting. But all things considered, the operating environment, which we’ve — I think we’ve talked at is going to be more difficult. We are pretty pleased with what we are seeing in the sales for .

Operator: Our next question comes from Stephen Kim with Evercore ISI.

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