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

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Stephen Kim: Yes. Thanks very much, guys. Encouraging stuff regarding your comments on the market, and that certainly aligns with what we’re hearing as well. I wanted to follow-up on your comment about rates being a major driver to the improvement that you’ve been seeing. At this point, what share of would you say prospective buyers that you’re seeing are having their mortgage application rejected? So you’re actually not seeing them able to qualify compared with, let’s say, what you would have seen in 2019. And when you think longer term about your business, I think you said 25,000 starts or something like that. How much of that production do you expect to be used for rental purposes relative to, again, a normal time, let’s say, 2019.

Ryan Marshall: So, Stephen, let me grab the first piece of that. I will let Bob take the mortgage side. I would tell you rate — the first, your comment on rate, rate is part of it. What’s really driving kind of the sales trajectory right now is affordability, and rate is part of that equation. We’ve also done things in the way we’ve repriced, the way we’ve created incentive loans that have helped so affordability as well. So I think that’s a big part of it. I will skip to a couple of things that you said about production. Just to clarify so everybody is on the same page, we’ve got enough production based on what was already in production, plus what we intend to start that will deliver in this year such that our universe — our production universe will be big enough such that we’d expect to have enough homes to close, approximately 25,000 homes.

So — and then from a rental — your rental question, we’ve targeted — if you go back to the announcement we made a few years ago that we want to do — have roughly 7,500 homes over a 5-year period, kind of works out to be about 1,500 homes a year once we get fully kind of ramped up. So fairly small piece of our business, which is kind of how we strategically designed that. And I’ll flip it to Bob, and he can talk about the mortgage piece.

Bob O’Shaughnessy: Yes. I guess the good news is, Stephen, we haven’t seen a change really in people’s ability to qualify, or we haven’t seen people not being able to qualify increasing in a disproportionate way because of the rising rates. And I think more often than not, people know what they can spend. They’re prequalifying as they go through the process. So over the — I won’t say that I know that versus 2019, but if you look back over the last year or 2 we have seen a pretty consistent cadence of the percentage of people that are canceling contracts because they can’t qualify. It has not moved materially with the change in rates.

Stephen Kim: Yes. That’s really — that’s interesting and encouraging. I guess, Ryan, you just mentioned you sort of were more specific about your comment about that 25,000 unit mark, and that’s helpful. And what I gathered from your comment is that you may actually start fewer than 25,000, correct me if I’m wrong, and so you’re addressing sort of your ability to sort of scale down your starts as you have because you actually, I think, peaked at like 35,000 starts in 2021, I think it was. And so I guess my question regarding how you’re thinking about the size of your business when things sort of normalize whenever that happens. How quickly could you reattain that level of35,000 starts? What would it take? Is that something that you think that you could do relatively quickly if market conditions permitted it?

And then along with that, your lot count, owned lot count declined again this quarter. And I’m curious, do you expect it to decline further into the first half of 2023?

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