Toll Brothers, Inc. (NYSE:TOL) Q1 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Douglas Yearley: Which is also base price drops. It’s all 1 bucket.

Truman Patterson: Okay. Got it. Okay. So that’s kind of an all-in number that you all gave perfect. And then over the past decade or so, you all have had some pretty nice geographical expansion from mid-Atlantic, Northeast, out west and south, et cetera. I’m trying to understand, given the softness in the market, the recession that we’ve just gone through, are there any areas that you might find some land opportunities or geographical areas that you’re targeting to expand to in the coming years?

Douglas Yearley: We’ve expanded quite a bit in the last 3 or 4 years. We went into San Antonio. We went into Tampa. We’ve gone to Portland, Oregon. We’ve gone to Salt Lake City. We went to Spokane and Colleen. And so at the moment, Truman, there are — we’re going to Long Island. We just opened in Long Island. So at the moment, there’s no hot new market that we have our eyes on that were far enough along to tell you that we think we’re going. We’re always looking. We’re — I think we’re most focused, however, on getting bigger and more diversified in the existing core markets where we’re operating really well. That’s also going to really help leveraging the SG&A because some of these smaller market startups are pretty inefficient for a number of years before you get the machine going. And so I think over the next couple of years, you’ll see less of the secondary tertiary market expansion and more growth in our core markets.

Fred Cooper: The 1 market you didn’t mention is Nashville where we do have expense and we don’t have any communities to open yet.

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

Mike Dahl : Just a follow-up on the orders environment, it was helpful in terms of the color on January being greater than November, December combined. So I guess high-level math would be January had to be at least around 750 orders compared to 350, give or take. And November, December, but could you put a finer point on just help walk us through the monthly trends? And then when you talk about the February improvement, if you can give us some sense of quantification on orders, not just deposits.

Douglas Yearley: All right. I got it right here. So November was down 72% year-over-year. December was down 55% year-over-year. January was down 31% year-over-year. January sales were the highest pre-January 2020 since January of 2005, February is the same as January.

Mike Dahl : Okay. That’s very helpful. Fred, when you say same in unit terms or a percent change?

Fred Cooper: Units.

Douglas Yearley: Units.

Mike Dahl : Okay. My follow-up question, just on the land side. I mean, you guys obviously tightened up your underwriting quite a bit. You’ve given some high-level metrics in terms of combined margin and IRR thresholds in the past. How — where do those stand now? Have you maintained the similar threshold? Have you shifted that threshold at all up or down based on what you’re seeing?

Douglas Yearley: We’ve kept it the same, which is — we used to be 55% combined gross margin IRR to buy ground. That went to 60%, it’s now 65%. So if you’re going to have a 25% gross margin, you’re going to need a 40% IRR. If you’re going to have a 30% gross margin, we’ll give you a 35% IRR. It’s tight. It’s hard to find deals. We have deal flow, it’s happening, but we are being very disciplined right now in that very high combined underwriting.

Martin Connor : And we’re using current paces. In other years, we might have had a 12-month pace put in front of us. And we say that 12 months don’t matter. We need to see what happened over the last 4 weeks, 8 weeks kind of pace because that should, that’s what you should annualize not the full 12 months.