United Homes Group, Inc

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the United Homes Group second quarter 2023 earnings conference call. At this time, all lines are in a listen-only mode. Following the presentation, we will conduct a question and answer session. If at any time during this call you require immediate assistance, please press star zero for the operator. This call is being recorded on Thursday, August 10, 2023. I would now like to turn the conference over to Alan Hutto with United Homes Group. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon and welcome to the United Homes Group second quarter of 2023 earnings call. Before the call begins, I would like to note that this call will include forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws. United Homes Group cautions that forward-looking statements are subject to numerous assumptions, risks, and uncertainties which change over time. These risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, the risk factors described by United Homes Group in its filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Accordingly, forward-looking statements should not be relied upon as representing our views as of any subsequent date, and you should not place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements. We do not undertake any obligation to update forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances after the date they were made, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise, except as may be required under applicable securities laws. Additionally, reconciliations of non-GAAP financial measures discussed on this call to the most directly comparable GAAP measures can be accessed through the company's website and in its SEC filings. Hosting the call today are United Homes Group's Chief Executive Officer, Michael Neary, Chief Operating Officer, Shelton Twine, and Chief Financial Officer, Keith Feldman. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Michael.

Thanks, Alan. Good afternoon and thanks to everyone for joining us today for our inaugural earnings call as a public company. We're excited to share our results for the second quarter of 2023 and provide you with some color on current market conditions. But first, I wanted to give you an overview of who we are and what makes our company special. United Homes Group is a South Carolina-based home builder focused on the more affordable segments of our market. Formerly known as Great Southern Homes, we've built over 11,000 homes since 2004, turning a profit each year of our existence. We are home builders first and foremost with the passion for building high quality homes and making the American dream a reality for home buyers in our markets. We are also a group of entrepreneurial businessmen and women committed to the idea of continuous operational improvement, whether it's securing land in a more capital efficient manner, taking costs out of the business, or finding ways to reduce cycle times. We are constantly striving to get better at our jobs and improve the return on capital. I like to say, take ownership, act like an owner. Now that we're a public company, we're excited to expand our successful home building model to other high growth markets in the Southeast. We believe there's an incredible opportunity ahead of us given the strong fundamental trends we see playing out in the markets we're targeting. A combination of strong employment trends Reasonable affordability and better overall quality of life are bringing people to this part of the country, a trend that we expect to continue for the foreseeable future. In addition, the high interest rate environment has kept existing homeowners with low mortgage rates in place, resulting in a shortage of homes for sale and creating a real opportunity for new home builders to fill the void. Acquisitions will be a key component of our growth strategy, and we believe United Homes Group will be viewed as an acquirer of choice for private home builders. Many of these small builders looking at an exit are founder-owned, a perspective that I can relate to, given my role in starting Great Southern Homes. I understand their needs and concerns, particularly when it comes to protecting their legacy and taking care of their employees. Unlike most potential acquirers, we are looking to build on what local builders have already established rather than stripping it down for the land and homes and backlog. In most instances, we are interested in retaining their people so that we can leverage their local market knowledge and expertise. We believe these factors give us an advantage relative to other potential acquirers, and we look forward to sharing updates on the M&A front in the near future. Someone who will be instrumental in getting these deals to the finish line will be our new president of home building operations, Jack Masenko. Jack comes to us from BTIG, where he was a key figure in guiding our company through the process of going public. Jack has a great understanding of our business and what we are trying to achieve in the next phase of our company's evolution. We are thrilled to have him as part of our leadership team. So, with a favorable fundamental outlook, a proven operating strategy, and a strong balance sheet, United Homes Group is poised to build on the great Southern Homes legacy that was started almost 20 years ago. We believe there's a long runway for growth ahead of us given the supply and demand dynamics in place today and the long-term demographic trends playing out in our markets. As a result, we're excited for the journey ahead and believe the best is yet to come. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Shelton, who will provide more detail on operational results this quarter. Shelton?

Thanks, Michael, and good afternoon to everyone. Order activity during the second quarter was strong across our home building platform as we generated 341 net new orders. The healthy demand we experienced during the quarter allowed us to raise net pricing at several of our communities, which we believe will lead to better gross margins in the second half of 2023 relative to the first half. We saw order activity moderate in July, which is typical for this time of year. After years of abnormal sales patterns brought about by the pandemic and interest rate volatility, we believe our business has returned to a more normal cadence of order activity. We closed 385 homes during the second quarter, and our cancellation rate as a percentage of gross orders was 16%. For the first time in several quarters, we saw cycle times come down on a quarter-over-quarter basis as supply chain bottlenecks eased and trade labor and materials became more available. We believe we will see further improvements to building conditions in the back half of the year, which will give us better visibility into our operations and lead to faster inventory turns. Overall, we feel good about our business as we head into the back half of the year. We have either closed, sold, or started all of the homes we need to hit our internal delivery goals for 2023. We continue to see healthy demand in our markets, driven by a lack of existing home inventory and a more confident, engaged buyer population. Gross margins and backlog are higher than what they were in the first half of 2023, giving us optimism about our second half profitability. We made great headway in reducing cycle times during the second quarter and expect further improvements from here. In short, we believe we are well positioned to capitalize on the favorable housing fundamentals that exist in our markets in the back half of the year and beyond. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Keith, who will provide more detail on our balance sheet and our financial performance this quarter.

Thank you, Michael and Sheldon. Good afternoon. For the second quarter of 2023, net income was $245 million, which included a change in fair value of $242 million, primarily related to the accounting for a potential earn-out, which will fluctuate on our financial statements each quarter based on our ending stock price. This earn-out will be paid only in common shares and upon reaching certain stock price hurdles and can never result in a cash expense for the company. Home building revenue for the second quarter of 2023 was $122.1 million compared to $142.5 million for the second quarter of 2022. Home closings during the second quarter of 2023 were $385 compared to $459 in the second quarter of 2022. Average sales price during the second quarter of 2023 was $313,000 for 376 production-filled homes. This compares to an average sales price of $300,000 during the second quarter of 2022 for 451 production-built homes, representing a 4.3% increase. Our net new orders during the second quarter of 2023 were essentially flat over last year at 341 homes compared to 339 homes during the second quarter of 2022. Our backlog at the end of the second quarter was 293 homes with a value of $94 million. Gross profit for the three months ended June 30th, 2023 was 23.9 million. Adjusted gross profit, which excludes the impact of capitalized interest in cost of sales was 26.1 million. Adjusted gross profit as a percentage of revenue for the three months ended June 30th, 2023 was 21.4%, an increase of 120 basis points from the prior quarter. We expect gross margin to continue to increase throughout the remainder of the year as we sell through our remaining inventory with higher lumber costs as well as realized price increases at several communities. Our reported SG&A expense in the second quarter of 2023 adjusted for one-time transaction fees and non-cash stock-based compensation expense was $14.8 million or 12.1% of revenue. Adjusted book value excluding the non-cash derivative liability on our balance sheet with $91 million, and with our land-light strategy, none of our book value was comprised of raw land or development. As of June 30th, we had 53 active communities, which is expected to increase throughout the remainder of the year as we continue to open more stores. At the end of the second quarter, we had approximately 8,000 lots under control for our land development affiliate, as well as some third parties. Our balance sheet is solid, with $93 million in cash as of June 30th, and we recently increased our credit facility to $240 million from $150 million, providing for ample liquidity to execute on our various growth initiatives, which includes acquiring other homebuilders that complement our business. Our construction WIP decreased 45% from year-end 2022. This is due to slower new starts in late 2022 as interest rates started increasing, but we have aggressively picked up the pace of new stores during the second quarter of 2023 as we started approximately 470 homes versus 82 during the fourth quarter of 2022 and 146 during the first quarter of 2023. We anticipate keeping this trend going to the back half of the year as demand continues to be strong. Overall, we are an attractive market with a desirable product and have ample liquidity for growth, which positions us well for the future. That concludes our prepared remarks. Operator, please open up the line for questions.

Thank you.

Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question and answer session. Should you have a question, please press the star followed by the one on your touchstone phone. You will hear a three-tone prompt acknowledging your request. Questions will be taken in the order received. Should you wish to cancel your request, please press star two. Once again, that is star one should you wish to ask a question. Your question is from Carl Reichardt from VTIG. Please ask your question.

Thanks. How are you guys doing? Hope you're well. Congratulations on getting out and doing this call. Glad to hear you. I had a couple for you, starting with Shelton. Shelton, you talked about your pricing activity during the quarter. I'm curious, could you tell me roughly what percentage of stores you raised prices on and sort of what that percentage was? And then when you consider normal cadence for your low-end communities, kind of a sale week for a month, is that kind of what we should be looking at over the course of a year? Sure.

Good to hear from you, Carl. Yeah, the first part of that question, in terms of price increases, we've increased them in right about 25% of our communities throughout our markets. We've kind of taken the strategy where we're raising prices where we can. We're still keeping some incentives in place because we have been using our rate buy down to our advantage, we feel like, to keep sales up. But yeah, we have been able to increase pricing in about 25% of the neighborhoods. The second part of your question, remind me on that one again, Carl, the second part.

Sure. I'm just thinking, you talked about sort of a return to a normal cadence in July, recognizing July is different than March. But over the course of a year, at sort of an average community for you, what are you sort of targeting absorption-wise? Is it kind of a four-a-month kind of thing, or is it closer to five-a-month or three-a-month?

Yeah, and I mean, I want to be careful not to give too much guidance on it, but it's typically right around, you know, three and a half a month is our typical guidance. And, of course, that will vary, you know, based on the subdivision and based on, you know, some of them may have multiple price points, which may get a little bit higher pace.

Of course. All right. Thank you for that. And then, Michael, you talked in your opening comments about acquisitions. And since you've gone public, there have been some interesting changes in the world of private homebuilders. especially difficulty getting capital or, or some talk about that. Can you chat a little bit about a sort of what kinds of markets you're looking at larger markets that already have a lot of large builders or smaller markets that don't, and then what your sort of pipeline or trans what the transom looks like. You see more deals come over because we've had a change in the capital markets for privates, just maybe just some expansion on that particular strategy. Cause it's so important to you.

Thanks. Hey, Carl. Yeah, I would say, you know, we're looking at in-market deals first and foremost. Those seem to be coming our way, I guess, because people know us. You know, they see our signs. They, you know, we're involved in the HBAs, et cetera. So we're looking at, you know, we're finding that the local South Carolina markets are coming to us first and um, there are more people, uh, you know, we've gotten calls from other brokers, um, across, uh, the Southeast who, uh, you know, look at some other deals. So, you know, it's a little bit of both, but right now it's, you know, it's more in market, um, in market deals.

Okay. Thanks, Michael. And then if I can add one more quick one, um, can you talk a little bit about the bill to the bill to rent business? Um, if that contributed much, if anything to this particular quarter and, Sort of your thoughts and plans on that business on a go-forward basis. Thanks.

Hey, I'm going to let Jack answer that, but it's a great question. Hey, Carl. Good to hear from you as well.

Hello. Greetings. There were no built-to-rent deliveries in the quarter. We are in nascent stages of building out. We brought in a new head of built-to-rent who's got a 35-year-plus contract resume and track record in the business and came to us from a competitor. When you think about us, what we're really focused on is moving from more of a reactive to a proactive approach. So, you know, like other builders, we will on occasion sell scatter site products to the BTR operators, but we're really focused on moving towards is programmatic, institutional, community level transactions that I know it's an important topic to you as it was for me back in the day to really disclose and call those out specifically because it's important not only because they're lumpy transactions, but I think you get better visibility and credit if you're being forthright about what you're doing. So we're looking at community level projects, call it 60 to 150 unit deals with institutional capital partners in our footprint and contiguous markets. I think you'll hear a lot more from us about that. In coming quarters, we have a couple things that are under contract, and we'll look to close here into the back half of the year there as well. But really pivoting from more of a reactive to a proactive strategy and making it a real part of our business. We've got great in-migration in our markets, and a lot of times those folks are renters by choice for a while until they figure it out, and so we think it's a nice extension of some of the markets that we're lucky enough to operate in.

Appreciate that, Jack. Guys, thanks so much. Thanks, Carl. Thanks, Carl.

Thank you. Once again, please press star 1 should you wish to ask a question.

There are no further questions at this time. Please proceed.

Jack, do you want to wrap this up?

Yeah, sure. Thanks. Wanted to thank everybody for dialing into our inaugural earnings call. Look forward to updating you on our progress in the future, and feel free to reach out to us offline if you have any additional questions. Thank you.

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, the conference has now ended. Thank you all for joining. You may all disconnect.