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Operator
Good evening and thank you for attending the BACASA fourth quarter 2021 earnings call. My name is Selena and I will be your moderator. All lines will be muted during the presentation portion of the call with an opportunity for questions and answers at the end. If you'd like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. I would now like to pass the conference over to our host, Ryan Demancic with BACASA. Please go ahead.
Ryan Demancic
Good afternoon, everyone, and thanks for joining us today for Vacasa's fourth quarter 2021 earnings call. I'm pleased to be joined by CEO Matt Roberts and CFO Jamie Cohen. Before we begin, let me cover a few administrative details. This call contains information that speaks only as of the date of today's live broadcast, and redistribution of this broadcast is prohibited. We have posted a shareholder letter and press release on the IR section of our website at investors.vicasa.com that will be referenced by our speakers. Comments made during this conference call and in our shareholder letter and press release may contain statements that are commonly referred to as forward-looking statements. Such statements about future expectations, beliefs, plans, projections, strategies, targets, estimates, objectives, events, conditions, and financial performance. We caution you that various factors could cause actual results to differ from those we anticipated. For additional information concerning these risks and uncertainties, please read the forward-looking statement section in the press release and our shareholder letter we issued earlier today and the forward-looking statements and risk factors section outlined in our filings with the SEC. During this call, we will discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures. Information regarding our non-GAAP financial results, including a reconciliation of non-GAAP results, the most directly comparable financial measures can be found in our press release and shareholder letter. These non-GAAP measures should be considered in addition to our GAAP results and are not intended to be a substitute for our GAAP results. And now I'd like to hand a call over to Matt Roberts.
Matt Roberts
Matt? Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining Vacasa's first earnings call as a publicly traded company. In early December, we started trading on the NASDAQ and added over $340 million of gross cash proceeds to our balance sheet, leaving us well capitalized with a tremendous growth opportunity in front of us. I recognize that many on the call today are new to the CASA story, so I want to spend some time providing background on our company. Next, I'll touch on the substantial progress we made in 2021 before handing it over to Jamie Cohen, our CFO, to cover our strong financial results and 2022 guidance. Our business is performing extremely well. We are delivering solid financial performance, executing on our technology roadmap, and expanding our growth engine, all of which extends our leadership position. While this is our first earnings call as a publicly traded company, we have been sharing projections and reporting on our progress throughout most of 2021. and it's clear our business has incredible momentum. We've consistently beat and raised versus our initial projections. First, we beat Q2 and raised Q3. Then we beat the high end of Q3 and raised Q4. Then we beat the high end of Q4, and now we're raising our 2022 outlook. We also expect the business to reach adjusted EBITDA profitability for the full year 2023. Okay, so a quick overview of our company. Picasa is reinventing the vacation rental industry by leveraging proprietary purpose-built technology to create a better experience for everyone involved, homeowners, guests, and channel partners. Alternative accommodations is one of the fastest-growing categories in travel with tremendous consumer demand. Our primary focus is on the supply side of the vacation rental ecosystem, which is highly constrained and ripe for innovation. As the only scaled national vacation rental management platform, we play a critical role in fueling the alternative accommodations growth engine. We operate in a massive market with fantastic secular trends. There are more than 5 million vacation homes in the United States alone and 20 million globally. And from a guest perspective, the preference shift towards alternative accommodations started over a decade ago. driven by both technology enablement and expanding appeal of the category across multiple use cases. The vacation rental management industry is a local marketplace perfectly set up for disruption. Just think about the status quo of renting out a vacation home. Some people do it themselves, which is a ton of work, to properly set up your home, effectively market and price availability, and service all the guests' needs. including answering the phone call at 2 o'clock in the morning because the heater's out at the ski lodge. Or you can enlist a local vacation rental manager, but their fragmented nature and relatively unsophisticated technology leads to suboptimal homeowner income. This is where Vacasa comes in with technology to modernize and truly rethink the industry. It sounds ambitious, but it's not new. This is a proven playbook. Innovative tech-enabled platforms have helped create, disrupt, and accelerate industries. There's pattern recognition between what we're doing and what others have done in other categories. Just think about how real estate, mobility, and on-demand delivery have been redefined over the past decade. My experience at OpenTable taught me how meaningful and transformative these tech-enabled platforms can be to local marketplace businesses. Our value proposition for homeowners is simple yet powerful. Just hand us the keys, tell us which nights you want your home for personal use, and start earning monthly income. That's it. We handle all the hard work like setting up the home, establishing optimal monthly rates, communicating with guests before, during, and after a reservation, and ensuring homes are properly cleaned and maintained. Our proprietary technology platform serves as the foundation of our business and has been crucial to our success. All key aspects of our platform were purpose-built, addressing specific needs and pain points of the vacation rental management process, resulting in a truly differentiated and elevated experience to homeowners, guests, and channel partners. In the past year alone, we invested nearly $50 million on technology, which we believe is greater than the spend of the combined total population of competitive local managers. A core component of our technology platform is our dynamic pricing engine, which is designed to generate greater income for homeowners. We accomplish this by using a combination of technology products, artificial intelligence, human expertise, and a significant volume of data to uniquely derive rates for each home on our platform. In fact, homeowners who were previously using local professional managers gained an average of 20% increase in their rental income in the first year and then an incremental 10% increase in the second year after switching to Vacasa. In addition to our dynamic pricing capabilities, we are able to capture demand wherever it exists by listing all the homes under our management on Vacasa's own website and consumer app. and distributing our listings to more than 100 channel partners, including Airbnb, Booking.com, and Vrbo. While our channel partners account for the majority of bookings, our direct channel is our single largest source, accounting for 30% of gross booking value in 2021. For guests, Vicasa provides a consistent and reliable experience that has many similarities to traditional accommodations. Guests can use the Vacasa app to check into the property and unlock the front door. We also offer 24-7 support by phone, online, or through the Vacasa Guest app. The top-tier hospitality we deliver ensures guests have a memorable experience, which leads to better reviews, which results in higher income for homeowners. Now turning to the tremendous progress we made in 2021, including adding homes to our platform, introducing new products, and maximizing homeowner income. Over the course of the year, we grew the number of homes on our platform by over 60% through our growth engine playbook, as well as through the strategic acquisition of turnkey vacation rentals. We add homes to our platform with two complementary playbooks, an individual and portfolio approach. The individual approach is a direct sales model where we create leads, then predominantly local sales representatives sign up individual homeowners. This approach is used in existing markets, and it accounts for the majority of our new additions. Under the portfolio approach, we buy local vacation rental managers, bringing on dozens of homes at once. Through this approach, we are able to efficiently enter new markets and build density at a faster rate, allowing us to accelerate our margin expansion in those markets. We made great progress throughout the year, ramping sales capacity under our individual approach as we successfully added hundreds of new sales representatives. In the fourth quarter 2021, our Salesforce added nearly 150% more homes than it did in the first quarter of the year. We also expect continued overall Salesforce productivity improvements going forward as our recently hired sales executives follow a predictable tenure-based productivity ramp. Our technology teams were hard at work releasing new products to improve the vacation experience for guests and homeowners and developing tools for our local market staff to drive efficiencies. We are particularly proud of the new homeowner app, which provides our owners with insights into the management, care, and performance of their vacation rental home. And we're seeing more than 60% of homeowners with the app log in weekly. We launched the rollout of our smart home technology package consisting of keyless locks, Wi-Fi routers, and noise monitoring technology, which is expected to be in place across our entire portfolio of homes by the end of 2022 at no additional cost to homeowners. We created a new clean inspection tool designed to improve guest and homeowner satisfaction by ensuring a standardized, efficient cleaning process across the tens of thousands of homes on our platform. And our yield management system also took a big step forward as our data scientists introduced itinerary-based pricing, which uniquely prices each itinerary based on the start and end date and a home's availability. Now I'll turn the call over to Jamie to review our fourth quarter financial results and guidance in detail. Jamie?
Matt
Thanks, Matt. We closed out 2021 on a strong note, delivering revenue and adjusted EBITDA well above our fourth quarter guidance ranges. Before getting into the details on the quarter, I want to provide some perspective on our outstanding financial performance in 2021. In July, we outlined ambitious financial targets for 2021. We finished the year with revenue of $889 million, $130 million, or over 15% ahead of our initial target, and up 81% year over year. Given our strong third quarter revenue outperformance and fourth quarter pacing, we made the decision in November to make incremental investments in the business across all of our operating expense lines, with the largest being in sales and marketing, to position us well for future growth. Even with these sizable investments, adjusted EBITDA was negative $29 million for full year 2021, $20 million ahead of our initial target. Over the past two years, our business has not only recovered from the pandemic, but we've significantly scaled, with our gross booking value reaching $1.9 billion in full year 2021, up 105% year-over-year, and tripling from 2019 levels. We also have a truly asset-light business model in which our full-service offering gains us exclusive control of a home's calendar. We don't need to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to buy supply or enter into long-term lease agreements. And advanced deposits on future reservations creates a favorable working capital dynamic. Our underlying business has shown to be inherently profitable as we continue to make discrete, controlled investments in two areas, sales and marketing, and technology and development. We spent over $225 million, excluding equity-based compensation, on these two line items in 2021. The size of this investment compared to our reported adjusted EBITDA loss of negative $29 million clearly shows that profitability is a choice for us. Our investments in sales and marketing are largely focused on expanding the teams responsible for adding new homes to our platform. We have a massive market opportunity ahead of us, and believe it is prudent to invest aggressively against that opportunity. We apply a lifetime value to the customer acquisition cost framework to evaluate the success of the individual approach, where we typically achieve a very healthy LTV to cap between four to five times. And we were at the high end of that range for 2021. Within technology and development, we are aggressively hiring product managers and engineers and adding external software to further enhance our technology platform. As Matt touched on in his remarks, our purpose-built technology platform drives our business operations, creates a differentiated experience for our homeowners and guests, allows us to scale more efficiently, and supports our strong growth. These investments enable us to reach sales faster, which not only drives revenue growth, but improves profitability as our margins improve meaningfully with density. Our profit margins are greater in high-density markets relative to low-density markets. driven by fixed cost leverage, shorter drive time, and labor savings. Additionally, our operating leverage is also evident during our feasibility-stronger quarter. Now I'd like to review the fourth quarter. Unless noted otherwise, I will be comparing our fourth quarter results to the fourth quarter of 2020, and I'll be referencing the operating expense lines excluding the impact of stock-based compensation and business combination costs, which you can find in both our press release and shareholder letter. Night sold reached $1.1 million in the fourth quarter, up 55% year over year, with the increase primarily driven by the addition of new properties to the platform. Gross booking value per night sold, which includes the total rent, fees, and taxes a guest pays, was $347 in the fourth quarter, up 27% year over year. Year over year growth in gross booking value per night sold accelerated each quarter throughout the year. While the overall vacation industry did experience strength, our sophisticated machine learning algorithms ensure we appropriately capitalize on the strength, optimizing the mix of night sold and gross booking value per night sold in an attempt to maximize homeowner income. Gross booking value, which is the combination of night sold and gross booking value per night sold, reached $379 million in the fourth quarter. That's 96% year over year. Revenue, which consists primarily of our commission on the rents we generate for homeowners and the fees we collect from guests, was 192 million in the fourth quarter, of 76% year-over-year, and ahead of our guidance range of 175 to 180 million. Cost of revenue was 56% of revenue in the fourth quarter, year-over-year operating leverage due to the strong growth in gross booking value per night sold. Operations and support expenses grew about in line with revenue year-over-year. Technology and development expenses were up over 100% year-over-year, as we successfully grew the size of our engineering and product teams and added tools to strengthen our technology platform, and in turn, our value proposition to homeowners and guests. Sales and marketing expenses were $66 million, up $49 million year-over-year, with the increase primarily due to our brand advertising campaign, scaled homeowner direct marketing, and higher Salesforce headcount. General and administrative expenses were 19 million in the fourth quarter, with a year-over-year increase due to hiring to support our growing business. Adjusted EBITDA was negative 68 million for the fourth quarter, ahead of our guidance range of negative 85 million to negative 80 million on stronger revenue and expenses coming in at the lower end of our internal expectations. Turning to 2022 guidance, we expect revenue to be in the range of 245 million to 255 million for the first quarter and $1.125 billion to $1.175 billion for the full year. Our guidance assumes that the combination of gross booking value per night sold and occupancy takes a slight step back from the record levels achieved in 2021, but remains above pre-pandemic levels. Specifically, we expect this to be most pronounced in the second half of 2022 as we lap a period of strong consumer demand, which resulted in gross booking value per night sold growth of 19% year-over-year in the third quarter of 2021 and 27% year-over-year growth in the fourth quarter. We expect adjusted EBITDA to be in the range of negative 25 million to negative 20 million for the first quarter and negative 21 million to negative 14 million for the full year. On the expense side, we expect to continue to invest in sales and marketing and technology and development. I would note that we don't plan on running another large-scale brand advertising campaign in the first quarter of 2022, and as a result, expect sales and marketing expenses to decline sequentially from the fourth quarter of 2021. Finally, given the strong execution by our teams and the success of our growth investments, we expect to reach adjusted EBITDA profitability for the full year 2023. One final comment on guidance. We expect to recognize about $13 million of revenue in the first quarter associated with the breakage of future state credits we issued to guests at the start of the pandemic. The revenue benefit will also flow through to adjusted EBITDA. While we will recognize revenue associated with the breakage of future state credits in future periods, we expect the amounts to be significantly lower in future periods. So we wanted to call out given the size in the first quarter. These impacts are included in our revenue and adjusted EBITDA guidance. With that, Matt and I will take your questions. Operator, please open up the line.
Operator
Thank you. If you'd like to ask a question, please press star followed by 1 on your telethon keypad. If for any reason you'd like to remove that question, please press star followed by 2. Again, to ask a question, press star 1. As a reminder, if you are using a speakerphone, please remember to pick up your handset before asking your question. We will pause here briefly as questions are registered. The first question comes from Doug Anmuth with J.P. Morgan. Please proceed.
Doug Anmuth
Questions. Had a couple. Something you could talk about the Salesforce. I know you said you added 200 heads last year. If you could give some some color on where you think this could go over time. And then when you think about the 22 growth, how much of that is driven by new supply additions? And I also just wanted to ask about your early thoughts on the summer travel season. And do you expect VR to continue to take share in the face of greater reopening and potential return to more urban destinations? Thanks.
Matt Roberts
Sure. Hi, it's Matt. I'll take the sales team first. So we did add a lot of salespeople during this year. We were down in 2020, though, as you remember. So part of it was sort of rebuilding and growing our sales team. We had a lot of really positive momentum adding great new people. I would say we're probably going to get at about half the amount that we added in 21 in 2022. And then we'll also have further improvements in the productivity. The tenured sales reps are about twice as productive as untenured. So we're going to get a nice lift as our new sales reps gain tenure. And then Jamie, you want to talk through sort of growth?
Matt
Yeah, absolutely. So as Matt said, there will be There will be a lot of great growth in terms of new sales coming from the reps that we added last year. If you recall, the reps with at least 12 months of tenure are about twice as productive as those with less than 12 months. So we'll continue to see productivity gains over the course of 2022 from the reps that we added in 2021. And then, you know, general rules is we tend to see about 85% of our revenue coming from units that are already on the platform prior to the year beginning. So it's a pretty decent roll of thumb in terms of current supply versus new supply added. And then in terms of your question around booking, we're seeing some really great strengths, you know, as we enter our peak season in the second and third quarter. That's a big driver of the strong revenue guidance that we've issued both for the first quarter as well as the full year. So taking that into account, on both a nominal and a per-home basis, we are pacing ahead of 2019 running. So pleased with what we're seeing thus far, and we think that we'll continue to see strength in demand as we go through the year. Great.
Doug Anmuth
Thank you both.
spk00
Thank you.
Operator
Thank you, Doug. Ladies and gentlemen, please limit your questions to one. The next question comes from Eric Sheridan with Goldman Sachs. Please proceed.
Doug
Thanks so much for taking the question. I'll try to ask one in two parts and see if I can thread the needle. In terms of following up on Doug, maybe just thinking about the demand trends you're seeing exiting 21 and going into 22, can you parse out for us how we should be thinking about price as a determinant of growth on a per unit basis or a per room night basis looking out to 22? And the second component would be, given the demand you're seeing, would you expect to see more than normal seasonality as we move through 22? Or should we think about the beginning of the year and think about normal seasonal trends? going forward through 22. Thanks so much.
Matt
Yeah, Eric, this is Jamie. I can take both of those. So in terms of price, we've had a great Q4. We've had a really strong Q1 thus far. And you saw our guide of the midpoint of 30% year-over-year growth for the full year. For gross booking value for nights sold and occupancy, we said that the combination of those two We'll take a slight step back in the second half of the year as we're comping over record-setting levels from 2021. You know, we saw that growth booking value per night fold in particular was up 19% in the third quarter and up 27% in the fourth quarter. So, you know, when we're putting out guidance, we're, you know, we're we're not setting it at these record high levels. We may very well end up there, but being a bit more conservative there, we will, and, you know, we still expect these metrics to be above pre-pandemic levels, though. And then in terms of your question around seasonality, I think the kind of rule of thumb seasonality that we've talked about in the business before, you know, and what we've seen historically is still accurate. I don't think that we're expecting more pronounced seasonality at this point. We continue to see strength coming out of peak into the fourth quarter and into the first quarter, so I'd say the seasonality looks pretty normal.
Doug
Thanks so much.
Operator
Thank you, Eric. The next question comes from Andrew Boone with JMP Securities. Please proceed.
Eric
Hi, guys. Thanks for taking my question. On gross margins, we saw 700 basis points of expansion on a year-over-year basis and understood you guys made investments in terms of supporting markets kind of during the shoulder season. Can you talk about that improvement and help break it down in terms of tech versus just for the density improvements? Thanks so much.
Matt
Yeah, Andrew. So the gross margin expansion, I'd say primary driver is the gross bookings. value per night sold increases that we saw throughout the year, particularly in the second half, which gives us nice leverage as that flows through because there is not additional cost to service our reservations. In terms of quantifying tech versus density, I'd say in the past year, more on the density side. And as we continue to add homes to the platform, we continue to see that density. And you know that we see a big difference in profit margin for high density versus low density markets. So continuing to see that improvement. From a tech perspective, I think we've announced some really exciting things that we're rolling out right now. the clean inspection tool in particular, which we believe is one not only showing to drive better clean scores and then therefore get satisfaction, but we also believe that this gives us the ability to not have to send out as much human labor to do manual inspections in the home. So that is something that as we look forward into the future will help to create efficiencies along with the smart home rollout that we also talked about.
Eric
Great. Thank you.
Operator
Thank you, Andrew. The next question comes from Jed Kelly with Oppenheimer. Please proceed.
Andrew
Great. Thanks for taking our questions. You mentioned in the fourth quarter you added two and a half times more homes in the fourth quarter versus one Q. How much of that was based on the portfolio approach? And can you give us a sense on the portfolio pipeline for this year. And then you mentioned your brand marketing campaign in 4Q. How did that perform for your direct traffic? And did it underperform? Did it overperform? And how should we view your direct traffic for 22? Thank you.
Matt Roberts
Sure. Hey dad, it's Matt. I'll take this. So as far as, uh, the fourth quarter, a lot of the strength in the fourth quarter was really driven by our individual side because we were adding sales people throughout the year and also their productivity is improving throughout the year. So we had a really great strong quarter from a, um, from an individual side. We don't split out, uh, the individual versus portfolio in any given quarter. Suffice it to say that individual continues to have strong momentum and it still is a vast majority of our new additions is coming from an individual. A general kind of commentary on portfolio, it still remains a really attractive opportunity for us to add dozens of homes in any given new market. So it's a great new market entry. And as we talked about before, just building density in a market which expands our contribution margins as well. So nothing sort of specific about the pipeline on the portfolio other than there's 4,400 property managers that represent over 350,000 homes. So there's a huge amount of companies that are still available to talk to and that could be good fits for joining Vacasa. And we run pretty much the same sort of sales funnel approach on portfolio side is a different type of sale as we do on the individual side um and then the last thing you the question is sort of on our direct traffic yeah your direct traffic uh based on this and specifically the brand campaign so the the on the channel campaign that we launched in the fourth quarter was an opportunity for us to uh invest some of the overperformance that we had done during 2021. Really the objective was just to learn. And I think from that perspective is a big success. I mean, there's some things that we learned about the campaign that we thought we can refine and do better on next time. And there's some things that worked quite well that we'll look to continue going forward. But the main objective of that campaign was not to, to think that we would come out of that test with a new vehicle that was going to be like the centerpiece of how we add property. That's still a direct response program. All of our forecasts, all of our guidance is continuing to be based on that direct response marketing campaigns that we've been running historically. But we learned a lot on the test, and I think we'll look to refine and come up with some new programs, probably in the back half of the year, that take advantage of that learning.
Matt
Thank you. Hey, Jed, it's Jamie. Just to jump in quickly, the two and a half times in Q4 versus Q1 is actually just the individual approach. So we just wanted to give you a stat that was on the individual how much we were able to scale the Salesforce and show off some great results there. So just to clarify.
Andrew
All right, thanks. Thank you.
Operator
Thank you, Jed. The next question comes from Bernie McTernan with Needham and Company. Please proceed.
Jed
Great. Thank you for taking the question. I just wanted to zoom in on the capture rate. It came in lower than we expected in the fourth quarter, but I think it's driven by the higher ADRs. But anything else impacting that rate and then is up still the best way to think about 2022?
Matt Roberts
And capture rate, you're defining capture rate as our revenue over gross booking value? Exactly, yep. Yeah. So there's a few elements that go into that calculation. I mean, one of it's not necessarily just the sort of commission rate, which would be one of the more dominant ones. But, you know, we do have some revenue that don't appear in GBV, such as real estate. And they don't, it doesn't grow. That sort of other revenue line doesn't grow either. in concert with the homes and on our platform or GBV. And then there's a few things that will impact like the commission rates that we will charge. We set our commission rates at a local geography basis and also sort of by potential income at a homeowner basis as well. So there'll be some mix shifts that go along with that. Nothing new there. That's exactly how we've been doing it over time. You'll have some mix shifts there as well. And then finally, we had a little bit of a mix shift in where turnkey was at a slightly lower commission rate than historical vicasa as well. Those things are the ones that sort of contribute to a difference in the take rate on a year-over-year basis, and then maybe a little bit what you modeled. But there isn't anything new that we're doing. Bernie Mayer Kingsville, relative to Commission race, in particular, that would influence our take rate. Bernie Mayer Kingsville, Either positively or negatively going forward.
Ryan Demancic
Scott, thanks man. Sure.
Operator
Thank you Bernie the next question comes from Mike rondo with Northland securities please proceed.
Ryan Demancic
Yeah, thanks, guys, and congratulations on the quarter. Any update on the competitive landscape or just kind of what you're seeing out there?
Matt Roberts
Yeah, I think the position that we have established as being a leader and having all the advantages that go along with the scale that we have continue to just pay dividends, right? I mean, we're able to – I think I mentioned that we spent $50 million – on our tech and dev, and I really think that that's more than the entire local competitive landscape combined that would be able to spend towards technology. And all that technology helps our homeowners make more money, which helps us sell the value proposition and then add properties to our platform. So no, the short answer is no, we're not really seeing any increase in competitive pressure as we go out and sell in the market. And our velocity of sales has accelerated, as Jamie pointed out, even just in the fourth quarter. And we're continuing to build that supply growth engine, both in the individual side and the portfolio side.
Eric
Thank you.
Matt Roberts
Sure.
Operator
Thank you, Mike. The next question comes from Justin Patterson with KeyBank. Please proceed.
Mike
Great. Thank you very much. Matt, how should we think about 2022 in terms of product innovation versus 2021? It looks like you had a lot of great rollouts over the course of the year. And then, Jamie, you alluded to it a bit, I think, in Andrew's answer earlier, but would love to hear about how you think of those investments benefiting KPIs throughout the year. Thank you.
Matt Roberts
Well, I'm really excited about the current year, Justin. I think from a product and innovation perspective, those are just the things that we highlighted to you in terms of 2021. There's a ton more that we just didn't make the top list to share with you. I'm really particularly excited about some of the things that we're able to do on the efficiency, operations efficiency side. that we'll be rolling out this year, some things that'll be really supportive of our individual sales channel with, for example, we're rolling out Salesforce across the business. And then the proprietary part is all the tie-ins that we have to our vacation rental management system, which is our proprietary system that should give us a ton of leverage there too. So And we're adding to the team. We're growing the team. It's what we said we would be doing. We're being really successful at doing that, which is no easy feat in this competitive market for tech talent. So I feel really good about the pace of innovation that we're operating at now. I mean, I'm a CEO, so I'm naturally impatient. But at the same time, I think the team is just doing a fantastic job putting new stuff into place. into our customers' hands.
Matt
And then, Dustin, in terms of your question around KPIs, specifically, I think that all of these investments that we're making in technology will continue to help us gradually get towards our longer-term margin targets, and these specifically over cost of revenue for the clean inspection tool, and then also our operations and support line items. Kind of at a higher level, just thinking about margin leverage, there's kind of the two big factors are, one, density. And if we continue to add units, we'll continue to see markets getting more dense. And you'll see markets increasing in contribution margin, driven by our fixed cost leverage, reducing driving distances, and labor savings. And then you'll also just see sheer fixed cost leverage as well over the YMs, GNA. And then we're continuing to invest in sales and marketing and tech and dev in the short term. But longer term, that's where you'll see those come up. And so I think on the tech side specifically, though, you'll see those reflected largely over our local labor.
Mike
Great. Thank you. Thanks, Justin.
Operator
Thank you, Justin. That concludes the Q&A session. I would like to pass the conference back to Matt Roberts for closing remarks.
Matt Roberts
Well, I just want to thank everybody for joining on our call today. As you can see, we're really proud of the progress that we made in 21 and very excited about what we're already starting to do in 22 and what we have on the horizon here. I definitely want to thank our team members across the country, because without all their dedication and hard work every day, none of it would work. And in particular, I'd love to really thank our homeowners for trusting us with their asset and to making them the most income possible from their home. So I look forward to keeping everybody up to date on our progress as we move through 2022. And again, thanks for taking the time to join us.
Operator
That concludes the PCASA fourth quarter 2021 earnings call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect your line.
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