Essent Group Ltd. Common Shares

Thank you for standing by. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to today's Essent Group Limited fourth quarter earnings call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you'd like to ask a question during this time, simply press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. And if you'd like to withdraw your question, simply press star one again. Thank you. I would now like to turn the call over to Phil Stefano with Investor Relations. Phil, please go ahead.

Thank you, Greg. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our call. Joining me today are Mark Cassell, Chairman and CEO, and David Weinstock, Chief Financial Officer. Also on hand for the Q&A portion of the call is Chris Curran, President of Essent Guarantee. Our press release, which contains Essent's financial results for the fourth quarter and full year 2024, was issued earlier today and is available on our website at EssentGroup.com. Our press release includes non-GAAP financial measures that may be discussed during today's call. A complete description of these measures and the reconciliation to GATT may be found in Exhibit O of our press release. Prior to getting started, I would like to remind participants that today's discussions are being recorded and will include the use of forward-looking statements. These statements are based on current expectations, estimates, projections, and assumptions that are subject to risks and uncertainties, which may cause actual results to differ materially. For discussion of these risks and uncertainties, please review the cautionary language regarding forward-looking statements in today's press release, the risk factors included in our Form 10-K filed with the SEC on February 16, 2024, and any other reports and registration statements filed with the SEC, which are also available on our website. Now let me turn the call over to Mark.

Thanks, Phil, and good morning, everyone. Earlier today, we released our fourth quarter and full year 2024 financial results. Strong credit quality and resilience in the housing and labor markets continue to drive credit performance, while interest rates remain a tailwind for persistency and investment income. Although mortgage origination activity remains below historical levels, we anticipate that home buying demand is merely being postponed given the level of rates and affordability. While there is always uncertainty in the economic environment, given the strength of our balance sheet and our buy, manage, and distribute operating model, we believe Essendon is well positioned for a range of economic scenarios. And now for our results. For the fourth quarter of 2024, we reported net income of $168 million compared to $175 million a year ago. On a diluted per share basis, we earned $1.58 for the fourth quarter compared to $1.64 a year ago. For the full year, we earned $729 million, or $6.85 per diluted share, while our return on average equity was 14%. As of December 31st, our book value per share was $53.36, an increase of 11% from a year ago. As of December 31st, our U.S. mortgage insurance enforce was $244 billion, a 2% increase versus a year ago. Our 12-month persistency on December 31st was 86%, down about one point from last quarter, while nearly 60% of our enforced portfolio has a note rate of 5.5% or lower. Although persistency has likely peaked, we continue to expect that the current level of mortgage rates will support elevated persistency in the near term. Credit quality of our insurance and force remains strong, with a weighted average FICO of 746 and a weighted average original LTV of 93%. Credit performance in the fourth quarter primarily reflected both the aging of our portfolio and the typical seasonality of default behavior. Note, however, that credit performance for the fourth quarter was also impacted by approximately 2,000 defaults in areas affected by Hurricanes Helene and Milton. In addition, we are monitoring the potential impact of defaults from the California wildfires. Dave will discuss defaults and reserves in more detail in a few moments. On the mortgage insurance front, our industry remains competitive and strong credit guardrails remain in place, driven by the underpinnings established by the GSEs after the global financial crisis. These guardrails combined with our S&Edge credit engine enable us to selectively grow our high credit quality insurance reports while generating strong returns. We are pleased with our position in the marketplace and the unit economics that we are achieving on new business. As a reminder, we price for new business assuming a combined ratio of roughly 35% to 45%. In the first quarter of 2025, we entered into two quarter share transactions with a panel of highly rated reinsurers to provide forward protection for our 2025 and 2026 business. We are pleased with the strong execution and remain committed to a programmatic reinsurance strategy, which helps to diversify our capital resources while seeding a meaningful portion of our mezzanine credit risk. At year-end 2024, approximately 97% of our portfolio is covered by some form of reinsurance. S&RE had another strong year of performance, writing high-quality GSE risk share business while leveraging its fee-based MGA services. S&RE ended the year with annual third-party revenues of approximately $80 million, while our third-party risk and force was $2.2 billion. Since 2014, S&RE has earned over $450 million of net income from its third-party business and has contributed approximately $800 million to S&RE's book value. Title operations incurred a pre-tax loss of approximately $21 million in the prior year prior to corporate allocations. We continue to maintain a long-term view for this business. However, given it is levered to rates, we do not expect title will have any material impact on earnings over the near term. Cash and investments as of December 31st were $6.3 billion, and our new money yield in the fourth quarter remained over 5%. For the full year 2024, our investment yield was 3.7% compared to 3.5% in 2023. Net investment income was $222 million in 2024, up nearly 20% from 2023. As of December 31st, the carrying value of other invested assets is $304 million, and ever to date, these investments have created $81 million of value. As of December 31st, we are in a position of strength with $5.6 billion in gap equity access to $1.6 billion in excess of loss reinsurance, and a PMIR sufficiency ratio of 178%. With a full year 2024 operating cash flow of $852 million, our franchise remains well positioned from an earnings, cash flow, and balance sheet perspective. As a result of our strong financial performance and capital position, I am pleased to announce that our board has improved an 11% increase in our quarterly dividend to $0.31 per share. At the same time, our board also approved a $500 million share repurchase authorization that runs through year-end 2026. Now let me turn the call over to Dave.

Thanks, Mark, and good morning, everyone. Let me review our results for the quarter in a little more detail. For the fourth quarter, we earned $1.58 per diluted share compared to $1.65 last quarter and $1.64 in the fourth quarter a year ago. Our U.S. mortgage insurance portfolio ended 2024 with insurance in force of $243.6 billion, an increase of $669 million from September 30th, and an increase of $4.6 billion, or 2%, compared to $239.1 billion at December 31, 2023. Persistency at December 31, 2024 decreased to 85.7%, compared to 86.6% at the end of the third quarter. Net premium earned for the fourth quarter of 2024 was $244 million and includes $16.2 million of premiums earned by Essentry on our third-party business and $16.6 million of premiums earned by the title operations. The average base premium rate for the U.S. mortgage insurance portfolio for the fourth quarter was 41 basis points, and the average net premium rate was 35 basis points in the fourth quarter of 2024, both consistent with last quarter. we expect that the average base premium rate for the full year 2025 will be largely unchanged from the fourth quarter rate of 41 basis points. Consolidated net investment income for full year 2024 was $222.1 million compared to $186.1 million for the full year 2023 due to growth in the investment portfolio and investing at higher yields than the book yield of our existing portfolio. Net investment income for the fourth quarter was relatively flat to the prior quarter. Credit performance for the fourth quarter was affected by default in areas impacted by Hurricanes Helene and Milton. The provision for losses and loss adjustment expense on the U.S. mortgage insurance portfolio was $37.2 million in the fourth quarter of 2024 compared to $29.8 million in the third quarter of 2024 and $19 million in the fourth quarter a year ago. During the fourth quarter, Total defaults increased by 2,533, which includes 2,119 defaults that we identified as hurricane-related defaults. Based on prior industry experience, we expect the ultimate number of hurricane-related defaults that will result in claims will be less than the default to claim experience of non-hurricane-related defaults. Our provision for losses on these hurricane defaults does reflect a higher cure rate assumption than the estimates used on non-hurricane defaults. The provision for losses in the fourth quarter includes $8 million pertaining to the hurricane defaults, representing our best estimate of the ultimate loss to be incurred for claims associated with these defaults. Looking forward, we will continue to gather information on this population of defaults and update our reserves if needed. At December 31st, the default rate on the U.S. mortgage insurance portfolio was 2.27%, up 32 basis points from 1.95% at September 30th, 2024. For the full year 2024, we recorded a net provision on the U.S. mortgage insurance portfolio of approximately $75 million, with higher defaults reflecting aging of the portfolio and the impact of the hurricanes. Other underwriting and operating expenses in the fourth quarter were $71 million and include $26.7 million of total title expenses, of which $8.5 million are premiums retained by agents. Our consolidated expense ratio was 28.7% this quarter. Our expense ratio excluding title, which is a non-GAAP measure, was 19.4% this quarter. The description of our expense ratio excluding title and the reconciliation of GAAP can be found in the exhibit of our press release. The consolidated effective tax rate for full year 2024 was 14.7%, including the impact of $2 million of favorable discrete tax items. For 2025, we estimate that the annual effective tax rate will be approximately 15.5%, excluding the impact of any discreet items. As Mark noted, our holding company liquidity remains strong and includes $500 million of undrawn revolver capacity under our committed credit facility. At December 31st, we had $500 million of senior unsecured notes outstanding, and our debt-to-capital ratio was 8%. At December 31st, SN Guaranty's PMIR sufficiency ratio was strong at 178%, with $1.6 billion in excess available assets. At quarter end, SN Guaranty's statutory capital was $3.6 billion, with a risk-to-capital ratio of 9.8 to 1. Note that statutory capital includes $2.5 billion of contingency reserves at December 31st. During the full year 2024, SN Guaranty paid dividends of $165 million to its U.S. holding company. As of January 1st, Essendon Guarantee can pay ordinary dividends of $397 million in 2025. At the quarter end, Essendon Guarantee of PA, which provided reinsurance to Essendon Guarantee on certain policies originated prior to April 1st, 2019, entered into a commutation and release agreement under which all the outstanding risk and force was commuted back to Essendon Guarantee. Essendon Guarantee of PA then surrendered its insurance license effective December 31st, 2024, freed up $93 million of cash and investments at Essend Guaranty FPA as liquidity to the U.S. holding company. As a result, there were no dividends from the insurance subsidiaries to the U.S. holding company during the fourth quarter of 2024. During the fourth quarter, Essend repaid a dividend of $87.5 million to Essend Group. Also in the quarter, Essend Group paid cash dividends totaling $29.4 million to shareholders, and we repurchased 1.2 million shares for $66 million under the authorization approved by our board in October 2023. In January 2025, we repurchased nearly 1 million shares for $52 million, taking advantage of the volatility in essence share price. As we have previously discussed, we are patient and value sensitive when it comes to buying back shares. Believing this strategy will support our long-term goal of compounding book value per share growth over time. Now let me turn the call back over to Mark.

Thanks, Dave. In closing, we are pleased with our full year 2024 financial results, which continue to reflect the strength of our franchise. Our high-quality portfolio combined with resilience in housing and employment continues to translate to strong credit performance, while our business continues to benefit from the impact of rates on persistency and investment income. Our strong operating performance continues to generate excess capital, which we will approach in a balanced manner by maintaining balance sheet strength preserving optionality for strategic growth opportunities, and optimizing shareholder returns over the longer term. Looking forward, we remain committed to our buy, manage, and distribute operating model, and believe that Essent remains well-positioned to deliver attractive returns for our shareholders. Now, let's get to your questions.

Thanks, Mark. And at this time, I would like to remind everyone, in order to ask a question, press star, then the number one on your telephone keypad. Once again, star one. And we will pause just a moment to compile the Q&A roster. Okay, it looks like our first question comes from the line of Bose George with KBW. Bose, please go ahead.

Hey, everyone. Good morning. Actually, first on title, is your expectation for 2025 that title results will be similar to 24? And, you know, was there anything unusual in title this quarter, just, you know, the provision was up and the OPEX was up?

Hey, Bose. Good morning. Yeah, I would say with title, for 25, I would expect more of the same. I think we have a cost structure, and we had said earlier, right, it would take 12 to 18 months to stand it up. We're right at 18 months. It's relatively well stood up. It's just a matter of I kind of look at some of that, you know, partial, the cost, you know, the drag is kind of an option cost for refinance to come back, and the rates just haven't come back. Like I said in the script, we're levered to rates, But we did sign up one pretty large lender last year. So we're really carrying capacity for that lender. And there's a cost to that. So I would expect it to be kind of more of the same. Again, longer term, it's a call option. And we do believe longer term it will be supplemental earnings relative to S&RE. And I think we're still – but we continue to make progress there. But, again, I think when the rates come down, we should see – We should see better results. In the fourth quarter, Boze, it was more around the provision, you know, excess provision that we've normally had, and that was really just some of the cleanup from the underwriter that we bought as some of the claims came due. So a little bit of, you know, fourth quarter cleanup there.

Okay, great. Thanks. And then, actually, the hurricane-related default count that you gave, the 2,219, was that the defaults that's in the inventory at quarter end or had some of those cured by quarter end?

They were in there at quarter end. So, like we said in the script, I think most of the increase of defaults were the hurricanes. So, if you take out, you know, 2.25 or 2.27 default rate, you take out the defaults. It's probably, you know, closer to 2%.

Okay, great. Thanks.

Sure.

All right. Thank you, Bose. And our next question comes from the line of Terry Ma with Barclays. Terry, please go ahead.

Hey, thank you. Good morning, everyone. Maybe just to follow up on the defaults, I kind of stripped at the 2,000 or so out of new notices in the quarter. New notices are actually down sequentially, which is kind of counter to typical seasonality. So kind of any color on kind of what's going on there.

Hey, Terry, it's Dave Weinstock. Yeah, you know, there are clearly some ebbs and flows to default patterns. You're right that, in general, we do see an uptick in the second half of the year for sure and somewhat a little bit in the fourth quarter. There wasn't anything that we read into it necessarily. I would say, on the whole, as we looked at 2024, In general, 2024's default pattern was a little bit favorable, you know, mostly every quarter to prior historical quarters. So I think what we really saw in the fourth quarter was maybe a little bit more of the same.

Got it. Got it. Okay. And then if I look at the default rate, kind of ex-hurricanes, kind of the 2% you just quoted, the year-over-year change kind of decelerated compared to last quarter. I'm just curious, have we kind of reached a point with kind of vintage seasoning where you should start to get more of a steady pace of increase for the default rate, or is that kind of too early to call right now?

Yeah, I think it's too early to call. And, you know, I think just big picture, Terry, you know, I think given the seasoning of the book and just the average age of the book, you know, you're looking at, you know, historically pre-COVID was 18 months. The book kind of continued to turn over. Because of, you know, kind of post-COVID, this kind of second cycle, COVID was the first cycle, right? Low rates, tons of origination, a lot of refinancing, portfolio turning over. Kind of in the middle of 22 when rates shot up, we've kind of been frozen. And the book is really lengthening out. It's like 33 months as of 32, 33 months. So you're starting to really, you know, we're getting that extra year of premiums, which we've enjoyed over the past couple years. But I think, you know, just think about it. You know, the more borrowers are outstanding for longer periods of time, it's kind of natural that, you know, a few of them that stick around longer will default. So it's pretty much in our expectations. But it wouldn't surprise me if the default rate kind of continues to go up somewhat during 25. And I think you're starting to – I wouldn't be surprised if the whole industry sees it and, you know, maybe we're – You know, maybe we're different, but I think when we see it kind of to go up to the, you know, two-ish or 3% range wouldn't surprise me at all.

Got it. Okay. Helpful. Thank you.

Yeah.

Thank you, Jerry. And our next question comes from the line of Rick Shane with J.P. Morgan. Rick, please go ahead.

Thanks for taking my questions this morning. Look, there's been a bunch of questions about hurricanes. I suspect we're probably going to get questions next quarter about fires. And obviously, there are short-term implications on the model. But I'm curious, Mark, in many of the high-cost regions of the country, insurance is now becoming very expensive or not necessarily even available. Two things. First of all, how do you guys monitor whether or not borrowers are, in fact, insured? And if insurance really becomes increasingly problematic, How do you think about that in terms of pricing for risk and considering affordability?

Yeah, that's a really good question. It's been a topic recently for a while internally. One, I think if they have a mortgage, they're required to have homeowners. So if somehow they're dropped, they'll get force-placed. so we don't worry about them having the insurance should something happen. So I think we're pretty well covered there. And remember, and you know this, Rick, and I'm sure a lot of others do, we're not really on the hook until the home is repaired. So there's that kind of layer of protection we have, and that's why we've seen historically a lot of the defaults in the hurricane regions tend to cure at a pretty high rate. Again, Past performance doesn't predict the future, but that's been pretty much the scenario we've had for past hurricanes. In terms of the longer term impact of homeowners insurance, Yeah, I think it's going to continue to be an issue in certain parts of the country. Just remember, you know, when some of the real coastal regions or even where the wildfires are, these are high cost areas, Rick. It's not a lot of mortgage insurance. So we don't really, we're not that exposed. I think they're the ones that are most susceptible to these significant increases in homeowners. But even Even for normal folks, you'll see it go from like $600 a year to $1,200. It's significant. It's significant from a borrower perspective. If you kind of like raise above it a kind of big picture from an MI perspective, it's like maybe a point in DTI. So it's like we think about it a lot, but I'm trying to put it in perspective for investors that, yes, it's an added cost. And I think it goes in general, Rick, to kind of our theme here, that with affordability going up and maybe staying up, the amount of disposable income that borrowers are going to have to use or allocate for mortgages I just think is going to increase. I mean, you live in California. It's always been that way in California. For 30 years, borrowers have allocated more of their disposable income to housing. It hasn't really been that big. that hasn't been that way for the rest of the country. And I just think where home ownership rates will continue to stay where they are, kind of in the mid to upper 60s, I think borrowers are going to allocate more of their disposable income. I don't think they're going to have a choice if they want to be homeowners. So hopefully that gives you a little bit of big picture context.

It does. And again, look, I know you think in five and ten year horizons. Are you concerned that it has a chilling effect on HPA, which more broadly does impact you guys?

You know, I don't... HPA has gone up so much, Rick, in the past five years that I think it's okay for it to pause for a while, to be honest. I think, again, for it to be flattish and allow... And this kind of gets... Allow kind of incomes to catch up, which is kind of part of my longer-term theme for Essendon. And I alluded to it earlier earlier, you know, my response to Terry, but there's kind of like, you know, three cycles, right? If you just think about recently, we had the COVID cycle, super low rates, lots of origination, and it was an anomaly, right? You know, we've never really seen rates come down that quickly and stay that way. Just in that scene, maybe we saw it kind of in, you know, 2003 was probably the last time we saw such, you know, significant refinance. And then kind of rates shot up in mid-22. So it's kind of like the new book started, right? So we have high rates. HPAs is pretty high. So affordability has been an issue. It's clearly been an issue for the past. We're still into it. I think once, and that's been an anomaly, right? We've never seen a housing market. I read last week that typically four million borrowers or four million people move every year. Last year was 2.7. So we're still kind of in this housing, I guess it's a rut is a good way to say it, but we're going to come out of it. And when we do, and I think how we come out of it is, I don't know if rates come down significantly. I think having HPA remain relatively flattish and allow time for incomes to to increase, you're just going to see it happen naturally, right? Families continue to form. They need to move into bigger houses. People change jobs. More of that natural activity is going to come. And I think when we enter in that cycle, I think you're going to see renewed growth in our business. I really do. I can't predict when that's going to happen. I don't know if it happens in 2025. I think it takes a while for it to play out. But again, when you think bigger picture for the industry, right, around a trillion and a half of insurance and force, it wouldn't surprise me. And it's really only grown maybe 2% last year, 2% the year before. I think we're in a pause. And I do think when these forces come together, I think it'll be a bit of a tailwind for the business.

Got it. Hey, Mark, I always appreciate the answers. Thank you so much.

Welcome. Thanks, Rick. And our next question comes from the line of Doug Harder with UBS. Excuse me. Doug, please go ahead.

Thanks. Mark, you guys increased the dividend, increased the share repurchase. And given what you just said, that we might be in kind of a pause for industry insurance and forced growth. How are you thinking about the pacing of capital return in the near term versus opportunities either in mortgage insurance or elsewhere to deploy capital?

It's a good question, Doug. And I think there is... I think we're entering into this year a decent opportunity for us to return capital and become a little bit more capital efficient, right? When you kind of combine the pause and growth, the buildup of capital, we've continued to build capital up over the past few years. So even though rates have been high, you know, credit's been benign, persistency's been good, and we've had this nice tailwind from investment income, and I think mentioned in the script, like $850 million of cash coming in the door. So it's been a strong operating performance, and we've really built up capital levels. So add that and put into the fact that we feel pretty confident around credit in the shorter term. And I know I know it's your job, and we have to think through kind of the fault rates and where they're going. We do think, again, I alluded to it earlier, for them to continue to move up to 3% if they get to that level. It won't surprise me, and we won't get super kind of concerned about it. It's kind of well within our expectations, and add in kind of our PMARs cushion, right? And that's the thing that always, that's our biggest concern, Doug, is kind of the event. We are, and I know a lot of our analysts are specialty finance analysts, but at the end of the day, we really are more of an insurance company. I know our specialty is mortgage, but the financial performance in terms of premiums built up, paying claims, it's much more of an insurance company. They don't have a lot of liquidity risk. uh... you know that especially uh... finance company has your liquidity risk if anything is kind of in a p marge calculation in terms of the pros of locality uh... our business is really a cat business in a way arc our catastrophe happens to be a macro a severe macroeconomic recession right that's what we that that's the thing that we we think about the most we don't worry about the kind of ins and outs of uh... even of a normal recession or soft landing it's really that that big event They don't happen that often, but when they do, they're significant. It happened in the MI business back in the early 80s with some regional events and super high rates. It really crumbled a lot of the MIs back then. It clearly happened during the great financial crisis. We got a peak at a crisis in COVID, but it happened to be relatively short. And we run, we've talked about this before, we run our stress test through the GFC stress test. The Moody's S4 is becoming more kind of, I would say, commonly looked at amongst those in the industry. I think when we kind of go, when we run our numbers through that, we feel pretty good. So we feel like, and that's kind of when we think about What's the right PMIR's capital sufficiency ratio? A lot of that is running through the stress and making sure we have it. So we feel good there. And then when you add in kind of like the capital, it's at the holdco. And, you know, you've heard me before think about, you know, investment opportunities. We just haven't seen anything that we like in terms of the investment. When you put all that together, it is, you know, for us to return capital, I think it's a time, it's a good time for us to do it, right? We have, and we've talked about the numerator and denominator. The numerator, again, given that pause, and the pause is across the business. It's not just in the core business. Clearly, you know, we alluded to title is more, it's smaller, much smaller, but it's rate sensitive. And we're seeing a little bit of the pause even within S&R, given that kind of the lack of GSC issuance. So when you add all that up for us to, and again, taking advantage really, as Dave alluded to, we're price sensitive on every purchases. It was just a fantastic opportunity, you know, kind of post our November call. So we'll continue, you know, again, we have like a grid that we'll continue to execute. And don't forget that we have the special dividend as a tool. We haven't used it yet, but again, I think that's always out there. And I think our goal is to grow book value per share, but we also want to make sure we have strong ROEs. And you don't want too much capital to create a drag. I mean, I know it's a high-class problem for us to have, but I do think you'll see a little bit more of that activity in 2025. Great.

Appreciate it, Mark.

Thank you, Doug. And our next question comes from the line of Jeff Dunn with Dowling and Partners. Jeff, please go ahead.

Thanks. Good morning, guys. Dave, just to confirm, you said a 15.5% tax rate for this year?

Yes, that's our current estimate for 2025.

Yep. I'm surprised at how low it is with the new minimum tax. Can you walk through the mechanics of that and what kind of credits maybe you're assuming to get to that level?

Yeah, so, and actually, Jeff, you know, it's actually up a little bit from what our full year was for 2024. You know, to the extent that you're thinking about Bermuda tax and, you know, I know there's been a lot of, you know, there's been some developments there that are potentially coming and I know there are those, there are definitely some Bermuda-based companies that have recorded an economic transition adjustment And I think that's being looked at and how much of that can be deductible and the like. To cut through that, we don't have one of those. We didn't record an economic transition adjustment. We have a very limited international presence, and there is an international presence exemption related to the Bermuda income tax that really exempts us from tax until 2030. You know, when you look at that, that's why, you know, on the whole, we're basically saying for 2025, we're going to be around the same place we were really in 2024. Gotcha.

Okay. And then do you have the count for the Q3 new notices of hurricane effective notices that came in?

Yeah, you know, Jeff, we didn't actually, the hurricanes hit really late in September and beginning of October. We didn't really think any of those defaults that came in in the third quarter were hurricane related defaults. Really, we really thought everything was really in the fourth quarter.

Gotcha. And then last, could you repeat the buyback info for the quarter? I just missed that when we ran through the numbers.

Yeah. In the quarter, we repurchased I got it right here. We repurchased 1.2 million shares for $66 million in the fourth quarter. And in January, we repurchased nearly 1 million shares for $52 million.

Perfect. Thank you.

Sure. Great. Thanks, Jeff. Just a reminder, folks, again, if you would like to ask a question, it is star 1 on your telephone keypad. Once again, star 1.

our next question comes from the line of eric hagan with btig eric please go ahead hey thanks good morning i appreciate you guys uh taking my question all right so it feels like the non-bank lenders are are laser focused on bringing down origination and servicing costs managing their own prepayment risk through you know strong recapture and a lot of that improvement in cost and scale already seem to be showing up in the refi behavior when when rates are dropping do you guys have any perspective on how further growth of these non-banks and the lower cost of capital could drive, you know, prepay behavior specifically for the high LTV cohort of borrowers out there. And then how that kind of dynamic maybe traces back to how you guys price risk.

Yeah, clearly it's in kind of our duration assumptions when we think about it, you know, when we price risk on the front end. I think it's an interesting point, Eric. It's nice to have you back on the calls. And we... You are correct in terms of how efficient the larger originators have become on refinancing. And you can imagine maybe even with some of the potential AI tools out there that they could become even more efficient. But they're brutally efficient. They have been for a while. That's the one thing to keep in mind. They have been for a while. And so I think when we think about it, I think it's still rate dependent. I mean, so if rates do come down, would we see more kind of MI roll off the books? Absolutely. And again, but I think it'll be, as I said earlier, be replaced by rates come down. Following up on my answer to Rick, it probably brings in that new cycle a little bit quicker because I think it'll unlock a lot of purchase activity too. So I don't know if that exactly answers your question, but I do think it really is rate dependent for these guys. I know they're brutally efficient, but you still need rates to kind of come down. And we saw that. I think that was the example. I think we might have talked about it before, but there was kind of that refinance flash in October. And we saw, and you can see it reflected in our numbers, I think our refinance percentage was 14-ish. in the fourth quarter, so it was relatively higher. And we saw a bit on title. We didn't take advantage of it because it wasn't long enough. But I agree with you. When it comes, they react very quickly.

Great perspectives. I appreciate you guys. Thank you.

Thank you, Eric. And it looks like our final question today comes from the line of Bose George with KBW. He's back. Bose, please go ahead.

Great, thanks. I just had a couple of modeling-related questions. Did you guys give guidance for expenses for 2025?

No, we didn't, Boze, because we're moving to the segment reporting, which you guys will see in the K disclosure. So it's going to be more MI and then kind of other segments. So we didn't We'll be able to kind of, once you see the numbers, we'll be able to potentially give you some MI type guidance. But big picture, if you were to look at last year's numbers, it'll be relatively flattish, like when you cut through it. But we didn't, we wanted to wait until the K was out and you guys had a good chance to kind of look through it.

Okay, great. And then actually just one more on the investment portfolio. What's the incremental yield versus the current yield? And actually just the decline quarter of a quarter, a little surprising. So kind of what drove that?

yeah it's i know it's a little surprising but we've really kind of reposition repositioning the book so we moved and we started that you know in the past i want to say for four months we're moving out of kind of a shorter term cash uh... back into kind of more a b s and in corporate credit kind of back to where we were before kind of moving back to our normal portfolio so there's a little bit of of that rolling off it was it was to your treasuries at really high rates kind of rolling off so i would think I would think this year, Bose, just in terms of kind of the rate, I think it stays in that same neighborhood. Longer term, depending if the yield curve stays where it is, it wouldn't surprise us to see it go above four, but I don't think that's going to happen in 2025.

Okay, great. Thanks a lot. Sure.

Thanks, Bose. And there are no further questions, so I will now hand it back to management for closing remarks.

I'd like to thank everyone for joining us, and again, for the second time in seven years, I'd like to congratulate our Philadelphia Eagles for winning the Super Bowl, and have a great weekend, and go Birds!