Heritage Insurance Holdings, Inc.

Good morning and welcome to the Heritage Insurance Holdings Third Quarter 2025 Earnings Conference Call. Please note today's event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Kirk Lusk, Chief Financial Officer for the company. Please go ahead.

Good morning and thank you for joining us today. We invite you to visit the investor section of our website, investors.heritagepci.com, where the earnings release and our earnings call will be archived. These materials are available for replay or review at your convenience. Today's call may contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements are based upon management's current expectations and subject to uncertainty and changes in circumstances. In our earnings press release and our SEC filings, we detail material risks that may cause our future results to differ from our expectations. Our statements are as of today, and we have no obligation to update any forward-looking statements we may make. For a description of the forward-looking statements and the risks that could cause our results to differ materially from those described in the forward-looking statements, please refer to our annual report on Form 10-K, earnings release, and other SEC filings. Our comments today will also include non-GAAP financial measures. The reconciliations of and other information regarding these measures can be found in our press release. With me on the call today is Ernie Garite, our Chief Executive Officer. I will now turn the call over to Ernie.

Thank you, Kirk. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. We delivered strong third quarter results, having achieved net income of $50.4 million, up significantly from a year ago, and maintaining the positive trajectory of our earnings. As Kirk and I have been discussing on our earnings calls over the last year, we continue to see tangible results from the successful implementation of our strategic initiatives, which were designed to generate positive and consistent shareholder returns by attaining and maintaining rate adequacy, managing exposure, enhancing our underwriting discipline, and improving claims and customer service levels. This has created a significant amount of earnings power within Heritage, which continues to show through. As part of that strategy, we re-underwrote our personal lines book while taking needed rate increases to achieve adequate rates. This has led to a steady contraction in our policies enforced over the last four years, while our enforced premium increased from approximately $1.1 billion to an all-time record in the third quarter of $1.44 billion. At the same time, we improved both the quality and the diversification of our book of business. Looking out over the next six months, We expect our personal lines policy count to return to growth as we have now opened nearly all of our geographies to new business as compared to only 30% a year ago. We are already seeing our new business production ramp up with new business premium written for the third quarter of $36 million, representing an increase of 166%. as compared to 13.7 million of new business written in the third quarter of last year. The decline in our policy count continues to moderate, having decreased by 6,800 policies in the third quarter as compared to a decrease of over 19,000 policies in the third quarter of 2024. In fact, our third quarter PIF count reduction was the smallest decrease that we have experienced since we deployed these strategic initiatives in June of 2021. While it takes time to open our territories, we are seeing good new business momentum continue across our regions. Based upon these factors, I believe that we are on a firm path to deliver full year policy growth in 2026. Importantly, we have longstanding relationships with agents and brokers across our geographies. that we have maintained over the last four years, despite slowing new business growth and re-underwriting our book of personal lines business. In the Northeast and portions of the Mid-Atlantic, we predominantly produce business through Narragansett Bay Insurance Company, domiciled in and operated out of Rhode Island. Over the years, we have built a successful homeowners insurance business, which has expanded across the coastal regions of the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic. The company has strong relationships with independent agents based upon a trusted brand. Likewise, Zephyr Insurance operates in and serves the Hawaiian market. Although Zephyr initially focused exclusively on Hawaiian hurricane wind risk, we subsequently expanded Zephyr's product offering to meet the needs of our customers and the overall Hawaiian market. Our organization benefits from the agility and the rapid market responsiveness typical of a regional enterprise, while also leveraging the economies of scale found in larger, super-regional companies. We have consolidated many functions to gain efficiency, but retained the underwriting, marketing, and customer service functions in each region to better address the unique needs of each market. Every region has its own unique dynamics. and operating the business locally allows us to quickly adapt to changing conditions as well as provide outstanding customer service to our policyholders and agent partners. As we grow, our robust infrastructure allows us to write new personal lines business without adding significant administrative expense. We understand each of our markets and have built relationships with hundreds of master agencies which represent thousands of agents throughout our geographic footprint. Our longstanding agency partners have expressed a willingness and desire to grow with us, which in turn provides confidence in our outlook for improved growth in the year ahead. We also remain focused on making decisions based on our data and analytics. This has been the cornerstone of our discipline underwriting process across all of our geographies. which we will maintain as we grow and which contributed to the lower net loss ratio this quarter. As we grow, we will maintain our discipline underwriting processes as well as rate adequacy and managing exposures. An example of our discipline approach can be seen in the commercial residential business, which we reduced in the third quarter due to more competitive market conditions. I believe this further demonstrates the discipline of our management team. Fortunately, we have ample room to grow our personalized business and can choose to be selective across the 16 states where we do business. We are also exploring expansion opportunities into new regions of the country, as well as the delivery of new products to our existing markets. We have a long runway ahead of profitable growth of our business and deliver value to our shareholders. Reinsurance is a critical component of our business, and we have maintained a stable, indemnity-based reinsurance program at manageable costs with an excellent panel of highly rated and collateralized reinsurers. Over the course of the third quarter, we continue to meet with our reinsurance partners who continue to support our growth and from whom we anticipate we'll offer incremental capacity as we look to our 6 renewal next year. Additionally, we are seeing the benefits of tort reform as industry loss expectations for Hurricane Milton have been steadily coming down, largely due to reduced litigation, which our reinsurers should begin seeing in the coming months. Given the improved litigation environment in Florida, the lack of reinsured losses, and the capacity entering the reinsurance market, we are optimistic that reinsurance pricing will continue to improve looking ahead in 2026. We also believe that the impact of this necessary legislation will be favorable to the consumer in terms of the cost of insurance. To conclude, our business continues to gain momentum and the earnings power of the company is building. We're also growing capital which will support our managed growth strategy as we expect to begin to deliver policy count growth in the quarters ahead. We're also now in a capital position to review our capital allocation strategy and believe our shares are trading below intrinsic value and do not reflect the many opportunities that we have to further grow the company. As a result, we restarted our share repurchase program in the third quarter, having repurchased 106,000 shares for a total cost of $2.3 million. I would also like to reiterate our dedication in navigating the complexities of our market with a strategic focus that prioritizes long-term profitability shareholder value, and customer service driven by our dedicated workforce.