PulteGroup, Inc.

Good morning. My name is Rob and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Pulte Group fourth quarter 2021 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. If you'd like to withdraw your question, again, press star one. Thank you. Jim Zumer, you may begin your conference.

Great. Thank you, Rob. Good morning, and thank you for joining today's call. We look forward to discussing Pulte Group's outstanding fourth quarter earnings for the period ended December 31, 2021. I'm joined on today's call by Ryan Marshall, President and CEO, Bob O'Shaughnessy, Executive Vice President and CFO, and Jim Osowski, Senior VP, Finance. A copy of our earnings release and this morning's presentation slide have been posted to our corporate website at PulteGroup.com. We'll also post an audio replay of today's call later. I want to highlight that we will be discussing our reported fourth quarter numbers as well as our results adjusted to exclude the impact of certain reserve adjustments and tax benefits recorded in the period. A reconciliation of our adjusted results to our reported financials is included in this morning's release and within today's webcast slides. We encourage you to review these tables to assist in your analysis of our business performance. Also, I want to alert everyone that today's presentation includes full-flipping statements about the company's expected future performance. Actual results could differ materially from those suggested by our comments made today. Most significant risk factors that could affect future results are summarized as part of today's earnings release and within the accompanying presentation slides. These risk factors and other key information are detailed in our SEC filings, including our annual and quarterly reports. Now, let me turn the call over to Ryan Marshall. Ryan?

Thanks, Jim, and good morning. It's great to speak with you again and to have this opportunity to review Pulte Group's impressive fourth quarter and full year results. I am extremely proud of what our organization has been able to accomplish. For starters, I want to thank the entire Pulte Group team for the tremendous effort demonstrated throughout 2021. but particularly in the fourth quarter from sales to procurement construction to our financial services team you clearly showed what a proud and talented group of determined people can achieve in a minute bob will review our fourth quarter results but i want to highlight a few of our full year numbers to clearly demonstrate just how much success we've realized over the past 12 months even with all the challenges the home building industry faced in 2021 from supply chain disruptions and labor shortages to municipal delays and COVID waves, we grew our closings by 17% to almost 29,000 homes. Benefiting from the very favorable demand and pricing conditions, we increased home building revenues by an even greater 27% to $13.5 billion. We were then able to fully capitalize on this top-line growth by expanding gross margins by 210 basis points to 26.4% and driving a 43% increase in our reported full-year earnings of $7.43 per share. Our financial discussions tend to focus on the income statement But I would also highlight that over the past 12 months, we lowered our debt to capital ratio to a historic low of 21.3%, while raising our return on equity to 28%. I would also highlight that over the course of 2021, we continued our disciplined allocation of capital in alignment with our stated priorities. This allocation included investing over $4 billion in land acquisition and land development, increasing our dividend pay rate per share in 2021 by 17%, retiring $726 million of bonds, and repurchasing $900 million of stock, reducing our shares outstanding by approximately 6%. There is a lot to be excited about with regard to Pulte Group's 2021 operating and financial results. In assessing our performance, we fully appreciate that we benefited from a very favorable supply and demand dynamics in the marketplace. On the demand side, we saw a strong desire for homeownership across all markets and buyer groups. At one end, we have maturing millennials driving extraordinary demand for first-time and first move-up product, while at the other end, we have empty nesters who are downsizing or retiring into their next stage of life. This demand strength drove an increase of 8% in our 2021 net new orders to almost 32,000 homes, including 6,769 orders in the fourth quarter. The reality is that these numbers could have been significantly higher, but COVID and other challenges impacted our availability of lots, labor, and materials, which caused us to intentionally slow sales. As part of our response strategy to these resource constraints, we raised prices in 2021 and actively restricted new home sales through lot releases or similar practices. We continue to implement these actions in the fourth quarter as we raise prices and effectively owl our communities. At the same time, we continue to restrict sales in more than half of our communities. The strong demand experienced in the fourth quarter has continued into January with no signs that higher interest rates are impacting the desire for new homes. As we look forward to the year ahead, we are well positioned to meet this strong demand. We enter 2022 with twice as many spec homes in the production pipeline compared to last year, along with a land pipeline that will allow us to expand our community count throughout this year. We also have all the lots we need for our 2022 deliveries and expect to increase our full-year gross margins by upwards of 250 basis points. In other words, we enter 2022 with tremendous momentum. While demand conditions are strong, the supply side of the equation has been extremely challenging with no clear signs as to when things will get better. The limited supply of new and existing homes allowed prices to increase by double digits last year, but labor shortages and significant disruptions in the supply chain are limiting production and extending build cycles. Our suppliers and partners are working hard to provide needed resources, but key products are under allocation, must be ordered months in advance, or are simply not available. The ongoing surge in COVID infection rates is impacting our suppliers and is also making it very hard for trades to field crews consistently, and expanding their teams is an even bigger challenge. Unfortunately, we expect construction processes to remain difficult through much, if not all, of 2022. In response to these challenges, we continue to implement actions to help ensure we can complete high-quality homes and deliver deliveries until supply chain issues are resolved. These actions include increasing spec starts, ordering earlier, narrowing option packages, and even warehousing inventory of critical building products. These efforts are time-consuming, and we lose some production efficiencies, but for the foreseeable future, they are required to get homes built. We've said in the past that scale, particularly local scale, matters, and this is certainly the case today. Let me now turn the call over to Bob for a review of our fourth quarter results. Bob?