PulteGroup, Inc.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for standing by. My name is Kelvin, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Pulte Group fourth quarter 2024 earnings conference call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speakers' remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you'd like to ask a question during this time, simply press the star button followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, press star one again. Thank you. I would now like to turn the call over to Bob Shaughnessy. Sorry, Bob Shaughnessy. My apologies. Please go ahead.

All right. Thanks, Calvin. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to today's call. We look forward to discussing our fourth quarter and full year financial results. With me today are Ryan Marshall, our President and CEO, and Jim Osowski, our incoming Executive Vice President and CFO. As always, a copy of our earnings release and this morning's presentation slides have been posted to our corporate website at PulteGroup.com. We'll also post an audio replay of this call later today. I'd highlight that today's presentation includes forward-looking statements about the company's expected future performance. Actual results could differ materially from those suggested by our comments today. The 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. With that said, let me turn the call over to Ryan.

Thanks, Bob, and good morning. We are pleased to speak with you today about how we are running the business and our outstanding fourth quarter and full-year financial results. Before Bob gives you the detailed data relating to the fourth quarter, I thought it would be appropriate to summarize some of the company's many achievements in 2024. Multigroup delivered 31,219 homes in 2024, which represents an increase of 9% over last year. We generated record home sale revenues of $17.3 billion. We once again reported industry-leading full-year gross margins of 28.9%. And we were able to do this in the face of increasing affordability challenges through the careful management of product offerings, pricing, incentives, and absorption paces as we sought to maintain high profitability while ensuring we continued to turn our assets. We continue to manage our overheads efficiently as our reported SG&A amounted to 7.6% of our home sale revenues, including the insurance benefits we recorded in 2024. And we reported strong operating results from our financial services operations, which generated $210 million of pre-tax income compared to $133 million last year. As a result, Our reported net operating margin was 21.3% for the year. No matter how you look at it, our performance this year was outstanding as we have continued to navigate the turbulence in the markets over the last few years. Our performance is a product of the disciplined and consistent manner in which we are running the business, which has allowed us to quickly adjust key business practices to position Pulte Group for ongoing success. Our strong operating performance also allowed us to continue to manage our capital in a manner which leaves us with considerable financial strength. In the year, we generated $1.7 billion of cash flow from operations after investing $5.3 billion in new land. We continue to efficiently increase our land pipeline, putting approximately 43,000 new lots under control. Inclusive of these lots, we now control 235,000 lots, of which 56% are under option. In addition, we returned $1.7 billion to investors, including $1.2 billion through share repurchases, the payment of $168 million in dividends, and $310 million through the early retirement of senior notes. After all of that, we ended the year with $1.7 billion of cash and our gross debt to capital ratio was 11.8%. We are also very proud of the numerous awards recognizing our company's culture, including being named to Fortune's Top 100 Best Companies to Work For in 2024 for the fourth consecutive year. Looking to the future, it remains our view that the long-term outlook for new home construction is positive. The U.S. economy has navigated recessionary concerns well, employment remains strong, and the interest in new homes remains at high levels. In addition, the structural shortage of housing due to underbuilding, ever-increasing land entitlement challenges, and ongoing labor availability challenges, together with our expectation for continuing lower resale transactions due to a higher-for-longer rate environment, leads us to believe that new home supply will continue to be absorbed without a significant increase in standing inventory. Given our constructive views on the outlook for long-term housing demand, we are planning to continue to invest in our operations to support growing our business over time. Within our operating model, we set our start space to align with the sales environment rather than being based on a predetermined annual production volume. As a result, Home buying demand will impact our closing volumes and resulting growth from year to year. While there can be resulting peaks and valleys in our deliveries, our focus remains on investing in our business to grow volume while maintaining high returns. As we've demonstrated for much of the past decade, we expect to continue to generate strong cash flows that will allow us to fund our business investment, pay our dividend, and return excess capital to investors. all while maintaining our balance sheet strength and flexibility. Our expectation of continued financial success is reflected in this morning's announcement that our board approved a $1.5 billion increase to our share repurchase authorization. With many forecasting interest rates to fall, the economy to stay relatively healthy, and conditions in the job market to remain favorable, there are certainly reasons to be optimistic about housing demand in the coming years. Having said that, affordability challenges and the generally high cost of living are certainly impacting the American consumer. Specific to homebuyers, we believe the recent volatility in mortgage rates, including the current increase back above 7%, has contributed to the recent lower activity levels. Against this backdrop, we continue to carefully monitor our investment and production levels with a view towards generating high returns in our business. Consistent with how we have been managing our business in recent years, we are managing our starts activity with a view towards driving our spec inventory to be more in line with our desired levels, including targeting our total spec inventory to be between 40% and 45% of our total units under production. Let me now turn the call over to Bob for a review of our fourth quarter results.