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spk05: Good morning and welcome to the RE-MAX Holdings Preliminary Fourth Quarter 2021 Earnings Conference Call and Webcast. My name is Savannah and I will be facilitating the audio portion of today's call. At this time, I would like to turn the call over to Andy Schultz, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations. Mr. Schultz.
spk04: Thank you, Operator. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to RE-MAX Holdings Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2021 Earnings Conference Call. please visit the investor relations section of www.remaxholdings.com for all earnings-related materials and to access the live webcast and the replay of the call today. If you are participating through the webcast, please note that you will need to advance the slides as we move through the presentation. Turning to slide two, our prepared remarks and the answers to your questions on today's call may contain forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements include those related to agent count, franchise sales, financial measures and outlook, brand expansion, competition, technology, housing and mortgage market conditions, capital allocation, dividends, share repurchases, strategic and operational plans, and business models. Forward-looking statements represent management's current estimates. REMAX Holdings assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements in the future. Forward-looking statements address matters that are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from those projected in forward-looking statements. These are discussed in our fourth quarter 2021 financial results press release and other SEC filings. Also, we will refer to certain non-GAAP measures on today's call. Please see the definitions and reconciliations of non-GAAP measures contained in our most recent quarterly financial results press release, which is available on our website. Joining me on our call today are Adam Contos, our chief executive officer, Steve Joyce, director and incoming CEO, Kerry Callahan, our chief financial officer, and the presidents and CEOs of our brands, Nick Bailey and Ward Morrison. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to RE-MAX Holdings CEO, Adam Contos. Adam. Thank you, Andy, and thanks to everyone for joining our call today. Looking at slide three, we exceeded our expectations during the fourth quarter. Our strong performance was driven by better-than-anticipated results from our acquisitions of RE-MAX, INTEGRIS, North American regions, and solid organic growth contributions from our core operations. Over the past few years, we have been strategically investing to expand and diversify our revenue and growth opportunities. Our Q4 results affirm that these investments are beginning to pay off. Here are some of the highlights. Overall, REMAX Holdings revenue for the fourth quarter was $89.2 million, up over 23%, largely driven by our July acquisition of Integra. Excluding the marketing funds, we had 5% organic revenue growth in the fourth quarter. We generated adjusted EBITDA of $31.1 million, up over 30%, and we expanded our adjusted EBITDA margin to 34.8%. Adjusted EPS increased more than 27% to $0.60. Overall, agent count grew more than 4,000 agents to 142,000 agents in total, a new record. And Motto opened a record number of offices in 2021, with growth of more than 30%. Today is my last earnings call as CEO of Remax Holdings. Before I turn the call over to Nick, I just want to say what a pleasure it has been working with our tremendous team There's also been an absolute privilege and honor to serve our two amazing networks. Our REMAX and Motto affiliates are hands down the best entrepreneurs in real estate, and it has been the highlight of my professional career to lead them. Our board member, Steve Joyce, will lead REMAX Holdings until the search for our next CEO is complete. I cannot think of a better person to pass the baton to than Steve. His deep experience and long track record of success in leading publicly traded franchisors makes him an optimal fit to lead our company. I am confident he will seamlessly step into the CEO chair and add to our momentum. I'm proud of all that we have accomplished over the past few years. I know I leave the company in great hands, and I look forward to sharing in its many future successes as a shareholder. With that, I'll turn it over to Nick. Thanks, Adam. Good morning, everyone. Moving to slide four, although January home sales were robust by historic standards, they were down modestly, about 5% relative to last year's frenzied start, according to the latest RENEXT National Housing Report. Importantly, the rate of price appreciation paused as the median sales price across the 51 metros surveyed remained steady relative to December sales price. Homebuyers hope this is the continuation of a welcome trend as it represents the second month in a row of very low to no price appreciations. Perhaps the most notable development from January was that mortgage rates started to tick up. Interest rates impact consumer confidence and influence their behavior. Some markets are seeing an early start to their spring selling season as buyers and sellers rush to beat any additional rate increases. Nevertheless, rates remain historically attractive. And with prices stabilizing recently, that is helping offset affordability concerns for the time being. Some exhausted homebuyers may be discouraged by the prospect of rising rates and choose to sit on the sidelines as a consequence. A combination of slightly cooled demand with the expected increase of new homes coming to the market might just be the ticket to start tipping the overall housing market toward equilibrium. In the interim, we expect 2022 to be another strong year for housing, once again driven by strong demand. There's a ton of pent-up demand from last year, and the prospect of rising rates might boost that demand in the first half of the year. Price appreciation trends might follow a similar pattern, moving higher faster in the first half of the year and then less in the back half. Markets with the highest job growth should continue to see the healthiest price increases in the coming year. Looking at slide five, overall agent count increased over 3% year over year to a new high of 142,000 agents. We've added over 4,000 agents worldwide since December 2020, highlighted by terrific growth in Canada. Our agent count in Canada grew by 2,000 agents during 2021, which is a whopping 10% increase. And encouragingly, the increase was broad-based as we experienced growth in almost every province, highlighted by outsized growth in the Ontario Atlantic region, which contributed notably to the acquired Renex Integra operations in the quarter. We are tracking to hit 25,000 agents in Canada sometime later this year, which would represent a 25% increase from just a few years ago. Note that on average, an agent in our Canadian company-owned regions generates over $2,400 in annual revenue in 2021. That is only about 20% less than we derive annually from a U.S.-based agent in company-owned regions. As a result, we're focused on our combined U.S. and Canadian agent count growth and use it as a key performance indicator. And the fact we're approaching levels we haven't seen in over a dozen years is cause for optimism. In the U.S., we had many states that grew their respective agent counts in 2021. However, due to agent attrition in other states, our agent count in the U.S. finished the year slightly down overall. Increasing our U.S. agent count remains our number one company priority, and we have several good ideas on how to spur that growth. We will look forward to telling you more about that in the future. Now, switching to the global arena, our international agent count increased 5.6% to more than 56,000 agents, which is a new record. That represents growth of more than 10,000 agents during the two-year pandemic, which is a tremendous accomplishment under adverse conditions. As the pandemic eases, we expect to see our growth outside the U.S. and Canada begin to accelerate. I'm excited to be heading to Las Vegas this weekend for our annual International Agent Conference. Our network's interest in attending has been fantastic, and we now expect over 6,500 attendees from more than 34 countries to gather, learn, network, share best practices, and get reacquainted with old friends. Also, while we're in Vegas, we also plan to celebrate because in terms of closed transactions, 2021 was the best year ever in the history of REMAX. RENEXT surpassed more than 2 million total transaction size in 2021, and that is something that no other brand has ever done. With that, I'll turn it over to Ward. Thanks, Nick. Looking at slide six, the fourth quarter was a strong capstone to another year of outstanding growth for Motto. In 2021, the Motto Network generated almost $3.5 billion in loan volume and helped nearly 13,000 families realize their dreams of homeownership. Both metrics far surpass 2020s totals. Motto's number one goal every year is growing franchise sales. We hit an inflection point in our franchise sales two years ago, and I'm happy to say the momentum carried forward through last year. We sold 64 franchises in 2021, just off our record pace set in 2020. And just a few short weeks ago, we sold our 300th franchise since inception, which is a rare achievement for any franchise to hit, let alone within the first five and a half years of its launch. Motto has averaged at least one franchise sales per week since our founding in October 2016. And we continue to see strong demand across many customer types. Most Motto franchise sales to date, a little over 55%, have been the REMAX brokers. Importantly, an increasing number of sales are now to independent real estate brokerages or professionals affiliated with a rival brand, representing over 15% of franchise sales to date. The remaining 30% of sales have been to entrepreneurs, investors, or owners of related businesses like title insurers. The extraordinary growth the model mortgage brand has experienced and the rapid diversification of franchise ownership is a testament to how compelling our value proposition is. Potential franchisees know the importance of ancillary business opportunities and how ancillaries can help them diversify their revenue streams and fortify their balance sheets. With the prospect of rising interest rates, potential franchisees are also aware of the counter-cyclical nature of our business model and Motto's unique position in the purchase market. Simply put, Motto's loan originators are often tied directly to purchase pipelines driven by real estate agents. Additionally, Motto's LOs tend to come on board with a lot of local experience and connections to their respective communities, attributes that are vital to building a successful purchase pipeline. As a result, Motto has a much higher percentage of purchase volume than the industry average. This is a fact not lost on the 70% or so of our Motto franchisees who are either real estate brokers or professionals and are situated close to the real estate transaction. Robust franchise sales are also leading to strong office openings, which ultimately drive contributions to our overall organic revenue growth. We opened nearly 60 new offices in 2021, a record. That represents over 30% annual growth, and we have many more openings in the pipeline. As of year end, we had 187 independently owned and operated offices under the Motto Mortgage brand across 38 states and Washington, D.C. The Motto team does a terrific job of helping our franchisees navigate the licensing process and the steps needed to get their offices open. It's an important part of our overall value proposition. And as the impact of COVID lessens, our office openings are kicking up. We're off to a fast start so far in 2022, and we expect to open our 200th Motto franchise any day now. Another big area of organizational focus for our mortgage business this past year has been the continued development of Wienlo. We acquired Wienlo in the second half of 2020 to solve one of our Motto franchisees' primary pain points. finding steady, dependable, and economic loan processing services. With the addition of Wienlo, motto offices now have access to an operationally ingrained third-party loan processing team, which is held to the same high standards of customer service that have come to define the motto mortgage brand. Last quarter, we introduced Wienlo's Loan Brokering System, or LBS, which has been designed to address the specific needs of the professional loan originator operating in the mortgage brokerage channel. We are continuing to iterate on the platform and incorporate critical feedback from our network. Our model affiliates will receive the LBS platform at no additional fee, as well as obtain initial discounts on the integrated Wingo loan processing offerings. Wingo LBS should officially launch the mortgage brokerage industry sometime later in 2022. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Carrie.
spk06: Thank you, Ward. Good morning, everyone. Moving to slide 7. fourth quarter revenue grew 23.1% to $89.2 million. Excluding the marketing funds, revenue was just over $66 million, an increase of 21.2%. This increase was comprised of just over 15% acquisitive growth, 5% organic growth, and just under 1% growth from FX. All acquisitive growth came from last July's acquisition of REMAX Integra's North American operations. which continues to perform better than we anticipated in every significant metric, agent count, revenue growth, cost energies, and profit. Notably, for the third quarter in a row, we generated mid-single-digit organic revenue growth at the marketing fund. As expected, we are witnessing a trend of organic growth developing, and we believe it will continue throughout 2022. Our 5% organic revenue growth rate this quarter was even more encouraging, given that we lapped a historically strong Q4 housing market, so none of the growth came from broker fees. Many drivers contributed to our top-line performance during Q4, including more targeted use of agent recruiting incentives, pricing, increased events-based revenue, and motto expansion, to name the most notable ones. If you exclude the Booge legacy runoff, our organic growth improved by almost another 1%. Looking at slide eight, we also exceeded the top end of our profit guidance range for the third straight quarter, as our adjusted EBITDA increased almost 31% to $31.1 million. Fourth quarter adjusted EBITDA increased primarily due to strong contributions from the acquisition of Integra. Adjusted EBITDA also increased due to incremental revenue from fewer agent recruiting initiatives and a price increase in REMAX continuing franchise fees, offset by increased travel costs in our real estate segment and by continued investment in WEMO within our mortgage segment. The entire acquisition has been a bright spot in both our Q4 and full year 2021 performance, and we expect that to continue. We continue to see growth from the other acquisitions we've made over the past two years, but WEMO and FIRST have ramped slower than expected. From a profit perspective, our business model has significant leverage. Mid-single-digit organic revenue growth again translated to strong profit performance, which was accompanied by margin expansion. Our adjusted EBITDA margin of 34.8% in Q4 was up 200 basis points compared to 32.8% in the fourth quarter of 2020. Over time, we aim to generate consistent mid-single-digit organic revenue growth, which should translate into a higher rate of adjusted EBITDA growth and typically an even higher rate of earnings growth. That's the beauty of the franchise model. Before I get to our guidance, I wanted to spend a moment on capital allocation. Since our initial public offering, we've consistently stated that returning capital to shareholders was a priority. It was true in 2013, and it remains true today. That's why I am pleased with last month's announcement that our board of directors authorized a common stock repurchase program of up to $100 million, reflecting confidence in the company's performance and the strength of our balance sheet. We believe the investments we've made over the past few years position us well to continue to grow and generate substantial amounts of free cash flow over the long term. We continue to balance returning capital to shareholders with strategic investments in the business to create shareholder value, and we will continue to prioritize our capital allocation accordingly. Moving to slide nine, the company's first quarter and full year 2022 outlook assumes no further currency movements, acquisitions, or divestitures. For the first quarter of 2022, we expect agent count to increase 1.5% to 2.5% over first quarter 2021, revenue in a range of $88 million to $92 million, including revenue from the marketing funds in a range of $22 to $24 million, and adjusted EBITDA in a range of $25 million to $28 million. For the full year 2022, we expect agent count to increase 2% to 4% over full year 2021, Revenue in a range of $366 million to $376 million, including revenue from the marketing funds in a range of $91.5 million to $95.5 million, and adjusted EBITDA in a range of $130 million to $135 million. One last item to note with respect to our 2022 expectations. Due to having a full year of contributions from Integra, we expect our income tax rate used to calculate adjusted net income to increase from 24% to 25%. Now, I'll turn the call over to Steve for closing comments.
spk04: Thank you, Carrie. Looking at slide 10, over the past few years, Adam and the leadership team have done an outstanding job investing for growth, expanding our services, and positioning REMAX Holdings for continued success in the future. The company's strategic investments have significantly diversified and broadened our revenue and growth opportunities. We saw those investments start to pay off in 2021, and as evidenced by our 2022 guidance, we expect that to continue in the year ahead. I look forward to working with our talented team to build on our momentum. My goals as CEO are straightforward. First, amplify our growth, and revitalize our U.S. agent count, in particular by focusing on a few strategic initiatives. And second, work with our board of directors to identify our next company leader. I am here to successfully execute on these two critical objectives, and I plan to see them through. Whether that takes six, 12, or 18 months, I am here for the durations. I'm excited by both opportunities and look forward to sharing more good news in the coming weeks and months. With that, operator, let's open it up for questions.
spk05: And as a reminder, it is star one if you would like to ask a question. And we'll pause for a moment to compile the Q&A roster. And our first question will come from Ryan McKenna from Zellman Associates. Please go ahead. Thank you.
spk00: Yes, thank you very much, and good morning, and Steve, nice to hear you on the call as well, and Adam, congrats on everything, and good luck with everything. So I wanted to focus a bit on, Steve, what you just mentioned, you know, the few core strategic initiatives, and Nick touched on this as well, but just curious if you can dig a little deeper there. You know, what's the path to kind of returning the U.S. segment towards growth and With the success in Canada and strong growth there, I guess, any learnings or things happening within that market that maybe we can think about as applicable to the U.S. side of things? Thank you.
spk04: You're welcome, Ben. Good morning. Let's see. So, yes, in answer to your question, Canada is a learning opportunity for us because we've had some great successes there. And a number of the things that they're doing are the types of things that we're thinking about bringing to the U.S., amongst some others. So if you look around the industry, a number of the folks in our business have done some interesting things on both retention and on gaining agents. And we have been in the process of looking at and determining which of those we want to do. You will hear from us in the near term. as to the things that we're going to do that we think will make a difference in the U.S. count. The great thing about the Canadian agent count is those agents are worth 80% of what the U.S. agents were, so that's helping significantly from the standpoint of the value of the agents we have in-house. But we are totally dedicated, as Nick said, to bringing back growth on the u.s agent side as well we have several levers to pull and we are in the process of determining which levers will be pulled and in which order to have the maximum impact on that agent count that will happen over the first quarter so you can expect to see the results of those kind of coming through in 22 and we fully expect to bring that agent count back to positive growth, as is indicated in our guidance for the year. But we do think that there's significant opportunity continuing in Canada as well. And so the combination of those two, we think will continue to benefit us. In addition to that, we believe we've got the opportunity to strongly expand in the mortgage business. And we are looking at, as others have on other sides of the transaction, that we think that we can bring value to brokers and agents and to the company by determining which avenues of those grows to go. So what we want to do is bring the U.S. and Canada agent count to a healthy growth perspective on an ongoing basis, but then also continue to grow other revenue streams to expand that growth trajectory for the company going forward. And to expand a little bit on my role, so we are in a position where I'm here to help change that growth trajectory. I have been reasonably successful in the last 40 years, but in several of the last decades. in the three companies I've been associated with. The good thing is with Adam and the team, they have already put a number of the building blocks in place and have been working on a number of things that I think we're going to be able to take advantage of this year. But we believe that we've got a significant opportunity to grow this company at a more rapid pace with a more varied revenue and profit stream that will benefit shareholders in the long term.
spk00: That is very helpful. Thank you for all the detail there. Ward, one for you on the mortgage side. So obviously seeing good franchise sales and performance in that business. I guess one thing I've noticed is it seems that there's more advertising going on on social media. I see motto ads here and there. So I guess are you guys ramping up kind of the consumer-facing marketing of Motto? And just economically, are costs on the mortgage side similar to the franchise side, marketing-related in terms of going into, like, marketing fund kind of pass-throughs, or would those be in SG&A? And, you know, generally speaking, if you can just kind of hit on that, whether you guys are pushing towards just more marketing in general to the consumer and assumingly also towards mortgage and franchise professionals to potentially drive more franchise sales. Thank you.
spk04: Sure. Thanks, Ryan. A couple different things done back there. The first one would be, yeah, we do have a national marketing fund. It's very small compared to the REMAX side of the house as we're getting ramped up. We do augment some of that with traditional SG&A spend, but we're very judicious about it. I mean, we're mainly emphasizing digital advertising. The biggest thing that I think you're seeing is the growth of the network. As the network grows, we have not only our Facebook, our Instagram, our social properties that we're advertising on, but we're also supporting our LOs or our loan originators and doing their own advertising as well and the offices. So just recently we rolled out a program called Model Rep where we're actually doing the social media for our LOs and our offices. So that's why I think you're seeing some of the increased advertising out there because we're just taking steps to foster that grassroots effort that happens in every franchise, but particularly as this franchise starts to grow.
spk00: Very helpful. Thank you.
spk05: Our next question is from Stephen Sheldon with William Byer. Please go ahead.
spk03: Hey, good morning. I guess I wanted to follow up on kind of the mortgage and motto. I guess, how are you thinking about the profit trajectory for, I guess, the combined mortgage business heading into 2022? It looks like there's still a drag of about $5 million to adjusted EBITDA in 2021. I know WEMO is a big factor in profitability there, taking stuff back. But could you, you know, if you think about 2022 and 2023, could you approach break-even profit or even some level of profitability for the combined mortgage operations?
spk06: Hey, good morning, Steven. It's Carrie. Great question. As we think about WEMLO and the mortgage business in general, we're very excited about the opportunities. We are continuing to invest in WEMLO, and so that is pushing the break-even point back a little bit. Current best estimates in terms of the quarterly profit break-even is back end of this year, so kind of looking at Q4, and then looking at profit contributions from the combined mortgage segment as we head into 2023.
spk03: Got it. That's good to hear. I appreciate that. And then I guess on the international side, great to see RE-MAX expand into some new countries. How much more potential is there for that? And any updates on the potential to boost your revenue per agent in some of these international markets? Because it seems like that could be a really important lever you still have to drive growth and profitability here at some point.
spk01: Yeah, great question. So on the global side, we continue to see good growth. We're at a record high of, you know, over 56,000 agents opening four countries.
spk04: We look at a number of them that are continuing to grow at a quick clip. And the forecast, even looking at this year, I believe that Argentina, Brazil, even one of the newest, Pakistan, opens March 1st and already has sales. And so we'll see – we believe we'll see good growth out of those. As far as looking at monetizing the global footprint, that has been something that continues to be a focus as we've taken one avenue as a direction in doing that is the use of technology. This year we just launched successfully taking technology out of the U.S. into Canada for the first time that we went across borders, and we believe that that's going to set the foundation for the opportunity for to possibly use technology as a driver between not only tools and services but the referral network and look at maximizing or extending that revenue globally in the future. Great. Thank you.
spk05: Our next question will come from John Campbell with Steven.
spk02: Hey, guys. Good morning. And Adam, I enjoyed working with you over all these years and wish you the best of luck. I don't know if this question – yeah, absolutely. I don't know if this question makes sense for Kerry or Nick, but, you know, if I look at the full year 2% to 4% agent growth you guys have done out there, you know, you've talked to Canada agents maybe hitting, you know, 25,000 or so this year. If I assume, you know, a mid to, I don't know, high single digit or so on the international growth, I'm thinking that maybe the swing factor or the difference between the two and the four is whether you guys are basically going to grow U.S. agents or not. Is that a fair way to frame it up?
spk06: I think that that's a reasonable look. I mean, as Steve mentioned, top priority is reinvigorating that U.S. agent count growth. But still, you have to remember, right, there's differences to our model. And we're going to look to grow, you know, those hundreds of agents in the U.S. And that's the expectation, at least near term, because we're focused on the right agent for REMAX. And getting that back on track is obviously a key priority.
spk02: Okay, that's helpful. And I don't know if this is a fair question, but just bigger picture, longer term, I mean, you guys are pretty confident about the mid-single digit organic growth over time. And I know every year is going to have a kind of different market backdrop, if you will. But do you guys feel, you know, over the next couple of years, is that mid-single digit growth achievable if you assume U.S. agent count is kind of static?
spk06: I think one of the things that we've really been focused on over the last couple of years is really diversification and broadening our revenue and profit opportunities. And Steve even spoke and alluded to that increasingly in his previous remarks. And so as we think about that, you know, there's a lot of different levers that we can pull. And so we're not entirely tied to that U.S. agent count now. So we are, you know, assuming that the macro hangs in there, you know, obviously, and that the housing market continues to perform reasonably well, you know, because we think about kind of 3%, 4%, 5%. We feel confident in that, even with kind of a modest agent count growth in the U.S.
spk02: Okay. That's helpful. And then you guys have addressed this in the past, but it does seem like you're exploring a couple of options or levers, as you put it, around the U.S. agent growth. And you mentioned, you know, that's a number one priority for the company this year. I want to ask you again, because I think you guys have been asked this before, but what is your thought on equity issuance? I mean, that has been a kind of key tool for, you know, some of the faster growth peers. Is it something that you guys are exploring or is that possibly one of the options?
spk04: Yeah, I'll take that. So that is clearly one of the things that we believe could be a catalyst for us. And the question isn't whether or not we plan on using equity going forward, because we will. The issue will be, where do we want to apply it? And it goes broader than just agent recruiting. It also goes to looking at acquisitions. It goes to looking at various different types of new avenues of growth we want to explore. And so when we look at the opportunities, particularly as it relates to other revenue streams, we see that as significant, obviously, around the transaction. But then the other is, you know, look, I come from a background where, you know, when I was at, I started Marriott, and Marriott now has 33 brands. And I went to Choice and went from nine brands to 13 brands. And so I'm in a, I come from a background where the utilization of different revenue streams and brands is is a regular part of the franchise model. And so I think you should think that we're going to consider all those options in terms of what are the best investments for us. Now, on the other side, we think one of the strongest investments, of course, immediately facing us is share repurchase. So you can expect to see us pulling that lever as well. But there's a combination of tools that are available. This is one of the things that's exciting about this company is that We're in great shape financially. We're in great shape from the standpoint of our businesses. We need to make a couple of adjustments, but then the question is choosing which are the strongest and best opportunities to increase total shareholder value, and that's what we're all about going forward.
spk02: That's a great response. I appreciate that, Steve.
spk05: Our next question will come from Matthew Erdner with Jones Trading. Please go ahead.
spk01: Hey, guys, thanks. I'm asking a question on behalf of Jason Stewart. So you just mentioned the Sherry purchase. At what price does that look attractive to you guys, and where would we expect you to go in at?
spk04: Good morning. Good morning. Carrie, why don't you start, then I'll jump in.
spk06: You know, look, obviously, return of capital has continued to be a top priority of ours. You know, looking at balancing the dividend and the share repurchases, you know, we're very confident in the future opportunities, and we think there's tremendous value to be delivered, given where the stock is trading right now. And you'll see us continue to act opportunistically when we think we can purchase and deliver the best returns to shareholders.
spk04: So, yeah, and I guess the way to think about it is we believe Our top priority is total shareholder return, which is why you'll see us pushing
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