UWM Holdings Corporation Class A

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Good morning. This is Blake Colo, Chief Business Officer and Head of Investor Relations. Thank you for joining us and welcome to the fourth quarter and full year 2023 UWM Holdings Corporation's earnings call. Before we start, I would like to remind everyone that this conference call includes forward-looking statements. For more information about factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from forward-looking statements, please refer to the earnings release that we issued this morning. I will now turn the call over to Matt Ishbia. Chairman and CEO of UWM Holdings Corporation and United Wholesale Mortgage.

Thanks, Blake, and thank you everyone for joining us today. Let's jump right into a couple thoughts. First off, 2023 was one of the best years in UWM's history. It wasn't the year that would stand out from a financial perspective, but will stand out from a dominance perspective. We separated from our competitors significantly on market share, growth, operational earnings, and strategic investments. It was our second year as the number one overall lender. It was our third consecutive year as the number one purchase lender, and our ninth consecutive year as the number one wholesale lender. As you heard me say many times before, the best mortgage companies shine in high-rate markets, and that's exactly what we have done consistently here at UWM. While there have been a lot of commentary about higher interest rates on the overall mortgage environment this year, UWM delivered our best purchase year of all time with almost $94 billion of purchase, about 20.7 of that being the fourth quarter. We ended the year with over $108 billion of overall production and record market share across the board. In short, I'm incredibly proud of our team's performance throughout the year and believe this performance is also clear evidence of the strength of the broker channel. UWM and our broker partners have succeeded during times when many have failed, and now we are uniquely positioned to take advantage of the lower rates and increased housing inventory and demand that I believe we will see over the next 6, 12, and 18 months. Before talking about the fourth quarter, I'd like to emphasize a few key messages. First and foremost, the broker channel is strong and continues to grow its overall share of the industry. Loan officers continue to join the broker channel, and real estate agents and consumers continue to see that brokers are the best choice for a mortgage. Second is our investment technology continues to give our brokers a competitive advantage on speed, price, and process. Always making the process faster, easier, and cheaper is our focus. The gap between UWM and our competitors is only getting larger. It's becoming that much harder to catch up given our relentless effort to continuously improve. Third, I've always stressed that UWM only competes for two out of ten loans. The good news is the broker channel keeps growing and now we are competing for almost two and a half out of ten loans. Soon that will be 3 out of 10 loans and maybe then 4 out of 10 loans. This is a tremendous upside to the broker channel, and UWM is prepared to make the most of that opportunity in the future. Fourth, and the point I'm most proud of, is unlike other mortgage companies, we have continued to invest in our people and grow our team. Since the beginning of 2023, we've grown our team by about 15%. We've never laid off a single team member in our 38 year history. The strength of our business gives us the ability to hire and invest in our people and we look forward to even more growth in 2024. Our culture and our team is a differentiator and people that have been to our office have been able to see that firsthand. Finally, we remain committed to sharing our success with our shareholders. For the 13th consecutive quarter, we'll be paying a $0.10 per share dividend. As I've said multiple times before, the dividend will be paid out in good times and tougher times. And it's paying out in a year like 2023 should give complete confidence to the industry and to the market that it will continue going forward. Both UWM and the broker channel are ready to dominate in 2024. There's no doubt in my mind that we are strategically positioned to seize the opportunity ahead. Let's look closer at the fourth quarter. We closed $24.4 billion in production for the quarter at the higher end of the guidance, with $20.7 billion of that coming from just purchase. Gain margin was 92 basis points, also well within guidance. And after adjusting for changes in the fair value MSRs due to valuation inputs or assumptions, we generated pre-tax earnings of $39.2 million in the fourth quarter and $253.7 million for the year, both significant increases from 2022. In sum, we had a great quarter in a higher rate environment than fourth quarter 2022. And I'm confident 2024 will be a better year in this industry than 2023. Volume and margins should be higher, but even whether they are or not, UWM will be successful and dominate with technology and service. I'm now going to turn the call over to our CFO, Andrew Huebacher.