UWM Holdings Corporation Class A

Good morning. My name is Krista and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the UWM Holdings Corporation first quarter 2024 earnings conference 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 would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If at any time you would like to remove your question from the queue, please repress star 1. Thank you. Blake Colo, you may begin your conference.

Good morning. This is Blake Colo, Chief Business Officer and Head of Investor Relations. Thank you for joining us and welcome to the first quarter 2024 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.

You know, I've been really excited about this earnings call. A lot of great things to talk about. You know, we're extremely busy here at UWM. We're hiring hundreds of new team members preparing for the future and the opportunity. and there's a great buzz around our campus that I wish all of you guys could feel. On our last call, I said we expected 2024 to be a better year for the housing and mortgage industry, and the first quarter supports what I expected. We are in the weeds of our business and have done a nice job executing on our game plan. With that said, I want to touch on a couple main themes before getting into the quarterly numbers. First, The broker channel is the best place for a consumer to get a loan, and it's the best place for a loan officer to work. Knowing this, it's great to see how much the broker channel has grown in both share and people over the last few years. More and more loan officers, consumers, and real estate agents are seeing what we have already known for a long time, that the mortgage broker is the best place to get a mortgage. Consumers and real estate agents are seeing it as well. It's very exciting. Second, and I want everyone to remember what I'm about to say next, is something that I've been saying for years since becoming public. When rates are high, the brokers in UWM will always dominate. And that is exactly what has happened over the last two and a half years or so. Now I'm telling you this, when rates go down, every mortgage company in America, including UWM, will look great. But remember, we are different because UWM was built to perform in both purchase and refi markets. And that is something I'm very proud of. Overall, it's been a tremendous start to the year. And we're excited about the momentum in our business. Let's jump into the first quarter. We closed $27.6 billion in production for the quarter at the higher end of our guidance with over $22 billion of this coming from purchase. I'd like to point out that we grew 13% from the fourth quarter and more impressively 24% compared to last year's first quarter. I don't think there's a lot of lenders that can say they've grown that much year over year. We've been guided to 75 to 100 basis points for a long time and I bumped it to 80 to 105 for the first quarter. We exceeded that guidance with a gain margin of 108 basis points. And it was a very profitable quarter with $180.5 million in net income, and that includes a $15 million write-down on fair value. As these results demonstrate, we continue to deliver on our expectations by remaining focused on being the best mortgage lender in the country. That means continuing to invest in our people, in our technology, in our service, no matter what others in the industry are doing. We know what we are good at, and we know what we're great at. We don't try to be all things to all people, and we win because of it. As you will hear from Andrew shortly, our financial position is very strong, and we fully intend to keep rewarding our shareholders with a great dividend, as I've been saying, quarter in and quarter out. We remain confident that the volumes and margin will remain strong in 2024, as we've been saying for the last couple of quarters, and we are uniquely positioned to capitalize on the next refi boom, whether it comes next month, six months, or in 12 months. We are prepared. I'll now turn things over to Andrew, our CFO.