William Charles Erbey
Analyst · Mike Grondahl with Piper Jaffray
Thank you, Mark, and good morning, and thank you for joining today's call. This morning, I would like to discuss an issue that has been raised by a number of our shareholders: Altisource's ability to continue to grow its revenue and earnings. Granted the default and origination markets are a challenging environment, however, we believe we are well-positioned to grow through the cyclical changes anticipated in each of these markets. From inception, Altisource's strategy has been to grow its long-term earnings by 15% per year, as the capital-light company, generates sustained to operating cash flow, irrespective of the economic cycle we're in. As you can see on Slide 4, even with limited benefit from Ocwen's acquisition of the Homeward Residential servicing platform and no benefit from Ocwen's acquisition of the ResCap servicing platform and Ally Bank servicing rights, we grew service revenue by 18% in the first quarter of 2013 compared to the first quarter of 2012. Profit margins did not improve proportionally due to the technology and corporate investments we are making to support our future growth and that carrying of Mortgage Services employees and facilities expense in anticipation of the near doubling of the number of non-GSE loan serviced by Ocwen on REALServicing by the fourth quarter of 2013. As you can see from Slide 6, our growth has significantly outpaced our plan, fueled in large part by Ocwen's continued expansion. The success that we've experienced in our default related services has matched the meaningful success we've had in our other businesses. Since inception, service revenue from non-default related Mortgage Services has grown 104% per year, while our default related Mortgage Services have grown by 67%. To some degree, we're a victim of our own success. To provide other avenues of growth beyond default-related services, we are primarily focused on 3 revenue initiatives: First, growing our originations-related services; second, providing asset management services to the single-family revenue market; and third, explaining how to do to the non-distressed home sale market. To build these other businesses, we're applying the same disciplined approach that we apply to our default-related services. Also important to our earnings goal is margin expansion, which I will cover later in the presentation. Turning to the originations markets. The growth of our origination-related services has outpaced the growth in the origination market, generally due to the growth in the Lenders One membership and our development roll out of new services to the members of Lenders One. We're just beginning to roll out many of our services to the members of Lenders One, as well as Ocwen's origination operation, and believe our growth will continue, irrespective of the overall volume originations. With the potential slowdown in the origination volume and declining origination margins, Lenders One members are beginning to focus on the cost side of the profitability equation, and we believe that this will serve us well. We are currently providing origination related services to the members at a lower -- at a low cost to help them save money. Given the expected decline in origination volume, we're also working on establishing relationships with investors to provide additional sales channels for our members. These products could include jumbo, reverse and non-prime mortgage loan. Secondly, we enhanced our property management, lease management and renovation management capabilities in 2012 to position us to provide services to the single-family rental market. Altisource Residential has begun to acquire portfolios of nonperforming loans, and we expect to see growth from this vertical in the coming years. Third, with regard to Hubzu, we have demonstrated that home owners will purchase their homes on Hubzu. We believe over 50% of homes acquired through Hubzu in 2012 were purchased for personal use. To develop Hubzu as a marketplace for non-distressed home sales, we normally want homeowners to be willing to purchase their homes on Hubzu, but also for homeowners and their agents to list their homes for sale on Hubzu. Today, we're focused on attracting real estate brokers and agents to list their homes for sale on Hubzu, and in time, we will target individual homeowners to use our real estate brokerage to list their homes for sale as well. Over $40 billion per year is spent on real estate brokerage commissions in the United States. If we capture just a small percentage of this incredibly large market, we can substantially accelerate our growth. Given the growth we've seen in the above initiatives, unless one is extremely pessimistic regarding Ocwen's ability to acquire additional mortgage servicing rights and extraordinary optimistic regarding the growth of personal disposable income required to reduce delinquencies, Altisource's long-term growth prospects are very bright. We believe Ocwen's anticipated servicing portfolio of growth will continue to provide a meaningful contribution to our revenue even as delinquency rates decline. Delinquencies are not going to go away. According to Moody's, CreditForecast.com, even pre-financial crisis, non-GSE delinquency rates average 6.7%. As delinquencies and the opportunities for Ocwen to acquire this servicing, our large non-performing loan portfolios return to a more normal level, we may experience a flattening in our revenue in the short-term. In the long-term, however, the expansion of our other services and the redeployment of the operating cash generated from our businesses should provide for ongoing growth. Slide 10 provides Moody's historical and projected delinquency rates. In our view, Moody's estimates are overly optimistic as we don't believe there's going to be a sustained reduction in delinquencies until the American labor force realizes sustained increases in disposable personal income. In fact, as you can see on Slide 11, the total number of delinquent loans in REO today is only $400,000 lower than average number of delinquent loans in REO for the past 4 years. Slide 12 sets forth graphically a reasonable path to revenue growth for Altisource under 2 scenarios with the number of non-agency or private label security loans acquired by Ocwen, representing the only assumption we changed in each of these scenarios. Each of the key revenue driver assumptions used for the 2 scenarios are set forth on Slide 13. In order to provide a conservative approach, we assume the delinquency rate declines at the same rate as Moody's estimate, which we believe is overly optimistic. Additionally, we have not assumed that any of the cash generated by Altisource is reinvested in the business. In scenario 1, we assume that Ocwen does not acquire any additional private label servicing rights beyond those that have already been announced. And in scenario 2, we assume that Ocwen acquires $100 billion of private label servicing rights per year for the next 3 years. Each of these scenarios generate meaningful service revenue growth and substantial operating cash flow for Altisource. Assuming we generate between 25% and 35% of operating cash flow from our servicing revenue for 2013 through 2017, we will generate operating cash flow between 82% and 114% of our current market capitalization in scenario 2 and between 59% and 83% of our current market capitalization in scenario 1. As you can see in these 2 scenarios, with the near doubling of the non-GSE loans within Ocwen's servicing portfolio in the fourth quarter of 2013 compared with the fourth quarter of 2012, we anticipate that we will experience substantial revenue growth in 2014. What is interesting is that under each scenario, the runway for our default-related services still remains long. In addition, the slope of the decline in default-related services from the high watermark is reduced as a result of the growth of our newer default-related services. Of course, any major servicing acquisition Ocwen beyond the amounts we included in our scenarios will serve to increase the high watermark. This is a high-class problem to have -- as this is very high margin business that generates substantial operating cash flow. We could use this cash flow to buy back shares and/or make acquisitions that meet our growth and return objective. Ocwen has stated that they believe $1 trillion of additional servicing will be sold into the market. With Ocwen's competitive advantages as the premier servicer of high-touch loans, we believe Ocwen will continue to experience very strong servicing portfolio growth, as the shift in servicing from bank to non-bank services continues. Ocwen's anticipated growth, coupled with our development of new default-related services like mortgage modification and insurance, short sale services and mortgage charge-off collections, will serve to partially offset the impact of the decline in delinquencies. We believe we have presented reasonable and attainable targets for each of our growth initiatives. There are opportunities for our growth initiatives to perform considerably better than is illustrated here. Now that we've discussed the revenue side of the business, let's spend a minute on margins. As we discussed with you last quarter, we expect the margins in our default-related services to increase by 7 percentage points on a run-rate basis by the end of 2013, even after the amortization of the intangible assets associated with the Homeward and ResCap transactions. We're very pleased that our gross profit margins at our Mortgage Services segment improved from 46% in the first quarter of 2012 to 47% in the first quarter of this year to a more efficient work for processes and transition in certain services from vendors to in-house employees at lower total costs even after incurring the carrying cost of employees at a facility to support Mortgage Services' anticipated growth. On a consolidated company basis, we expect our overall 2013 margins to remain relatively flat, as we invest in hiring U.S. technology employees to complete the development of our next-generation technology and as we grow certain corporate functions to support our continued expansion. We would not be making these investments in our technology and corporate functions if we did not believe we were going to continue to grow. We expect the technology and overhead expenditures to stabilize in 2014, leading to increased profit margins. We believe that we have the right revenue engines and the long-term sustainable competitive advantages to accomplish our growth objective. To a large degree, it's now all about execution. As you can see on Slide 14, Altisource's leadership team has demonstrated their ability to develop and grow new services. We need to continue to apply the same skills to our other growth engines. I will now turn the call over to Mark for our financial update. Mark?