Bill Shepro
Analyst · Omega Advisors. Your line is now open
Good morning and thank you for joining today’s call. We had a very productive third quarter. From a financial perspective, we generated $0.69 of adjusted diluted earnings per share and $36.8 million of adjusted operating cash flow. We launched a business performance and cost optimization program, which we refer to as Project Catalyst, that we anticipate will generate between $65 million and $90 million in annualized run rate cost reductions once fully implemented. On the business front, we made excellent progress with both new and existing customers, and in our earlier-stage businesses in which we are investing. Turning to our third quarter results, slides five and six provide you with an overview of our financial performance. As you can see, we generated $1.74 in adjusted earnings per share year-to-date, representing 87% of the midpoint of our financial scenarios. For both the third quarter and year-to-date compared to last year, we experienced revenue decline from the run-off of Ocwen and RESIs portfolios of nonperforming loans in REO and the elongated timing to onboard and generate revenue from new business. Despite this revenue decline, we are making very strong progress improving our adjusted operating income and adjusted operating income margins, as we begin to benefit from Project Catalyst, which I will discuss in greater detail in a couple of minutes. These improvements were very evident in the third quarter, with adjusted operating income of $25.7 million at a 13% margin. This compares favorably to $23.4 million at a 10.5% margin in the third quarter of 2017 and $21.9 million at a 10.5% margin in the second quarter of this year. We still have a lot of work to do with Catalyst but we are pleased that this is the first quarterly year-over-year increase in adjusted operating income in 10 quarters. Compared to the third quarter and first nine months of 2017, adjusted diluted earnings per share was lower, primarily from higher interest expense from the refinancing of our term loan and no 2018 gain on debt repurchase, partially offset by efficiency improvements. The first nine months of 2018 was also impacted by lower service revenue. We had a strong quarter from adjusted operating cash flow perspective, generating $36.8 million or $0.19 per dollar of service revenue. With respect to third quarter investing and financing cash flows, we received $15 million from the sale of the rental portfolio management business to RESI and used these proceeds to reduce our debt. We ended the quarter with $148 million of cash and marketable securities, and $241 million of net debt less marketable securities. Turning to slide seven. During the third quarter we launched Project Catalyst to optimize our operations and reduce costs to better align our cost structure with our anticipated revenues and improve our operating margins. Based upon a detailed analysis completed during the quarter, we established targeted annual run rate cost savings of between $65 million and $90 million, with more than half of the targeted savings projected in 2019 and the full run rate benefit expected in 2020. To achieve these savings, we preliminarily estimate that we will incur a total of between $25 million and $35 million in one-time restructuring charges. While there is a tremendous amount of work to achieve our targeted savings, Project Catalyst gives us greater confidence in our ability to grow Altisource’s adjusted pre-tax earnings in 2019 and improve our operating margins compared to this year. We began aggressively driving some of the initial programs during the quarter and to-date have achieved approximately $23 million in annualized cost reductions or 30% of the midpoint of our savings opportunity. For the quarter, we incurred $3.4 million in restructuring charges associated with Project Catalyst. We plan to provide an update on our Project Catalyst progress on subsequent earnings calls. We also made excellent progress in our businesses, with both new and existing customers. We continue to onboarding the wins that we have discussed with you over the last few quarters. Slide eight provides a summary of the larger wins and the progress we have made with each. We are particularly pleased with the speed with which we have onboarded and started to receive referrals from one of the largest institutional real estate and mortgage investors in the U.S. Just last quarter, this client notified us that we are one of the few vendors selected to provide REO, foreclosure and short-sale auction services for them. During the quarter, we executed the agreements, received our first REO referrals in August and our first foreclosure auction referrals in October. We anticipate that we will go live with short sales in the first quarter. We are also very excited with the progress we made with onboarding a top five servicer for property inspection and preservation services and a top 10 servicer for REO asset management. Based on the progress we have made and feedback from these customers, we expect to begin receiving referrals from both in the first quarter of 2019. These are big wins and should generate very meaningful revenue as we achieve a stabilized level of referrals. With respect to our existing customers, as we announced in August, we made the strategic decision to amend our agreements with RESI to permit the internalization of its rental property management. As a result, we agreed to transition homes we are managing for RESI back to them. In connection with this agreement, RESI paid us $15 million in August and will pay us an additional $3 million on the earlier of a RESI change of control or August 2023. We are pleased with this transaction, which generated $13.7 million gain in the quarter. It enables us to monetize a relatively small operation and focus on larger opportunities. During the first nine months of 2018, the Rental Property Management business generated service revenue of $3.8 million and an adjusted pre-tax loss of $1.7 million. We also continue to make progress growing our inventory of Hubzu referrals with existing customers other than Ocwen, RESI and NRZ. During the third quarter, the inventory from these customers grew by 43%, compared to 5% in the second quarter of 2018 and we ended the quarter with close to 2,000 homes in inventory. Customers in other than Ocwen, RESI and NRZ referred on average more than 400 homes per month to us during the quarter. This increase in referrals coupled with the new client wins should support longer term Hubzu revenue growth. Turning to the investments we are making in our earlier-stage businesses. Before getting into the details, it’s worth highlighting that our projected 2018 adjusted EBITDA at a midpoint of our provided scenarios would be $149 million, if you were to add back these investments, which we expense. As you can see on slide nine, based on Altisource’s current market cap and net debt less marketable securities, Altisource’s enterprise value is approximately $688 million. This represents a 4.6 times multiple of 2018 adjusted EBITDA plus investments in earlier-stage businesses and an even lower multiple if you also reduce net debt by our short-term investments in real estate. Of course, we are making investments in earlier-stage businesses, because we believe they will provide our shareholders with a very attractive return and support future growth. I’d like to highlight two of the earlier-stage businesses that capture the majority of our investment spend. The first is Owners.com, our technology-enabled real estate brokerage that is at the center of our consumer real estate solutions business. The second is Pointillist, which is included in our corporate and other businesses segment. Pointillist, which was born out of Altisource’s consumer analytics team is a potentially disruptive SaaS-based platform that provides unique customer journey analytics at scale and enables customers to engage through our intelligent platform. We believe Owners.com and Pointillist provide tremendous growth opportunities for the firm. Owners.com continues to gain momentum. In the third quarter of 2018, service revenue grew by 87% and the number of transactions by 81% compared to the same period last year. Additionally, we achieved an important milestone in our agile growth model by generating more than $1 million of revenue in the seasonally strong month of August. From an operational perspective, we continue to focus on streamlining the consumer experience and enabling our real estate agents with differentiating tools to better support homebuyers and sellers throughout the process. To further optimize the consumer experience, we introduced an innovative search capability that allows users to easily search for their favorite properties by defining must haves and nice to haves. We also launched a bundled services offering, which provides additional savings and convenience to consumers who purchase multiple services from us. To provide our real estate agents with differentiated tools, we enhanced our agent app to enable agents to easily produce a professional home tour report for prospective homebuyers. We ended the quarter working with approximately 5,300 customers, up from the 2,000 customers we are working with this time last year and the 4,200 customers at the end of the second quarter of this year. We currently anticipate that Owners.com’s revenue growth rate will be in the high-double digits again next year and the operating loss will be modestly lower. Pointillist uses artificial intelligence to enable companies to discover the important opportunities and obstacles faced by their customers. This helps Pointillist clients optimize their customers journeys to improve experience, reduce churn and increase lifetime value. Customer journey analytics is a large and rapidly growing segment of the marketing technology market. The largest players in the industry are actively acquiring companies with innovative offerings and high revenue multiples to remain relevant and improve their competitive positions. As Pointillist continues to gain momentum and attract enterprise customers, we will evaluate the monetization strategy for this business. We have two sales strategies to grow Pointillist, a channel partner strategy and a direct-to-customer strategy. We have 14 channel partners marketing the solution to their customers. These channel partners represent some of the leading consulting and marketing firms in the world. We are also gaining market recognition and are regularly being included in RFPs for journey analytics solutions. Some of Pointillist’s notably industry recognition includes being selected as a Stevie Gold Winner for providing best new marketing solution for sales and customer service, being selected by CUSTOMER magazine as a Customer Product of the Year and being selected by a Best in Biz as the Enterprise Marketing Product of the Year. If you are interested in learning more about Owners.com and Pointillist, I invite you to visit our website at Owners.com and pointillist.com. We have also added slides 12 to 17 in the appendix to provide you with more information on these businesses. In conclusion, we continue to win and onboard business from some of the largest and most well respected financial institutions in our industry, building a sizable pipeline of future revenue. This speaks to the tremendous amount of work that the Altisource team has done to position the firm to win business from these marquee accounts, confirming not only that our service capabilities are very competitive, but also a testimonial to our market position and profile. When you combine these new customer wins, the progress we are making in our earlier-stage businesses and Project Catalyst, we believe we are positioning Altisource for sustainable growth, margin expansion and improved operating flexibility, further advancing our competitive positioning. Before opening the call for questions, I’d like to thank our Altisource employees, who have shown great focus and commitment to both Altisource and our customers as we continue our evolution and advance our competitive position. I’d now like to open up the call for questions. Operator?