Josh Harley
Analyst · D.A. Davidson. Please go ahead with your question
Thank you, Roger. And of course, thank you to everyone who's on today's call. Our entire team really appreciates your support and your faith in us. We're proud that you're a part of our Fathom family. Now quarter after quarter, our results continue to demonstrate the power of our truly disruptive business model. And I'm proud to be here to share our significant growth. We're winning through innovation and by delivering real long-term value to our agents, employees, clients and of course our shareholders. For the third quarter year over year, revenue grew by 81%. Our agent count grew by 50% and our transactions grew by 42%. We also reduced adjusted EBITDA losses by over 20% from Q2 to Q3, getting us even closer to adjusted EBITDA breakeven. And while we're continued to invest in enhancing our foundation for the sustained long-term growth of our newer business lines, those investment dollars are quickly becoming a smaller percentage of our ongoing expenses. There are some who don't really know who we are yet, but with time I believe more investors will truly understand our business and value us accordingly. If you really dig into our story, you'll realize that not only has Fathom gendered impressive performance to date, but we still have an extraordinary path ahead of us. A lot of companies sacrifice profitability for growth, but I'm proud to say that we do not have to operate that way. We can do both. Our cash position remains strong and we plan to continue to focus on operational cash flow generation. Our steadfast discipline allows us to be good stewards of the money with which you've entrusted us. We believe Fathom is on track to more than double its revenue for the foreseeable future and we look forward to proving it. The question is, how do we get there? Now since going public, we've substantially increased revenue, continued the expansion of our agent network, improved agent retention, entered new geographic markets and completed strategic acquisitions designed to further solidify our market position. That's an awful lot to accomplish in just one year, but it demonstrates our focus, our commitment, and our ability to get things done. With the recent addition of our own in-house mortgage title and insurance companies, along with additional SaaS product offerings, we now have the potential to dramatically increase our revenue and importantly, our profitability per transaction. I want to reiterate that these companies are not joint ventures. We fully own each of them. That means that we not giving up any of the revenue and profitability. And it means we have complete control over the quality of service. That matters a lot. It matters to our clients. It matters to our agents and it should matter to you because that's how we believe that we can achieve a greater attach rate for these new businesses. Now, as you know, we also recently acquired a lead generation and nurturing company and two technology companies, one specializing in big data aggregation and content creation and the other specializing in home search and CRM tools to help us attract more buyers and sellers, which in turn also helps to attract more agents. Now, speaking of attracting more agents, we believe that Fathom continues to have one of the most attractive agent commission plans and overall offerings in the industry. I truly believe our comp plan for agents and superior to every other publicly traded brokerage hands down. Our focus is not just in adding more agents though, but also helping those agents become more productive, close more sales, and ultimately earn more money. We believe we're accomplishing that by providing more training and more technology to help our agents get in front of more buyers and sellers. As well, we're helping agents reduce the amount of time required to manage the transaction process, giving them more time to network and sell. To prove that point agents who join Fathom increased their sales by an average of nearly 49% after four years. Many of our agents report doubling their sales after the first year at Fathom. We often hear say that they joined Fathom to earn more commission, but they stay for the culture. And I'm proud that we still have one of the lowest agent attrition rates in the industry. And if you want a true representation of whether Fathom agents are happy, our low agent attrition rate is the best indicator. I'm extremely proud that a retention of high-producing agents improved greatly between 2019 and 2020. And we're seeing continued improvements throughout 2021. This quarter, our agent attrition rate remained less than 1.4%. Digging deeper, agents who close less than one sale per year make up over 75% of agent attrition and only 2.5% of our agent attrition comes from agents who close 10 sales per year or more. Said differently with over 7,500 agents, only nine, nine of those agents closed 10 or more transactions per year and left Fathom in Q3, right? It's very small number. We're very proud of that fact. As some of you know, our agents are quickly becoming evangelists for the company, which we believe should further accelerate our growth over time. Now, as I mentioned for Q3, we experienced 50% growth in agent count ending the quarter with more than 75 hit -- 7,500 agents. One of the beautiful things about this growth is that our cost to acquire one agent during the period was approximately $985 making our breakeven on each agent, close to what we make on just their first sale alone. I also want to point out that the average lifetime value of an agent is over $18,000 on just the real estate side of the business. The ratio of that lifetime value to our cost of agent acquisition is over 20X and that doesn't take into account the revenue from a recently acquired mortgage title and insurance companies or the potential revenue from the leads that we can generate for our agents. Now, we believe that Fathom is in a unique position to grow even faster at a time when a real estate market is turbulent. Even if house prices decline, it should not be a headwind for Fathom Realty. In fact, it can actually prove to be a tailwind for Fathom's growth. I want to spend just a minute on this point, because I think it's more important than most people realize. While other real estate companies may see strong headwinds as home prices fall or rise for that matter as mortgage rates rise and housing remains in low supply, I strongly believe that Fathom could benefit significantly and here's why. There's only two ways for a real estate agent to make more money, one, right, increase their revenue by selling more homes or decrease their costs. And the biggest cost an agent has is usually their brokerage fees and splits in a market where it's hard to find homes to sell or buy. We believe that due to our financial model agents will be attracted to fathom in order to make up for any lost income by decreasing the fees they pay. In fact, if an agent closes 20% fewer homes due to the shifting market conditions, but moves to fathom from a brokerage, who's charging them 30% split. They'll actually earn approximately 9% more income, again, 20% fewer sales, but 9% more income. And that sounds like a win to mean. And of course, most agents would agree. In fact, we're already seeing some of that benefit through our site traffic. Our careers website traffic is up over 300% year over year, as we can team to see interest and fathom grow last quarter. I talked about how we were beginning to see home sales and prices normalizing, and that we may even see home prices in some areas come down. And that's exactly what we saw this quarter. Prices have come down in many of our markets with homes see in the market a little bit longer, but again, I truly believe this is positive for fathom long term. It's also important to note that as home prices fall, many of our competitors may see a strain on their profitability because they take a percentage fee on every single transaction, but that would not be the case for fathom. We earn the same transaction fee from the agent, regardless of whether the agent earns a $10,000 commission or an $8,000 commission. This should allow us to continue to capture more market share from real estate companies with the old traditional commission models. As our agent base grows, those agents bring more transactions with them. As we add more transactions, we have more opportunities to capture mortgage title and into insurance revenue. Fathom's ability to attract an ever increasing number of real estate agents by providing them with greater income potential. Along with the technology training and support they need to grow their businesses is even more evident today, especially during these unprecedented and changing times. As I mentioned earlier, our results for Q3 were outstanding. That clearly fathom is moving in a very positive direction, attracting higher producing agents and selling more homes and higher price markets, which by the way, should significantly benefit our mortgage title insurance operation, as well as the lead business that we're building in Q3 fathom Realty added New Mexico and Minnesota. And so now we're in, we're actually licensed in 34 states in DC. We plan to open several more markets in the coming months with longer term plans to be in all 50 states and eventually move into Canada as well. Now, part of our secret sauce is the advantage that our Intel agent platform creates the obvious being that it helps us attract new agents while helping them become more productive. We're very excited that our technology also allows fathom to reduce our cost per agent over time while improving our, our operational efficiencies. We're continuing work hard in the development of a national real estate search portal as well, neighborly, which we believe will play a significant role in helping us attract even more agents as well as home buyers, while gendering greater revenue profitability from the leads that we generate along with the mortgage title and insurance business that comes with it. Now, ultimately our technology play outcome allows us to eliminate our reliance on third party tech providers, which reduces our costs significantly at the same time, provides more robust technology to our agents, employees and our clients until agent gives us the power to control the full life cycle of the home buyer and the seller gain a greater under any of, of our data and how to use it to further improve our offerings while generating leads for our agents. Plus, we can now begin to identify potential clients for our mortgage insurance and title companies long before they're under contract. Our SA company live by is also making some incredible head. We now provide tech and, and or data to more than 750 companies across the country with over 100,000 agents. Some of our, some of our customers include CoreLogic Berkshire Hathaway, home services, Sotheby's and app properties for encompassed lending. We, increase the number of loan officers by 17% with plans to continue adding more loan officers each month to help grow our mortgage operation across the 41 states in which we're currently licensed for mortgage. We've also made significant investments in a mortgage operation, and we're already seeing a great return on that investment in the form of improved tax rate and market share. Our title company title is growing exceptionally as well. And I could not be more proud of our team's efforts, VA's license in 29 states now, and we're seeing impressive improvements in our attach rate every single month. In fact, our Q3 title revenue alone was almost as high as what we made, what they generated in all of 2020 before acquisition industrywide online, notarization was up 547% and 2020. And while 2021 numbers for this online trend are not out yet. The end of is seeing that trend continue important to note that trend benefits our title model as more agents accept this new normal, our insurance company, Daly insurance is currently licensed in 47 states in DC, and we're gaining traction with FA agents every single month as well. One amazing and important statistic is that over 3% of the insurance quotes that go out are converted in policies. We believe that over time, our insurance operation could help us improve our revenue and profitability during the seasonally slower winter months and help us through the cyclical nature of the real estate industry. Total personal lines grew by over 26% sent in a third quarter year over year. And total premiums grew by over 20 by I'm sorry, by over 12% rather, this is essentially recurring revenue, and we're just getting started there as you know, our mortgage title and insurance operations were all added through strategic acquisitions, and we've also made several strategic brokerage acquisition as well in a very short period of time. I bring this up because I think it's important to clarify that at this point, we have all the puzzle pieces. We need to build a solid and profitable company. We're working diligently to integrate each business fully, to ensure strong attach rates moving forward. We expect that any future acquisition we consider will primarily be focused around opening new markets or expanding in the smaller current markets to hit critical mass faster, which also helps growth through name recognition and Asia referrals in those new markets that would normally take years to get to a solid foothold. We intend to continue growing quickly and we will use AC strategically as opportunities arise. Now, last quarter, we were able to demonstrate that on only 10,000 real estate transactions, our real estate business achieved adjusted EBITDA break. Even if we had not made the extra strategic investments into our ancillary businesses, we would've been able to demonstrate adjusted EBITDA break even for the whole company , but again, we're playing to win long term. And that requires investments in the business investments that are already proving to be the right move on our last call. We shared that assuming we reach between 100,110,000 transactions per year, we believe we can generate adjusted. EBIDA exceeding $40 million while we're not prepared to provide a timeline for this transaction milestone. We do feel confident we can maintain the strong agent and transaction growth that we've demonstrated since our IPO a year ago, July and over the last 12 years, since our inception. In addition to this, we have decided it's time to provide some additional guidance, which Marco will share shortly. As you can tell, we believe fathom has a great future, and we're incredibly excited and proud. So with that, I'll turn the call over Marco. Marco, it's all yours.