Dan Mathewes
Analyst · Patrick Scholes of SunTrust Robinson, Humphrey. Please proceed with your questions
Thank you Mark and good morning everyone. Before getting into the results, I'd like to cover a quick refresher on deferrals. As you will recall, our model allows us to pre-sale new projects up to two years in advance of opening. GAAP ASC 606 requires that we defer the revenue, cost of product and direct SG&A associated with those pre-sales until we open the property for occupancy. Put simply this requirement creates deferral items on our balance sheet that grows during the presale phase and consequently there's an artificial reduction to adjusted EBITDA during this period. Once we obtain a temporary certificate of occupancy for our project, we reverse those items in their entirety, creating a large positive income statement recognition that inflates EBITDA in that period. As these adjustments create misleading volatility in our revenues and EBITDA and the sales booked during the presale period generate cash flow, we manage our business internally by focusing on earnings, excluding deferrals and recognitions. Hence, all references to net income, adjusted EBITDA and real estate results on this call for current, prior and future periods, exclude the impact of deferrals and recognitions. This quarter deferrals were a drag of $19 million on our reported ASC 606 EBITDA. Further details can be found in tables T-1 and T-15 in our press release and a complete accounting of our historical deferral recognition activity can you found in Excel format on the Financial Reporting section of our Investor Relations site. We would encourage you to reach out to Mark Melnyk for additional help in understanding deferrals in your modeling and valuation work. Now let's turn to the results for the fourth quarter and full year 2019. Total fourth quarter revenues increased 2.9% to $503 million, reflecting growth in our Real Estate, Resort and Club and Financing businesses with flat Rental and Ancillary revenues. Q4 adjusted EBITDA came in at $124 million versus $105 million last year, a year-over-year increase of 18%. Q4 adjusted EBITDA also came in well ahead of our implied guidance for Q4. These results were driven by the growth in revenues combined with a continuous focus on cost efficiency. Adjusted EBITDA margins improved by 318 basis points. It is important to note on the cost efficiency front a couple of items are specific to 2019. Specifically, we've benefited from a gain of approximately $4 million associated with the change in certain employee benefits as well as an additional $4 million gain in our Real Estate segment, which I'll discuss in a minute. For the full year, our adjusted EBITDA was $453 million, versus $424 million last year with margins up 85 basis points to 23.6%. This includes the $8 million of unique items that I just mentioned. Net income was $91 million diluted earnings per share was $1.05, compared to net income of $39 million and diluted earnings per share of $0.40 in the fourth quarter of 2018. Full year net income was $261 million and diluted earnings per share was $2.92 versus prior year of full year net income of $219 million and diluted earnings per share of $2.24. Within Real Estate, Q4 contract sales gained 1.4% as solid growth of 5.2%, partially offset by 2.5% decline in VBG. As Mark discussed earlier, our increased focus on execution was reflected in the gaining our close rate for the quarter, offset by the trend of lower transaction prices we've discussed on prior calls. Our provision for bad debt was 8% of owned sales, reflecting finest in static pool forecast models and underwriting strategies. The refinement to our static pool forecast model benefited our Q4 provision by approximately $4 million. Going forward, we anticipate the rate should trend between 11% and 13%. For the full year, contract sales were flat versus our revised guidance of flat to down 3%. Fee for service mix for the quarter was 52% versus 56% last year, within our 48% to 54% guidance for the full year. With the introduction of our new projects this year, we anticipate signing a higher proportion of owned inventory and expect to see fee for service mix between 47% and 53% of our contract sales in 2020. Turning to Real Estate expenses, product cost was 26.4% in Q4 and finished the year at 23.7%. As we discussed on our last call, 2019 product cost benefited from a larger-than-normal cumulative product cost adjustment in Q3. This fact coupled with the introduction of additional inventory and higher product cost regions like New York and Hawaii will drive our overall costs of product to a range of 27% to 30% going forward. SMG&A was 38.1% of sales and favorable by 81 basis points as a result of the improvement in close rates for the quarter that drove some operating leverage. For the year, SMG&A was 39.8% of contract sales, up 28 basis points versus 2018. Our Q4 Real Estate margin was $86 million, up 10% versus last year, margins of 31.7% were up 274 basis points. For the year, Real Estate margin was $315 million with margins of 30.6%. While we do anticipate seeing leverage on SMG&A in 2020 owing to higher sales volumes, our higher cost of product will nevertheless drive overall Real Estate segment margin compression in 2020. At our financing business, Q4 margin was $29 million with a margin percentage of 67.4% versus a margin of $27 million at a margin percentage of 65.9% last year. So our credit trends remained stable, and our allowance for bad debt is expected to remain near current levels to due to underwriting transits implemented over the year, coupled with anticipated increases and purchases of our new projects in Hawaii by Japanese buyers that generally carry stronger credit profiles. Looking at the portfolio balance, gross receivables stood at just over $1.3 billion. Our average down payment year-to-date is 12.4%. Our average interest income rate increased to 12.5% from 12.3% last year. Turning to our Resort and Club business now it was 5.5% for the quarter and the year, which drove an 8.9% increase in revenue to $61 million. Both Club and Resort revenue contributed to the gain and we once again reached a new high for revenue per member, $587. Margin for Q4 was up 17% to $49 million with a margin percentage of 80.3%. This quarter capped off a year of strong results for Club and Resort with revenues up 11.1% to $191 million. Margin of 145 million and margin percentage increase of $324 basis points to 75.9%. Rental and Ancillary revenues in the fourth quarter were flat $54 million, with an increase in rental revenue offsetting the decline in ancillary revenues. The lower supply of rental rooms at the Quinn during the transition to a timeshare property will continue to be a driving growth until we lap the conversion towards the end of 2020. Rental and Ancillary expenses were $1 million higher at $39 million owing to larger subsidy requirements for newly opened properties. Our margin was $15 million with margin percentage coming at 27.8%. As we detailed in our last call the transition of the Quinn to timeshare property from a rental property is drag on the segment margins in the coming year and we anticipate a slightly higher level of margin compression in the Rental and Ancillary segment in 2020 versus what we saw in 2019. Bridging the gap between segment adjusted EBITDA and total adjusted EBITDA, fourth quarter G&A decreased $5 million driven by the aforementioned changes to certain employee benefits as well as the result of class efficiency initiatives implemented this year. License fees were up $1 million and EBITDA from JVs was flat. Our tax rate in Q4 was 2.2% as a result of an accounting methods review recently approved by the IRS, which resulted in a benefit of $18 million being recorded in the fourth quarter. This was one time benefit and going forward our tax rate will revert to a more normalized range of 27% to 29%. At end of Q4, our net leverage stood at 1.7 times versus our target range of 1.5 to 2 times. Looking at our liquidity position, we ended the year with $57 million of unrestricted cash, $479 million of capacity under revolver and $450 million of capacity in the warehouse. On the debt front, we had corporate debt, net of deferred financing cost of $828 million. The non-recourse debt balance of $747 million. Owing to inventory spending for new properties our Q4 adjusted free cash flow was a decline of $71 million, compared to a decline of $25 million last year. Adjusted free cash flow for the full year was $71 million. In Q4 2019, we did not complete any share repurchases. Since the programs origination in November of 2018, we have repurchased $355 million worth of shares at an average price of $29.90. $283 million of this amount was repurchased in 2019. For 2020, we are guiding to adjusted EBITDA of $455 million to $475 million. With contract sales of plus 3% to 7%. Mark mentioned earlier, given the uncertainties associated with the coronavirus at this time, our guidance does not include the impact from the virus. But as a framework, each 5% impact to sales through our Japanese customers would be a one point impact to our contract sales growth rates and roughly $5 million to $6 million to EBITDA. Walking through the additional items in our guidance, adjusted free cash flow is expected to be in the range of $50 million to $110 million. Net income is expected to be $253 million to $268 million or $2.91 to $3.08 on a per share basis. Both of these are excluding all deferral recognition activity, and our guidance assumes no further share repurchases based on $87 million shares outstanding. Similar to our last call, before we turn to Q&A, I'd like to remind you that we do not comment on market speculation and will not be addressing rumors. We will now turn the call over to the operator and look forward to your questions. Operator?