Larry Sorsby
Analyst · the Company's website at www.khov.com. Those listeners who would like to follow along should now log on to the website. I would like to turn the call over to Jeff O'Keefe, Vice President, Investor Relations. Jeff, please go ahead
Thank you, Ara. We don’t typically provide weekly data as it can be quite volatile, but as I walk you through the next four slides, you will see the impact COVID-19 had on various traffic and sales metrics on us on a weekly basis. On Slide 11, we show that the weekly traffic troughed at the end of March and the first couple weeks in April at roughly 600 units of traffic. Since that time, we’ve seen improvements to almost 1500 traffic units per week – last week. Even though it was good to see traffic rebound of the lows, we still have not returned to February’s average level of 1710 traffic units which we show on the far right-hand portion of the slide. However, the traffic we did see was very high quality. Further, our website traffic remains strong through the entire shutdown period. We also saw an increase in cancellation rates. Turning to Slide 12, there you can see a similar trend in weekly cancellation rates as a percentage of gross contracts. They peaked in the second full week of April at 46%, but have come back down to more normal levels in the high teens in recent weeks. Interestingly, there were four weeks when the weekly cancellation rates were much higher than normal for March 29 through April 19. But even in those weeks, the absolute number of cancellations didn’t change much compared to the period prior to COVID-19 shutdown. However, during those same four weeks, our gross contracts per week declined significantly and that is what caused our cancellation rates to increase. Slide 13 shows weekly cancellations as a percentage of beginning contract backlog. Here, you can see that while there are some minor weekly ups and downs, our backlog cancellation rate remained steady throughout the entire period. We really did not see a large cancellation from our backlog. On Slide 14, we show weekly net contracts, which have been on the rise for the past seven consecutive weeks. We have not increased incentives in most of our communities and we’ve not seen the level of the centers rise in most of our peers’ communities either. We are not discounting home prices in order to drive the improvements in our sales pace. We are just seeing increased market demand. Turning to Slide 15, this was a good quarter for our Financial Services division. Their year-over-year second quarter pretax earnings increased 30% to $5 million. These improvements were driven by both volume increases and improved operating margins. Recently, there have been a lot of focus on whether customers can still qualify for a mortgage due to tighter loan underwriting standards and the unprecedented high number of recent job losses. Whenever there are material changes to mortgage underwriting criteria, our mortgage company scrubs our contract backlogs to see if customers still qualify. Fortunately, the overwhelming majority of our customers still qualified for a mortgage, amazingly, only ten of our customers who planned to close in our second quarter had lost their job and no longer qualified. We entered the pre-COVID-19 environment with an extremely strong sales push. On the top half of Slide 16, we show that we have a solid backlog of 2221 homes under contract at the end of the first quarter. The number of homes in backlog was up 24% and the dollar amount was up 20%. Notwithstanding the strong deliveries in our second quarter, and the fore COVID-19 period of sales, on the bottom-half of the slide, you can see that the number of homes in our consolidated contract backlog at the end of the second quarter of fiscal 2020 was still 6% higher than it was a year earlier and it was a slight growth in contract backlog dollars at April 30th of 2020, compared to the end of last year’s second quarter. Today, most of the customers in our backlog seem very motivated to close. On Slide 17, you can see that we closed 446 homes in March 2020. In spite of COVID-19, we closed more homes in March this year than we closed in both March of 2019 and in February 2020, then we increased that level and closed 503 homes in April. Despite the virus, our customers clearly still wanted to move into their new homes. If you turn to Slide 18, you can see that our consolidated community count declined by 15 communities from 147 on April 30, 2019 to 132 at the end of April this year. This decline is due primarily to three factors. Number one, selling through communities faster than we expected prior to the impact of COVID-19; number two, in total, there were seven community grand openings that were expected for the second quarter that were delayed. Some of these delays were due to COVID-19 and others were related to normal development plans. Number three, we contributed four wholly-owned communities into unconsolidated joint ventures during the first quarter of fiscal 2020. Given the impact of COVID-19, and uncertain economic environment going forward, similar to our peers, we took measures to preserve cash by delaying certain land purchases, land development activity and beginning work on some unsold homes. Turning to Slide 19. In response to COVID-19, we reduced our available spec homes from almost 800 at the end of January to just over 600 at the end of April. However, we really not altered our spec strategy much. We had 4.7 specs homes per community at the end of the second quarter this year which is consistent with our average of 4.6 spec homes per community since 1997. During the second quarter of fiscal 2020, 49% of our contracts were for spec homes, compared to 46% in last year’s second quarter. Clearly, thus far during the pandemic, demand for quick move in homes has remained strong. Given this demand, we intend to gradually increase our level of spec homes back to be closer to the 790 we had at the end of our first quarter. On Slide 20, we control 26,734 lots or a 4.9 years supply at the end of the second quarter. In spite of the adverse impacts of COVID-19, we still added 1289 newly controlled lots during the second quarter. After temporarily slowing new land acquisitions due to COVID-19, given the recent improvement in demand for our homes, our land acquisition teams are back in the market sourcing new deals today. We will remain disciplined to our underwriting standards using current home sales price, current home sales pace and current construction cost. If we find land deals that pencil under these self-adjusting criteria, we will purchase them. Turning to Slide 21, compared to our peers, you can see that we had the third highest percent of land control via options, we continue to use land options whenever possible in order to achieve high inventory turns, enhance our returns on capital and reduce risk. We are pleased to control 60% of our land through options. Looking at our consolidated communities in the aggregate, including mothballed communities and the $198 million of inventory not owned, we have an inventory book value of $1.3 billion net of $194 million of impairments. Turning now to Slide 22, compared to our peers, you see that we have the second highest inventory turnover rate for the trailing 12 month period. Although we lag NVRs, industry-leading number – turnover number, our turns remain 42% higher than the next highest peer below us. High inventory turns are a key component of our overall strategy. Another area of discussion is related to our deferred tax asset. Our deferred tax asset is very significant and because it is fully reserved or by valuation allowance it is not currently reflected on our balance sheet. We’ve taken numerous steps to protect this asset. As of April 30th 2020, our deferred tax asset in the aggregate was $597 million. We will not have to pay Federal cash income taxes on approximately $1.9 billion of future pretax earnings. On Slide 23, we show that we ended the second quarter with a shareholders’ deficit of $495 million. If you add back our valuation allowance, as we’ve done on this slide, then our shareholders’ equity will be a positive $110 million. As you can see on Slide 24, we ended the second quarter with $247 million of liquidity. This is slightly higher than the liquidity – and then our liquidity target range of $170 million to $245 million and if higher, then the $225 million we had in the previous quarter. In order to maximize financial flexibility and increasing our cash position, we elected to draw in full our $125 million credit facility on March 25th. During the second quarter, those funds remained in our bank accounts which ensured the cash was available as we needed it. In late May, we regained confidence in the financial markets and repaid our revolver in full. Turning to Slide 25. On the top of this slide, we show our maturity ladder at the end of the first quarter and on the bottom of this slide, we show what it looked like at the end of our second quarter. In March, we extended our debt maturities by exchanging $59 million of our 10% second lien notes due July 2022 include $59 million of our 11.25% 1.5 lien notes due February of 2026. We remain pleased with the debt exchanges we completed over the past seven months. These steps simplified our balance sheet and extended the maturities on more than $1 billion of our debt. We will continue to analyze and evaluate our capital structure and explore transactions to further strengthen our balance sheet. Given the large unemployment numbers and uncertainty in the economy, we are withdrawing any goals or guidance we offered in our earlier public comments and we will not be giving any guidance for the next quarter or for the full year. Now, I will turn it back over to Ara for some brief closing remarks.