Curtis Hodgson
Analyst · Mark Smith with Lake Street Capital Markets
Mark, that's a good question. I was hoping for a softball, but yes. Let's talk about commodities because that's something we all know we can look them up on the Internet. So lumber fell off a cliff in March and April, and we actually locked in lumber prices, probably at least through the second quarter, maybe a little bit beyond that. So we took a pretty bold move on lumber. Steel has gone down 10%, 15%. We're tied to indexes, and how we purchase steel. And that's got to improve in our favor, at least in Q2, and we're going ahead and buy steel a little bit further out than we would otherwise to take advantage of what we think, it is maybe the bottom of steel prices. So those are the 2 principal commodities in a mobile home, about 20% lumber and about 10% steel. And the other 70%, much of it we import from China, and we're just happy that we're getting our supplies without interruption from our Chinese vendors. And then the other half is just hard to put our finger on. Most of it doesn't seem to be vary in price no matter what's happening to the economy. So we've already told many of our customers to expect 0 price increases for the remainder of the year. I hope we can honor that forward-looking movement. So they can plan accordingly. And so basically, as we improve our product, which we do every model year, including this one coming up, our customers will get those improvements, probably at no additional cost on the units that they purchased, not that I want to get them to delay their orders, but I think like all models, we improve every time we come up with a new model a year. Now the first part of your question about cost-cutting and whether it's sustainable. We're leaving no stone unturned here. I mean if we can buy coffee cheaper, we're going to buy coffee cheaper. So we're attacking all of our G&A expenses, and I don't want to throw out, but all that means because I'll found somebody on a call that's going to get transcribed, but I think it is sustainable. I think when you have 36 million people unemployed and you have plenty of jobs for people, and when you're buying things in pretty good quantity and other people have cut down their buying. I think it puts us in a pretty powerful position as far as being able to keep these cost-cutting measures in place probably for 3, 6, 9 months. Another way to look at it is, we're able to build a mobile home less expensively, but that doesn't mean we're going to decrease prices. It's probably going to be more feature-packed than the feature than it has been in the past. That's probably the quid pro quo that we're going to see. I'm pretty excited about some of the new things coming down the pipeline in product, European cabinets and energy-efficient houses and 60-inch wide showers and things like that, that elevating the manufactured housing industry to be more competitive with the site-built housing industry. You're going to see more and more of that unveiled, not just by Legacy, but the industry as a whole. And the more that we can compete with other forms of housing, the more market share our industry is going to be able to capture. Although interest rates are down for the site built sector, the ability to get one of those mortgages is tougher, which is good news for our segment. So I don't know if you've seen this or not, but the number of mortgage applications being approved is down significantly after the coronavirus and that's just because of a natural tightening of credit across the board, and that bodes well for our industry because people will come over to our industry. Our credit standards don't really change according to economic swings, and nor do our interest rates or anything like that, we're not constantly changing our offerings on a credit point of view. Our credit criteria to date is exactly the same as it was 6 months ago. Absolutely no change whatsoever. So I don't know if that answered your question, Mark, but kind of sets us up well, I think, for the third and fourth quarter, assuming there's some sort of rebounds in the national economy.