Curtis Hodgson
Analyst · B. Riley
Thanks, Jon. Let me quickly cover my perception of our current market environment, then discuss a few strategic topics and share some concluding thoughts. The manufactured housing industry is continuing to face headwinds and it did so throughout 2025. Despite persistent housing affordability problem for our markets, manufactured homes, of course, remain roughly 2/3 less expensive than site build homes, falling consumer confidence and tariff-driven price increases restrained growth. Industry shipments were running at an annualized rate of approximately $106,000 last year. Our own unit volumes were down approximately 20% year-over-year. The long-term structural case for affordable manufactured housing has never been stronger. The affordability gap between what we build and site-built house continues to widen. Manufactured homes average about $85 per square foot versus double that for site-built construction. We are well positioned to serve the roughly 63 million U.S. households with annual incomes below $75,000. But let me run through a couple of specific topics. On the retail and dealer side, unit sales were lower unit -- year-over-year. The revenue rose sharply as price increases took hold and the size of our unit was up slightly. Our 14 company-owned heritage and Tiny House retail locations were 12% higher in '25 than '24. On the community side, commercial sales to park owners and developers fell as operators scaled back. Our operators have been unable to raise rents as fast as price increases have been going on in our industry. We believe it's a cyclical pause rather than a structural change. Underlying tenant demand remains stable, occupancy rates in the mobile home parks, particularly in large metropolitan areas are very high. In our finance division, the loan portfolio generated $43 million of interest income last year, and we expect continued growth as consumer portfolio expands. Credit quality remains strong, over 97% current, across all of our portfolios. We are seeing modestly higher charge-off activity and have increased our loan loss reserves accordingly, which is reflected in the SG&A increase Jon described. In fact, I believe there's going to be around an $8 million delta between that which we pay taxes on because we're not allowed to deduct loan loss provisions and our GAAP income that we're reporting to you today. On tariffs and raw materials, we continue to monitor the situation closely. It seems to change almost every day. Tariffs on Chinese sourced inputs currently add about $1,200 for the cost of each of our homes. I have to ask my buyers what's the latest on tariffs and the bottom line is we currently are paying 35% tariff on anything we import from China. We repurchased 346,000 shares last year, and our existing repurchase program expired in October. Although we did initiate a $10 million buyback program at our last Board meeting, and we will be evaluating whether to repurchase on an ongoing basis. On development, we, of course, have one super big project going on in Austin. I keep predicting that it's near finished. One of these days, I'll be right. But I really think we'll be putting homes into consumers in a calendar year 2026, although it may be the third or fourth quarter before that happens. We have 10 land development projects in total, many of which are already engineered and entitled. Our 3 manufactured -- manufacturing facilities, Fort Worth and Commerce and Eatonton produced 1,549 homes in 2025. We're certain to be able to outstrip that this year. We are -- we've been running pretty much at capacity at both Texas facilities since the first of the year. We're probably going to do just in Texas alone, the 1,500 units that we did company-wide last year. On workforce housing and data center opportunities, we continue to exploit that. We've already taken orders for over 500 houses in this space this year. It's a potentially significant growth avenue, it complements our core business, and it's something that we're pretty good at. We also completed a small tuck-in acquisition, AmeriCasa in November. It added a consumer loan portfolio, a retail location and some technology. I don't expect that acquisition to make much of a difference in 2026. Although the prospects of some of the foundation, especially in technology still looks pretty strong. For closing thoughts, let me just close a couple of things on where I think we stand. Legacy delivers consistent profitability. We've never had a quarterly loss in our history. This year's increase in book value of 8-point-something percent is the worst year we've had, but most of that was -- it was largely affected, let's put it this way, by increasing provisions for loans as the economy gets a little less certain. The CECL requirements under accounting increased several million dollars and that shows up in the fourth quarter. Our balance sheet is conservatively stated. Book value is $22.20 a share. I personally believe that liquidation value is significantly higher than book value because of all the provisions that we take. And our valuation when we started was about $700,000. We've grown shareholders' equity to $528 million over these 20 years. A pretty good IRR. I'm not going to broadcast it because it's just pretty extreme. But as long as we keep growing at 8%, 10%, 12% per year, we'll be a $1 billion company, probably by the turn of this decade and beyond that as we progress. With our stock trading near book value or today below book value, we view this period as an opportunity to reinvigorate growth and innovation, should increase profit margins and create stock premium. If the stock continues to trade at or below book value, we will use our balance sheet strength to repurchase shares opportunistically. And sure, this is a great time to be an owner of Legacy. There really isn't any downside. You own a part of a company that has never lost money in any year since its founding, that's conservatively capitalized and is perfectly positioned to provide affordable housing to thousands of families as affordability moves to the front of the national agenda. And Texas, in particular, has a front row in all the data center business, which for us is just what we often do in the oil fields. We provide workforce housing for rural areas that are experiencing growth. Operator, this concludes my prepared remarks. Please begin the question and answer.