John Britti
Analyst · United Capital Markets. Your line is now open
Thanks, Steve. Good morning and thank you for joining us today. First, a few comments about our executive team. As you know, our colleague Ron Faris, concluded his tenure as President and CEO of Ocwen after over 27 years. We thank him for stewardship and wish him the best. As we have also previously said, Glen Messina will assume the role of Ocwen’s President and CEO upon the close of the PHH transaction. Until that time, I will serve on an interim basis as CEO of Ocwen. As announced last week, Cathy Dondzila, our Chief Accounting Officer, serves as our Principal Financial Officer for SEC reporting purposes until we name a new CFO. The CFO search process is already underway. Since our last earnings release, our focus has remained on the strategies that we have previously outlined to drive stronger financial performance and continue the transformation of Ocwen. While there are many things we do day to day to improve performance of the Company such as managing the efficiency of our operation and providing excellent customer service, we have been and will continue to focus on four key areas in the near-term. These are helping homeowners resolving legacy, legal and regulatory matters; investing our excess cash; and preparing for closing of our acquisition of PHH. We realized that these current areas of focus may not in themselves be sufficient to complete a transformation to enable us to resume growth and profitability. Nevertheless, success in these four areas, particularly the closing of the PHH transaction and capturing of potential synergies are necessary steps in that process and position us very well to we move our business forward. Regarding the first area, an important part of the Ocwen tradition is our motto that we all take to heart. That motto is helping homeowners is what we do. In the second quarter, we helped over 10,700 families remain in their home and get a fresh start to a loan modification. Modifications help homeowners into sustainable performing loans while also providing better outcomes to mortgage loan investors. Our servicing segment achieved all this while having its eighth consecutive quarter of positive pretax earnings. Since 2008, we have provided modifications to over 786,000 families and we remain an industry leader in providing sustainable loan modifications to home owners. In addition to modification activity, our forward lending business specializes in helping homeowners, access better loan terms to refinances, while our reverse lending helps senior homeowners access equity in their homes. During the quarter, we helped over 1,100 of our servicing customers refinance into a better loan. Meanwhile, our reverse lending business helped over 1,200 seniors and their families convert home equity into cash. With regard to legacy matters, we believe that as a result of court ruling, settlements and ongoing negotiation, we’re continuing to make progress on this front. These legacy legal and regulatory issues remain a focus as they have both hampered our ability to grow and create uncertainty for our investors. I refer you to our second quarter 10-K disclosures for more detail on our progress in these matters. Another important task has been the deployment of excess cash. As discussed on last quarter’s earnings call, we’ve executed clean-up calls that we own. We own clean-up calls in approximately $18 billion of UPB and we expect to continue deploying capital on these calls. In the past few months, we’ve executed calls on 14 deals with unpaid principal balance of about $85 million. In general, we believe these calls have attractive asset returns that we estimate will exceed 10%. We have also deployed cash into somewhat lower yielding short and medium-term investments that reduce our debt service costs. Notwithstanding the importance [ph] of the first three areas, a particular area of emphasis in recent months has been and will remain developing a successful integration plan for our pending acquisition of PHH. We believe this transaction will have many operational and financial benefits, including helping us move on to the Black Knight MSP platform more quickly and with less risk than a de novo implementation might acquire. Transition to MSP is a necessary condition for future growth in our servicing portfolio. In addition, we believe it will help Ocwen to achieve more efficient scale in operations and utilize best practices across two great companies to optimize our longer-term performance. As noted in our press release, this morning, we are encouraged by our progress towards closing the transaction and we are currently targeting to close in the third quarter of 2018. The Ocwen and PHH teams have been developing detailed integration plan to support this effort and allow us to realize synergy as quickly as possible, while minimizing impact on our customers and mortgage loan investors. Based on more detailed plans and analysis, we have raised our target for annualized run rate synergies to $100 million, which we aim to realize within about 18 months of close, and which is higher than our previous estimate of $50 million. This target refers potential reductions in run rate expense. Please refer to our investor presentation for more detail on our analysis of potential synergies. In keeping with our commitment to provide excellent service to our customers, we are paying particular attention to the more than 1 million Ocwen customers that will be moving on to the MSP platform. While change inevitably results in concerns, we’re making every effort to minimize the impact on our borrowers to ensure excellent service throughout the transfer process. The transfer process will occur over several months, following the closing of the merger. This dedication to customer service is one reason we anticipate some delays in realizing the full synergies we believe are achievable. Before turning over to Cathy, let me cover three other areas. Funding our balance sheet, our lending business and our MSR valuation. Regarding our balance sheet. Ocwen has always sought to maintain a manageable debt burden and strong liquidity. We continuously evaluate options for improving our cost of funds and when appropriate, delever the balance sheet. During the second quarter, for example, we voluntarily paid down the senior secured term loan debt by $50 million to approximately $240 million. In late-June, we opportunistically tested the waters on refinancing our remaining first lean term loan debt with the object of improving term. We ultimately chose not to move forward. The term loan market experienced oversupply and widening spread at the end of June as prior excess demand slipped to oversupply. The mortgage sector in particular was negatively affected by a very large issuance of unsecured debt. We believe that further progress on some of the areas I just discussed may improve use of Ocwen’s credit. As such, in coming months, we may decide to renew our efforts to revamp our term loans or seek other forms of financing to optimize our balance sheet. In the meantime, we closed on a refinance in mid-July of a $225 million advance facility on much better terms than our prior facility. That refinancing bolsters our view that it would be in shareholders’ best interest to hold off at least for now on term loan financing. We remain opportunistic and seeking to improve our overall balance sheet costs and risk. Turning to lending. As you’ll note, our overall lending performance is down quarter-to-quarter and our forward lending business continues to struggle to achieve breakeven. It is obvious to anyone following the mortgage industry past several months have seen a sizable decline in both volume and profit across the industry. This has been true in both the forward and reverse lending industries. While we are far from immune to these general trends, we have I believe nonetheless weathered them better than most. Our volume and margins in both forward and reverse have held up better than the industry as a whole. Some of this is a function of the underlying business. For example, our forward lending business relies on recapturing loans from our servicing portfolio. Our servicing portfolio is less interest rate sensitive and more credit and equity sensitive than most servicing portfolios. As a result, stronger employment conditions and home price appreciation drive more loan activity in our portfolio as compared to the industry as a whole. We also believe credit goes to our management of these businesses. We continue to look for ways to improve performance by evolving with the market. We are investing in marketing technology and process changes in efforts to stay ahead. Notwithstanding these efforts, we fully expect the second half of the year will remain challenging for our lending businesses. Regarding MSR valuations. We saw essentially no impact from the 15 basis-point increase in benchmark rates from the end of Q1 to the end of Q2. Secondary market trading of servicing assets show MSR prices remain at or near record multiples, in excess of 5 times annual cash flow for conventional servicing for the various industry sources. While there are potential demand dynamics that may modestly improve valuations, it seems unlikely that we would see much upside in MSR valuations even if rates continue to rise. I will now turn it over to Cathy Dondzila, our Chief Accounting Officer, who will provide you more details on our second quarter results.