Glen Messina
Analyst · Lee Cooperman with Omega Family Office. Please proceed with your question
Thanks, Dico. Good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining us. The environment we're facing today is nothing like we expected at the start of the first quarter. Little, if anything we're doing today is business as usual. We have strong momentum going into the first quarter and that momentum continued in January and February, then COVID-19 happened. I'm extremely proud of how our team has reacted while maintaining our high standards for operational excellence and compliance. I want to thank our team for their efforts to move to remote operations as swiftly and seamlessly as possible and especially thank our employees that continue to report to our facilities where it's critical for them to perform their functions. Additionally, we would like to thank the healthcare professionals and first responders for the sacrifices made throughout the world to battle the COVID-19 pandemic. Throughout this crisis, our team has maintained business operations to assist our 1.4 million borrowers and has fielded more than 740,000 calls from March 1 through April 30. As of April 30, we've provided approximately 115,000 active forbearance plans for all borrowers in need, even if they were not protected under the CARES Act. Despite the strain the COVID-19 environment will place on our business, we expect to have adequate liquidity to operate our business and we expect to opportunistically originate approximately $25 billion in new servicing for 2020 with the targeted 50-50 mix of loan servicing, and sub servicing. While we are operating in an environment with increased risk, we believe this environment has created increased opportunities to invest in high quality, newly originated MSRs and delinquent servicing at very attractive returns. Our proven expertise in special servicing and the actions we have taken over the past 18 months to strengthen our company position us as one of the few players in the industry who could take advantage of these opportunities. We've built a great platform and a great team. Our primary growth limitation will be our available growth capital. In this regard, we're highly focused on exploring all strategic options to leverage our proven operating capability in this environment to fully realize the value of our platform. We currently serve more than 460,000 consumers of pre-crisis subprime loans. We have completed approximately 1.5 million non-foreclosure outcomes on behalf of struggling families since the financial crisis. We believe that Ocwen has a critical role to play in the current environment to help borrowers and the mortgage industry. We continue to be one of the best servicers for non-performing loans with decades of experience that will help us assist homeowners in the current situation. We've done it in the past, and we'll do it again. I'd like to cover some of our business highlights from the first quarter. Please turn to Slide 4. Despite the headwinds we face from the COVID-19 pandemic, we made solid progress in the quarter. We reported a net loss of $25 million in the first quarter, which includes a $78 million pretax loss due to the impact of changes in interest rates on the MSR portfolio of net of hedges [ph], and a $62 million income tax benefit primarily from the utilization of NOLs relating to the change in carry back rules under the CARES Act. Pretax income before notable items of $2 million include $7 million on favorable impact of COVID-19 during the quarter and $3 million unfavorable impact due to seasonal changes in employee costs and escrow balances versus the fourth quarter. We ended the quarter with unrestricted cash of $264 million despite $59 million in MSR financing margin calls and $134 million in debt retirement, and book value per share increased 9% from the fourth quarter to $3.32 cents per share. First quarter funded volume was approximately $4 billion and we achieve March annualized funded volume in our flow and retail channels of approximately $11 billion. We realized annualized run rate cost savings of $395 million as compared to the adjusted annualized run rate costs of Ocwen and PHH combined for the second quarter of 2018. Despite the strength in our liquidity position, the dramatic improvements we've made to our platform and the solid momentum of our key business initiatives, we remain disappointed that our share price trades add an extreme discount to book value. We believe we are taking all the appropriate actions to fully realize the value of our platform. Lastly, we received a favorable ruling in the legacy Florida matter where the court granted our motion and dismissed with prejudice a deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act claim. One of our top priorities is to resolve the Florida and CFPB matters prior to trial in a manner that results in an acceptable financial outcome for our stakeholders. In this regard, we have increased our reserves related to these matters in the first quarter to approximately $18 million. However, we cannot provide any assurances that we'll be able to resolve this matter for the amounts currently reserved or in the time frame we desire. Now please start Slide 5. We believe that swift actions we have taken in response to the challenges created by the COVID-19 pandemic have positioned Ocwen well to navigate through the uncertain future ahead. We took decisive and proactive action to safeguard our employees so that we could continue to serve our borrowers, clients, and investors. We are fully functional with nearly all our global team working from home and approximately 2% of our team must work on site to the job requirements. Our team is performing exceptionally well in this environment. I'm proud of our call center team who has fielded hundreds of thousands of calls between March 1 and April 30. Our call center is performing well and our performance compares favorably to the call center statistics most recently provided by the MBA. As mentioned earlier, as of April 30, we granted approximately 115,000 active forbearance plans or roughly 8.5% of our total number of loans serviced. We have sole responsibility to advance in roughly 27% of these plans or approximately 7% of our owned portfolio. On average, we're seeing approximately 26% of borrowers on forbearance plans continue to make their payments. As you can see in the slide, this varies by investor type and is 41% for GSE loans. Based on the MBA report data as of April 27, the percentage of loans in our portfolio on forbearance for Fannie, Freddie and Ginnie investor types is below other non-bank servicers. For PLS, it's above. We believe this is based on the quality and seasoning of our portfolio. We have developed our forecast for advances based on our experience in natural disasters. However, in this case, we're using unemployment as one of the drivers to forecast future forbearance plan demand, ultimate reinstatement and default levels. Our current forbearance plan levels are consistent with our forecasts and we're seeing a reduction in the number of borrowers who are requesting forbearance, which is also consistent with our forecast. Moving on to Slide 6. We expect current cash levels plus operating cash flow and our working capital improvement actions will support our operating needs, origination objectives, debt service requirements and the equity portion of our servicing advanced requirements while maintaining our target $200 million in operating cash plus liquidity earmarks. We estimate the total amount of advances will peak around the end of this year for an incremental amount of approximately $150 million, above our first quarter 2020 events balances. We have a decade of experience in managing and collecting servicer advances, which peaked at well over $2 billion following the financial crisis. We're confident in our ability to manage the projected increase in advances. We do not have to advance PNI on 16% of the loans in our own servicing portfolio because contractually, we're only required to remit payments when the borrower makes them. On the remainder of the portfolio where we must advance, for Fannie and Freddie loans, we stopped advancing it four months PNI. We recover our PNI advances at resolution of the forbearance plan, loss mitigation workout or liquidation. Virginia loans, we advanced PNI while the forbearance plan is active. We will evaluate the borrower for a partial claim prior to the end of the forbearance period and recover the advances if they qualify for the partial claim. If the borrower does not qualify, we would extend their forbearance plan up to 12 months and would eventually be evaluated for a loss mitigation solution or default. We can use excess funds in custodial accounts to limit our PNI advances. For PLS loans, we would continue to advance PNI through a series of one month forbearance plans, which advance the due date upon completion and move the resulting this payment to or near the loan's maturity as a non-interest bearing balance. As such, Ocwen does not expect to be out of pocket cash for any more than one month for each loan. Generally, we may stop advancing for PNI, once deem non-recoverable from the net proceeds of the property. We are required to advance PNI on all loans until resolution of the forbearance plan, loss mitigation solution or property disposition. Based on our natural disaster experience, we are assuming varying forbearance duration and repayment terms, and that some borrowers will unfortunately ultimately go to default. Moving on to Slide 7; industry origination volumes and margins are strong. Frankly, margins are higher than we've seen in a long time. We have built flow and recapture originations capability to capitalize on this. We have good momentum in these channels and we're continuing to expand our capabilities. We are acting opportunistically to originate MSRs in our retail and flow channels at a deep discount to historical levels before COVID-19, resulting in highly attractive returns. Included in our liquidity estimates is funding $25 billion in originations for 2020 at a target 50-50 mix of loan servicing and subservicing. We believe this ratio is prudent and appropriate to conserve capital and considering potential variability in market conditions. Our recapture fund defined for the quarter was $196 million and gross loss volume was $870 million. Our March funded volume was adversely impacted by our and the markets' transition to remote environment. Block buying trends and margins continue to be strong and loan pipeline cycle times are beginning to normalize. In April recorded gross loss by more than $500 million and we continue to expand capacity to maximize recapture volume potential. In our correspondent forward lending channel, we are currently purchasing volume for more than 68 counterparties and have an additional hundred and 182 in the pipeline. First quarter bid volume was $13.4 billion, up 126% from the fourth quarter. We originated over $2 billion of annualized volumes during the quarter. Overall, our flow channels across agency purchase, co-issue, and direct flow MSR arrangements originated over $5 billion of annualized volumes during the quarter. We were also granted approval to participate as a certified buyer as part of the Fannie Mae SMP Program. Our reverse originations business funded $226 million of loans in the quarter, a 60% increase compared to the same quarter last year. We were ranked as the number two reverse mortgage lender in the quarter based on FHA endorsements. Currently, we have a pipeline of $90 billion in subservicing opportunities. Although the subservicing sale cycle has a long tail, there appears to be a growing interest from prospects in our offering as potential customers look to diversify subservicing providers. Please turn to Slide 8. We believe this environment will create opportunities to invest in or subservice delinquent servicing at very attractive returns. The pace and magnitude of our growth is largely limited by our available capital. We're evaluating a number of different opportunities to partner with investors to acquire or subservice delinquent servicing, or using our planned MSR funding vehicle as one of the mechanism to finance acquisition of delinquent servicing. Ocwen continues to be one of the best servicers for non-performing loans, with decades of experience that will help us assist homeowners in the current situation. We have created a flexible, highly-automated operating platform that allows us to mark easily, scale up loss mitigation capability, allowing for operations to maintain quality while undergoing increases in volume and rapid change. Today, we're managing over $3 billion in advances and our proven capabilities allows us to aggressively market our subservicing for servicers that do not have the experience or capacity in handling delinquent loans. We have been the leader in previous government homeowner assistance programs and completed over 350,000 modifications under the prior HAMP program, which was 60% higher than the next highest servicer. We have completed more than $1.5 million non-foreclosure outcomes on behalf of struggling families since the financial crisis. Under the Treasury MHA Program, following the prior recession, Ocwen completed almost 120,000 principal reduction modifications to non-GSE borrowers, which was almost 50% of all such modifications offered by the entire industry under the program. Turning to Slide 9; we expect our financial performance for the balance of 2020 will see both positive and adverse impacts resulting from the COVID environment. In servicing, we expect to see lower servicing revenues and higher operating and interest expense. In addition, given current interest rates, we are likely to see higher MSR amortization and some additional revenue pressure due to higher prepayments. In contrast, we expect a more robust originations market with strong near-term volume and margin opportunities. We believe our actions over the past 12 months to build diversified origination sources and reduce our cost structure as well as our loss mitigation capabilities and strong operating scales position us to capitalize on this market disruption and could provide the opportunity to prudently acquire servicing assets at very strong returns. Going forward, we're executing our COVID-19 action plan and keep its initiatives with commitment and focus. While we continue to achieve progress toward our objective to deliver attractive long term returns for our shareholders, we are not providing near term earnings guidance, because of the uncertainty in the number of borrowers needing forbearance, duration of forbearance and foreclosure moratorium, borrowers needing loss mitigation, industry origination volumes and margins, and any future state or federal government actions that may further impact the mortgage industry. Now, I'll turn it over to June who will discuss the results for the quarter.