Glen Messina
Analyst · BTIG. Please go ahead
Thanks, Dico. Good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining us. We're looking forward to sharing our progress with you today. I'd like to start by reviewing a few highlights for the second quarter and take you through our actions to address the challenging and dynamic mortgage market. Please turn to Slide 3. We believe our balanced business model is working as intended, as expected for the first half of this year, servicing appreciation and profit improvement is offsetting originations decline. Our second quarter results reflect the impact of continued rising rates, widening spreads and previously disclosed strategic asset sales as well as the benefits from our actions to address the market environment. MSR values increased and we improved profitability and forward originations versus the first quarter. This was partially offset by losses and transaction costs of the EBO and MSR sales we discussed last quarter as well as the market value decline of servicing assets other than MSRs. Our origination team drove meaningful profit improvement in forward originations, while reverse origination profitability was impacted by a steep increase in interest rates and severe spread widening. We improved our mix of higher-margin products and services. We had strong subservicing additions and a growing potential opportunity pipeline. We're reducing our cost structure enterprise-wide and targeting roughly $60 million in annualized run rate expense reduction by the fourth quarter of this year versus the second quarter. We've executed our identified actions to achieve at least 90% of that target, and we expect to complete all actions in the third quarter and realize the full run rate benefit of cost reduction actions in the fourth quarter. We closed the second quarter with $266 million in total liquidity. This is a result of dynamically managing our owned MSR portfolio, driving growth in subservicing over owned MSRs, optimizing MSR, warehouse, advanced financing facilities and our custodial arrangements. To support our capital-efficient growth strategy, we're making progress in expanding our relationship with MAV and other MSR funding partnerships. Our prudent liquidity management supports our objective to allocate capital to share repurchases, debt repurchases and opportunistic MSR investments to deliver value for shareholders. Consistent with the surge in bulk MSR trading activity we're seeing, we believe there will be an increase in M&A activity within the industry, and we're maintaining flexibility to consider all value-creating alternatives. As we look forward to the second half of the year, our focus will be continuing to leverage our balanced and diversified business model. We expect the third quarter will continue to be a transitional period as we complete our cost reduction actions and other key business initiatives. We are assuming reverse origination margins remain tight and volumes depressed and nominal reduction in forward servicing prepayments. With successful execution of our key initiatives and assuming no further adverse market developments, we expect to deliver after-tax ROE before notable items at or above our minimum target of 9% by the fourth quarter. I believe we're well positioned for the risk of a recession in the near term. We've taken decisive action to derisk our Ginnie Mae portfolio, particularly with our EBO and sale of our most severely delinquent loans. Additionally, more than 50% of our portfolio is subservicing with reduced exposure to advances and we're a proven industry leader in special servicing as well as the Ginnie Mae Tier I servicer. I'm pleased with the results in navigating this business cycle and remain confident in our ability to execute those items that are in our control. Let's turn to Slide 4 to discuss the environment and our key initiatives to address the market conditions. Continued rising rates and rate volatility in the second quarter drove further deterioration of industry forward originations. The MBA industry forecast for 2022 was revised down again in July. We continue to see competitive pressure in forward originations and the volume and margin environment is impacting our subservicing clients as well. We expect the timing of servicing additions to be delayed as potential clients deal with origination challenges and/or monetize their MSRs. As we and the industry reduced origination capacity, the competitive pressures may subside, though we're not expecting that to be meaningfully this year. A recent reversal in interest rates suggest rates may have peaked. However, the probability of a recession has also increased. With the heightened probability of a recession in the near term, we believe our special servicing skills will be increasingly valuable and may present new growth opportunities for us. The reverse market has been adversely impacted by the interest rate environment as well. Reverse mortgage interest rates are up over 125 basis points in the second quarter after increasing about 25 basis points in the first quarter. And in the second quarter, reverse spreads widened to roughly 4x our observed levels in 2021. This has adversely impacted refinance opportunity in the reverse mortgage industry and the industry overall is pivoting to new customer acquisition. Regarding reverse subservicing, we believe prospective clients are excited about our entry into the market, our end-to-end capabilities and proven servicing skills. Long term, we still like the reverse market. Demographic trends remain favorable with 12,000 people turning age 65 every day. Senior home equity is at record levels with over $11 trillion at the end of the first quarter, an increase of over $500 billion versus the fourth quarter of 2021. We believe the legacy stigma is diminishing around reverse mortgages and is becoming more accepted as a retirement planning tool. In this business environment, we're focused on a deliberate strategy comprised of 5 initiatives to drive business performance and deliver value for our shareholders. We're leveraging the strength of our balanced and diversified business model, we're driving prudent growth adapted for the environment, reducing our cost structure across the organization, optimizing liquidity, diversifying financing sources and repositioning for higher rates and allocating capital to maximize value for shareholders. Now please turn to Slide 5. We believe there are 3 main profitability drivers for us in this environment. First, our balanced business model is working. Servicing GAAP pretax income in the quarter is up significantly versus the second quarter last year due to MSR value appreciation, slower amortization, expense productivity and portfolio growth. The improvement in servicing profitability and MSR value gains more than offsets the decline in profitability and forward originations as well as the impact of our strategic asset sales to derisk the servicing portfolio and harvest MSR value appreciation. In this part of the market cycle, originations will be a less important driver of earnings, but is a critical element of our business to replenish and grow our servicing portfolio. The second driver is subservicing. We've made great progress in growing our forward servicing business supported by our global technology-enabled scalable platform. Our success here reflects our proven industry-leading operating performance that has been recognized by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and HUD with top honors in their respective servicing performance recognition programs. We continue to be a leader in special servicing, supporting borrowers and investors and outperforming MBA and Moody's industry operations' benchmarks. We have earned our client's trust as is evidenced by meaningful subservicing additions, renewal of our contract with Rithm, formerly NRZ, and other potential new opportunities. We've added $79 billion in subservicing UPB in the last 12 months. We have $14 billion in scheduled subservicing additions in the next 6 months, and our opportunity pipeline for forward and reverse is over $400 billion in potential additions. Our recognized special servicing skills position us to deliver value to clients, investors and consumers in an economic downturn. And with over 50% of our servicing portfolio comprised of subservicing, our exposure to higher costs and advances in a recession is reduced versus a 100% owned servicing portfolio. The third driver is our reverse business. We are the only large-scale, full-service end-to-end reverse mortgage provider in the industry. While origination volume and margins have been adversely impacted by record spread widening and rate increases, we continue to believe the long-term industry opportunity is attractive. Margins have been and continue to be superior to the forward originations market, and we are taking actions to adjust our cost structure to address recent margin compression. Our reverse subservicing business is gaining scale, profitability is improving, and we have a robust potential opportunity pipeline. Overall, we're excited about the potential for our business and do not believe the recent share price is reflective of our financial position, our earnings power or the strength of our business. Now let's turn to Slide 6. Our growth strategy has evolved for the current environment. The last -- this time last year, we were focused on driving MSR additions at attractive multiples. However, this year, we opportunistically sold the MSRs as well at attractive levels, and we've been prudent in selectively investing in new MSRs in the first half of the year. Our focus has been driving growth in subservicing additions through new clients, MAV and other MSR investment partners. We believe the emphasis on subservicing versus owned servicing in this part of the cycle supports our capital allocation flexibility and helps manage the risk of increased servicing advances and servicing profitability deterioration with increased delinquencies. We're growing in higher-margin products and services and forward originations, including Ginnie Mae, Best Efforts and non-delegated deliveries and direct-to-consumer in both forward and reverse. We've increased the percentage mix of these products and services by 6 percentage points this year, year-over-year, driven in large part to continued growth in our client base. In forward consumer direct, we continue to shift to cash out and our refinance recapture rate continues to improve, achieving a record level for us at 51% during the second quarter. More recently, we have begun to focus on purchase originations in consumer direct -- forward consumer direct that is. But we are really in the very early stages of building our capabilities here. In reverse, we also continue to grow direct-to-consumer retail originations, which have the highest revenue margins. With increased competition expected in reverse from legacy forward originators as well as traditional reverse originators, the market transition to customer acquisition and the larger correspondent clients who may be shifting to direct HMBS issuance, growing reverse direct-to-consumer retail is a critical component of our growth strategy. Notwithstanding the unfortunate but necessary downsizing we initiated, we're pleased with our team's progress to reposition us to optimize performance for the current market environment. Now please turn to Slide 7. Mortgage application volume recently dropped to levels not seen in 20 years. In this part of the mortgage industry cycle, any industry participant who has exposure to mortgage originations needs to make the difficult choice to aggressively reduce expenses to maintain profitability. We've demonstrated our ability to reduce costs materially during the PHH integration, cost optimization, productivity enhancement and continuous improvements are all part of our core DNA. We're committed to reduce costs to support market demand and business needs in this part of the industry cycle, while continuing to deliver on our commitments to customers, clients and investors. We're targeting annualized cost reduction of over $60 million across originations, servicing and overhead functions, and that's as measured by the fourth quarter over the second quarter of this year. We've executed our identified actions to achieve 90% of our annualized targets and expect to complete the remaining actions in Q3, so we are well underway here. We expect to realize the full impact of our cost reduction actions in the fourth quarter, and our focus is to drive sustainable cost reduction, driving demand management, supporting the most essential activities and maintaining a prudent risk and compliance management framework. The key actions include rationalizing staff levels, vendor and contract costs. As well, we continue to leverage our season to mature global operating capabilities. Our proprietary global operating platform has been in place for the last 20 years and provide services to support all aspects of our business. Lastly, we continue to drive automation, digital migration and other systemic process improvements consistent with our technology road map and focus on continuous process improvement. Please turn to Slide 8. We're optimizing liquidity, financing sources and custodial arrangements to support the needs of our business during this part of the market cycle. Total liquidity has improved since year-end 2021. This is a function of capital-efficient growth and liability management actions. As we mentioned earlier, we're actively managing our growth with a bias to capital light subservicing. We are dynamically managing our own MSR portfolio to selectively harvest value appreciation. We expect we will continue this approach going forward, and we're focused on all of our asset-based financing arrangements to ensure we have the optimum capacity, aligning indices and improved spreads on warehouse borrowings. We expanded our MSR financing facilities, improved spreads, advanced rates and aligned interest rate indices to match custodial arrangements. Similarly, in our warehouse lines, they've been right-sized, mitigating rate increases through optimized utilization and we've negotiated better terms. We've also restructured advanced lines to duration match interest indices to align with our custodian arrangements. Improved -- we've improved our custodial earnings rate by nearly 75 basis points with more expected in the third quarter, and we're tying our accounts to SOFR going forward. We're making progress negotiating our MAV upsize. We're targeting an incremental $250 million in equity capacity and targeting to complete that upsize in Q3. In addition, we're in discussions with 2 potential MSR funding partners and are targeting to complete at least one transaction with these potential partners in the second half of this year. Please turn to Slide 9. As we said last quarter, given the current share price, we are optimizing our capital allocation to deliver value for shareholders. In the second quarter, we opportunistically purchased $25 million of PHH notes at 94.5% at par. This delivered onetime earnings of almost $1 million and has a positive effect on our leverage ratios. Under our authorization for up to $50 million in share repurchases, we've purchased $17 million through July 31 at an average price of just under $30 per share, which translates to roughly 574,000 shares retired. We continue to repurchase stock as laid out in our repurchase plan. We do not believe our recent share price is reflective of our financial position, our earnings power or the strength of our business. And with the book value per share of roughly $59, we believe repurchasing our shares at a substantial discount to book is a prudent value-added investment. We expect the authorization to remain in place until completion or expiration in November of 2022, subject to market and business conditions. Recently, we have reengaged in the bulk MSR market opportunistically, given improved pricing that we're seeing. We are pursuing a current opportunity pipeline of roughly $15 billion of potential deals at various stages of evaluation. We would expect to fund potential bulk MSR purchases largely through MAV, though we also expect some may be funded by PHH directly. In addition to a robust bulk market, we believe the market headwinds may drive increased M&A opportunities. As we have said before, management and the Board remain flexible to consider all actionable and value-creating alternatives. Now I'd like to introduce Sean O'Neill, who recently joined Ocwen as our Chief Financial Officer. Sean, welcome to your first Ocwen earnings call. I will pass the mic to you to discuss our results for the quarter.