Mark Harding
Analyst · Above All Advisors. Please proceed with your question
Thanks very much. And I’d like to welcome you all to our second quarter for the period -- the six months period ending February 28, 2021 earnings call. Just some housekeeping items, for those of you who are dialed in but want to follow the presentation on our deck. If you jump over to our website at purecyclewater.com. On the front page of that, there will be a link where you can click on to the earnings presentation and you can follow it along with us. So, with that, I will start the presentation with the first order of business, which is to get the lawyers out of the room where we satisfy them and note that this is our Safe Harbor statement and statements that are not historical facts contained or incorporated by reference in this presentation are forward-looking statements. I am sure you are all familiar with Safe Harbor statements and forward-looking statements. So to give those of you who are new to the company and we have got a number of new folks who have either called in to inquire about the company or had participated in one of the conferences that we have done recently. I will give you kind of a brief overview of the business enterprise. Then we will drill down on some of the specifics of each of our segments and then I am going to turn the call over to our CFO, Kevin McNeill who will give you guys a highlight of our impressive earnings over the quarter, so -- or over the six-month period. So, with that, the company operates in three complementary business segments, a Water Resource segment, where we own water rights in a water short area and then develop those water rights for our own use and as a water -- wholesale water provider for other customers, a Land Development segment, where we own property in the right part of the Denver area, in the I-70 corridor, which is one of the fastest-growing quarters in the metropolitan area, and then a new segment that we have recently announced as a single-family rental, Build-to-Rent segment and I will drill down a little bit more specifics on that as we go through the presentation. Highlighting our Water segment, we are sort of what we define as cradle to grave, where we have a large water portfolio in the water short area. Part of the country where you can actually own water is a property asset. So we own about 29,000 acre feet of water rights and that enables us to provide service to an estimated 60,000 connections and we define our connections as sort of the equivalent of a residential connection. And then we also develop the wells, the diversion structures off of the surface water streams, the treated that distributed out to the customers. We collect that back once the customers used it. We process that through water reclamation facility and then we reuse that water supply either through irrigation customers, where we sell that water to irrigation clients or we sell that water to oil and gas customers for industries. So we use and reuse that water supply. We get paid two fee instruments for that. We get paid a one-time connection fee, a very substantial fee for our connection charges. We get about $27.7, $27.7 for the water side for the water side and about $4,800 for the sewer side, so rounded numbers around $32,000 for our connection fees and if you do the math on the capacity of the portfolio, that’s about $2 billion in revenue and then there’s about a 50% margin in that business, because we are going to build the brick-and-mortar. All of the infrastructure that does deliver that to all of our customers. And then we get monthly water and sewer bills, so we collect about $1,500 per connection per year combined water and sewer revenues. And doing the math again on our estimated capacity of 60,000 connections at build out, that generates about $90 million year-over-year revenue and that’s about another 50% margin business when you are working through operating and maintaining the system. I do want to highlight this as a kind of our keystone asset, our new wastewater reclamation facility and what this does is its 100% reuse facility. It takes 100% of the wastewater that comes into that facility, treats it back to a standard that we can reuse that for outdoor irrigation and Colorado has some very specific regulations that govern the reuse of that water supply for parks and open space irrigation. So, we do do that. We have dual distribution system within the Sky Ranch community that allows us to deliver that directly to our parks and open space, as well as bring that back to our storage facility for use for industrial, oil and gas customers. This is a little bit about our customer connections and an idea of where they are, where they are coming from and sort of their projected growth rate. And so, we have got a growing customer base. Although, if you look at our capacity at 60,000, we are at a very, very small number, we are just beginning in terms of our customer growth. But we are growing quite rapidly year-over-year on our connections both due to what we are doing at Sky Ranch, as well as our other service areas in Albert County, which is a project that we acquired the service to a couple of years back that we provide both residential and commercial connections down into Albert County on that. So, if you take a look at this, it’s kind of a projection we build out of just the 5,000 connections for Sky Ranch and we are kind of projecting that over the next say, eight years or nine years. Moving on -- kind of a graphic data that illustrates the growth in our investments in our water utility assets. So we continue to add to our portfolio of assets that deliver that service both in terms of the infrastructure, on the diversion and all elements of that storage distribution systems, those sorts of things. So this will continue to grow. This will be that 50% capacity that we use to invest those capacities into the brick-and-mortar of the Utility segment business. So I want to spill over into the second segment, our Land Development segment, which really incorporates us as a master plan developer in the Denver metropolitan area. We acquired about 1,000 acres of property a number of years ago. We acquired that at the right time. You always want to buy right, but acquiring raw land in the middle in the depths of the Great Recession certainly took a lot of courage and we are grateful to our shareholders and our Board for the confidence they placed in us for making those investments, but it was a good buy. And in total, the project can accommodate up to 3,400 residential units and a couple million square feet of commercial development and when you equate out that commercial development in terms of SFEs we are projecting that to be in that 1,600 single-family equivalents on the utility side. And so that metric will come into play a little bit later as I detail what the build-out capacity of Sky Ranch is. But we believe that that build-out capacity is around 5,000 single-family connections and we equate that both not only in terms of the Utility segment but also on the real estate, what we look to realize in terms of the revenue potential in the real estate. Highlighting a little bit of our successes on this, we started our first phase, which is about 509 single-family lots and we did that about 18 months ago, almost two years ago. We have got to just shy of 300 residents out there now, a little over 100 homes under construction and so that has exceeded the expectations of both our builders as well as our models. And it’s mostly been because of the product. We have an entry level product out here. It’s one of the -- it is I think the most affordable master plan community in the Denver metropolitan area and if it’s not the most affordable, among the most affordable master plan communities in the metropolitan area. We are projecting that the available lots in this first phase will be sold out by the end of this year. We have recognized our full revenue on the lot deliveries of about $37 million to-date and we have recognized about $11.5 million of tap fee revenues to-date. The total should inch its way up to about $14 million, as the balance of tap’s are applied for by each of our builders and these are three production builders in our first phase. Moving on to kind of highlight a little bit of our second phase, we have got about 900 lofts in our second phase. So about twice the size of our first phase, we broke ground in February of 2021 and our dirt crew is out there grading our first phase of these lots right now. They are about half through grading the first 230 lots. So we hope they -- them to be done in about the end of May time frame and then we will mobilize all the Utility crews and start to deliver lots later this year. If you take a look at our lot revenue for Phase 2, we did have a substantial increase from our pricing in the first phase mostly just because we were looking to break into the market in our first phase and we are getting into a little bit more price metrics here where we had about a 30% increase in our overall lot costs and so we are estimating lot revenues about $72.6 million. This phase has a number of different product lines. Our first phase was pretty homogeneous. We had single-family detached lots, which were anywhere from 4,800 square feet to 5,200 square feet. They are either 45-foot or 50-foot lot frontage, pretty standard lot delivery for our production builders. And this one will have a number of different products. We will still have those same 45-foot, 50-foot lots. But we will have paired products, a townhome product. We will have a duplex product. We will have some alley loads in both the 40-foot sizing and the 35-foot sizing. So it will be much more attractive to a broader range of buyers. So when we look at the absorption on this one, we don’t look at it necessarily by the builder, but we look at it by the product class and we have six different product classes in this next phase. Tap fee revenues again here illustrated about $21.5 million and then the reimbursable cost at about $48 million, which we get back through reimbursements from the local municipality, the Sky Ranch Metropolitan districts of the Sky Ranch Community Authority Board. Doing some math work all here, this is kind of an illustration of both how filing one stacks up, how filing two looks to project itself out and then what the balance of it is going to look like. And the balance is really taking the remaining 3,600, which we convert that 1,600 commercial lots into residential lots and so those -- that forecast here is going to have the same revenue projection that we would have at a residential level, as well as the same cost projection. We think we are going to do better than that because the commercial land is more valuable and it has certainly more efficiencies on delivering utilities to it. But for comparison purposes, this kind of gives you a feel for what’s the pedal left in Sky Ranch. And so if you are looking at this we probably got about another $150 million in total revenue over, say, $65 million. So we have got maybe $80 million worth of margin in the Phase 2 that’s available and then the next phase that can carry us up to about 6 -- little over $600 million with about, you can call it $150 million worth of costs in there and some of those efficiencies in there in terms of the tap fees and the lot delivery cost. So very attractive margins and what we are looking at for the rest of Sky Ranch. And so that comparison each investor can kind of take a look at that from a discount factor, but we are projecting that over this say the next eight years to 10 years that will give you a kind of an analysis of how fairly the stock is priced. Moving on into our new discussion topic and I do want to spend a little bit of time on this because this is exciting for us. It’s a Build-to-Rent. We are actually going to contract with our portfolio homebuilders to be able to build these homes for us, so that we can continue to have them be our builder and just we are not competing with them. We really are just saying we are going to hold back on this lot and then we are going to be your first customer on those lots. So as they are building on the blocks that we reserve these lots for, they have the opportunity to be able to come in and build for us on that. And really it’s a nice model for us, because it allows us to capitalize on the highly appreciated land cost, as well as the long-standing investment that we have in the utilities. And if I look to try and highlight why we think this is important and why this is a good segment for us. This is kind of an illustration of some of the demand statistics about how home values continue to go and then that constrained inventory that we see in terms of home prices. And then we also see a significantly constrained inventory of entry level home prices here in Colorado. If you took a look at these statistics before the recession, roughly 50% of all homes that were started in the Denver area were in that entry level product category and today that number has fallen to less than 4%, so tremendous demand for what it is that we are doing out there. And then just some statistics about the price appreciation of the home values, this -- the competitive listings, I think you have all seen the headlines about every time you list a property, you are getting above -- you are getting multiple offers above your asking price and so what that tells us is there’s significant appreciation for these lots and how we translate that. We are looking at why Sky Ranch. The Denver population continues to be among the top in the country in terms of urbanized areas for residential growth. We think the Sky Ranch, our entry price product is the right location. We have got a tremendous land plan that incorporates parks and open space and a new charter school that we have approved or that our local school district has approved and we have been working with them for a number of years to really bring that investment into the community. And then the commutes to employment centers. So Sky Ranch is the perfect location for something like this particular model. And how we look to capitalize on that is take a look at we are able to deliver the vertical side of this for about $300,000, a little bit more than $300,000 on a $450,000 home. So that’s the incremental cost of the investment into the Build-to-Rent as compared to just selling the lot and the tap. And what we were able to do is line up interest rates -- attractive interest rates for that additional cost. So when we went to this -- when we took this opportunity to our Board. It said that we might consider it but you can’t use any of our cash and you have got to find a way to be able to fund the incremental component of the vertical costs, which we were able to do with that mortgage type money and so we have lined up some financing for about 3.75% for this Build-to-Rent. And then if you look at the metrics on it, if we are renting that out as a $450,000 home, we have got a rental income there at about $2,800 a month and so that generates about $33,000 over the year. And then we have got our costs in here, but what this ultimately does is it has positive cash flow to us of another $15,000 per single-family connection and when you add that to the $1,500 single-family connection on a Utility model, this becomes very accretive to the income statement. So the advantage on this Build-to-Rent, if you take a look at the next slide, it allows us to be able to grow both the balance sheet and the income statement. So the positive accretive cash flows that are going to be recurring cash flows to the income statement of $15,000 per connection and then also taking a $450,000 market value and seeing that continue to appreciate. So if you show just some modest depreciation on those home values you have got a great asset appreciation. And so we are going to kind of add this to the portfolio with our second filing here and we have got about 100 lot reserve for that. It will be incremental. So we will have start out with a dozen that will be in our first phase. We will kind of roll that forward as each incremental phase and we were also able to add three new lots to our first filing. So we are actually under construction for our first three units of that. And so as we continue to update you on that and one of the things that we would like to do is also try and have an Investor Day here this summer where we -- as we can all open up and travel for those of you that are out of town, have an opportunity to come out and see not only the successes of our first phase, see the construction of our second phase, see what we are looking at in terms of our build-the-rent units as well and then, more on kind of a water Utility segments and some industrial and gas activity and that’s kind of inched its way back. So there will be a bit more information about that as we come a little bit closer to the summer and get some dates that we will circulate out to everybody. So with that as a lead in, I do want to highlight the fact that there still is an attractive oil and gas opportunity for us to sell water to oil and gas operators. There’s been a significant investment into this field that’s been derisked. So they do have a very strong understanding of the production efficiencies of this field and there’s thousands of wells that are looked to be drilled in here. And we continue to see an increase in the amount of water usage per wells. So our current operator is using about 250,000 worth of water for each well that they have in this capacity. And really, what they look to do is try and stay ahead of the growth of the metropolitan area. So they are going to be working their way from sort of the west side of this map over to the east so that they can maintain the spacing that the new -- the setback requirements the state of Colorado has and Colorado has had a fairly dysfunctional relationship with oil and gas. But I think they have come into a fairly workable framework for operators to be able to get what they need to get done and be at safe distance and setback requirements for residential communities that where they are encroaching into the residential community, there’s an expectation that they will be in a safe operating distance. And so we find ourselves in that part of the formation that’s attractive but also where development hasn’t quite come out of that yet. So I think there’s a good relationship and we find ourselves kind of in a better part of that field for operators. So we do have a rig that was relocated here this spring and is drilling additional wells, and so we will continue to deliver water for them and you will start to see that on our income statement as we go forward. Okay. So what I am going to do is move over to the financial results here and I am going to turn the call over to Kevin McNeill, he is our CFO and he’s been kind of really working this side of the company and optimizing what we are doing on that and I will let him highlight what we have done.