Jay Farner
Analyst · Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead
All right. Well, good afternoon, and welcome to the Rocket Companies earnings call for the second quarter of 2021. We had a strong second quarter as we continue to execute on our growth strategy and leverage our platform across real estate, auto and financial services. In real estate, revenue was driven in part by record purchase volume, putting us on track to reach our goal of becoming the largest retail home purchase lender in the nation by the end of 2023. Many of the accomplishments that we've achieved are results of our technology and of course our people, who bring their best to work each and every day. This tremendous combination was recently rewarded with Rocket Mortgage again being named the #1 company for client service and mortgage servicing by J.D. Power. The accolade marks the eighth consecutive time our company has earned this honor and it's our 19th J.D. Power award overall, when you include the 11 straight #1 rankings we've received for mortgage origination. Our servicing team put our clients first, helping them through the difficult and uncertain times during the pandemic. While clients at other lenders experienced several hour wait times at the onset of the pandemic, Rocket Mortgage clients were able to navigate a digital solution, complete with educational resources and easily apply for forbearance plans online. This approach resulted in Rocket's forbearance rate being 41% lower in the industry. Innovative technology-driven, client-first solutions such as these are a testament of our ability to scale and to quickly pivot to meet the demands of unpredictable markets without the need to add headcount and ultimately deliver unmatched client experiences. As we turn back to the second quarter results, 2020 accelerated the shift to an all digital experience, an opportunity that Rocket has planned to capture. The demand for digital experiences has only expanded providing true momentum for Rocket Companies across all our core markets: real estate, auto, and financial services. Consider this. When we look back at 2019, we have now more than doubled the size of our business from pre-COVID levels. Rocket Companies generated $84 billion in closed loan volume and $2.8 billion of revenue in the second quarter of 2021. Loans more than doubled the second quarter of 2019 and more volume than we did the entire year of 2018. Our Q2 EBITDA of $1.3 billion was more than triple the same period two years ago, demonstrating the sheer power and scalability of the Rocket platform. On today's call, I'll highlight the flexibility of the Rocket platform to capture the growth ahead, including our strategy to revolutionize the homebuying experience, also touch on our increasingly important relationship with B2B partners across the Rocket ecosystem. As we've shared with you in past calls, the Rocket platform is built to win. Our initiatives provide certainty in life's most complex moments. We removed the friction and pain points for major events, like buying a home, getting a personal loan, or purchasing a car, all from a scalable centralized platform. This flexibility allows us to stay nimble and go after the areas of greatest opportunity, optimizing revenue for our companies and driving value for our investors. In today's environment, consumer demand is incredibly strong in each of our markets. In fact, the markets are so hot that there are significant inventory challenges in both real estate and automotive sectors. Even under these conditions, we achieved records for home purchase volume as well as Rocket auto gross merchandise value and unit sales. Based on the strength of demand at the top of our funnel, we believe both record purchase volume and record auto results would have been even higher if not for inventory challenges. As today's mortgage market shifts for home purchase in 2021, Rocket is geared to capture more purchase volume driven by our superior technology-driven client experience, product innovation and our integrated end-to-end homebuying ecosystem. We mentioned last quarter that our company has set a goal to become the largest retail home purchase lender in the country by 2023. Continuing to transform the homebuying experience is the single biggest opportunity for Rocket Companies today. We spent years creating a complete end-to-end experience that puts the power of choice back into the hands of the consumer. From credit monitoring to home search, connections with better local agents, centralized services or comprehensive ForSaleByOwner process and our recently announced iBuying services to provide a back-up offer to sellers. We have the suite of services that allow consumers to create a bespoke process tailored to their individual needs while driving extremely strong conversion rates. When paired with the power of America's largest mortgage lender and Rocket Mortgage and one of the largest title providers and Amrock, no other company can provide the same level integrated one-stop services that Rocket delivers. Our iBuying program facilitated through third-party partner companies will be released over the next several quarters. Just last month, Rocket Homes announced an important milestone posting home listings in all 50 states. Rocket Companies is now the only residential real estate ecosystem that has mortgage licenses, real estate broker licenses, home search listings, real estate agents and real estate agent partners spanning all 50 states. With nationwide coverage, Rocket Homes is performing at scale with traffic growing six-fold year-over-year to reach nearly 2 million unique monthly visitors in the second quarter. In addition, Rocket Homes drove a record $2 billion in second quarter real estate transaction value, representing the value of homes purchased and sold through our real estate agent network. Rocket Homes is still in the early innings in a very long runway for growth. Rocket Homes also drives purchase volume for Rocket Mortgage and we expect a momentum in purchase to continue. Rocket Homes draws in-process clients into the rocket ecosystem even earlier in the funnel and then regularly engages with our pool of nearly 2.4 million servicing clients, representing $0.5 trillion in servicing value. This significantly increases our lifetime value in recurring revenue with potential and existing clients. From the beginning of year, roughly 70% of Rocket Homes' transactions involve both an agent in the Rocket Homes real estate agent network and in Rocket Mortgage, representing an attach rate among the highest in the industry. We also have a high attach rate between Rocket Mortgage and Amrock. In fact, Amrock serves as the appraisal management company for approximately 65% of appraisals order for our direct consumer mortgages, illustrating the power of our ecosystem. We are also extending our value proposition of creating simple, seamless experiences to now include residential solar. Solar energy adoption is at a growth inflection point. According to third-party research, the current solar energy market is expected to quadruple by 2030, with roughly one in eight homes adopting solar power. Our dedicated highly trained group of team members from the Rocket Cloud Force will serve as Rocket's solar advisers to our clients. The team will help clients to determine if solar panels are the best choice for their home and connect homeowners to our simple, digital financing application. Once financing is complete, the Rocket Cloud Force will facilitate the installation of a new solar solution. We will also be well positioned to help consumers who may not have started with Rocket Solar consolidate their solar loan and mortgage for significant cost savings. We launched Rocket Solar with a regulatory [ph] finance product in late July and expect to be operating at scale in 2022. Our entry in solar is yet another example of Rocket Companies maximizing the lifetime value of our clients by adding complementary services that we are uniquely positioned to deliver, thanks to the versatility and scalability of the Rocket platform. Looking at Rocket Auto the company drove record performance in the second quarter with both auto unit sales growth of 140% and gross merchandise value more than tripling year-over-year. And considering the auto inventory shortages facing the industry, we are particularly proud of these results. Rocket auto continues to add new partners who are interested in connecting their inventory with our new perspective buyers. During the quarter, one of the largest online sellers of used cars joined Rocket Auto's partnership network, giving Rocket Auto access to tens of thousands of additional used cars to sell through its constantly expanding platform and providing significant more fuel to Rocket Auto's growth story. Technology and data are the cornerstones of our platform. From the use of data science to optimize every aspect of our client marketing funnel, the use of ethical AI, to aid in client service, to sophisticated pricing models, just to name a few. Technology and data fundamentally drive our business, financing client experience through speed and personalization, increasing efficiency through streamline workflows and decisioning and improving our pull-through and lead conversion. During 2021 intelligent client targeting models were deployed to more than 80% of our client contact, ensuring that our Rocket Cloud Force is reaching out to clients at the exact moment they are most ready to engage with us. By tailoring the experience to client we have lifted conversion resulting in approximately $4 billion in incremental application volumes so far this year. The beauty of our platform is its flexibility to meet clients where they are and scale across multiple products and verticals regardless of the market environment. Our company started as the direct consumer mortgage lender, Rocket Companies is increasingly being multi-product, multichannel platform. In addition to consumers, the Rocket platform works closely with three important B2B constituents; real estate agents, mortgage brokers, and premier enterprise partners. Each of these audiences play a crucial role as trusted advisors, leveraging the patent products and tools that Rocket has developed to help deliver additional value to empower our clients and to reach their goals. Real estate agents, they play a critical role in the homebuying process and we are empowering agents in our network with new leads, products and tools to win in today's competitive environment, through innovative tools like our verified approval process which fully underwrites buyers and allows them to make offers that compete with cash buyers through our overnight underwrite, which ensures purchase loans are underwritten in mere hours, we arm real estate professionals and their clients with the tools to ensure that they win. Another Rocket Mortgage innovation that's proven popular with realtors is Rocket Pro Insight, which we unveiled last year to help real estate agents create [indiscernible] letters through our office, track the status of their client's mortgage and receive real time updates. The number of real estate agents leveraging Rocket Pro Insight more than tripled to 15,000 up from just 14,000 two quarters ago. For the thousands of mortgage brokers in our Rocket Pro TPO network we arm them with the industry knowledge and tools to work smarter and grow their business. In the second quarter we began our revamp of our builder partner portal starting with our newly enhanced pricing calculator, providing greater ease of use for our partners to run different scenarios for their clients. From the past month more than 20,000 unique mortgage professionals relied on our interactive broker tools to move mortgage applications to the finish line and their clients to closing too. Our Pathfinder tool that we created in partnership with Google, provides simple answers to even the most complicated mortgage qualification and underwriting questions and has become one of the top resources for mortgage brokers. We continue to add new premier enterprise partners to our network and we deepened our integration with our existing partners. We recently launched our new integration with Credit Karma allowing more than 110 million users to apply for a Rocket mortgage directly inside their app. We also continued to grow and expand our relationship with partners including Mint, Charles Schwab and realtor.com, just to name a few. We are excited to serve a broader range of clients through deep integrations with our partners and deliver the trusted high-quality experiences their customers expect. It is also my pleasure to announce a new relationship with MassMutual. This new relationship will allow the company's 9000 plus agents to originate home loans through Rocket Mortgage. Turning to our community, from the beginning we have operated with a more than profit philosophy, along with Rocket Community Fund, our philanthropic partner company, we have executed numerous data-driven investments and initiatives to serve and support Detroiters and revitalize Detroit, our hometown and where we are the largest employer. At the end of June we sponsored a flagship event the Rocket Mortgage Classic, PGA tournament event held in Detroit. Rocket Mortgage Classic showcases the best talent in golf while raising funds to help bridge the digital divide and bring broadband connectivity to all Detroiters. As we continue to grow Detroit, it's critical that Detroiters have an equitable opportunity to grow with us. In closing, we are entering the third quarter with tremendous momentum across our entire platform and we are poised to have a record year across our platform from Rocket Mortgage to Amrock, Rocket Homes and Rocket Auto. I'd like to think about this. Over the past several years Rocket Mortgage has grown volume and taken market share consistently. In 2018 we originated $83 billion in mortgage volume. In 2019 that grew to $145 billion and we ended 2020 with $320 billion in mortgage volume. While industry forecasters expect a smaller market in 2021, we expect to grow volume from our 2020 record levels. We are going to gain market share and achieve record origination volume this year. In addition, we expect our servicing book to grow more than 30% this year to over $600 billion, driving recurring cash revenue stream of more than $1 billion. Rocket portfolio companies reinforce our ecosystem and contribute to our best in business retention rate, expanding client lifetime value. This year we are building on momentum from 2020 and we are proud of what our team has accomplished and I'm even more excited about what's ahead. With that, I will turn things over to Julie to go deeper into the numbers. Julie?