Mat Ishbia
Analyst · Piper Sandler. Your line is open
Thanks Blake. Appreciate it. So let's jump into it. Appreciate you guys all joining the call today. First off, let's talk about 2021, it was an amazing year for UWM. I think it makes sense for me to focus on recapping our key achievements for the year before getting into the quarterly results and outlook for 2022. First, UWM set a new production record in 2021 with just under $227 billion in origination, up almost $44 billion from 2020. One most impressive aspects of this, is that $87 billion of production was purchase business which is most in company history in any given year. In addition, we average about $25 billion in purchase production in each of the last three quarters of 2021. My second key point is our consistent growth and profitability quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year. 2021 marked our seventh consecutive year of origination growth and our 15th consecutive year of profitability. We delivered $1.6 billion in net income, our second most profitable year ever. Our continued focus on speed, service and best-in-class technologies while we continue to deliver these results. However, our scale is now also a huge factor in our success. Our scale is what gives us increased capital and our continued ability to deliver strong and consistent results for all of our shareholders. My third point is our continued advancement in technology. In 2021, we launched many amazing technologies, but the biggest one of note is BOLT, the most advanced underwriting system in the industry. BOLT gives brokers more control brought in the loan origination process and we found that brokers more control to the process naturally becomes more efficient and lowers our cost per loan. We implemented UClose technology several years ago with the same role of making the processing closing more efficient, and that has been a huge success as well. It's technology like BOLT and UClose that help us close loans faster than anyone in the industry and at lower origination costs. Lastly, I have to express that none of these accomplishments of 2021 which were amazing across the Board would not be happening without our amazing team members, our amazing broker partners and the ideas we get from them and the partnership we've had, it's a huge part of our success. With a great partnership, I'm excited for continued success and growth together. Now let's talk about the fourth quarter. We delivered $55 billion in production, representing our best quarter of all time, beating our 2020 fourth quarter numbers. The $24.5 billion of purchase we delivered in the fourth quarter was a record for us and astounding 103% year-over-year, once again from Q4 on the purchase side. We know brokers are the dominant player in the purchase market. We are confident you'll see the number one direct funded purchase lender again in 2022. We delivered $239.8 million of net income for the quarter, with margins at 80 basis points. With these being some of the lowest margin we've seen in the quarter and history, we still remained very, very profitable. I believe these margin numbers are near the bottom and actually the first quarter of 2022 to be very similar to the fourth quarter somewhere between 75 and 85 basis points of margin with $33 billion to $42 billion of production. We'll be very profitable of these numbers and will remain so even if it were lower. Lastly, I want to focus on the most important part, which is 2022. Number one, the broker channel will continue to grow. The refi business flows, we're seeing retail also converting the wholesale channel at fastest pace in many years. We've dedicated teams helping these loan officers, with transition in making sure they're successful from day one. We're seeing the most activity since inception of our beamortgagebroker.com platform also I'm sure the broker channel is growing and at a faster pace than we've seen in years. We saw some of this happened in 2018 and '19, but this time it'll be much more dramatic, and we're seeing early signs at this point. Number two, we've achieved significant scale and remain laser focused on becoming more efficient. We believe our cost of loan will go down over the next 24 months with BOLT as it gets more adoption and we continue to enhance the technology to make it even greater, and there's other big technology in the works as well. And finally, we continue to contemplate the best time to bring servicing in-house. We have a large servicing book. We won a lowest WACs, weighted average coupon, in the country. We'll likely finish 2022 over $400 billion. We know there is a lot of opportunity with this, we are exploring financial upside of bringing servicing in-house, we'll also think there is a great opportunity to develop our own best-in-class servicing platform which have many additional benefits and present other business opportunities for UWM. I appreciate everyone on the call for spending time with us today, and look forward to seeing a lot of you on our campus for May 12 for UWM Live, which is a event where a lot of our clients will be there, a very big positive thing about the broker channel, we'd love to invite many of you guys to join us. Now I'm going to turn it over to our CFO, Tim Forrester to give a couple other details about 2021 and the fourth quarter as well.