Operator
Operator
Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Zillow Group Q2 2015 Earnings Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question-and-answer session, and instructions will be given at that time. As a reminder, today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the call over to RJ Jones, Vice President of Investor Relations. Sir, the floor is yours. Raymond Jones - VP-Investor Relations & Competitive Intelligence: Thank you. Good afternoon and welcome to Zillow Group's second quarter 2015 earnings conference call. Joining me today to talk about our results are Spencer Rascoff, Chief Executive Officer; and Kathleen Philips, Zillow Group's new Chief Financial Officer. During the call, we will make forward-looking statements regarding future financial performance and events. Although we believe the expectations reflected in the forward-looking statements are reasonable, we can't guarantee these results and actual results may differ materially. We caution you to consider the risk factors in our SEC filings, which could cause actual results to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements made in the press release and on this call. The date of this call is August 4, 2015, and forward-looking statements made today are based on assumptions as of this date. We undertake no obligation to update these statements as a result of new information or future events. During this call, we will discuss GAAP and non-GAAP measures. We will also discuss results on both a reported and pro forma basis. Reported results were prepared in accordance with GAAP. For comparative purposes, pro forma results assume the February 2015 acquisition of Trulia occurred on January 1, 2014, and reflects certain adjustments and exclusions described in our filings. We encourage you to read our press release as it contains information about our reported and pro forma results including reconciliation of non-GAAP financial measures. In our remarks, the non-GAAP financial measure, adjusted EBITDA is referred to as EBITDA, which excludes other income, depreciation and amortization expense, share-based compensation expense, acquisition-related costs, restructuring costs and interest expense. This call is being broadcast on the Internet and is available on the Investor Relations section of the Zillow Group website. A recording will be available after 8:00 p.m. Eastern Time today. Please note that the earnings press release is available on our website and after the call, a copy of today's prepared remarks will also be available on our website. Today, we will open the call with prepared remarks followed by our standard live question-and-answer session. During the Q&A, we will answer questions asked via Twitter and take questions from those dialed into the call. Individuals may submit questions by tweeting @ZillowGroup, using the Zearnings hashtag. I will now turn the call over to Spencer. Spencer M. Rascoff - Chief Executive Officer & Director: Thank you for joining us today to discuss our second quarter results. I want to start by thanking our outgoing CFO, Chad Cohen, for his nine years of contributions to Zillow, and I wish him all the best in his new role as CFO at a Life Sciences biotech company. Chad is going to have the opportunity to build out the financial function again from the ground up where his passion lies. I have no doubt he will be as successful at his new company as he was with Zillow. With me on the call today is Kathleen Philips, our newly appointed CFO. Most of you already know Kathleen. She has been with Zillow for five years, first as our General Counsel, and for the last two years as our Chief Operating Officer. Kathleen has been a critical part of our executive team for years, and played a pivotal role in all of our key corporate finance initiatives, including our IPO four years ago, our two follow-on equity offerings and all 10 acquisitions, the largest of which was Trulia. Kathleen oversaw the entire Trulia acquisition process, FTC review, and subsequent integration. During her time as COO, she was already running M&A, Corporate Development, Human Resources, Legal and Customer Support. Before Zillow, I worked closely with Kathleen for five years at Hotwire where she was our General Counsel and on our senior leadership team. After evaluating many excellent external CFO candidates, we're confident that Kathleen is perfectly positioned to be Zillow Group's new CFO and I'm very excited to work with her in her new role. Kathleen inherits an incredible finance organization, including Jennifer Holstein, VP of Financial Reporting and Compliance; and Jessica Lee, VP and Corporate Controller, both of whom have long-standing tenure at the helm of Zillow's finance function. Our finance team is in great hands. As Kathleen moves into the CFO role, I'm also pleased to announce Amy Bohutinsky, as our new Chief Operating Officer of Zillow Group. Amy has been with Zillow for 10 years and was most recently our Chief Marketing Officer, where her team helped grow Zillow's brand from almost nothing to the powerhouse it is today. The quality, tenure, stability and camaraderie of our management team continues to be a key strength of ours, and a differentiator, and I'm very pleased that we were able to make these important organizational changes without missing a beat. Turning now to the second quarter. First I'll start with the operating results, next I'll provide an update on our business, touching on our four priorities, which are; bringing Trulia into Zillow Group, growing our collective Zillow Group audience, growing our agent advertising business and growing our emerging marketplaces. Next, Kathleen will run through our financials and then we'll open up the call for questions. As usual, we'll take questions from the conference call and from Twitter using the hashtag Zearnings. After the call, I'll take further follow-up questions on Twitter as well. So, starting with our results. Zillow Group had a strong second quarter, as we exceeded our expectations. Our revenue grew 20% year-over-year on a pro-forma basis to over $171 million in Q2, which was about $2 million higher than the outlook we gave on our May 12 call. Continued strength in our marketplace categories, which include real estate and mortgages, along with substantial audience growth drove these results. Across our Zillow Group portfolio, we averaged 141 million monthly unique users during the quarter. Within Zillow Group, our flagship Zillow brand continues to lead the category in traffic across mobile and web, growing 22% year-over-year per Google Analytics, and according to comScore, receiving nearly 50% of all category visitors. Second quarter EBITDA was about $21 million, which far exceeded our outlook of around $4 million. There were a few causes of this EBITDA beat. I'll tick through them in order from largest impact to smallest. First, within marketing, we intentionally shifted some ad expenses to Q3 because we achieved our audience goals with a lower and more efficient ad spend in Q2. Second, we saved a few million in combined company expenses from reduced sales team expense and other synergies in the quarter. Third, Q2 was the first quarter post closing, and our forecast for Q2 expenses reflected the uncertainties of the transition as we brought these two companies together. Finally, the revenue beat flowed through to EBITDA. Overall, we continue to execute well across our portfolio of brands during this transition year, and we remain intensely focused on the top priority, which is fully integrating agent ad sales between Zillow and Trulia. What remains clear to us is that this multi-brand portfolio strategy is the right one. Consumers value choices in how and where they can search for their next home and connect with the best local professionals. By operating multiple brands, our audience grows as consumers increasingly engage with our various brands. An example of this is on mobile, where according to comScore, Zillow Group brands now account for 72% of all mobile-only real estate category visitors. This is extraordinary and represents a tremendous opportunity for our advertisers as well as validating our acquisition of Trulia. But perhaps the most tangible benefit from our massive scale so far was our seamless transition to direct listing feeds in April. MLSs, brokerages and agents understood that Zillow Group offers access to the largest consumer home shopping audience, and they signed up to add listings at an unprecedented rate. We now receive significantly more high-quality listings directly from MLSs than we did when a third-party vendor provided us with MLS listings. And we now have more than 300 MLSs sending us data directly, having added 81 new MLS partnerships in just the last three months alone. Other benefits of combined scale with Trulia and Zillow include the continuing trend of our most tech-centric and marketing-savvy advertisers increasing their buying with us. This comes through in our data on the growth rate among our largest agent advertisers. For example, at the end of Q2, the number of agents spending more than $5,000 per month, grew 48% year-over-year. Agents spending over $2,500 per month, grew 44% year-over-year. And the number of agents spending over $1,000 per month grew 34% year-over-year. The churn rate among these cohorts very low, validating our strategy of focusing on high performing agents. Already, we've fully integrated our rentals, mortgages, display and back of the house operations with Trulia. In fact, we've now moved up the timeline to integrate our agent advertising business by several months, expected to complete this by the end of the third quarter. We'll be slowly rolling out the cross-brand Premier Agent ad product, that combines both mobile and web presence for our agents over the next several weeks. As we've done before when Zillow made major changes to our ad products, the rollout will be staged incrementally, so that we can iterate on successes and minimize potential disruption. Our sales force has been preparing for months to execute this launch successfully. Account transitions for our customers, sales reps, and account managers are mapped out and ready to go. Once the product is launched, the revenue from our agent advertisers will be Zillow Group and we'll no longer separate Zillow and Trulia revenue streams. Agents will buy advertising from Zillow Group, and their ads will be served across all platforms, including mobile apps, mobile web and desktop web; and across all of our owned and operated national consumer brands, including Zillow, Trulia, HotPads, Yahoo!, MSN, AOL, HGTV and Leju in China. We're excited about the significant progress we've made to this point and look forward to gaining further speed as this Trulia integration reaches its final stages. Meanwhile, the impact on Trulia users and advertisers is consistent with what we laid out in the operational update call on April 14, and in our first quarter call on May 12. We made significant changes to the Trulia agent ad product in the second quarter that are impacting the business as we expected. Changing the Trulia agent advertiser list from four default checks to one default check, which is the Zillow standard and we believe to be a more consumer friendly model, has resulted in agent cancellations from lower ARPA agents and that's okay. This change positions Trulia for the ad product integration with Zillow, and benefits high ARPA agents and consumers alike. Additionally, we've sunsetted promotional discount pricing on Trulia, which has resulted in lower advertiser net adds. This too is desired as those impressions are now going to better agents, who value their leads more and provide better service to consumers. These Trulia agents who departed over the past few months were low ARPA and low producing; the agents who remain are higher-converting and higher ARPA. As we integrate Trulia's agent business, we're also very focused on growing the Trulia consumer brand and product. Over the past year, Trulia's top line audience growth has stalled. Together, our Zillow and Trulia product and marketing teams are working to reinvigorate growth. We're sharing best practices across the brands and there are a number of areas where our experience with Zillow can help Trulia. Soon, when the Zillow and Trulia ad products will be merged, the combined audience scale of Zillow plus Trulia becomes much more relevant than traffic on one brand or the other. However, Trulia traffic growth is a priority and we're putting significant resources and effort behind it, and we will turn around its traffic trends. It is worth mentioning that this relates to top line audience and the impact is much less severe for bottom of the funnel contact volumes. In the midst of this flurry of integration, the fundamentals on our flagship Zillow brand are the strongest that they've ever been. Our Zillow audience continues to grow and our advertising is working. Not only did the Zillow brand alone represent nearly half of the real estate category in market share of visitors, but Zillow Group now represents the 32nd largest web property in America. We've maintained our market share of traffic, nearly double that of our nearest competitors, and the majority of our growth is coming from organic or free traffic channels. Mobile continues to be a strong driver of growth with over 70% – over 70%, excuse me, of weekend visits to Zillow coming from a mobile device. Lastly revenue growth in Zillow's Premier Agent program was 48% year-over-year, reflecting continued increased spending by our most prolific agent advertisers. All-in, these are stellar numbers for Zillow core, reflecting years of product innovation and brand building. A recent development, which enables us to add depth to our industry value proposition is our pending acquisition of DotLoop. DotLoop simplifies the transaction process that consumers and agents go through when buying and selling homes by making it paperless. DotLoop brings the transaction online from the creation of a listing agreement to the submission of offers to the actual closing, driving speed and efficiency into the process. Brokerages and agents have been adopting paperless transaction services rapidly, as they eliminate many inconveniences for themselves and their clients. We're excited about the potential that DotLoop offers our 10,000 brokerage partners and their agents to increase their conversion of consumer contacts into sales. Today, real estate agents create more than 300,000 loops and nearly half a million people sign real estate documents in DotLoop each month. We look forward to combining our scale with DotLoop services, enhancing its product and expanding its network effects. The consideration for DotLoop was substantially in cash. The decision to use cash with retention incentives in stock reflects management and the Board's confidence in the long-term opportunity for Zillow Group and our overall sensitivity to dilution. Now to our emerging marketplaces. Our New York City brand, StreetEasy, continues to excel on all fronts. This year, we began advertising StreetEasy in Manhattan for the first time, and we are extremely pleased with the results on audience growth and revenue. In particular, the StreetEasy team's hard work on product and organic growth has paid off. StreetEasy's audience is now 90% larger today than when we acquired it two years ago. In Zillow Mortgages, we recently changed our pricing model from cost-per-click to cost-per-lead. The transition was seamless and welcomed by our mortgage advertisers. With our mortgage revenue up 44% in the quarter; traffic, loan requests, contact volumes and revenue all continue to grow ahead of mortgage industry trends. In Zillow Rentals, we continue to gain traction. Our total rentals audience remains massive, by far number one in the category according to comScore, despite competitors' ad spend. During the quarter, we launched a new ad product called Boost, which is selling well. We now provide property managers the opportunity to purchase prime advertising space at the top of renters' search results. Our new premium advertising product helps multifamily rental professionals shine the spotlight on property promotions and specific units. And we continue to evolve our nascent sales team to support our revenue growth into the large advertising opportunity in rentals. Last week, we announced that we'll execute a change in our capital structure related to our long-term focus. Later this month, we will issue a class of non-voting Class C stock that our shareholders approved last December. Each Zillow Group holder of Class A or Class B shares will receive two Class C shares, basically a three-way stocks split. C shares will trade under the symbol Z, and A shares will trade under the symbol ZG. For Zillow Group extending our dual class structure through the issuance of C shares allows us to continue our focus on long-term growth and innovation. We're focused on making the right decisions for the business today that can lead to outsized total shareholder returns over the course of years. This structure ensures that we can continue to take big swings and set our sights on the long-term. To conclude, we've been very focused operationally on the integration of Trulia and made great progress on a number of fronts. As with most mergers of any scale, it's required a great deal of time, attention, and energy. I'm very pleased that we will have successfully combined all advertising products by the end of the third quarter, well ahead of the timetable we shared on our May 12 conference call. Most importantly, the strategic rationale for the combination remains extremely strong, and we're already seeing benefits of our combined scale in many parts of the business. We're as fired up as ever to power through this time of transition and be well set up for a great 2016. I'll now turn the call over to Kathleen to review the financial results in more detail.