Newmark Group Inc (NMRK) 2022 Q4 法說會逐字稿

Greetings. Welcome to Newmark Group, Inc's Fourth Quarter 2022 financial results. This time all participants are in listen-only mode. A question-and-answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero from your telephone keypad. Please note that this conference is being recorded. At this time, I will now turn the conference over to Jason McGruder, Head of Investor Relations. Mr. McGruder, you may now begin.

Thank you, operator. Good morning. Newmark issued its fourth quarter 2022 financial results press release and a presentation summarizing these results this morning. The results provided on today's call compare only the 3 months ended December 31st, 2022, with the year earlier period, unless otherwise stated. We will also be referring to our results on this call only on a non-GAAP basis, unless otherwise stated. These non-GAAP terms include adjusted earnings and adjusted EBITDA. Please see the sections of today's press release for the complete and or updated definitions of any non-GAAP terms, reconciliations of these items to the corresponding GAAP results, and how, when and why management uses them. More information with respect to our GAAP and non-GAAP results is available on our website in today's press release, the supplemental Excel table and the quarterly results presentation. Unless otherwise stated, any figures with respect to cash flow from operations discussed on today's call refer to net cash provided by operating activities, excluding loan origination and sales and also exclude the impact of the 2021 equity vent. Cash from the business is the same cash flow metric, excluding employee loans for producers. The outlook discussed on today's call assumes no additional share repurchases, material acquisitions, or meaningful changes in the company's stock price. Our expectations are subject to change based on various macroeconomic, social, political or other factors. While our 2025 or other long-term financial operational targets do assume acquisitions, they are also subject to change for these same reasons. None of our long-term targets or goals should be considered formal guidance. I also remind you that information on this call about our business that are not historical facts or forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 as amended and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 as amended. Such statements involve risks and uncertainties. Except as required by law, Newmark undertakes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements. For a complete discussion of additional risks and uncertainties, which could cause actual results to differ from those contained in the forward-looking statements, see Newmark's Securities and Exchange Commission filings, including, but not limited to, the risk factors set forth in our most recent Form 10-K, N-Q or 8-K, which are incorporated by reference. I'm now happy to turn the call over to our host, Barry Gosin, Chief Executive Officer of Newmark Group, Inc.

Good morning, and thank you for joining us. With me today are Newmark's Chief Financial Officer, Mike Rispoli; our Chief Revenue Officer, Lou Alvarado; and our Chief Strategy Officer, Jeff Day. For the past decade, Newmark has strived to become the company with the greatest talent in the industry. Our near-term objectives include becoming #1 in capital markets in the United States. Yesterday, we took a major step towards this goal by adding the industry's top capital markets team led by Doug Harmon and Adam Spies, who are based in New York, the largest real estate market in the world. We have an incredible combination of the top strategists and advisers together with extraordinary local expertise. This has led to over a decade of strong growth and becoming a top commercial real estate services platform in the U.S. During the fourth quarter, interest rates rose at the fastest pace in over 30 years. This led to challenging market conditions, but also has created an opportunity for Newmark to solidify its position as the platform of choice for the real estate industry's top professionals. We believe the current market dislocation, coupled with our strong financial position, is creating opportunities for us to hire top talent and acquire companies at attractive valuations. As we have seen with past downturns and subsequent recoveries, Capital Markets leads the rebound. Once the markets and the Fed are aligned, we expect that to drive significantly higher industry volumes. Historically, our investment sales and debt businesses have had a multiplier effect, which drives outsized growth across Newmark. [Indiscernable], we expect our market share, revenues and earnings to materially outperform the industry. While the macroeconomic environment may be challenging in the short term, we remain excited about our market position and our future. Our professionals are actively assisting clients as they navigate the current environment, restructure their portfolios and redesign their workplaces. On the investor side, we are advising our clients on equity recapitalization, debt financing and repurposing underutilized properties, including conversion into multifamily, life science, industrial and other uses. We also expect the growing demand for hybrid work environments to create opportunities for consulting and our flexible workspace business. As an example, we recently arranged the sale and financing of 25 Water Street, a 1.1 million square foot conversion to multifamily of an office building in New York City. This transaction represents one of the largest ever conversions in the United States. The long-term fundamentals of commercial real estate remain strong with closed-end funds alone having approximately $436 billion of global capital waiting to be deployed. More than $2.5 trillion of U.S. commercial and multifamily debt maturing over the next 5 years and the continuing secular trend towards outsourcing of real estate services to companies like Newmark. With that, I'm happy to turn the call over to Mike.

Thank you, Barry, and good morning. Our total revenues were $607.3 million, down 38.3% due to lower industry-wide transaction activity, particularly in capital markets, where U.S. investment sales were down 62% and debt originations were down 54%. In leasing, industrial and retail were bright spots, surpassing pre-pandemic levels for the year. However, office remains challenging with CoStar reporting a 20% decline in U.S. office leasing activity during the fourth quarter. Total expenses of $497.1 million were 31% lower, largely due to the variable nature of our expenses. We are ahead of schedule with respect to our $50 million annualized fixed cost savings target and expect to realize at least $35 million during 2023. Turning to earnings, our fourth quarter results compare to record fourth quarter 2021 earnings, creating a difficult year-over-year comparison. Adjusted EBITDA was $102.2 million compared with $225.4 million. This result largely reflects the dramatic rise in interest rates on our higher-margin capital markets business. Our EPS was $0.32 compared with $0.65. We repurchased 1.7 million shares at an average of $8 per share and reduced our weighted average share count to 236.3 million shares, down 7.1%. Our fully diluted share count is now slightly below year-end 2017. Over the past 2 years, we have returned $792 million to shareholders through share repurchases and redemptions. In addition, we have returned $38.8 million in dividends and after tax distributions. We expect to continue returning capital to shareholders, although our near-term rate of share repurchases will decline. This is due to the current market dislocation, which is providing us with high-quality opportunities to hire the industry's best talent and acquire companies at attractive valuations. Moving to the balance sheet. We ended the year with $233 million of cash and cash equivalents. The change in cash from a year earlier reflects cash flows from operations of $261.5 million and proceeds from the sale of our remaining NASDAQ shares. Offset by $294.8 million of share repurchases, cash used for acquisitions of $64.2 million and normal movements in working capital. We remain in a strong financial position with net leverage at 0.6 times. Our cash and cash equivalents, expected cash flow generation, and $600 million revolving credit line provides us with over $1 billion of available capital. Turning to 2023 guidance. We expect total revenues of between $2.5 billion and $2.7 billion compared with $2.755 billion. We anticipate solid fee growth across our suite of management services and loan servicing businesses. This guidance also reflects reduced U.S. transaction volumes in the first half of 2023 and improvements thereafter. We anticipate adjusted EBITDA of between $425 million and $510 million versus $510.7 million. We expect the tax rate for adjusted earnings between 14% and 17% and weighted average share count to be flat to down 1%. You will also note that we included guidance for the first quarter of 2023 in our press release. While we do not normally provide quarterly guidance, we thought it was important to include this information given the macroeconomic conditions, which are expected to dampen industry volumes through the first half of 2023. And with that, I would like to open the call for questions.

Thank you. At this time, we'll be conducting a question-and-answer session. If you'd like to ask a question today, please press star one from your telephone keypad and a confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You can press star two if you would like to remove your question from the queue. For participants that are using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. One moment, please, while we poll for questions. Once again, that's star one. Thank you...Thank you. And our first question today comes from the line of Chadni Luthra with Goldman Sachs. Please proceed wiht your question.

Hi, good morning. Thank you for taking my question. Very helpful on the guidance and the first quarter guidance as well. But could you perhaps talk a little bit about how do you think different segments of the business would perform as you think about the overall revenue guidance, especially if there's a way to pass out first half and the second half? And help us understand what kind of recovery are you embedding in the back half for leasing and for capital markets?

Sure. I think we talked a little bit about this last quarter, and we'd actually put a hypothetical model into our earnings materials. And if you notice the guidance we gave for 2023 is a little bit better than that hypothetical model. Certainly, we still continue to believe our management businesses will grow in the low to mid-teens, and our transactional businesses, certainly down but less down for the leasing business, and more down for the capital markets business, investment sales, in particular. You could see our guidance for the first quarter is down. We would expect that each of these businesses would incrementally improve as we go through the year with the third and fourth quarter being a bit stronger as interest rates sort of settle and transaction activity comes back into the capital markets world.

Very helpful. Thank you. And I'd like to pivot a little bit to the hirings that you've made recently. So you've obviously mentioned just moments ago that you expect to pull back a little bit on share repurchase, at least compared to 2022, as you focus on hiring and acquisitions potentially, given the opportunity in those items. What are the gaps that are left to be filled as you think about building a very strong muscle within capital markets? And how do you think about sort of within the brokerage business, how do you think about different segments or geographies? Help us understand that, please.

So the fundamental foundation of our business is built around talent, the best talent in every sector, in every vertical, in every geography. So we have work to do and we have white space in many places, but the more talent that we bring on board, the more we elevate our brand. The more top professionals want to be here. It helps us everywhere, it all, not just capital markets, but it helps in leasing. The follow-on business to fantastic and gifted professionals is in capital markets, there's leasing agencies that follow, there's property management that follows, there's servicing business that follows, there's project management that follows all that. It all has a multiplier effect. And the same thing goes in the tenant rep and the multimarket tenant rep business. If you hire great people, you do great things. And all of the other businesses that we build around it will be better, that may be more recurring revenue because we have visibility and an opportunity to penetrate deeper into the markets that those opportunities exist because of our capital markets and because of our delivering great tenants and the many things that we do, which is provided by the underlying foundation of the business, is getting a talent premium that we expect, and that is really the plan.

Thank you. I'll stick with 2 question rule.

Our next question comes from the line of Alexander Goldfarb with Piper Sandler. Please proceed with your question.

Hey, good morning. Morning, Barry. And definitely quite the headline that you guys made last night after the close. The first question is sort of continuing on that. Obviously, I'm sure that Adam and Doug don't come cheap. But I know that you are building for the long-term, you've done a very good job building out across, but you're also a public company so you're sort of balancing the long-term benefits to Newmark and the platform of building up in the different verticals versus, you're a public company and obviously, right now in the current environment, we all know that it's not a great time, but obviously, next year and forward, people expect paybacks. So when someone sees the headline of Adam and Doug coming on board, how do they think about the payback on that? Is it sort of the normal trajectory? Or will this take longer to earn a return that will see to the bottom line just because of whatever the cost of hiring was.

Alex, we underwrite every acquisition to be profitable and to get us the better desired returns. So there's a lot of mythology out there. People don't move for money. It's even anywhere because any firm would hire great talent if they could get the great talent. But when you build a foundation like we built, we're certainly more attractive for them. So I think everything we do is about being accretive on its own, but it also gives us the ability to attract other talent for less money because this is where they want to be because the money upfront is not why people move. It just isn't.

And then the second question, Barry, is we just went through an incredible decade of transaction activity, compressing cap rates, street retail trading at crazy prices, clearly we're now experiencing higher interest rates and repricing of certain asset classes. Based on your tenure over your years and decades of the real estate market, how do you envision the next transaction cycle to be? Do you think it will be sort of what we had before? Maybe just give us some perspective because a lot of us have only known compressing cap rates and lower and lower interest rates versus higher interest rates and changing capital markets. So maybe some perspective on what you think the recovery will look like.

I've been through 5 cycles. What's interesting is what we found out in the pandemic, which if you look back at our performance, in '19, we used this strategy of hiring great talent, and we built up our multi and the market was relatively good. And then in the pandemic - cycles are more knowable in a pandemic. We, like everybody, were put on our heels a little bit in understanding how deep this is, what this is, how long will it last? So we didn't hire and... what we found is when the pandemic resided and people were back to work, we crushed it. All of those investments in '19 paid off in spades. We came out like a bat out of hell. So what we realized is that you have to keep hiring talent, growing the talent base. It will be beneficial to the platform, and we will outperform the market. Now here we are in what's way more knowable as a cycle. Yes, there are nuances to every cycle. There's Fed-induced cycles, there's supply demand cycles. There's a host of things, the dot-com bubble cycle in 2000 and the RTC bank crisis in '90. They all have a different taste, a different makeup. But we know that the one thing that all cycles have in common is they end. And in this case, the cycle begins. So it's sort of a reset. If cap rates go up 300 basis points or 200 to 300 basis points, interest rates go up 300 basis points, we're in the business as an intermediary. Prices reset, people sell property and then it starts over again. There are other things that impact the purchasing of assets. Inflation will never go away. So where you have a supply-demand constrained market, you build new product, it's more expensive. So you need a better return, you need higher rents. And so rents always over the long period of time, continue to go up. So even in a market that gets reset, it's not only cap rate compression, it's supply/demand, it's mobility and whether it's a low-tax state, attracting lots of new population. There's always things that impact demand and cycles. And we're in a good place. At the moment, transactions are down. At the moment, we generally do larger transactions, which are impacted more greatly by a debt freeze-up in the market. So we're incredibly encouraged to continue leaning forward and doing what we've done because we know it's going to yield a better result.

Thank you, Barry.

The next question is coming from the line of Jade Rahmani with KBW. Please proceed with your question.

Thank you very much. There's starting to be a few signs of improving liquidity in the market. Not sure how sustainable it is, but wondering on your side, from some of your top clients, the largest, most institutional clients, are you seeing any green shoots? Are you seeing any improvement in tone?

...Hi Jade, this is Jeff. We actually, just in the last 30 days or so have seen investors increasingly active. Just one anecdote, we had a property on the market in Texas. We had 88 [indiscernable] signed. We had 33 offers, 15 best-and-finals. So the first step here, obviously, is people willing to engage in transactions, the property did sell for less than the owner wanted to sell it for, but we are starting to see people interested in transacting and evaluating where the price point is, which is a better place than where we were at the end of the quarter.

Thank you very much, go ahead.

Jade, this is Lou. On the office, industrial and retail sector, I mean, we've definitely seen more activity as far as people engaging they understand, a lot of BOVs right? We're really trying to understand where the market is in order to position themselves and determine what's the best timing for them to go. There's definitely going to be activity as we see the Fed slow down, people are getting more comfortable as to where things are going to be so that they can make these decisions and hit the market and are preparing at this time.

Thank you very much. The target to be the #1 capital markets company in this space. Do you need large deals to come back to make that happen? Can you just talk to the scope of the business? Maybe give some color around how it's stratified by deal size? When we look at someone like a CBRE, they're also very big in the large deal space. So to really outtake them, do you need the large transactions to come back?

We will play in the private clients, smaller deals. We have a strategy for that. I think when you do the big deals, it's much more attractive for even the private client guys that do smaller deals. So we're going to play up and down the levels of transaction. But if you start with the big and create the foundation and you elevate the brand, it's good in all sites. But we fully expect to do small deals as well. It's also affordable and smaller deals in the multi space is also a good place to be as well. So we'll be an [indiscernable] to that.

Thank you.

Thank you. If you'd like to ask a question today, please press star one from your telephone keypad. The next question comes from the line of Patrick O'Shaughnessy with Raymond James. Please proceed with your questions.

Hey, good morning. Maybe a question for Jeff. Jeff, the GSEs did not lend up to their caps in 2022. Do you have a sense for why that was the case? And, as you look to 2023, do you think they'll get closer to the caps?

The GSEs have seen an evolution, which is increasingly focused on what they call their 'mission business', which is the affordable business. Small loans, targeted affordable, et cetera. And so as they are measured and as FHFA has changed how their affordability is measured, which used to be by unit, but now it's by percentage of production, the pressure to hit their caps every year is not the same as it was historically. So what I would expect is to see a slight shift, which we already saw last year towards a greater focus on affordability, and we would expect them to be slightly countercyclical so that as other debt capital sources are out of the market, the GSEs fill the gap. When debt capital is clinical, then we would expect the GSEs to back off a little bit. And that's what we saw last year. So as it relates to this year, particularly with interest rates, I would expect them to fill the gaps, and I would expect them to be somewhere close to their caps.

Great. That's helpful, thank you. And then, Barry, you indicated that brokers don't move to Newmark because of the upfront signing bonus. Does that imply that you're offering the same upfront cash as where they're leaving? Or kind of, what are the implications of that statement?

We don't offer any more money than anybody else. And some places have to offer more because of the nature of the platform. So we don't believe people choose Newmark because of the money.

Got it. And then maybe...Go ahead.

I was going to add, remember, we used a combination of cash and equity and our equity is profitable at the end, and we have long-term contracts that we signed with our top producers. So the way we do it, we think is a little bit differentiated and a little bit better in the market and it builds a brand over a long period of time.

Got it. That's helpful. And then maybe an adjacent follow-up to that. You indicated that market dislocations do kind of tend to stimulate some attractive hiring opportunities. Why is that the case? Is it just people become less satisfied with their existing employer in dislocated market situations? Or what would kind of cause them to maybe look for greener pastures?

I don't know that it makes them more unhappy with their existing. Usually, that exists prior. When you are immersed in a very active market, it's very hard to pick your head up and take the time to make a move. And when there is a slowdown, it's a moment in time when people can make a move. And that usually occurs in a time like this when there is more space between transactions.

Patrick, it's Lou. Also, I think a lot of people also look and say, "look, as the market is going to recover, who do I want my teammates to be so I can capture more market share and make more money over the period of the contract?" And that's when they look and say, "Well, where do I really want to be and who do I really want to be partnering with in order to be more successful?" And that's one of the things that we do. We make people better. We make people have higher production than they had where they were before. And that's really why they look to join us when these kinds are like this are happening.

Makes sense, thank you.

Our next question comes from a follow-up from the line of Jade Rahmani with KBW. Please proceed with your questions.

Thank you very much. Just a few technical questions. As a result of the Cushman hires, do you expect a material increase in the share count? And when would we start seeing that?

So I think we guided our share count to be flat to down 1% for '23 compared to '22. Obviously, we've considered all things we know about today. So we won't be changing guidance based on that fact.

Thank you. On the adjusted tax rate, it looked like it came in pretty low for the fourth quarter. What drove that? And what's the driver of the low tax rate on an adjusted basis for 2023?

It's actually really simple, less earnings. So our stock compensation, which is tax deductible for the company, came in roughly around the 7% to 9% range that we guided to, actually a little bit below for 2022. But on lower earnings, that just drives your tax rate down a bit. So we came in around 17% for '22. We're guiding 14% to 17% based on the guidance range for '23.

What do you expect for stock-based compensation for 2023?

It's within the same range of 7% to 9% of our commissionable revenues. So I think it came in around $120 million for 2022. You can do the math, it will be roughly in that range, maybe a little bit more, a little bit less, but nothing materially different.

And on commissionable revenues, basically, we should take investment sales, capital markets, we should exclude MSR gains? And then should we also exclude management services?

Yeah, the only part of management services that falls into that is the valuation business because they are on a commission basis. But other than that, it's leasing, it's capital markets, which is sales and debt, as you said, without the MSR in valuation.

Okay. And then is there employee loan amortization expense running through the P&L?

Yes. It's running through GAAP and non-GAAP. So it's already reflected in our numbers.

What's the magnitude of that?

I'm not sure we've disclosed that, but maybe as we prepare the 10-K, we'll take a look and see if it's in there or if we can add something that would be helpful to you.

Alright, great. Thanks so much.

Thank you.

Thank you. We've reached the end of the question-and-answer session. And I'll now return the call over to Mr. Barry Gosin; Chief Executive Officer, for closing remarks.

Thank you all for joining us today. I'm extremely excited about the company's future and look forward to updating you on the next quarterly call. So, thank you.

Thank you. This concludes today's conference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.