NYSE:KBH KB Home Q1 2025 Earnings Report $48.62 +0.76 (+1.59%) Closing price 03:59 PM EasternExtended Trading$47.81 -0.81 (-1.66%) As of 07:59 PM Eastern Extended trading is trading that happens on electronic markets outside of regular trading hours. This is a fair market value extended hours price provided by Massive. Learn more. ProfileEarnings HistoryForecast KB Home EPS ResultsActual EPS$1.49Consensus EPS $1.56Beat/MissMissed by -$0.07One Year Ago EPS$1.76KB Home Revenue ResultsActual Revenue$1.39 billionExpected Revenue$1.51 billionBeat/MissMissed by -$114.89 millionYoY Revenue Growth-5.20%KB Home Announcement DetailsQuarterQ1 2025Date3/24/2025TimeAfter Market ClosesConference Call DateMonday, March 24, 2025Conference Call Time5:00PM ETUpcoming EarningsKB Home's Q4 2026 earnings is estimated for Tuesday, September 22, 2026, based on past reporting schedulesConference Call ResourcesConference Call AudioConference Call TranscriptSlide DeckPress Release (8-K)Quarterly Report (10-Q)Earnings HistoryCompany ProfileSlide DeckFull Screen Slide DeckPowered by KB Home Q1 2025 Earnings Call TranscriptProvided by QuartrMarch 24, 2025ShareShareShare This ReportLink copied to clipboard.Key Takeaways KB Home lowered its fiscal 2025 revenue guidance to $6.6B–$7.0B, citing a softer spring selling season and declining consumer confidence. In Q1, the company achieved an adjusted housing gross profit margin of 20.3%, above the midpoint of its guidance, and delivered diluted EPS of $1.49 on $1.39B in revenues. By cleaning up incentives and reducing base prices by an average of ~$15K in about 50% of communities, KB Home saw net orders accelerate to a 5.1 homes/month/community pace over the past five weeks. KB Home improved its build times to 147 days companywide (139 days for built-to-order), marking a 20% year-over-year reduction and moving toward its 120-day target. Q1 land investment surged 57% YoY to $920M, expanding lot position by 41% to ~78,200 lots, while the company returned $50M to shareholders via share repurchases under its ongoing buyback program. AI Generated. May Contain Errors.Conference Call Audio Live Call not available Earnings Conference CallKB Home Q1 202500:00 / 00:00Speed:1x1.25x1.5x2xTranscript SectionsPresentationParticipantsPresentationSkip to Participants Operator00:00:00Good afternoon. My name is John, and I'll be your conference operator today. I would like to welcome everyone to the KB Home 2025 Q1 Earnings Conference Call. Currently, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Following the company's opening remarks, we will open the lines for questions. Today's conference call is being recorded and will be available for replay at the company's website kbhome.com through 24 April 2025. I would like to turn the call over to Jill Peters, Senior Vice President, Investor Relations. Thank you, Jill. You may begin. Operator00:00:34Thank you, John. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today to review our results for the Q1 of fiscal 2025. On the call are Jeff Mezger, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; Rob McGibney, President and Chief Operating Officer; Bill Hollinger, Senior Vice President and Chief Accounting Officer; and Thad Johnson, Senior Vice President and Treasurer. During this call, items will be discussed that are considered forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements are not guarantees of future results, and the company does not undertake any obligation to update them. Due to various factors, including those detailed in today's press release and in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, actual results could be materially different from those stated or implied in the forward-looking statements. Operator00:01:33In addition, a reconciliation of the non-GAAP measure of adjusted housing gross profit margin, which excludes inventory-related charges, and any other non-GAAP measure referenced during today's discussion to its most directly comparable GAAP measure can be found in today's press release and/or on the investor relations page of our website at kbhome.com. With that, here is Jeff Mezger. Jeff MezgerChairman and CEO at KB Home00:02:00Thank you, Jill. Good afternoon, everyone. In addition to reporting our Q1 results today, we also announced that Rob Dillard will be joining the company as our Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Rob is a well-rounded leader with a solid financial and operational background. He's an excellent addition to our deeply talented and long-tenured finance and accounting team. We're excited for him to join us next week. Moving on to market conditions. Consumers are continuing to cope with affordability concerns and uncertainties around macroeconomic and geopolitical events. As a result, consumer confidence has declined sequentially each month for the past several months, and homebuyers are moving more slowly in making their purchase decisions. Jeff MezgerChairman and CEO at KB Home00:02:52While longer-term housing market conditions remain favorable, driven by demographics and an undersupply of homes, demand at the start of the spring selling season has been more muted than we have seen over the past few years. As a result of this softer selling environment, we are lowering our revenue guidance for fiscal 2025. As for the details of our results, we produced total revenues of $1.4 billion and diluted earnings per share of $1.49 in our Q1. We delivered fewer homes than we anticipated due to about 150 less inventory home sales than we projected, and a timing issue that impacted roughly 75 of our deliveries in Southern California following the wildfires early this year. Even with this lower level of deliveries, our gross margin held up well at 20.3%, excluding inventory-related charges, above the midpoint of our guided range. Jeff MezgerChairman and CEO at KB Home00:03:57With our SG&A of 11%, we produced an operating income margin of 9.3%. We increased our book value per share to over $57, a 12% year-over-year increase. We generated 2,772 net orders in the Q1. While our average community count was in line with our projection and our cancellation rate was fairly steady, our monthly absorption pace per community was 3.6 homes compared to 4.6 in last year's Q1. At the time of our last earnings call in January, traffic in our communities was higher year-over-year, along with higher website leads, and mortgage interest rates were similar to where they were in the year-ago period. These metrics indicated to us that we were set up to experience a typical start to the spring selling season, similar to how the 2024 spring season unfolded, with the strongest weeks of the Q1 still ahead of us. Jeff MezgerChairman and CEO at KB Home00:05:03With a meaningful number of planned new community openings, we expected to achieve a flat year-over-year net order comparison for the full quarter. As the quarter progressed following our last call, it became apparent that demand was softer than we expected. We took action in mid-February, evaluating our base pricing in every community relative to local market conditions, then repositioning our communities with a focus on offering the most compelling value. We were encouraged by buyers' responses to these actions and saw a meaningful improvement in our net orders in the last two weeks of the quarter, which has continued into the first three weeks of our Q2. For the trailing five weeks, our weekly net sales have averaged about 300, which equates to an absorption pace of 5.1 net orders per month per community. This is approaching a more normalized order pace for the spring. Jeff MezgerChairman and CEO at KB Home00:06:03While we're pleased with this progress, we recognize that the environment is dynamic, and we are committed to taking further action if necessary, depending on how market conditions evolve. Let me pause here for a moment and ask Rob to provide more details on our deliveries and sales, as well as an operational update. Rob. Rob McGibneyPresident and COO at KB Home00:06:24Thank you, Jeff. I will begin by addressing our shortfall in deliveries, which trailed our Q1 expectation by approximately 225 homes. Our revenue guidance is comprised of anticipated deliveries of homes from our backlog, together with sales of inventory homes, which has represented about 40% of our business in each of the past two fiscal years. We expected about 150 more sales of inventory homes than we generated and fell short of this projection due to factors impacting our sales overall, which I will discuss in a moment. We also had roughly 75 deliveries in Southern California shift into the Q2 as we were unable to get meters, utility hookups, and final clearances on completed homes, with crews diverted to priorities related to wildfires in the Los Angeles area that occurred in January. Rob McGibneyPresident and COO at KB Home00:07:17While we expect to close all of these homes in the Q2, and many have already been delivered, we will continue to navigate any wildfire-related issues that arise. Moving on to net orders. At the time of our last earnings conference call, six weeks into our Q1, our net orders were down about 12% year-over-year. Historically, we begin to see net order momentum build in late January and early February, similar to what we experienced in the year-ago Q1, even with mortgage interest rates in the high 6% range at that time. However, the 2025 spring selling season started slower than in previous years, reflecting a decline in consumer confidence as consumers processed the variables relating to macroeconomic and geopolitical issues. This decline in confidence is leading homebuyers to take longer to make their purchase decisions. Rob McGibneyPresident and COO at KB Home00:08:11In addition, a number of our planned community openings were delayed until late in the Q1 or early in the second, contributing to our Q1 net sales result. With healthy traffic in our communities, we took steps in mid-February to drive an increased urgency to purchase by improving affordability for our customers. We focused on offering the most compelling value, reducing base prices, and in many cases, lowering or eliminating incentives, helping to offset the margin impact of those price changes. As we have shared in the past, although buyers are sensitive to rates and monthly payments, the primary motivation of most of our customers is securing a home that meets their needs at the best price. We thoughtfully and selectively adjusted pricing as needed on a community-by-community basis to stimulate demand and achieve a higher selling pace. As Jeff shared, consumers responded to these adjustments. Rob McGibneyPresident and COO at KB Home00:09:07We believe we have found the market and are encouraged with our trend over the last five weeks, equating to an average absorption pace of 5.1 net orders per month per community within our targeted range for the spring. While base price is the main motivator for our customers, we also provided mortgage-related support to our buyers as needed. Mortgage concessions represented approximately 2% of our housing revenues in our Q1, two-thirds of which were rate buy-downs, and the other one-third was the cost of loan locks. Our sales goals for this year are closely connected to our community count expectations. At the end of the Q1, we had 255 active communities, up 7% year-over-year, contributing to an average of 257, which also increased 7%. We continue to expect to maintain roughly 250 to 260 active communities throughout our 2025 second and Q3s. Rob McGibneyPresident and COO at KB Home00:10:06In addition, we anticipate ending the year with approximately 250 communities before growing our count again in early 2026, just ahead of that spring selling season. Our backlog at the end of February was over 4,400 homes valued at $2.2 billion. We maintained a normalized cancellation rate during the quarter, indicating that buyers are ready and able to close on their homes. While our backlog is lower year-over-year, our build times are nearly 20% faster as compared to the prior year quarter. This allows us to sell built-to-order homes later in the year while still achieving a year-end closing. Our 2025 deliveries will be comprised of the homes we have in backlog, built-to-order homes sold through the early part of our Q3, and sales of inventory homes. We started approximately 2,800 homes in the Q1, contributing to over 6,500 total homes in production. Rob McGibneyPresident and COO at KB Home00:11:06We remain consistent in aligning our starts with sales, with the majority of those starts already sold. Overall, our build times, measured in calendar days, improved sequentially in the Q1 to 147 days, our best level in the last four years. For build-to-order homes, our build times are currently 139 days. This progress in the Q1 moves us closer to our goal of 120 days from start to home completion, which is at the lower end of our historical range. Several of our divisions are already building homes at this target level, and we are confident in our ability to achieve this goal company-wide. Rob McGibneyPresident and COO at KB Home00:11:48The benefits of lower build times are numerous, including a more compelling selling proposition for our customers purchasing a build-to-order home relative to the 60 days it takes to complete an existing or speculative home sale, better inventory turns, monetizing our assets quicker, and a lower cost of interest rate locks due to the shorter duration of the lock, which will help reduce our mortgage concession cost over time. We are continuing to rely on our long-standing trade relationships with our Even flow production to ensure that we have the crews necessary to get our homes built. We have not seen any meaningful trade labor shortages to date. Our value engineering and studio simplification efforts are yielding results as we further reduce direct costs on our homes started during the Q1. Rob McGibneyPresident and COO at KB Home00:12:37Direct costs were down both sequentially and year-over-year, helping to offset the impact of our price reductions and increases in land costs. Our costs, including lumber, are protected for almost all of our Q2 starts under the terms of our supply contracts. Regarding lumber, we had started moving toward longer locks in expectation of tariffs being implemented. Our national purchasing team, working with our divisions, has effectively managed to hold off anticipated tariff-related cost increases to date. Before I wrap up, I will review the credit metrics of our buyers who finance their mortgages through our joint venture, KBHS Home Loans. We increased our capture rate sequentially with 90% of buyers who finance their homes using KBHS. Higher capture rates help us manage our backlog more effectively and provide more visibility in closings, which benefits our company as well as our buyers. Rob McGibneyPresident and COO at KB Home00:13:35In addition, we see higher customer satisfaction levels from buyers who use our joint venture versus other lenders. The average cash down payment was stable both sequentially and year-over-year at 16%, equating to about $80,000. On average, the household income of customers who use KBHS was about $133,000, and they had a FICO score of 746. Even with one-half of our customers purchasing their first home, we are still attracting buyers with strong credit profiles who can qualify for their mortgage while making a significant down payment. In conclusion, while we believe we are aligned with current market conditions based on the solid net orders we have generated over the past five weeks, we will remain nimble in our approach to the spring selling season, balancing pace and price at the community level. Rob McGibneyPresident and COO at KB Home00:14:27Our community count trajectory is consistent with the update we provided at the start of the year, and we have a significant number of planned grand openings in the Q2, as well as the second half of this year. We are committed to executing on the day-to-day fundamentals of our business, maintaining our high customer satisfaction levels, further improving build times, value engineering our products to lower direct costs, and balancing pace and price to optimize each asset. We are confident in our ability to navigate varying market conditions. With that, I will turn the call back over to Jeff. Jeff MezgerChairman and CEO at KB Home00:15:02Thanks, Rob. We continue to view the long-term outlook for the housing market favorably and are investing in our future community count growth to support our objective of expanding our scale. During the quarter, we invested $920 million in land acquisition and development, of which about 40% went toward development and fees. The Q1 will likely represent the high watermark in our land spend for this year and included the purchase of two large parcels in Las Vegas, which will provide continuity as we replace our highly successful Inspirada community. Over the past five years, we've averaged nearly 450 deliveries each year at Inspirada across multiple product lines, and the community is approaching closeout. The two new parcels will offer similar product lines as Inspirada at affordable price points. Jeff MezgerChairman and CEO at KB Home00:15:59Our Las Vegas business is one of our largest and strongest performers, having consistently generated the highest gross margins and profitability in the company. We continue to adhere to our underwriting criteria, product strategy, and price points, and remain mindful of the housing market and overall economy with the intention of adjusting our investment spend as necessary to match local market conditions. Our investments have contributed to increasing our lot position by 41% year-over-year to over 78,200 lots owned or controlled, 46% of which are optioned. We have expanded our lot position with a focus on capital efficiency, developing lots in smaller phases wherever possible, and balancing development with our start space to manage our inventory of finished lots. We've continued our balanced approach of investing in our growth while returning nearly $70 million in capital to shareholders in our Q1, including $50 million in share repurchases. Jeff MezgerChairman and CEO at KB Home00:17:07In closing, I want to recognize the entire KB Home team for their ongoing commitment to serving our homebuyers. Although we have reduced our revenue guidance for fiscal 2025 to between $6.6 billion and $7 billion, primarily to reflect the lower level of net orders that we generated in our Q1, we are encouraged that homebuyers have responded to the actions we took to offer the most compelling value, and we have experienced solid net orders in the past five weeks since implementing those adjustments. While we believe we have taken the appropriate steps to achieve our sales targets, we have a strong and experienced team that has successfully navigated varying market conditions while supporting our customers and operating our business effectively. We are confident in our ability to continue to do so. Jeff MezgerChairman and CEO at KB Home00:18:00Our company is well-positioned for future growth with the lots owned or controlled to support higher revenues with a strong balance sheet and significant financial flexibility. Long-term, we remain committed to enhancing shareholder value through profitable scale expansion and producing higher returns, as well as continuing to return cash to shareholders. Bill Hollinger will be providing a financial review today, and I'll turn the call over to Bill. Bill HollingerSVP and Chief Accounting Officer at KB Home00:18:30Thank you, Jeff. As Jeff and Rob mentioned, the Q1 proved to be challenging for a variety of reasons. As a result, our performance fell short of our expectations, primarily due to lower-than-anticipated deliveries, which impacted both our revenues and net income. Nevertheless, several other key metrics for the quarter were aligned with our previous guidance. Regarding our current outlook for the remainder of 2025, we are revising our guidance to reflect our Q1 results, including the more muted start to the spring selling season, as well as the selective price adjustments we implemented in mid-February to stimulate demand and support a higher sales pace. In the 2025 Q1, we produced housing revenues of $1.39 billion, net income of $110 million, and diluted earnings per share of $1.49. Bill HollingerSVP and Chief Accounting Officer at KB Home00:19:26We continued our balanced approach to capital allocation with $920 million in land-related investments, up 57% year-over-year, while returning over $69 million to our stockholders through share repurchases and dividends. We also kept our debt-to-capital ratio at a healthy level. Our housing revenues for the Q1 were down 5% compared to $1.46 billion in the prior year period due to a 9% decrease in the number of homes delivered, partly offset by a 4% increase in their overall average selling price. The 2,770 homes delivered in the quarter represented a backlog conversion rate of 62% compared to 55% in a year-earlier period, largely reflecting our improved build times. As Rob mentioned, the number of homes delivered was below expectations, mainly due to fewer-than-expected deliveries from inventory sales and utility services related to delays at some of our Southern California communities as local resources were diverted to address wildfire-related priorities. Bill HollingerSVP and Chief Accounting Officer at KB Home00:20:42With our revised outlook, we expect Q2 housing revenues to range from $1.45 billion-$1.55 billion. Looking at the 2025 full year, we are now forecasting housing revenues in the range of $6.6 billion-$7.0 billion. The upper end of this range remains within our previous guidance. In the Q1 our overall average selling price of homes delivered was $500,700, also in line with our guidance. Reflecting our selective price adjustments and anticipated mix of deliveries, we expect our Q2 overall average selling price to be approximately $488,000. For the full year, we are revising our overall average selling price projection to be in the range of $480,000-$495,000. For context, our prior guidance was $488,000-$498,000. Homebuilding operating income was $127.3 million compared to $157.7 million for the year-earlier quarter. Bill HollingerSVP and Chief Accounting Officer at KB Home00:22:02Operating income included inventory-related charges, totaling $1.5 million in the current quarter and $1.3 million in the prior quarter, consisting in both periods entirely of land option contract abandonments. Our homebuilding operating income for the quarter was 9.2% compared to 10.8% in last year's Q1, mainly due to our lower housing gross profit margin. We anticipate our 2025 Q2 homebuilding operating income margin will be approximately 8.5%. For the 2025 full year, we are projecting this metric to be approximately 9.4%, which primarily reflects expected sequential improvement in the latter half of the year, driven by increased operating leverage on higher revenues. Our current projection is lower compared to both our prior guidance of approximately 10.7% and the year-earlier results of 11.1%. These operating income margins assume no inventory-related charges. Our 2025 Q1 housing gross profit margin was 20.2% compared to 21.5% for the year-earlier quarter. Bill HollingerSVP and Chief Accounting Officer at KB Home00:23:25The decrease mainly reflected higher relative land costs, increased homebuyer concessions, and reduced operating leverage. Excluding inventory-related charges, our housing gross profit margin was 20.3%, above the midpoint of our guidance for the 2025 Q1. For the year-earlier quarter, it was 21.6%. We are forecasting a housing gross profit margin for the 2025 Q2 in the range of 19.1% to 19.5%, and for the full year, in the range of 19.2% to 20.0%, assuming no inventory-related charges. Our gross margin outlook for both periods reflects lower selling prices than we anticipated in January, reduced operating leverage on lower delivery volume, and the challenging operating environment. Our selling, general, and administrative expense ratio for the quarter of 11% was up slightly from the year-earlier quarter. Bill HollingerSVP and Chief Accounting Officer at KB Home00:24:31Considering the operating leverage effect was approximately 40 basis points, we would have achieved our guidance had we delivered or we had generated the delivery volume we were expecting. We are forecasting a 2025 Q2 SG&A ratio to be in the range of 10.6% to 11.0%, and expect our 2025 full year SG&A ratio will be in the range of 10.0%-10.4%. Our income tax expense of $29.8 million for the quarter represented an effective tax rate of 21.4% compared to 20.6% for the year-earlier quarter. The current quarter rate compared favorably to our guidance primarily due to the impact of tax benefits related to stock-based compensation. We expect our effective tax rate to be approximately 24% for the Q2 and full year. As we said on our previous earnings call, our 2025 full year tax rate is expected to be up slightly from the previous year. Bill HollingerSVP and Chief Accounting Officer at KB Home00:25:45This is primarily due to decreases in energy tax credits. In terms of our bottom line results for the quarter, we generated net income of $109.6 million and diluted earnings per share of $1.49. This compares to net income of $138.7 million and diluted earnings per share of $1.76 for the same quarter of last year. Turning to land, we continue the positive momentum of the past few quarters in expanding our lot portfolio to position our business for future growth and larger scale. In the Q1, we significantly increased our investment in land acquisition and development to $920 million, ending the quarter with inventory balance of just under $6 billion, up 13% from a year ago. In keeping with our balanced approach to capital allocation, we repurchased 754,000 shares of our common stock at a total cost of $50 million during the quarter. Bill HollingerSVP and Chief Accounting Officer at KB Home00:26:53With $650 million remaining under our current common stock purchase authorization and our healthy balance sheet, we have both the ability and intent to repurchase additional shares. However, the pace, volume, timing will depend on factors such as our operating cash flow, liquidity forecasts, land investment prospects and needs, the market price of our shares, and the conditions in the housing market and broader economic environment. We ended the quarter with total liquidity of $1.25 billion, including $268 million of cash and $982 million available under our unsecured revolving credit facility, with $100 million of cash borrowings outstanding. Our Q1 is typically when we have the lowest cash inflows and highest outflows of our fiscal year. As such, in executing on our priority of investing in land and land development for future growth during the 2025 Q1, we utilize cash borrowings from our credit facility. Bill HollingerSVP and Chief Accounting Officer at KB Home00:28:09As a result, our debt-to-capital ratio increased to 30.5% at the end of the quarter compared to 29.4% at the end of 2024. We do not expect to have any cash borrowings outstanding under the credit facility by the end of our fiscal year. We have no debt maturities until our term loans' 2026 expiration, with our next senior note maturity in June of 2027. In closing, although conditions were more challenging than anticipated in the 2025 Q1, we believe we are well-positioned to meet our updated outlook for the remainder of the year. At the same time, we plan to remain flexible to meet the evolving market conditions as we maintain our focus on balancing pace and price at each of our communities. Bill HollingerSVP and Chief Accounting Officer at KB Home00:29:07Overall, we believe our solid financial position, including our liquidity profile and long runway for debt maturities, and robust land portfolio will enable us to navigate the current environment, continue to be opportunistic and balanced with allocating capital in 2025 and beyond, and sustain our returns-focused growth strategy centered on enhancing long-term stockholder value. We will now take your questions. John, please open the line. Operator00:29:39Thank you. We will now be conducting a question-and-answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate that your line is in the queue. You may press star two to remove yourself from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. We ask that you please limit yourself to one question and one follow-up. Thank you. Operator00:30:05One moment, please, while we poll for questions. The first question comes from the line of Matthew Bouley with Barclays. Please proceed with your question. Matthew BouleyDirector and Senior Equity Research Analyst at Barclays00:30:22Hey, good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for taking the questions. I wanted to start with the price adjustments and specifically the question around kind of customer elasticity. I guess what level or what magnitude of price adjustments would you say was enough to kind of get consumers off of the fence here? How are you kind of able to separate what you were doing with these price adjustments relative to the kind of typical seasonal uptick that you would see in March anyway? Just any more detail around the magnitude and thinking about sort of protecting the backlog as well and customer elasticity. Thank you. Jeff MezgerChairman and CEO at KB Home00:31:03Matt, I can make a few comments, and then I'll hand it to Rob for some specifics. There are a lot of things going on in the market, and as we always share, it really is sub-market specific and community specific. As the divisions were working to get sales, in a lot of cases, they fell in the trap of starting to offer what I would call a pocket incentive where you do not advertise it. The consumer does not know about it until they get into the sales office, and then they would find out there is a $10,000 studio credit available if you buy this weekend and things like that. Jeff MezgerChairman and CEO at KB Home00:31:40As we analyzed things, we decided, "Let's get rid of all that, what I would call noise, and just take it to price so we can advertise on the website what the real price is net that we were already offering anyway." A lot of the moves we made really were cleaning out incentives and taking it to price. That was step one. Past that, as we analyzed each community, if there were communities not selling that were not aligned with the resale data in that sub-market or what new home competitors were doing, we took additional steps to pull the price down further as needed. It's not like you can identify that price will work. You have to keep going till you get your sales momentum back. We took some steps, and we were bold all the way around. Jeff MezgerChairman and CEO at KB Home00:32:32As I shared in my comments, it was the very first week after that our sales picked up quite a bit. Rob can give you some of the detail between offsets by reducing incentives versus pure price adjustments. Rob McGibneyPresident and COO at KB Home00:32:47Just to add some specifics to it, it was roughly half of our communities that we lowered base price. As Jeff said, at the same time, we were cleaning up some of the clutter with the incentives. It was a range, just depending on what the sales pace was, where resale levels are trending and tracking, all of those factors kind of into the mix. It ranged from $5,000 up to $30,000 in some cases. I think the average, if you put them all together, of the communities that we decreased, it was $15,000 or $16,000. Call it 3% on our ASP. Rob McGibneyPresident and COO at KB Home00:33:25At the same time, when we cleaned up the incentives and the other things that Jeff mentioned that were being offered, the net reduction or impact to margins is much lower than that. In fact, since we've made those moves, the margin roughly on deals that we're seeing come into backlog is only about 75 basis points lower. We feel pretty good about where we are right now. The communities where we've made the moves are performing. We've got some that have actually started performing better than what our expectations are. We've got some opportunity to claw back price and margin there. A handful of others that we still need to do some work on. Generally, we feel good about how we're positioned after making those moves, and the consumer has really responded to it well. Matthew BouleyDirector and Senior Equity Research Analyst at Barclays00:34:07Okay. Great. No, thank you for that color. Matthew BouleyDirector and Senior Equity Research Analyst at Barclays00:34:12I guess that leads me then to the next question around the margin. I think the way you implied the kind of gross margin cadence, I think you even said the operating margin should be improving sequentially by the second half relative to Q2. I think I heard you say that leverage on some of your fixed costs is a driver of that. You just mentioned there is a 75 basis point hit from the kind of net price adjustments. If I think about kind of what is going on with land basis and development costs, other type of inflation, you mentioned lumber on top as well. Can you just kind of bridge all those pieces together and pluses and minuses and give a little confidence on what drives that step up in margins in the second half? Thank you. Jeff MezgerChairman and CEO at KB Home00:34:57Yeah. Jeff MezgerChairman and CEO at KB Home00:34:57Matt, in general terms, the margin per house is holding pretty similarly as the year unfolds. Everything that we've done is already included in the guide that we provided today. The improvement in the operating margin is coming from leverage. Whether it's SG&A improvement or a little bit of gross margin improvement, both sides, it comes from delivering more houses. Operator00:35:21Thank you. The next question comes from the line of John Lovallo with UBS. Please proceed with your question. Matt JohnsonHead of Real Estate at UBS00:35:35Hey. Thanks, guys. You actually have Matt Johnson on for John. I appreciate the time. I guess just following up on that last question, I'll try and do some quick math. I think at the midpoint of your guide's guide, the implied back half gross margin is roughly, call it 19.5%. Matt JohnsonAnalyst at UBS00:35:51It would be down about 30 basis points relative to the first half, despite home sales being up, call it 36%, half over half. I guess could you just help us think through some of the puts and takes there as we go from the first half into the second half? Maybe how much of that is from mix as opposed to like-for-like deterioration? Jeff MezgerChairman and CEO at KB Home00:36:10I want to take a shot at that. Rob McGibneyPresident and COO at KB Home00:36:13Yeah, it was a little hard to hear your question, but if I got it. There is always mix involved, but we are not expecting a whole lot of mix here. We are expecting, and not to say it this way, but the midpoint of the uncertainty, let's say, ranges. We did look at kind of a high low. Sort of looking at things as they are today is kind of what our forecast reflects. Rob McGibneyPresident and COO at KB Home00:36:40There is really not much more I can add to that than just say that we are expecting some smaller than improvement in the housing gross profit margin, mostly due to leverage, not due to anything else. That is because of our second half, it is going to be what we believe is going to be far stronger volume-wise. We think most of the leverage that we are going to get to an operating income level will come from the SG&A side. Matt JohnsonHead of Real Estate at UBS00:37:15That all makes sense. I appreciate it. I guess just one more. For the full year, you guys are expecting home building operating margins of 9.4%. That would be down, call it 170 basis points year-over-year. Matt JohnsonHead of Real Estate at UBS00:37:30If we look back at last year, operating margins on a regional basis were actually up in both the Southwest and West Coast, while the pressure really came from the Central and the Southeast. I guess do you guys expect a similar story to play out this year or how we kind of think about that on a regional basis? Jeff MezgerChairman and CEO at KB Home00:37:48Yeah, I think that's the right way to look at it. West and Southwest are performing better financially right now. Operator00:37:59The next question comes from the line of Stephen Kim with Evercore ISI. Please proceed with your question. Stephen KimSenior Managing Director at Evercore ISI00:38:05Yeah, thanks very much, guys. Appreciate all the detail. I guess my first question relates to the cycle times. Rob, you talked about the fact that cycle times are down and all the benefits that that provides for the company. Stephen KimSenior Managing Director at Evercore ISI00:38:21I think you indicated you had not seen any trade labor shortages to date. We are curious as to, are you not seeing, have you not seen any, for lack of a better term, ICE raids in any of your communities or your neighboring communities? Is that what you meant by no trade labor shortages or are you, in fact, seeing some of that, but it is just not meaningfully disruptive enough to call out? You had said, I think direct costs were down year-over-year and quarter to quarter. I was wondering if you could quantify that a little bit for us. Rob McGibneyPresident and COO at KB Home00:38:54Sure. I will start with the first one last. Sequentially, our direct costs are down about 1%. year-over-year, we are looking at about 3%. That is to quantify that piece. Rob McGibneyPresident and COO at KB Home00:39:07On the labor, I'd say outside of the normal things that we would deal with outside of any kind of regulatory change or ICE or immigration policy change, it's really just been the same. We've seen nothing at all related to immigration. I mean, any kind of normal-type labor shortage we might see on a day-to-day basis in a typical year may still be there, but nothing at all, Steve, related to immigration policy. Stephen KimSenior Managing Director at Evercore ISI00:39:37That is really encouraging. I appreciate that. Right, of course. Yeah. We always have to add that these days, for sure. Okay. That is helpful. I guess if you could just mention, I think you gave a very nice discussion about how you've eliminated the pocket incentives and you sort of went to sort of putting these base prices on the internet and all that. Stephen KimSenior Managing Director at Evercore ISI00:40:03It sounds like you're talking about this as a permanent change. I just want to make sure that I'm interpreting that correctly. You've referred to it as, I think, cleaning up and getting rid of some of the noise and all that kind of thing. I just wanted to understand, is this something that you feel no longer has value, or is there something maybe more nuanced that you want to message there? Operator00:40:24Steve, it's an interesting evolution in that when you have a large backlog, you're sensitive to moving price because then you've got to go also deal with the backlog. Our division started doing these pocket incentives. Q4, we were already working hard to get sales, and a lot of them crept in. They were still there in the Q1. Operator00:40:51It was not reflected in our pricing, but it was reflected in the margins we were generating. We decided, "Let's get out of it and get back to our core values." I would say it is a permanent move because it is the way we like to run the business. Unfortunately, we fell in the trap of doing some things to try to get sales that really were not aligned with how we present the best value to the customer. Operator00:41:15Thank you. The next question comes from the line of Mike Dahl with RBC Capital Markets. Please proceed with your question. Mike DahlManaging Director at RBC Capital Markets00:41:25Hi, thanks for taking my questions. I guess I want to press on gross margins a little bit more. Maybe just remind us kind of in the current environment with what your guidance incorporates for the revenue ramp as the year goes on. Mike DahlManaging Director at RBC Capital Markets00:41:44How would you normally think about how that translates to seasonal gross margin uplift? Just trying to get a sense of really the flat-top guide in second half at face value does not seem awfully conservative. Maybe you can just help us think through and remind us what that seasonal component actually is from a quantitative standpoint. Leverage by quarter. Bill HollingerSVP and Chief Accounting Officer at KB Home00:42:07Yeah. I would say that it is, again, our normal sequential cadence in that we are going to see improving quarter to quarter with really what I will say, taking out the leverage impact with a more or less flat gross. The improvement is, again, mostly from the leverage. We are not looking to get much uplift in our gross margin without the leverage. I think, again, what we are hoping and what I maybe said earlier was that there is, again, a lot of uncertainty out there. Bill HollingerSVP and Chief Accounting Officer at KB Home00:42:54We're not expecting it to get worse. We're not expecting it to get better. This really reflects kind of what we think is in our backlog. With the sales price reductions that we've taken to date, obviously, things change. It'll impact our margins. Right now, it seems or it assumes a relatively static order right now. Mike DahlManaging Director at RBC Capital Markets00:43:23Okay. My follow-up is still along the same lines. It's more, why is that really the base case assumption when you just saw in a short period of time the need to make some changes? Your competitors are making changes based on what we see in terms of price. The demand environment has been very uncertain. There's an uncertain cost environment. Your sales pace, it's great to hear that it picked up, but it's still down year-on -year. Mike DahlManaging Director at RBC Capital Markets00:43:59Why is assuming that conditions will remain stable the right base case under the current conditions? Jeff MezgerChairman and CEO at KB Home00:44:08We're pleased with our sales right now. As I shared in my prepared comments, we're approaching a normal Q2 sales pace with the current margins we're guiding to. It's based on everybody's going to have their own crystal ball on where the world's headed. As we see it today, we took steps that are working. The steps we took are reflected in the margin guide we've provided, and we're hitting our sales numbers. Right now, we're pretty comfortable with where things are at. Operator00:44:41Thank you. The next question comes from the line of Michael Rehaut with JPMorgan. Please proceed with your question. Michael RehautManaging Director and Senior Equity Analyst at JPMorgan00:44:52Thanks. Good afternoon, everyone. Michael RehautManaging Director and Senior Equity Analyst at JPMorgan00:44:58First, I just wanted to, and I apologize if I missed this earlier, but I'd love to get kind of any regional differentiation across your footprint when you talk about, in particular, adjustments that you needed to make with incentives or pricing. If there were certain markets or even sub-markets that were kind of more prevalent or at the top of the list, and by contrast, which markets might be on the stronger end of the spectrum? Rob McGibneyPresident and COO at KB Home00:45:31Sure, Mike. I'll take that, Rob. As we always say, it really is market by market or even sub-market by sub-market. I'll talk about resale a little bit here because we've always viewed resale as our biggest competitor, regardless of what the new home competition is doing. We've got to stay tethered to that pricing with a reasonable new home premium to drive volume. Rob McGibneyPresident and COO at KB Home00:45:55As far as the regional color, I would say in broad terms that Florida was our softest state in terms of sales demand in the Q1. Because of that, we took the most pricing action there to find the market. I'd say roughly two-thirds of our communities, probably the same price range between $5,000 and $30,000. We had to do more in Florida to find that market. I'll just start with Jacksonville, for example, using that as a proxy. They've got just under, right at, seven months of supply. It's a month or so above what a historical norm would be in terms of resale supply or where most people consider a balanced market. Resale is a really efficient market. One positive that we see in that market is it is getting absorbed. Rob McGibneyPresident and COO at KB Home00:46:44You've got days on market are actually down year-over-year despite that higher supply, but it's likely because pricing has moved. We're seeing that market react. We've done the same thing in that market to find where we need to be to sell. Where we can offer that new personalized energy-efficient product with a small premium to resale, we find that we win. You look at the rest of Florida, Orlando was similar. They've seen their days on or their months of supply increased to about the same level. Have not seen the pricing levels adjust there like they've started to in Jacksonville. Their days on market continues to be pretty elevated. Made some more significant adjustments there. The other business we have is Tampa. It's a similar situation, but lower overall months of supply than Jacksonville or Orlando. Rob McGibneyPresident and COO at KB Home00:47:36Even within those three markets, it's sub-market by sub-market. Some perform better than others, and we've had to adjust the moves that we're making based on that. Texas, I would say the story was a little more mixed. Many of our communities continued to perform very well, while there were others that we had to adjust in. I'd say Houston and Austin held the best. The moves there were smaller and more surgical, where San Antonio required some more broad-based adjustments. When you get into the West, really resale is still very low in terms of where it's been historically. I mean, most of them are in the three or four months of supply range and haven't had to make as many moves in the West, and Southwest has held better. Michael RehautManaging Director and Senior Equity Analyst at JPMorgan00:48:24Thanks. That's a great overview. Appreciate all the detail there. Michael RehautManaging Director and Senior Equity Analyst at JPMorgan00:48:33I guess secondly, I'd love to shift towards the balance sheet. If you could just kind of remind us how you're thinking about leverage over the longer term and kind of the dividends and share repurchase and perhaps what the potential is for that over time. Jeff MezgerChairman and CEO at KB Home00:48:56Mike, our strategy really hasn't changed from where we've been the last few years. Our ratios will improve because we're growing the equity. We don't see the need to go get more debt. We don't have any maturities for a while. When they do come up, we'll deal with them. Top priority, we have to grow the business and get scaled and be more profitable. Along the way, we're taking our excess cash and repurchasing shares. We've done a lot of that over the last three to four years. That's more of an opportunistic play. Jeff MezgerChairman and CEO at KB Home00:49:36It depends on the price and what our cash forecasts are and where we think we're headed. As Bill shared in his comments, we don't expect to have anything out on the revolver. We had a little blip in Q1 because of the two Vegas land deals. That'll get absorbed and go away over the balance of the year. Our ratio guide would be it's going to keep coming down as we grow the equity. It's not going to be taking debt out. Grow the business and be opportunistic with the other things and take your excess cash and give it back to the shareholders. Operator00:50:13The next question comes from the line of Alan Ratner with Zelman & Associates. Please proceed with your question. Alan RatnerManaging Director at Zelman and Associates00:50:22Hey, guys. Good afternoon. Thanks for all the detail so far. Alan RatnerManaging Director at Zelman and Associates00:50:28My question on the price adjustments, I'm just curious if you can look at the last five weeks of solid order results following those adjustments. Would you say those have been driven more by kind of going back to buyers that were already in the pipeline, giving yourselves the tools to kind of go back and say, "We've made these adjustments," and that kind of pulling them off the sidelines given the hesitancy? Or would you say that it's actually translated to significant increases in new traffic, maybe coming from the website advertising and actually pulling through more sales from new individuals coming into the pipeline? Alan RatnerManaging Director at Zelman and Associates00:51:07Yeah, that's a good question. It's both. I think more so it's bringing in new buyers. I mean, as Jeff said, we are putting our best foot forward, advertising the best price on the internet. That's where most people see us first. Alan RatnerManaging Director at Zelman and Associates00:51:19I think that's generating new traffic that we weren't seeing before. I don't have a ratio or a percentage for you. I'd tell you that some percentage of it is going back to buyers that we already had in the queue or that were former leads that didn't purchase, couldn't purchase, maybe couldn't qualify. With some of the adjustments we've made, we have made sales from going back to past traffic. The majority of it is new traffic that's being generated from the website. Alan RatnerManaging Director at Zelman and Associates00:51:46Got it. That's encouraging. I think what we've heard in the past is one of the, I guess, trickier things for build-to-order builders making base price adjustments is the large backlogs that you guys have. I'm curious how you're dealing with your backlog. Alan RatnerManaging Director at Zelman and Associates00:52:04Are you proactively reaching out to them in the 50% or so of communities where you have adjusted prices? Are you offering those same adjustments? Are you taking it on a case-by-case basis as they get closer to the closing dates? Any color there would be helpful. Rob McGibneyPresident and COO at KB Home00:52:20Yeah, we're taking it on a case-by-case basis. Really, when you look at a lot of the deals that we have in backlog, everybody struck their own deal. I mean, Jeff mentioned some of the other incentives that were being offered and deals being made. As we looked at that, we really do not think there is a lot of backlog exposure. We have taken some adjustments where that was not the case, and the new deal might be better than what somebody had in backlog. In the grand scheme of things, it is pretty small. Operator00:52:50The next question comes from the line of Jay McCanless with Wedbush. Please proceed with your question. Jay McCanlessManaging Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst at Wedbush00:52:57Hey, thanks for taking my questions. The first one I had, just wanted to find out, are you guys still having problems getting meters and other things in California as the rebuild has started there? Rob McGibneyPresident and COO at KB Home00:53:11It's interesting. We kind of always have problems getting meters in California. Yeah, it is a little, it's still a little more delayed from the impact of the fires. I think we're through the worst part of that. A lot of the rebuilding hasn't started. I think that's going to be a long and ongoing process. It's a big state, a lot of volume, a lot of crews. I don't expect that that's going to be a significant ongoing drag on our timing to get meters and utility hookups on houses. Rob McGibneyPresident and COO at KB Home00:53:40Still there a little bit, getting better every day. I think that that'll be back to normal fairly soon. Jay McCanlessManaging Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst at Wedbush00:53:48Okay, good. That's good to hear. In the 50% of communities where you didn't adjust pricing, I guess, were you able to raise prices in some areas? If so, maybe highlight one or two that did well during the quarter or highlight one or two regions that did well during the quarter. Rob McGibneyPresident and COO at KB Home00:54:07Yeah. As I mentioned, the West and Southwest has performed better. I mean, on the half that we didn't move prices down, we didn't move prices down because they're selling at pace, and we're happy with what they've done. Now that the spring selling season is here, there are opportunities to lift. I'll just use Las Vegas as one of the examples. I mean, that market continues to do very well for us. Rob McGibneyPresident and COO at KB Home00:54:30Jeff mentioned the two large purchases that we've had there, but we've continually raised price there and continue with really strong absorptions. We've got similar examples throughout some places in California as well on the communities that were already performing well that are now doing even better. Operator00:54:51The next question comes from the line of Sam Reid with Wells Fargo. Please proceed with your question. Sam ReidSenior Equity Research Analyst and Executive Director at Wells Fargo00:54:56Awesome. Thanks so much. Just looking at your updated delivery guide, especially on the back of the Q1 orders, just on my very rough math, it looks like we're going to need to see backlog conversion accelerate in the second half. Could you just break down the balance between kind of maybe better cycle times or more spec homes? Because it would seem like one of those would potentially need to change to hit the revenue guide in the second half. Sam ReidSenior Equity Research Analyst and Executive Director at Wells Fargo00:55:21Just hoping to unpack that. Rob McGibneyPresident and COO at KB Home00:55:23Yeah. I mean, I think it's all the things that you just mentioned there, whether it's the improvement in cycle time or covering more of the inventory that's available. While it does increase from where we were in Q1, we think it's a very achievable number. I mean, you just look at where we were in Q4. It's similar to that. As we said, we're still targeting 120 days company average on cycle time. As we continue to progress towards that, that helps with the backlog conversion as well. Sam ReidSenior Equity Research Analyst and Executive Director at Wells Fargo00:55:56Yeah, that helps. Just to follow up to something in the prepared remarks, you delivered, I believe, slightly fewer inventory homes during the quarter than you were expecting. Can you just talk to why that number was a little bit lower? I think it was about 150 units. Sam ReidSenior Equity Research Analyst and Executive Director at Wells Fargo00:56:13Apologies if I missed. Can you just remind us what the gross margin spread historically has been between your build-to-order and your inventory homes? Was there any mixed benefit in the Q1 from that lower inventory home sale volume that we should be aware of? Thanks. Jeff MezgerChairman and CEO at KB Home00:56:28At the time we made our earnings call back in January, we assumed another 150 would sell and close in the quarter. We assumed more than that, but we missed it by the 150. If you think through the story we shared, we did not really take the steps to get our sales going until the second week of February. One could argue that we were a little slow on taking those steps on the inventory sale, and we missed it. Hindsight is always good, but we have taken the steps now, and we are selling. Jeff MezgerChairman and CEO at KB Home00:57:09It was a one-quarter short-term event, and we think we've addressed it. You want to go over anything else? Rob McGibneyPresident and COO at KB Home00:57:16No, I think that covers it. I mean, I personally expected that we would get more same-quarter sales and closings in Q1 than we did in Q4, and it did not turn out that way. Operator00:57:24Thank you. Next question comes from Susan McClary with Goldman Sachs. Please proceed with your question. Thank you. Susan McClarySenior Equity Research Analyst at Goldman Sachs00:57:38Good afternoon, everyone. My first question is on the design studios. Given that the consumer does seem to be under a bit more pressure, and you did have to take some actions to improve affordability, have there been any changes in what you're seeing in the design studios, either in terms of what they're choosing or anything in terms of what you're offering there? Rob McGibneyPresident and COO at KB Home00:58:02Not really, Susan. It's interesting. Rob McGibneyPresident and COO at KB Home00:58:05Our percentage of revenue that people are spending in the studio has stayed really consistent. Our square footage of homes has stayed really consistent. As to what they're picking, I think we've seen somewhat of a shift. Really, we started seeing that, oh, maybe a couple of years ago when rates moved up, it was less kind of fit-and-finish type things and spending more on things that buyers knew they couldn't change or that were difficult to change later, like room configuration, structural options, cabinets, countertops, things like that. No, they continue to spend about the same amount. For the most part, buyer behavior in the studio has been consistent. Susan McClarySenior Equity Research Analyst at Goldman Sachs00:58:44Okay. That's helpful. You mentioned that you are locking in your lumber for a bit longer just given the potential inflation or the inflation that we're already seeing in that product. Susan McClarySenior Equity Research Analyst at Goldman Sachs00:58:59Can you talk a bit more about how long that goes out for, how we should think about the potential impact if lumber continues to move from here? What you're seeing in other wood products as well, has there also been upward movement in some of those too? Rob McGibneyPresident and COO at KB Home00:59:14I haven't seen it in the other products. That may be something that's coming down the road. We haven't seen that yet. As to the lumber, we try to diversify on how we lock. We'll have 90 days, maybe 120 days on the long-term end. Some divisions we're locking for shorter term. As we look at the recent locks, most of our divisions are covered for the majority of the quarter here. Rob McGibneyPresident and COO at KB Home00:59:42At some point, if lumber continues to go up and depending on what happens with tariffs, and we do not know what that is going to do to domestic lumber pricing, but when those locks expire, we will have to adjust. Operator00:59:55Thank you. Our final question comes from the line of Trevor Allinson with Wolfe Research. Please proceed with your question. Good evening. Trevor AllinsonDirector and Senior Research Analyst, Homebuilders & Building Products at Wolfe Research01:00:08Thank you for taking my questions. First, you talked about closing out of Inspirata, and Las Vegas has been a really strong margin market for you guys. Can you talk about what type of gross margins you are earning at Inspirata and maybe the margin impacts as that closes out? When do you expect final sales to be from there? Jeff MezgerChairman and CEO at KB Home01:00:27Yeah. Trevor, we really do not get into what the gross margin is per community. Jeff MezgerChairman and CEO at KB Home01:00:34Rob and I have both shared that our Vegas margins are strong and well above the company average. The two land deals that we acquired, we had tied up for a couple of years each, had to take them through the entitlement process. They have a very good basis, very similar products to what we offer at Inspirata. And we have a lot of builders knocking on the door wanting to get lots from us. So we know we're in a good spot. Our expectation is Vegas will continue to be at the top for us in terms of profitability and margins. It's a great team and a very land-constrained market. Trevor AllinsonDirector and Senior Research Analyst, Homebuilders & Building Products at Wolfe Research01:01:12Okay. Understood. Appreciate that color. Second question is on spec production levels. We've heard several builders talk about pulling back on spec production given the slower start to the year. Trevor AllinsonDirector and Senior Research Analyst, Homebuilders & Building Products at Wolfe Research01:01:27Are you guys adjusting your spec production as well? What are your expectations for spec mix as a percentage of 2025 deliveries, and how does that compare to your spec mix as a percentage of 2024 deliveries? Thanks. Rob McGibneyPresident and COO at KB Home01:01:41Right now, we're running about the same. We've been about 60% BTO, 40% spec. Historically, we've been closer to 80/20. Our goal right now is to drive BTO sales. We do see higher margins on BTO sales. Our goal is to fill the pipeline with build-to-order sales. That will drive our starts and get back towards, over time, get back closer to that mix of 80% BTO, 20% inventory, or spec. Operator01:02:05Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, that does conclude the question-and-answer session. That also concludes today's teleconference. We thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect your lines.Read moreParticipantsExecutivesJeff MezgerChairman and CEORob McGibneyPresident and COOBill HollingerSVP and Chief Accounting OfficerAnalystsMatthew BouleyDirector and Senior Equity Research Analyst at BarclaysMatt JohnsonHead of Real Estate at UBSMatt JohnsonAnalyst at UBSStephen KimSenior Managing Director at Evercore ISIMike DahlManaging Director at RBC Capital MarketsMichael RehautManaging Director and Senior Equity Analyst at JPMorganAlan RatnerManaging Director at Zelman and AssociatesJay McCanlessManaging Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst at WedbushSam ReidSenior Equity Research Analyst and Executive Director at Wells FargoSusan McClarySenior Equity Research Analyst at Goldman SachsTrevor AllinsonDirector and Senior Research Analyst, Homebuilders & Building Products at Wolfe ResearchPowered by Earnings DocumentsSlide DeckPress Release(8-K)Quarterly report(10-Q) KB Home Earnings HeadlinesKB Home Posts Q3 Double Beat Despite 'Weakening' Housing MarketSeptember 22 at 5:11 PM | benzinga.comKB Home Posts Q3 Double Beat Despite 'Weakening' Housing MarketSeptember 22 at 4:46 PM | benzinga.comWATCH THIS BEFORE SEPTEMBER 25TH!!James Altucher says a quiet government filing could reveal Elon Musk's biggest move yet, and almost nobody has noticed it. Altucher believes the filing could matter to as many as 1,806,000 Americans in the years ahead. He explains why Musk buried it and what it could mean, free of charge.September 22 at 1:00 AM | Paradigm Press (Ad)KB Home Cuts Margin Outlook as Housing Conditions WorsenSeptember 22 at 4:45 PM | wsj.comKB Home Q3 Revenue Falls 20% to $1.30 BillionSeptember 22 at 4:31 PM | quiverquant.comQKB HOME REPORTS 2026 THIRD QUARTER RESULTSSeptember 22 at 4:10 PM | prnewswire.comSee More KB Home Headlines Get Earnings Announcements in your inboxWant to stay updated on the latest earnings announcements and upcoming reports for companies like KB Home? Sign up for Earnings360's daily newsletter to receive timely earnings updates on KB Home and other key companies, straight to your email. Email Address About KB HomeKB Home (NYSE:KBH) (NYSE: KBH) is a homebuilding company that designs, constructs and sells residential properties in the United States. Its offerings primarily include single-family homes, with communities and floor plans intended for first-time buyers, move-up buyers and other owner-occupants. The company also provides homebuyers with opportunities to personalize selected features and finishes through its build-to-order approach. The company operates in several major housing markets across the United States, including locations in Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Idaho, Nevada, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas and Washington. In addition to home construction and sales, KB Home supports the homebuying process through affiliated or partnered mortgage, title and insurance services, where available. KB Home was founded in 1957 by Donald Kaufman and Eli Broad under the name Kaufman and Broad. It expanded from its original operations in Detroit into a national homebuilding business and adopted the KB Home name in 2001. Jeffrey Mezger has served as the company's chairman and chief executive officer, leading its operations and strategic direction.View KB Home ProfileRead more More Earnings Resources from MarketBeat Earnings Tools Today's Earnings Tomorrow's Earnings Next Week's Earnings Upcoming Earnings Calls Earnings Newsletter Earnings Call Transcripts Earnings Beats & Misses Corporate Guidance Earnings Screener Latest Articles Meta’s Muse Highlights Arm’s Growing Role in AI InfrastructureNucor and Steel Dynamics Just Pulled Back—The Steel Story Still Looks Strong5 Dividend Stocks That Combine Income, Earnings Growth, and Wall Street SupportDespite Record Sales, Texas Roadhouse Has Beef With Beef CostsEncore Capital Group Has Doubled—But Its Best Tailwind Won’t Last ForeverCoach’s Momentum Powers Tapestry Despite the Stock’s Sharp Pullback3 Retail Stocks Getting Crushed and the Long-Dated Options Trade on Each One Upcoming Earnings Cintas (9/23/2026)Costco Wholesale (9/24/2026)Micron Technology (9/30/2026)NIKE (10/1/2026)Accenture (10/1/2026)PepsiCo (10/8/2026)Delta Air Lines (10/9/2026)America Movil (10/13/2026)BlackRock (10/13/2026)Citigroup (10/13/2026) Unlock superior investment research and tools. 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PresentationSkip to Participants Operator00:00:00Good afternoon. My name is John, and I'll be your conference operator today. I would like to welcome everyone to the KB Home 2025 Q1 Earnings Conference Call. Currently, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Following the company's opening remarks, we will open the lines for questions. Today's conference call is being recorded and will be available for replay at the company's website kbhome.com through 24 April 2025. I would like to turn the call over to Jill Peters, Senior Vice President, Investor Relations. Thank you, Jill. You may begin. Operator00:00:34Thank you, John. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today to review our results for the Q1 of fiscal 2025. On the call are Jeff Mezger, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; Rob McGibney, President and Chief Operating Officer; Bill Hollinger, Senior Vice President and Chief Accounting Officer; and Thad Johnson, Senior Vice President and Treasurer. During this call, items will be discussed that are considered forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements are not guarantees of future results, and the company does not undertake any obligation to update them. Due to various factors, including those detailed in today's press release and in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, actual results could be materially different from those stated or implied in the forward-looking statements. Operator00:01:33In addition, a reconciliation of the non-GAAP measure of adjusted housing gross profit margin, which excludes inventory-related charges, and any other non-GAAP measure referenced during today's discussion to its most directly comparable GAAP measure can be found in today's press release and/or on the investor relations page of our website at kbhome.com. With that, here is Jeff Mezger. Jeff MezgerChairman and CEO at KB Home00:02:00Thank you, Jill. Good afternoon, everyone. In addition to reporting our Q1 results today, we also announced that Rob Dillard will be joining the company as our Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Rob is a well-rounded leader with a solid financial and operational background. He's an excellent addition to our deeply talented and long-tenured finance and accounting team. We're excited for him to join us next week. Moving on to market conditions. Consumers are continuing to cope with affordability concerns and uncertainties around macroeconomic and geopolitical events. As a result, consumer confidence has declined sequentially each month for the past several months, and homebuyers are moving more slowly in making their purchase decisions. Jeff MezgerChairman and CEO at KB Home00:02:52While longer-term housing market conditions remain favorable, driven by demographics and an undersupply of homes, demand at the start of the spring selling season has been more muted than we have seen over the past few years. As a result of this softer selling environment, we are lowering our revenue guidance for fiscal 2025. As for the details of our results, we produced total revenues of $1.4 billion and diluted earnings per share of $1.49 in our Q1. We delivered fewer homes than we anticipated due to about 150 less inventory home sales than we projected, and a timing issue that impacted roughly 75 of our deliveries in Southern California following the wildfires early this year. Even with this lower level of deliveries, our gross margin held up well at 20.3%, excluding inventory-related charges, above the midpoint of our guided range. Jeff MezgerChairman and CEO at KB Home00:03:57With our SG&A of 11%, we produced an operating income margin of 9.3%. We increased our book value per share to over $57, a 12% year-over-year increase. We generated 2,772 net orders in the Q1. While our average community count was in line with our projection and our cancellation rate was fairly steady, our monthly absorption pace per community was 3.6 homes compared to 4.6 in last year's Q1. At the time of our last earnings call in January, traffic in our communities was higher year-over-year, along with higher website leads, and mortgage interest rates were similar to where they were in the year-ago period. These metrics indicated to us that we were set up to experience a typical start to the spring selling season, similar to how the 2024 spring season unfolded, with the strongest weeks of the Q1 still ahead of us. Jeff MezgerChairman and CEO at KB Home00:05:03With a meaningful number of planned new community openings, we expected to achieve a flat year-over-year net order comparison for the full quarter. As the quarter progressed following our last call, it became apparent that demand was softer than we expected. We took action in mid-February, evaluating our base pricing in every community relative to local market conditions, then repositioning our communities with a focus on offering the most compelling value. We were encouraged by buyers' responses to these actions and saw a meaningful improvement in our net orders in the last two weeks of the quarter, which has continued into the first three weeks of our Q2. For the trailing five weeks, our weekly net sales have averaged about 300, which equates to an absorption pace of 5.1 net orders per month per community. This is approaching a more normalized order pace for the spring. Jeff MezgerChairman and CEO at KB Home00:06:03While we're pleased with this progress, we recognize that the environment is dynamic, and we are committed to taking further action if necessary, depending on how market conditions evolve. Let me pause here for a moment and ask Rob to provide more details on our deliveries and sales, as well as an operational update. Rob. Rob McGibneyPresident and COO at KB Home00:06:24Thank you, Jeff. I will begin by addressing our shortfall in deliveries, which trailed our Q1 expectation by approximately 225 homes. Our revenue guidance is comprised of anticipated deliveries of homes from our backlog, together with sales of inventory homes, which has represented about 40% of our business in each of the past two fiscal years. We expected about 150 more sales of inventory homes than we generated and fell short of this projection due to factors impacting our sales overall, which I will discuss in a moment. We also had roughly 75 deliveries in Southern California shift into the Q2 as we were unable to get meters, utility hookups, and final clearances on completed homes, with crews diverted to priorities related to wildfires in the Los Angeles area that occurred in January. Rob McGibneyPresident and COO at KB Home00:07:17While we expect to close all of these homes in the Q2, and many have already been delivered, we will continue to navigate any wildfire-related issues that arise. Moving on to net orders. At the time of our last earnings conference call, six weeks into our Q1, our net orders were down about 12% year-over-year. Historically, we begin to see net order momentum build in late January and early February, similar to what we experienced in the year-ago Q1, even with mortgage interest rates in the high 6% range at that time. However, the 2025 spring selling season started slower than in previous years, reflecting a decline in consumer confidence as consumers processed the variables relating to macroeconomic and geopolitical issues. This decline in confidence is leading homebuyers to take longer to make their purchase decisions. Rob McGibneyPresident and COO at KB Home00:08:11In addition, a number of our planned community openings were delayed until late in the Q1 or early in the second, contributing to our Q1 net sales result. With healthy traffic in our communities, we took steps in mid-February to drive an increased urgency to purchase by improving affordability for our customers. We focused on offering the most compelling value, reducing base prices, and in many cases, lowering or eliminating incentives, helping to offset the margin impact of those price changes. As we have shared in the past, although buyers are sensitive to rates and monthly payments, the primary motivation of most of our customers is securing a home that meets their needs at the best price. We thoughtfully and selectively adjusted pricing as needed on a community-by-community basis to stimulate demand and achieve a higher selling pace. As Jeff shared, consumers responded to these adjustments. Rob McGibneyPresident and COO at KB Home00:09:07We believe we have found the market and are encouraged with our trend over the last five weeks, equating to an average absorption pace of 5.1 net orders per month per community within our targeted range for the spring. While base price is the main motivator for our customers, we also provided mortgage-related support to our buyers as needed. Mortgage concessions represented approximately 2% of our housing revenues in our Q1, two-thirds of which were rate buy-downs, and the other one-third was the cost of loan locks. Our sales goals for this year are closely connected to our community count expectations. At the end of the Q1, we had 255 active communities, up 7% year-over-year, contributing to an average of 257, which also increased 7%. We continue to expect to maintain roughly 250 to 260 active communities throughout our 2025 second and Q3s. Rob McGibneyPresident and COO at KB Home00:10:06In addition, we anticipate ending the year with approximately 250 communities before growing our count again in early 2026, just ahead of that spring selling season. Our backlog at the end of February was over 4,400 homes valued at $2.2 billion. We maintained a normalized cancellation rate during the quarter, indicating that buyers are ready and able to close on their homes. While our backlog is lower year-over-year, our build times are nearly 20% faster as compared to the prior year quarter. This allows us to sell built-to-order homes later in the year while still achieving a year-end closing. Our 2025 deliveries will be comprised of the homes we have in backlog, built-to-order homes sold through the early part of our Q3, and sales of inventory homes. We started approximately 2,800 homes in the Q1, contributing to over 6,500 total homes in production. Rob McGibneyPresident and COO at KB Home00:11:06We remain consistent in aligning our starts with sales, with the majority of those starts already sold. Overall, our build times, measured in calendar days, improved sequentially in the Q1 to 147 days, our best level in the last four years. For build-to-order homes, our build times are currently 139 days. This progress in the Q1 moves us closer to our goal of 120 days from start to home completion, which is at the lower end of our historical range. Several of our divisions are already building homes at this target level, and we are confident in our ability to achieve this goal company-wide. Rob McGibneyPresident and COO at KB Home00:11:48The benefits of lower build times are numerous, including a more compelling selling proposition for our customers purchasing a build-to-order home relative to the 60 days it takes to complete an existing or speculative home sale, better inventory turns, monetizing our assets quicker, and a lower cost of interest rate locks due to the shorter duration of the lock, which will help reduce our mortgage concession cost over time. We are continuing to rely on our long-standing trade relationships with our Even flow production to ensure that we have the crews necessary to get our homes built. We have not seen any meaningful trade labor shortages to date. Our value engineering and studio simplification efforts are yielding results as we further reduce direct costs on our homes started during the Q1. Rob McGibneyPresident and COO at KB Home00:12:37Direct costs were down both sequentially and year-over-year, helping to offset the impact of our price reductions and increases in land costs. Our costs, including lumber, are protected for almost all of our Q2 starts under the terms of our supply contracts. Regarding lumber, we had started moving toward longer locks in expectation of tariffs being implemented. Our national purchasing team, working with our divisions, has effectively managed to hold off anticipated tariff-related cost increases to date. Before I wrap up, I will review the credit metrics of our buyers who finance their mortgages through our joint venture, KBHS Home Loans. We increased our capture rate sequentially with 90% of buyers who finance their homes using KBHS. Higher capture rates help us manage our backlog more effectively and provide more visibility in closings, which benefits our company as well as our buyers. Rob McGibneyPresident and COO at KB Home00:13:35In addition, we see higher customer satisfaction levels from buyers who use our joint venture versus other lenders. The average cash down payment was stable both sequentially and year-over-year at 16%, equating to about $80,000. On average, the household income of customers who use KBHS was about $133,000, and they had a FICO score of 746. Even with one-half of our customers purchasing their first home, we are still attracting buyers with strong credit profiles who can qualify for their mortgage while making a significant down payment. In conclusion, while we believe we are aligned with current market conditions based on the solid net orders we have generated over the past five weeks, we will remain nimble in our approach to the spring selling season, balancing pace and price at the community level. Rob McGibneyPresident and COO at KB Home00:14:27Our community count trajectory is consistent with the update we provided at the start of the year, and we have a significant number of planned grand openings in the Q2, as well as the second half of this year. We are committed to executing on the day-to-day fundamentals of our business, maintaining our high customer satisfaction levels, further improving build times, value engineering our products to lower direct costs, and balancing pace and price to optimize each asset. We are confident in our ability to navigate varying market conditions. With that, I will turn the call back over to Jeff. Jeff MezgerChairman and CEO at KB Home00:15:02Thanks, Rob. We continue to view the long-term outlook for the housing market favorably and are investing in our future community count growth to support our objective of expanding our scale. During the quarter, we invested $920 million in land acquisition and development, of which about 40% went toward development and fees. The Q1 will likely represent the high watermark in our land spend for this year and included the purchase of two large parcels in Las Vegas, which will provide continuity as we replace our highly successful Inspirada community. Over the past five years, we've averaged nearly 450 deliveries each year at Inspirada across multiple product lines, and the community is approaching closeout. The two new parcels will offer similar product lines as Inspirada at affordable price points. Jeff MezgerChairman and CEO at KB Home00:15:59Our Las Vegas business is one of our largest and strongest performers, having consistently generated the highest gross margins and profitability in the company. We continue to adhere to our underwriting criteria, product strategy, and price points, and remain mindful of the housing market and overall economy with the intention of adjusting our investment spend as necessary to match local market conditions. Our investments have contributed to increasing our lot position by 41% year-over-year to over 78,200 lots owned or controlled, 46% of which are optioned. We have expanded our lot position with a focus on capital efficiency, developing lots in smaller phases wherever possible, and balancing development with our start space to manage our inventory of finished lots. We've continued our balanced approach of investing in our growth while returning nearly $70 million in capital to shareholders in our Q1, including $50 million in share repurchases. Jeff MezgerChairman and CEO at KB Home00:17:07In closing, I want to recognize the entire KB Home team for their ongoing commitment to serving our homebuyers. Although we have reduced our revenue guidance for fiscal 2025 to between $6.6 billion and $7 billion, primarily to reflect the lower level of net orders that we generated in our Q1, we are encouraged that homebuyers have responded to the actions we took to offer the most compelling value, and we have experienced solid net orders in the past five weeks since implementing those adjustments. While we believe we have taken the appropriate steps to achieve our sales targets, we have a strong and experienced team that has successfully navigated varying market conditions while supporting our customers and operating our business effectively. We are confident in our ability to continue to do so. Jeff MezgerChairman and CEO at KB Home00:18:00Our company is well-positioned for future growth with the lots owned or controlled to support higher revenues with a strong balance sheet and significant financial flexibility. Long-term, we remain committed to enhancing shareholder value through profitable scale expansion and producing higher returns, as well as continuing to return cash to shareholders. Bill Hollinger will be providing a financial review today, and I'll turn the call over to Bill. Bill HollingerSVP and Chief Accounting Officer at KB Home00:18:30Thank you, Jeff. As Jeff and Rob mentioned, the Q1 proved to be challenging for a variety of reasons. As a result, our performance fell short of our expectations, primarily due to lower-than-anticipated deliveries, which impacted both our revenues and net income. Nevertheless, several other key metrics for the quarter were aligned with our previous guidance. Regarding our current outlook for the remainder of 2025, we are revising our guidance to reflect our Q1 results, including the more muted start to the spring selling season, as well as the selective price adjustments we implemented in mid-February to stimulate demand and support a higher sales pace. In the 2025 Q1, we produced housing revenues of $1.39 billion, net income of $110 million, and diluted earnings per share of $1.49. Bill HollingerSVP and Chief Accounting Officer at KB Home00:19:26We continued our balanced approach to capital allocation with $920 million in land-related investments, up 57% year-over-year, while returning over $69 million to our stockholders through share repurchases and dividends. We also kept our debt-to-capital ratio at a healthy level. Our housing revenues for the Q1 were down 5% compared to $1.46 billion in the prior year period due to a 9% decrease in the number of homes delivered, partly offset by a 4% increase in their overall average selling price. The 2,770 homes delivered in the quarter represented a backlog conversion rate of 62% compared to 55% in a year-earlier period, largely reflecting our improved build times. As Rob mentioned, the number of homes delivered was below expectations, mainly due to fewer-than-expected deliveries from inventory sales and utility services related to delays at some of our Southern California communities as local resources were diverted to address wildfire-related priorities. Bill HollingerSVP and Chief Accounting Officer at KB Home00:20:42With our revised outlook, we expect Q2 housing revenues to range from $1.45 billion-$1.55 billion. Looking at the 2025 full year, we are now forecasting housing revenues in the range of $6.6 billion-$7.0 billion. The upper end of this range remains within our previous guidance. In the Q1 our overall average selling price of homes delivered was $500,700, also in line with our guidance. Reflecting our selective price adjustments and anticipated mix of deliveries, we expect our Q2 overall average selling price to be approximately $488,000. For the full year, we are revising our overall average selling price projection to be in the range of $480,000-$495,000. For context, our prior guidance was $488,000-$498,000. Homebuilding operating income was $127.3 million compared to $157.7 million for the year-earlier quarter. Bill HollingerSVP and Chief Accounting Officer at KB Home00:22:02Operating income included inventory-related charges, totaling $1.5 million in the current quarter and $1.3 million in the prior quarter, consisting in both periods entirely of land option contract abandonments. Our homebuilding operating income for the quarter was 9.2% compared to 10.8% in last year's Q1, mainly due to our lower housing gross profit margin. We anticipate our 2025 Q2 homebuilding operating income margin will be approximately 8.5%. For the 2025 full year, we are projecting this metric to be approximately 9.4%, which primarily reflects expected sequential improvement in the latter half of the year, driven by increased operating leverage on higher revenues. Our current projection is lower compared to both our prior guidance of approximately 10.7% and the year-earlier results of 11.1%. These operating income margins assume no inventory-related charges. Our 2025 Q1 housing gross profit margin was 20.2% compared to 21.5% for the year-earlier quarter. Bill HollingerSVP and Chief Accounting Officer at KB Home00:23:25The decrease mainly reflected higher relative land costs, increased homebuyer concessions, and reduced operating leverage. Excluding inventory-related charges, our housing gross profit margin was 20.3%, above the midpoint of our guidance for the 2025 Q1. For the year-earlier quarter, it was 21.6%. We are forecasting a housing gross profit margin for the 2025 Q2 in the range of 19.1% to 19.5%, and for the full year, in the range of 19.2% to 20.0%, assuming no inventory-related charges. Our gross margin outlook for both periods reflects lower selling prices than we anticipated in January, reduced operating leverage on lower delivery volume, and the challenging operating environment. Our selling, general, and administrative expense ratio for the quarter of 11% was up slightly from the year-earlier quarter. Bill HollingerSVP and Chief Accounting Officer at KB Home00:24:31Considering the operating leverage effect was approximately 40 basis points, we would have achieved our guidance had we delivered or we had generated the delivery volume we were expecting. We are forecasting a 2025 Q2 SG&A ratio to be in the range of 10.6% to 11.0%, and expect our 2025 full year SG&A ratio will be in the range of 10.0%-10.4%. Our income tax expense of $29.8 million for the quarter represented an effective tax rate of 21.4% compared to 20.6% for the year-earlier quarter. The current quarter rate compared favorably to our guidance primarily due to the impact of tax benefits related to stock-based compensation. We expect our effective tax rate to be approximately 24% for the Q2 and full year. As we said on our previous earnings call, our 2025 full year tax rate is expected to be up slightly from the previous year. Bill HollingerSVP and Chief Accounting Officer at KB Home00:25:45This is primarily due to decreases in energy tax credits. In terms of our bottom line results for the quarter, we generated net income of $109.6 million and diluted earnings per share of $1.49. This compares to net income of $138.7 million and diluted earnings per share of $1.76 for the same quarter of last year. Turning to land, we continue the positive momentum of the past few quarters in expanding our lot portfolio to position our business for future growth and larger scale. In the Q1, we significantly increased our investment in land acquisition and development to $920 million, ending the quarter with inventory balance of just under $6 billion, up 13% from a year ago. In keeping with our balanced approach to capital allocation, we repurchased 754,000 shares of our common stock at a total cost of $50 million during the quarter. Bill HollingerSVP and Chief Accounting Officer at KB Home00:26:53With $650 million remaining under our current common stock purchase authorization and our healthy balance sheet, we have both the ability and intent to repurchase additional shares. However, the pace, volume, timing will depend on factors such as our operating cash flow, liquidity forecasts, land investment prospects and needs, the market price of our shares, and the conditions in the housing market and broader economic environment. We ended the quarter with total liquidity of $1.25 billion, including $268 million of cash and $982 million available under our unsecured revolving credit facility, with $100 million of cash borrowings outstanding. Our Q1 is typically when we have the lowest cash inflows and highest outflows of our fiscal year. As such, in executing on our priority of investing in land and land development for future growth during the 2025 Q1, we utilize cash borrowings from our credit facility. Bill HollingerSVP and Chief Accounting Officer at KB Home00:28:09As a result, our debt-to-capital ratio increased to 30.5% at the end of the quarter compared to 29.4% at the end of 2024. We do not expect to have any cash borrowings outstanding under the credit facility by the end of our fiscal year. We have no debt maturities until our term loans' 2026 expiration, with our next senior note maturity in June of 2027. In closing, although conditions were more challenging than anticipated in the 2025 Q1, we believe we are well-positioned to meet our updated outlook for the remainder of the year. At the same time, we plan to remain flexible to meet the evolving market conditions as we maintain our focus on balancing pace and price at each of our communities. Bill HollingerSVP and Chief Accounting Officer at KB Home00:29:07Overall, we believe our solid financial position, including our liquidity profile and long runway for debt maturities, and robust land portfolio will enable us to navigate the current environment, continue to be opportunistic and balanced with allocating capital in 2025 and beyond, and sustain our returns-focused growth strategy centered on enhancing long-term stockholder value. We will now take your questions. John, please open the line. Operator00:29:39Thank you. We will now be conducting a question-and-answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate that your line is in the queue. You may press star two to remove yourself from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. We ask that you please limit yourself to one question and one follow-up. Thank you. Operator00:30:05One moment, please, while we poll for questions. The first question comes from the line of Matthew Bouley with Barclays. Please proceed with your question. Matthew BouleyDirector and Senior Equity Research Analyst at Barclays00:30:22Hey, good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for taking the questions. I wanted to start with the price adjustments and specifically the question around kind of customer elasticity. I guess what level or what magnitude of price adjustments would you say was enough to kind of get consumers off of the fence here? How are you kind of able to separate what you were doing with these price adjustments relative to the kind of typical seasonal uptick that you would see in March anyway? Just any more detail around the magnitude and thinking about sort of protecting the backlog as well and customer elasticity. Thank you. Jeff MezgerChairman and CEO at KB Home00:31:03Matt, I can make a few comments, and then I'll hand it to Rob for some specifics. There are a lot of things going on in the market, and as we always share, it really is sub-market specific and community specific. As the divisions were working to get sales, in a lot of cases, they fell in the trap of starting to offer what I would call a pocket incentive where you do not advertise it. The consumer does not know about it until they get into the sales office, and then they would find out there is a $10,000 studio credit available if you buy this weekend and things like that. Jeff MezgerChairman and CEO at KB Home00:31:40As we analyzed things, we decided, "Let's get rid of all that, what I would call noise, and just take it to price so we can advertise on the website what the real price is net that we were already offering anyway." A lot of the moves we made really were cleaning out incentives and taking it to price. That was step one. Past that, as we analyzed each community, if there were communities not selling that were not aligned with the resale data in that sub-market or what new home competitors were doing, we took additional steps to pull the price down further as needed. It's not like you can identify that price will work. You have to keep going till you get your sales momentum back. We took some steps, and we were bold all the way around. Jeff MezgerChairman and CEO at KB Home00:32:32As I shared in my comments, it was the very first week after that our sales picked up quite a bit. Rob can give you some of the detail between offsets by reducing incentives versus pure price adjustments. Rob McGibneyPresident and COO at KB Home00:32:47Just to add some specifics to it, it was roughly half of our communities that we lowered base price. As Jeff said, at the same time, we were cleaning up some of the clutter with the incentives. It was a range, just depending on what the sales pace was, where resale levels are trending and tracking, all of those factors kind of into the mix. It ranged from $5,000 up to $30,000 in some cases. I think the average, if you put them all together, of the communities that we decreased, it was $15,000 or $16,000. Call it 3% on our ASP. Rob McGibneyPresident and COO at KB Home00:33:25At the same time, when we cleaned up the incentives and the other things that Jeff mentioned that were being offered, the net reduction or impact to margins is much lower than that. In fact, since we've made those moves, the margin roughly on deals that we're seeing come into backlog is only about 75 basis points lower. We feel pretty good about where we are right now. The communities where we've made the moves are performing. We've got some that have actually started performing better than what our expectations are. We've got some opportunity to claw back price and margin there. A handful of others that we still need to do some work on. Generally, we feel good about how we're positioned after making those moves, and the consumer has really responded to it well. Matthew BouleyDirector and Senior Equity Research Analyst at Barclays00:34:07Okay. Great. No, thank you for that color. Matthew BouleyDirector and Senior Equity Research Analyst at Barclays00:34:12I guess that leads me then to the next question around the margin. I think the way you implied the kind of gross margin cadence, I think you even said the operating margin should be improving sequentially by the second half relative to Q2. I think I heard you say that leverage on some of your fixed costs is a driver of that. You just mentioned there is a 75 basis point hit from the kind of net price adjustments. If I think about kind of what is going on with land basis and development costs, other type of inflation, you mentioned lumber on top as well. Can you just kind of bridge all those pieces together and pluses and minuses and give a little confidence on what drives that step up in margins in the second half? Thank you. Jeff MezgerChairman and CEO at KB Home00:34:57Yeah. Jeff MezgerChairman and CEO at KB Home00:34:57Matt, in general terms, the margin per house is holding pretty similarly as the year unfolds. Everything that we've done is already included in the guide that we provided today. The improvement in the operating margin is coming from leverage. Whether it's SG&A improvement or a little bit of gross margin improvement, both sides, it comes from delivering more houses. Operator00:35:21Thank you. The next question comes from the line of John Lovallo with UBS. Please proceed with your question. Matt JohnsonHead of Real Estate at UBS00:35:35Hey. Thanks, guys. You actually have Matt Johnson on for John. I appreciate the time. I guess just following up on that last question, I'll try and do some quick math. I think at the midpoint of your guide's guide, the implied back half gross margin is roughly, call it 19.5%. Matt JohnsonAnalyst at UBS00:35:51It would be down about 30 basis points relative to the first half, despite home sales being up, call it 36%, half over half. I guess could you just help us think through some of the puts and takes there as we go from the first half into the second half? Maybe how much of that is from mix as opposed to like-for-like deterioration? Jeff MezgerChairman and CEO at KB Home00:36:10I want to take a shot at that. Rob McGibneyPresident and COO at KB Home00:36:13Yeah, it was a little hard to hear your question, but if I got it. There is always mix involved, but we are not expecting a whole lot of mix here. We are expecting, and not to say it this way, but the midpoint of the uncertainty, let's say, ranges. We did look at kind of a high low. Sort of looking at things as they are today is kind of what our forecast reflects. Rob McGibneyPresident and COO at KB Home00:36:40There is really not much more I can add to that than just say that we are expecting some smaller than improvement in the housing gross profit margin, mostly due to leverage, not due to anything else. That is because of our second half, it is going to be what we believe is going to be far stronger volume-wise. We think most of the leverage that we are going to get to an operating income level will come from the SG&A side. Matt JohnsonHead of Real Estate at UBS00:37:15That all makes sense. I appreciate it. I guess just one more. For the full year, you guys are expecting home building operating margins of 9.4%. That would be down, call it 170 basis points year-over-year. Matt JohnsonHead of Real Estate at UBS00:37:30If we look back at last year, operating margins on a regional basis were actually up in both the Southwest and West Coast, while the pressure really came from the Central and the Southeast. I guess do you guys expect a similar story to play out this year or how we kind of think about that on a regional basis? Jeff MezgerChairman and CEO at KB Home00:37:48Yeah, I think that's the right way to look at it. West and Southwest are performing better financially right now. Operator00:37:59The next question comes from the line of Stephen Kim with Evercore ISI. Please proceed with your question. Stephen KimSenior Managing Director at Evercore ISI00:38:05Yeah, thanks very much, guys. Appreciate all the detail. I guess my first question relates to the cycle times. Rob, you talked about the fact that cycle times are down and all the benefits that that provides for the company. Stephen KimSenior Managing Director at Evercore ISI00:38:21I think you indicated you had not seen any trade labor shortages to date. We are curious as to, are you not seeing, have you not seen any, for lack of a better term, ICE raids in any of your communities or your neighboring communities? Is that what you meant by no trade labor shortages or are you, in fact, seeing some of that, but it is just not meaningfully disruptive enough to call out? You had said, I think direct costs were down year-over-year and quarter to quarter. I was wondering if you could quantify that a little bit for us. Rob McGibneyPresident and COO at KB Home00:38:54Sure. I will start with the first one last. Sequentially, our direct costs are down about 1%. year-over-year, we are looking at about 3%. That is to quantify that piece. Rob McGibneyPresident and COO at KB Home00:39:07On the labor, I'd say outside of the normal things that we would deal with outside of any kind of regulatory change or ICE or immigration policy change, it's really just been the same. We've seen nothing at all related to immigration. I mean, any kind of normal-type labor shortage we might see on a day-to-day basis in a typical year may still be there, but nothing at all, Steve, related to immigration policy. Stephen KimSenior Managing Director at Evercore ISI00:39:37That is really encouraging. I appreciate that. Right, of course. Yeah. We always have to add that these days, for sure. Okay. That is helpful. I guess if you could just mention, I think you gave a very nice discussion about how you've eliminated the pocket incentives and you sort of went to sort of putting these base prices on the internet and all that. Stephen KimSenior Managing Director at Evercore ISI00:40:03It sounds like you're talking about this as a permanent change. I just want to make sure that I'm interpreting that correctly. You've referred to it as, I think, cleaning up and getting rid of some of the noise and all that kind of thing. I just wanted to understand, is this something that you feel no longer has value, or is there something maybe more nuanced that you want to message there? Operator00:40:24Steve, it's an interesting evolution in that when you have a large backlog, you're sensitive to moving price because then you've got to go also deal with the backlog. Our division started doing these pocket incentives. Q4, we were already working hard to get sales, and a lot of them crept in. They were still there in the Q1. Operator00:40:51It was not reflected in our pricing, but it was reflected in the margins we were generating. We decided, "Let's get out of it and get back to our core values." I would say it is a permanent move because it is the way we like to run the business. Unfortunately, we fell in the trap of doing some things to try to get sales that really were not aligned with how we present the best value to the customer. Operator00:41:15Thank you. The next question comes from the line of Mike Dahl with RBC Capital Markets. Please proceed with your question. Mike DahlManaging Director at RBC Capital Markets00:41:25Hi, thanks for taking my questions. I guess I want to press on gross margins a little bit more. Maybe just remind us kind of in the current environment with what your guidance incorporates for the revenue ramp as the year goes on. Mike DahlManaging Director at RBC Capital Markets00:41:44How would you normally think about how that translates to seasonal gross margin uplift? Just trying to get a sense of really the flat-top guide in second half at face value does not seem awfully conservative. Maybe you can just help us think through and remind us what that seasonal component actually is from a quantitative standpoint. Leverage by quarter. Bill HollingerSVP and Chief Accounting Officer at KB Home00:42:07Yeah. I would say that it is, again, our normal sequential cadence in that we are going to see improving quarter to quarter with really what I will say, taking out the leverage impact with a more or less flat gross. The improvement is, again, mostly from the leverage. We are not looking to get much uplift in our gross margin without the leverage. I think, again, what we are hoping and what I maybe said earlier was that there is, again, a lot of uncertainty out there. Bill HollingerSVP and Chief Accounting Officer at KB Home00:42:54We're not expecting it to get worse. We're not expecting it to get better. This really reflects kind of what we think is in our backlog. With the sales price reductions that we've taken to date, obviously, things change. It'll impact our margins. Right now, it seems or it assumes a relatively static order right now. Mike DahlManaging Director at RBC Capital Markets00:43:23Okay. My follow-up is still along the same lines. It's more, why is that really the base case assumption when you just saw in a short period of time the need to make some changes? Your competitors are making changes based on what we see in terms of price. The demand environment has been very uncertain. There's an uncertain cost environment. Your sales pace, it's great to hear that it picked up, but it's still down year-on -year. Mike DahlManaging Director at RBC Capital Markets00:43:59Why is assuming that conditions will remain stable the right base case under the current conditions? Jeff MezgerChairman and CEO at KB Home00:44:08We're pleased with our sales right now. As I shared in my prepared comments, we're approaching a normal Q2 sales pace with the current margins we're guiding to. It's based on everybody's going to have their own crystal ball on where the world's headed. As we see it today, we took steps that are working. The steps we took are reflected in the margin guide we've provided, and we're hitting our sales numbers. Right now, we're pretty comfortable with where things are at. Operator00:44:41Thank you. The next question comes from the line of Michael Rehaut with JPMorgan. Please proceed with your question. Michael RehautManaging Director and Senior Equity Analyst at JPMorgan00:44:52Thanks. Good afternoon, everyone. Michael RehautManaging Director and Senior Equity Analyst at JPMorgan00:44:58First, I just wanted to, and I apologize if I missed this earlier, but I'd love to get kind of any regional differentiation across your footprint when you talk about, in particular, adjustments that you needed to make with incentives or pricing. If there were certain markets or even sub-markets that were kind of more prevalent or at the top of the list, and by contrast, which markets might be on the stronger end of the spectrum? Rob McGibneyPresident and COO at KB Home00:45:31Sure, Mike. I'll take that, Rob. As we always say, it really is market by market or even sub-market by sub-market. I'll talk about resale a little bit here because we've always viewed resale as our biggest competitor, regardless of what the new home competition is doing. We've got to stay tethered to that pricing with a reasonable new home premium to drive volume. Rob McGibneyPresident and COO at KB Home00:45:55As far as the regional color, I would say in broad terms that Florida was our softest state in terms of sales demand in the Q1. Because of that, we took the most pricing action there to find the market. I'd say roughly two-thirds of our communities, probably the same price range between $5,000 and $30,000. We had to do more in Florida to find that market. I'll just start with Jacksonville, for example, using that as a proxy. They've got just under, right at, seven months of supply. It's a month or so above what a historical norm would be in terms of resale supply or where most people consider a balanced market. Resale is a really efficient market. One positive that we see in that market is it is getting absorbed. Rob McGibneyPresident and COO at KB Home00:46:44You've got days on market are actually down year-over-year despite that higher supply, but it's likely because pricing has moved. We're seeing that market react. We've done the same thing in that market to find where we need to be to sell. Where we can offer that new personalized energy-efficient product with a small premium to resale, we find that we win. You look at the rest of Florida, Orlando was similar. They've seen their days on or their months of supply increased to about the same level. Have not seen the pricing levels adjust there like they've started to in Jacksonville. Their days on market continues to be pretty elevated. Made some more significant adjustments there. The other business we have is Tampa. It's a similar situation, but lower overall months of supply than Jacksonville or Orlando. Rob McGibneyPresident and COO at KB Home00:47:36Even within those three markets, it's sub-market by sub-market. Some perform better than others, and we've had to adjust the moves that we're making based on that. Texas, I would say the story was a little more mixed. Many of our communities continued to perform very well, while there were others that we had to adjust in. I'd say Houston and Austin held the best. The moves there were smaller and more surgical, where San Antonio required some more broad-based adjustments. When you get into the West, really resale is still very low in terms of where it's been historically. I mean, most of them are in the three or four months of supply range and haven't had to make as many moves in the West, and Southwest has held better. Michael RehautManaging Director and Senior Equity Analyst at JPMorgan00:48:24Thanks. That's a great overview. Appreciate all the detail there. Michael RehautManaging Director and Senior Equity Analyst at JPMorgan00:48:33I guess secondly, I'd love to shift towards the balance sheet. If you could just kind of remind us how you're thinking about leverage over the longer term and kind of the dividends and share repurchase and perhaps what the potential is for that over time. Jeff MezgerChairman and CEO at KB Home00:48:56Mike, our strategy really hasn't changed from where we've been the last few years. Our ratios will improve because we're growing the equity. We don't see the need to go get more debt. We don't have any maturities for a while. When they do come up, we'll deal with them. Top priority, we have to grow the business and get scaled and be more profitable. Along the way, we're taking our excess cash and repurchasing shares. We've done a lot of that over the last three to four years. That's more of an opportunistic play. Jeff MezgerChairman and CEO at KB Home00:49:36It depends on the price and what our cash forecasts are and where we think we're headed. As Bill shared in his comments, we don't expect to have anything out on the revolver. We had a little blip in Q1 because of the two Vegas land deals. That'll get absorbed and go away over the balance of the year. Our ratio guide would be it's going to keep coming down as we grow the equity. It's not going to be taking debt out. Grow the business and be opportunistic with the other things and take your excess cash and give it back to the shareholders. Operator00:50:13The next question comes from the line of Alan Ratner with Zelman & Associates. Please proceed with your question. Alan RatnerManaging Director at Zelman and Associates00:50:22Hey, guys. Good afternoon. Thanks for all the detail so far. Alan RatnerManaging Director at Zelman and Associates00:50:28My question on the price adjustments, I'm just curious if you can look at the last five weeks of solid order results following those adjustments. Would you say those have been driven more by kind of going back to buyers that were already in the pipeline, giving yourselves the tools to kind of go back and say, "We've made these adjustments," and that kind of pulling them off the sidelines given the hesitancy? Or would you say that it's actually translated to significant increases in new traffic, maybe coming from the website advertising and actually pulling through more sales from new individuals coming into the pipeline? Alan RatnerManaging Director at Zelman and Associates00:51:07Yeah, that's a good question. It's both. I think more so it's bringing in new buyers. I mean, as Jeff said, we are putting our best foot forward, advertising the best price on the internet. That's where most people see us first. Alan RatnerManaging Director at Zelman and Associates00:51:19I think that's generating new traffic that we weren't seeing before. I don't have a ratio or a percentage for you. I'd tell you that some percentage of it is going back to buyers that we already had in the queue or that were former leads that didn't purchase, couldn't purchase, maybe couldn't qualify. With some of the adjustments we've made, we have made sales from going back to past traffic. The majority of it is new traffic that's being generated from the website. Alan RatnerManaging Director at Zelman and Associates00:51:46Got it. That's encouraging. I think what we've heard in the past is one of the, I guess, trickier things for build-to-order builders making base price adjustments is the large backlogs that you guys have. I'm curious how you're dealing with your backlog. Alan RatnerManaging Director at Zelman and Associates00:52:04Are you proactively reaching out to them in the 50% or so of communities where you have adjusted prices? Are you offering those same adjustments? Are you taking it on a case-by-case basis as they get closer to the closing dates? Any color there would be helpful. Rob McGibneyPresident and COO at KB Home00:52:20Yeah, we're taking it on a case-by-case basis. Really, when you look at a lot of the deals that we have in backlog, everybody struck their own deal. I mean, Jeff mentioned some of the other incentives that were being offered and deals being made. As we looked at that, we really do not think there is a lot of backlog exposure. We have taken some adjustments where that was not the case, and the new deal might be better than what somebody had in backlog. In the grand scheme of things, it is pretty small. Operator00:52:50The next question comes from the line of Jay McCanless with Wedbush. Please proceed with your question. Jay McCanlessManaging Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst at Wedbush00:52:57Hey, thanks for taking my questions. The first one I had, just wanted to find out, are you guys still having problems getting meters and other things in California as the rebuild has started there? Rob McGibneyPresident and COO at KB Home00:53:11It's interesting. We kind of always have problems getting meters in California. Yeah, it is a little, it's still a little more delayed from the impact of the fires. I think we're through the worst part of that. A lot of the rebuilding hasn't started. I think that's going to be a long and ongoing process. It's a big state, a lot of volume, a lot of crews. I don't expect that that's going to be a significant ongoing drag on our timing to get meters and utility hookups on houses. Rob McGibneyPresident and COO at KB Home00:53:40Still there a little bit, getting better every day. I think that that'll be back to normal fairly soon. Jay McCanlessManaging Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst at Wedbush00:53:48Okay, good. That's good to hear. In the 50% of communities where you didn't adjust pricing, I guess, were you able to raise prices in some areas? If so, maybe highlight one or two that did well during the quarter or highlight one or two regions that did well during the quarter. Rob McGibneyPresident and COO at KB Home00:54:07Yeah. As I mentioned, the West and Southwest has performed better. I mean, on the half that we didn't move prices down, we didn't move prices down because they're selling at pace, and we're happy with what they've done. Now that the spring selling season is here, there are opportunities to lift. I'll just use Las Vegas as one of the examples. I mean, that market continues to do very well for us. Rob McGibneyPresident and COO at KB Home00:54:30Jeff mentioned the two large purchases that we've had there, but we've continually raised price there and continue with really strong absorptions. We've got similar examples throughout some places in California as well on the communities that were already performing well that are now doing even better. Operator00:54:51The next question comes from the line of Sam Reid with Wells Fargo. Please proceed with your question. Sam ReidSenior Equity Research Analyst and Executive Director at Wells Fargo00:54:56Awesome. Thanks so much. Just looking at your updated delivery guide, especially on the back of the Q1 orders, just on my very rough math, it looks like we're going to need to see backlog conversion accelerate in the second half. Could you just break down the balance between kind of maybe better cycle times or more spec homes? Because it would seem like one of those would potentially need to change to hit the revenue guide in the second half. Sam ReidSenior Equity Research Analyst and Executive Director at Wells Fargo00:55:21Just hoping to unpack that. Rob McGibneyPresident and COO at KB Home00:55:23Yeah. I mean, I think it's all the things that you just mentioned there, whether it's the improvement in cycle time or covering more of the inventory that's available. While it does increase from where we were in Q1, we think it's a very achievable number. I mean, you just look at where we were in Q4. It's similar to that. As we said, we're still targeting 120 days company average on cycle time. As we continue to progress towards that, that helps with the backlog conversion as well. Sam ReidSenior Equity Research Analyst and Executive Director at Wells Fargo00:55:56Yeah, that helps. Just to follow up to something in the prepared remarks, you delivered, I believe, slightly fewer inventory homes during the quarter than you were expecting. Can you just talk to why that number was a little bit lower? I think it was about 150 units. Sam ReidSenior Equity Research Analyst and Executive Director at Wells Fargo00:56:13Apologies if I missed. Can you just remind us what the gross margin spread historically has been between your build-to-order and your inventory homes? Was there any mixed benefit in the Q1 from that lower inventory home sale volume that we should be aware of? Thanks. Jeff MezgerChairman and CEO at KB Home00:56:28At the time we made our earnings call back in January, we assumed another 150 would sell and close in the quarter. We assumed more than that, but we missed it by the 150. If you think through the story we shared, we did not really take the steps to get our sales going until the second week of February. One could argue that we were a little slow on taking those steps on the inventory sale, and we missed it. Hindsight is always good, but we have taken the steps now, and we are selling. Jeff MezgerChairman and CEO at KB Home00:57:09It was a one-quarter short-term event, and we think we've addressed it. You want to go over anything else? Rob McGibneyPresident and COO at KB Home00:57:16No, I think that covers it. I mean, I personally expected that we would get more same-quarter sales and closings in Q1 than we did in Q4, and it did not turn out that way. Operator00:57:24Thank you. Next question comes from Susan McClary with Goldman Sachs. Please proceed with your question. Thank you. Susan McClarySenior Equity Research Analyst at Goldman Sachs00:57:38Good afternoon, everyone. My first question is on the design studios. Given that the consumer does seem to be under a bit more pressure, and you did have to take some actions to improve affordability, have there been any changes in what you're seeing in the design studios, either in terms of what they're choosing or anything in terms of what you're offering there? Rob McGibneyPresident and COO at KB Home00:58:02Not really, Susan. It's interesting. Rob McGibneyPresident and COO at KB Home00:58:05Our percentage of revenue that people are spending in the studio has stayed really consistent. Our square footage of homes has stayed really consistent. As to what they're picking, I think we've seen somewhat of a shift. Really, we started seeing that, oh, maybe a couple of years ago when rates moved up, it was less kind of fit-and-finish type things and spending more on things that buyers knew they couldn't change or that were difficult to change later, like room configuration, structural options, cabinets, countertops, things like that. No, they continue to spend about the same amount. For the most part, buyer behavior in the studio has been consistent. Susan McClarySenior Equity Research Analyst at Goldman Sachs00:58:44Okay. That's helpful. You mentioned that you are locking in your lumber for a bit longer just given the potential inflation or the inflation that we're already seeing in that product. Susan McClarySenior Equity Research Analyst at Goldman Sachs00:58:59Can you talk a bit more about how long that goes out for, how we should think about the potential impact if lumber continues to move from here? What you're seeing in other wood products as well, has there also been upward movement in some of those too? Rob McGibneyPresident and COO at KB Home00:59:14I haven't seen it in the other products. That may be something that's coming down the road. We haven't seen that yet. As to the lumber, we try to diversify on how we lock. We'll have 90 days, maybe 120 days on the long-term end. Some divisions we're locking for shorter term. As we look at the recent locks, most of our divisions are covered for the majority of the quarter here. Rob McGibneyPresident and COO at KB Home00:59:42At some point, if lumber continues to go up and depending on what happens with tariffs, and we do not know what that is going to do to domestic lumber pricing, but when those locks expire, we will have to adjust. Operator00:59:55Thank you. Our final question comes from the line of Trevor Allinson with Wolfe Research. Please proceed with your question. Good evening. Trevor AllinsonDirector and Senior Research Analyst, Homebuilders & Building Products at Wolfe Research01:00:08Thank you for taking my questions. First, you talked about closing out of Inspirata, and Las Vegas has been a really strong margin market for you guys. Can you talk about what type of gross margins you are earning at Inspirata and maybe the margin impacts as that closes out? When do you expect final sales to be from there? Jeff MezgerChairman and CEO at KB Home01:00:27Yeah. Trevor, we really do not get into what the gross margin is per community. Jeff MezgerChairman and CEO at KB Home01:00:34Rob and I have both shared that our Vegas margins are strong and well above the company average. The two land deals that we acquired, we had tied up for a couple of years each, had to take them through the entitlement process. They have a very good basis, very similar products to what we offer at Inspirata. And we have a lot of builders knocking on the door wanting to get lots from us. So we know we're in a good spot. Our expectation is Vegas will continue to be at the top for us in terms of profitability and margins. It's a great team and a very land-constrained market. Trevor AllinsonDirector and Senior Research Analyst, Homebuilders & Building Products at Wolfe Research01:01:12Okay. Understood. Appreciate that color. Second question is on spec production levels. We've heard several builders talk about pulling back on spec production given the slower start to the year. Trevor AllinsonDirector and Senior Research Analyst, Homebuilders & Building Products at Wolfe Research01:01:27Are you guys adjusting your spec production as well? What are your expectations for spec mix as a percentage of 2025 deliveries, and how does that compare to your spec mix as a percentage of 2024 deliveries? Thanks. Rob McGibneyPresident and COO at KB Home01:01:41Right now, we're running about the same. We've been about 60% BTO, 40% spec. Historically, we've been closer to 80/20. Our goal right now is to drive BTO sales. We do see higher margins on BTO sales. Our goal is to fill the pipeline with build-to-order sales. That will drive our starts and get back towards, over time, get back closer to that mix of 80% BTO, 20% inventory, or spec. Operator01:02:05Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, that does conclude the question-and-answer session. That also concludes today's teleconference. We thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect your lines.Read moreParticipantsExecutivesJeff MezgerChairman and CEORob McGibneyPresident and COOBill HollingerSVP and Chief Accounting OfficerAnalystsMatthew BouleyDirector and Senior Equity Research Analyst at BarclaysMatt JohnsonHead of Real Estate at UBSMatt JohnsonAnalyst at UBSStephen KimSenior Managing Director at Evercore ISIMike DahlManaging Director at RBC Capital MarketsMichael RehautManaging Director and Senior Equity Analyst at JPMorganAlan RatnerManaging Director at Zelman and AssociatesJay McCanlessManaging Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst at WedbushSam ReidSenior Equity Research Analyst and Executive Director at Wells FargoSusan McClarySenior Equity Research Analyst at Goldman SachsTrevor AllinsonDirector and Senior Research Analyst, Homebuilders & Building Products at Wolfe ResearchPowered by