Frank V. McMahon - Vice Chairman
Analyst · Stephens Inc. Please go ahead
Thank you, Dennis. Our third quarter results were impacted by meaningful declines in revenue of our mortgage origination-related products such as appraisal, flood and electronic title plan information. However, many of our products, in particular our default-related and mortgage risk analytics solutions, experienced excellent growth relative to the third quarter of 2007. In spite of the challenging external environment, we continue to make considerable progress toward our financial and operational objectives. We have begun to realign our organizational structure and streamline our operations to centralize more functions. This effort will allow us to optimize resource allocation, promote best practices and eliminate redundancy. In the third quarter, we announced our plans to consolidate a number of our product companies into two new verticals: our Valuation Solution vertical, offering appraisal of BPOs and field services and our Outsourcing and Technology Solutions vertical, offering default, asset management, loss mitigation and offshore outsourcing services. We believe this realignment will enhance our ability to offer our clients a holistic solution and improve our operational efficiency. We will begin to see the benefits of these changes in the fourth quarter to some degree with improvements more visible in the first quarter of '09. Other operational initiatives are focused on data center centralization, product development centralization and facility consolidation. The changes we are making to our organization resulted in a number of non-recurring costs in the quarter. Therefore, we have identified these items to give the investment community a clear picture of the true earnings power of our division. From a financial standpoint, our goals are to increase revenue, improve EBITDA margins and improve free cash flow. Our compensation and billings programs are driven by our success in meeting these goals. Obviously, the external market has made growing our top line difficult in 2008. Although we have benefited from the fact that we have strong relationships with the country's top lenders, we have seen a number of our clients disappear one way or another over the last year. The introduction of new products, adding new clients and market share gains has softened the blow from low origination revenues fewer mortgage clients. We remain very encouraged by the momentum we are seeing in our mortgage risk analytics area. We have added 60 new investor clients this year and now have close to 200 clients in that area. Sales efforts in September and October have been strong, in particular our true loan to value, HPI and portfolio analysis products. Our front-end fraud tool, LoanSafe 2.0 has been adopted by many of the largest lenders this year. Client feedback has been overwhelmingly positive and we believe LoanSafe 2.0 has set a new standard in terms of fraud and risk analytic products. As you may imagine, we believe the recently announced TARP program offers opportunities for our business. We have had direct meetings with the Treasury, FDIC and Fed over the last six weeks to discuss how our products can enhance the availability of the government to analyze in value both securities and home loans. In addition, we believe the TARP program may increase the demand for our loss mitigation products and services. And finally, we believe we're well positioned to service sub contractors to the asset manager selected to manage the security and home loan programs established by the Treasury. Let me briefly summarize our third quarter results. Operating revenues declined 11.5% relative to Q3 '07. Adjusting for severance, our controllable cost, which we define as personnel costs and operating costs declined over 9% relative to the third quarter of last year. That resulted in adjusted EBITDA margins of 20.2% in the third quarter, which is down 200 basis points from the third quarter of '07. So despite our effort to reduce expenses, we did not accomplish our goal of expanding our EBITDA margins. Our profitability this quarter was adversely impacted by the results of our second lien title product company called ELS. Excluding the results of this business would have resulted in EBITDA margins expanding year-over-year. And I only note this because there are business model and product changes expected in ELS as we discussed on the second quarter call, and I'll talk about those in more detail later. I do want to be clear, however, that we recognize that we failed to accomplish our goal of expanding our EBITDA margins. However, we do believe we have taken... we do believe the steps we have taken this year as well as additional steps we plan to take over the next few quarters will position us to expand our margins going forward. Pages 14 and 15 reflect the pro forma results of the Information Solutions company for the third quarter. And these results include an allocation of corporate expenses including interest expense associated with approximately $560 million of corporate debt. As we enter the fourth quarter, our emphasis will remain on controlling costs and maintaining our focused approach to product developments. To date, we have initiated actions that are anticipated to generate approximately $80 million in annual savings. These actions have primarily centered on employee reductions, business line reorganizations, facilities consolidations and the consolidation of smaller data centers into our two primary data centers. Year-to-date, we have reduced domestic headcount by 800 positions and we have exited 44 facilities with current plans to exit an additional 17 by the end of the year. As market conditions continue to change, we will continue to adjust our cost structure to the extent possible. Turning to the Information and Outsourcing segment, revenues declined both on a sequential and year-over-year basis. Although the flood and appraisal business experienced a drop in volumes, the business lines focused on the default and loan servicing verticals continued to experience strong volumes with our REO business and our BPO basis, broker price opinion business, showing good year-over-year and sequential quarter growth. In addition, our Tax Service business, which already has the leading market share in the industry received mandates from two large lenders to convert from other providers to our company. Head count reductions as well as other cost savings initiatives are expected to result in annualized savings of $19 million. Our data and analytics solution segment posted mixed results. Our core logic, our mortgage risk analytics company had a strong quarter. However, other businesses tied to mortgage originations were impacted by the slowdown in lending activity. I have already commented on the success we are having with our investor clients and large banks. Other product development highlights include the introduction of a new default related AVM. This price enhances our existing market leading analytics and allows our clients to estimate market values based on... or market values on distressed properties. On the cost side, we have taken steps to reduce expenses with domestic head count down 10% and we have implemented initiatives expected to produce $20 million in annualized savings. Our adjusted EBITDA margins were 23.7% for the quarter, down from 27% last year. And when we announced our restructuring earlier this year, our plan was to convert ELS, our second lien company to an agent. This year we have experienced higher claim costs. This year, we've also redesigned the product. And these costs are expected to decline over time as the product is modified and the combination of the product change and the agency status is expected to reduce claim costs to the underwriter and improve margins to the Information Solutions company. First Advantage reported results earlier this week with pre-tax earnings declining relative to the third quarter of '07. The primary driver of the reduced earnings was softness in revenue, particularly in the lender and employer segments. There were pockets of strength, however. The Data Services segment continues to show improvement relative to prior year and the Multi-family segment continues to perform well in spite of market conditions. Finally, market contraction is providing opportunities to gain market share with our Lender Services segment now commanding over 50% market share. As in all of our businesses, FADB is focused on cost containment and cost savings with total 2008 savings initiatives of $30.8 million on an annualized basis. Adjusting for non-recurring items, the EBITDA margins at FADB were 20% in the third quarter. That concludes our remarks. We'd now like to open it up for questions. Question And Answer