Welcome to the Fourth Quarter Investor's Conference Call. Today's call is being recorded. Legal counsel requires us to advise that the discussion scheduled to take place today may contain forward-looking statements that involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties. Actual results may materially different from any future results, performance or achievements contemplated in the forward-looking statements. Additional information concerning factors that could cause actual results to materially differ from those in the forward-looking statements is contained in the company's annual information form as filed with the Canadian Securities Administrators and in the company's Annual Report on Form 40-F as filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. As a reminder, today's call is being recorded. Today is Friday, February 10, 2017. I would like to turn the call over to Chief Executive Officer, Mr. Scott Patterson. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you operator and welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to our fourth quarter and year-end conference call. Thank you for joining us. Jeremy Rakusin, our CFO, is here with me today and he we will walk you through the quarterly and full-year financial results. But first let me summarize and talk about some of our highlights. This morning we announced very strong results for the December quarter with revenues up 21% over the prior year EBITDA up 37% and earnings per share up 46%. EBITDA margins increased 90 basis points to 8%, primarily due to the continued realization of efficiencies at FirstService residential. Jeremy will expand on our margin improvement and mix change in his prepared comments. The 21% revenue growth for the quarter was largely driven by the acquisition of Century Fire earlier this year, but also supported by solid 6% organic growth and numerous tuck-under acquisitions completed during the year within both FirstService Residential and FirstService Brands. In total this year, we completed 13 transactions, investing over $90 million. At FirstService Residential revenues grew 9% in total, 5% organically. Organic growth for the quarter was comprised of low single-digit year-over-year increases in management fee revenue from new contract wins enhanced by high single digit increases in ancillary services including property services, consulting, insurance and various other add-on services and products. Regionally growth was driven primarily by our major high-ruse markets, South Florida, New York City, parts of California, Dallas, Toronto, and Vancouver. As discussed in our third quarter conference call, organic growth was tempered by flat to low growth in certain of our mature HOA markets, homeowner association markets, including Nevada, Arizona, and parts of Florida, where we proactively resigned accounts, which were earning a sufficient margin. We effectively made a decision to reallocate resources more efficiently. Looking forward…

Thank you, Scott and good morning everyone. Before focusing on a review of our full- year results and segmented performance, I would like to recap Scott's comments regarding the strong consolidated fourth-quarter performance. Revenues at $381 million, up 21% versus the prior year quarter, adjusted EBITDA at $30.7 million up 37% and adjusted EPS at $0.41 up 46% versus Q4 2015. Now let me walk through our consolidated full-year results for 2016, which once again tracked closely to performance expectations set out at the beginning of the year. Specifically, annual revenues were $1.48 billion a 17% increase over the $1.26 billion for 2015 and supported by a solid 6% organic growth. Adjusted EBITDA was $130.3 million up 27% over the $103 million last year, with margins expanding 60 basis points to 8.8%, up from 8.2%. And adjusted EPS was $1.62, up 35% versus $1.20 per share reported for 2015. As disclosed in prior conference calls, as well as this morning's press release, certain adjustments have been made from GAAP operating earnings and per-share earnings to arrive at our adjusted EBITDA and EPS results, each of which are consistent in approach and disclosures adopted in prior periods. Moving on to our segmented review of FirstService Residential and FirstService Brands, my comments will address both the fourth-quarter and full-year performance within each reporting division. At FirstService Residential, revenues were $274 million for the quarter, a 9% increase versus the prior year. Our EBITDA increased 26% to $17.2 million, driven by 80 basis points of margin expansion quarter over quarter. The margin improvement reflects a continuation of streamlining the cost structure across our property management services platform. For the full year, FirstService Residential grew FirstService Residential grew 6% on an organic basis. Growth was larger and stronger in the first half of the…

[Operator Instructions] Thank you. So we do have the first question from Anthony Zicha from Scotia Capital. Go ahead sir.

Hi good morning gentlemen.

Hi good morning.

Scott, can you give us a bit more color on the top line growth? How you see 2017 progressing in terms of organic? And maybe a bit more color on the acquisition pipeline that you see?

I think it will be mid- to slightly better on a consolidated basis. In my prepared comments, I said mid- to low-single digit organic growth for FirstService Residential, that is our expectation, certainly for the first half of the year. FirstService Brands, mid to high-single digit. Home improvement market continues to be active, most metrics point to a strong year-on-year improvement. And most of our brands benefit from that, particularly CertaPro, California Closets, and Floor Coverings International and those are certainly two of the big three drivers. Century Fire will be a mid- to high-single digit grower as well. Organically, that is our expectation, that's what they have experienced for the last few years. In terms of the pipeline, I would say that it is very consistent with what we've seen over the last 18 months. It is solid. We are very active, as you know with our Company-owned platforms. So there will probably be more activity on the Brand side. We are also very active in fire protection, working with our new partners at Century. And then the level of activity at FirstService Residential is just ongoing and similar to the level of activity we've experienced for that division, really over the last 20 years. We are looking at property management tuck-unders, but also ancillary service companies that fill out our offering in certain markets.

Okay. And can you give us a little bit more color on the margin progression on the residential side? I know Jeremy had mentioned that will be a key driver for 2017? Can you elaborate a bit on that?

I will let Jeremy take that.

Thank you.

Tony, we made very good progress this year, 80 basis points to 7.6% at FirstService Residential. We expect the progression from here to moderate, a lot of the work in low hanging fruit has been done. But, still have a clear sight to 8% in that business, which will average up the margins on a consolidated basis, as I said, to over 8% for 2017.

Okay, that's great. Thanks very much.

Thanks Tony.

The following question is from Marc Riddick from Sidoti & Co. Please go ahead, Marc.

Hi, good morning.

Good morning.

Hey, Marc.

So I wanted to touch on – you already covered the acquisition pipeline question, which I do appreciate as well as your views on the home-improvement trends, which are great for the Brands. I was wondering if you could spend some time maybe taking us a little bit behind the scenes as far some of the pruning exercises that were described, as well as the some of the general thoughts that you are looking at with some of the more mature markets that you mentioned, be it the Nevadas and Floridas of the world, and maybe what you might be seeing as far as that reallocation process? Maybe there's other key markets or other specialties?

Right, okay. Well in terms of the pruning exercise I went into some detail last quarter and I will return there. And really describing what is a much greater discipline for us around increasing our price to ensure that we earn a fair margin. And in situations where we have existing contracts that are going out to bid holding our price and not chasing lower-cost competitors. Our retention in the past has gotten as high as 97%. I think what we realized is that it was unhealthy retention in many cases, in that we were chasing lower-cost bids to keep the account and eroding our margin as a result. This is a price competitive market, a price competitive business. We are not the low cost provider. Our goal is to differentiate through our level of service delivery, our level of professionalism, our knowledge leadership, and to continually increase the gap between our service offering and our competitors. And over time we are confident that we will win back the accounts that we are losing solely on price, but they will see the difference and ultimately come back to us and we are starting to see that, but it will take some time. Does that answer your question?

It does, it does. And then I was wondering if maybe you could share some thoughts as far as some of the markets that you are a little more positive on, as opposed to some of the mature markets you had mentioned earlier?

I would differentiate it as the high-rise environment, large master-planned communities, 55 plus communities, I think we have a particular expertise in those larger communities and a compelling offer. A small single-family home community, a homeowner association in some of our mature markets, Nevada, Arizona, and parts of Florida, I mentioned in my prepared comments, we are less able to differentiate ourselves in such a compelling way, and those are situations where we are particularly prone to price competition.

Okay. Are there any particular key states that are maybe worth calling out as more positive than what you may have seen six or eight months ago?

No, not relative to six or eight months ago. Again, the high-rise environment – those are markets where we thrive, and I mentioned New York City, Toronto, South Florida I think and particular parts of California. And also areas where they have large master-planned communities, and that's really everywhere.

Okay, great. I appreciate, thank you very much.

Thanks, Marc.

The following question is from Brian Martin. Please go ahead, sir.

Yes, thanks for taking my question guys. I want to dig into the strong margins for the Brands portfolio. Was that a function of the Century Fire performing better than your forecast? Or are you generating better savings out of your California Closets production facility? How should we think about that margin profile going forward?

I mean going forward we should be thinking, I mean there are moving parts for that division, mid-teens. So you know 15% for the year, relatively good number may drift down a bit if we start to bring in a greater number of tuck-unders under Century Fire as well as some California Closets and Paul Davis Company-owned, a lot of them at 8% to 10% margins. In some instances on those Company-owned, we are bringing in ones that are even sub-that, if they're underperforming and we see the prospect of elevating those margins. All of those acquisition activities could moderate the margins a little bit, but mid teens I think is a good number going forward. On the plus side, Century Fire has performed really well both on the top line and in terms of its margin performance. So that would've been one of the contributors. As well as operating leverage at our franchise operations – growth in those businesses, a lot of it you know drops to the bottom line. And progress on California Closets we are seeing, while we continue to make investments on that. We are going to be opening an eastern manufacturing facility. In the Company-owned operations themselves, we are seeing improved margins as well as service metrics, quality control, et cetera.

Thanks guys. That's all I had. Thank you.

Thanks, Brain.

The following question is from Stephanie Price from CIBC. Please go ahead.

Good morning.

Good morning, Stephanie.

On the M&A pipeline, wondering if you could talk about your appetite to larger deals similar to Century Fire in 2017?

We are always open-minded, Stephanie. I would say our pipeline today is primarily the nuts and bolts type of tuck-under that we historically do. So I don't see it, but it is possible. How's that?

Okay. Maybe switching gears a bit to capital allocation, can you talk a bit about your priorities here, versus M&A, versus dividends, versus share repurchase?

Stephanie, it's Jeremy. All driving towards growth, so we will have in the order of $35 million of capital expenditures plus or minus for 2017, and we are going to deploy as much capital as needed for our acquisition strategy. Those are the primary focuses. Dividends, we feel like we've got a very conservative capital structure today and strong cash flow generation that the extra $17 million to $18 million to pay out the current level of dividends is very conservative. It gives us lots of headroom to again do the growth priorities that I just mentioned. And then share buybacks, I would say that is really only a function of buying back shares to offset share issuances from employee stock option exercises. It is not a tool we are using proactively in any fashion.

Okay, great. Thank you very much.

The following question is from Michael Smith from RBC. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, and good morning.

Good morning.

Good morning. In the Residential business, I mean, besides calling the low margin contracts, you mentioned that you are expanding margins by driving efficiencies? I was wondering if you could give us a few examples?

A lot of it is in the client accounting area, a lot of it is around automation accounts payable, client accounting processing, taking costs out of the local markets. We have over 100 offices, and we are regionalizing and centralizing those costs of things like occupancy, rent, technology, telephony costs, and some reductions around headcount, have been part of the exercise there, just becoming more efficient and now allowing us with these new contract wins to layer them in at a higher margin without adding the associated incremental costs.

And how far are you through that exercise [indiscernible].

I mean if you look back to 2014, where we have taken the margins I would say we are significantly advanced. There’s still elements, particularly around client accounting that are in front of us. But as I said earlier, a lot of the low hanging fruit has been achieved, and we have 40 basis points to our target 8%, and then we will take a look at things, when we hit that target, for other potential opportunities. But I would say we are significantly advanced for the cost reduction exercise.

Okay, and just on the culling of the renewals and your contract, do you see any of your competitors becoming more disciplined? I think you mentioned that you are starting to see some of those communities come back to you? Did I hear that correctly?

Yes, we are winning back accounts, increasingly, I would say from certain markets where we lost on price. But I don’t know that our competitors are being undisciplined. It’s their business model, and the way they choose to manage their business. Most of them are small owner operated, and not necessarily focused on growth, but focused on maintaining their size. And they have a lower cost structure – in many, many cases they manage, they are thinner in terms of their org structure, I would say we are fully compliant with labor regulations and health benefit regulations, and our competitors, we just know that they, in some cases, are not and so our cost structure is higher, and I don’t see that changing. So again, we need to prove up our differentiators, and we do. And we sell a significant amount of business every year. And our retention rate of 95% to 97%, the rate we are selling derives a high single digit organic growth rate. When we get down to 93%, that organic growth rate that drops, and so that is where we are trying to find that balance.

Thank you. And just on the add-on products, or ancillary revenue, is there a – are you going through a big push to try and get that sort of add-on products some momentum? And particularly, I guess, with your high-rise business?

No, not – I wouldn’t say any particular push. I mean we are always focused on it in general. Over the longer-term, ancillary revenue should grow really in line with management fee revenue. As we add communities, we have an opportunity to provide more value to those communities. From time to time it does swing, and this quarter ancillary service revenue was higher, it is grown in lock step the first nine months of the year, but it was higher this quarter. Think that’s probably more of a function of our management fee revenue dipping then anything. But we did see growth in ancillary services, which includes things like amenity management, pool maintenance and repair, janitorial, developer consulting, insurance programs, and on and on. I mean there are many different offerings that we have.

Okay. And just switching gears to the Brands business, can you give us an update on the timing of the California Closets production facility? When that is going to start hitting, or finish, or start producing?

Well. So we have Phoenix, which is our western manufacturing facility, that is fully operational. Two lines, two full shifts, moving to three lines in 2017. And then by the end of the second quarter of this year, we will be up and running in Grand Rapids, Michigan with our eastern manufacturing facility.

And that, presumably would have an impact right away?

Well, we will certainly move production in some of our midwest and eastern facilities starting with the end of the second quarter, and start to ramp that up. I mean we have the blueprint now. We have gone through the learning and we are very confident that we can get Grand Rapids up and purring quickly.

Okay. And then just lastly, on the fire protection, it sounds to me like this is an area of focus for you, you like the business. Do you have, does your pipeline have a number of tuck-unders that you are looking at now? And is there ability to cross-sell, particularly with your condos?

So certainly, Century Fire and the fire protection market is a focus for us. I wouldn’t say it is more of a focus than our other businesses. But we do see it as a very similar opportunity, as an essential outsource property service. It is a very, very large market. It is a fragmented market. The revenue is recurring, there’s a lot about this industry that we love. And we have put together a plan, and over the next several years what we want to accomplish, where we want to go. First and foremost, it is filling out the service line within the seven states that we operate today within the southeast U.S. Sprinkler, fire alarm, and fire extinguisher, three service lines, and we are not full service in every office so we are looking to fill that out. And then in addition, Florida, Texas, and North Carolina are strategically important markets for us. I talk about the advanced deal which gets us into South Florida. There is more tuck-under activity for us that we want to accomplish in the state of Florida. And certainly we do have opportunities in our pipeline that I think would be representative of the size Century is within FirstService, so no more, no less. Cross-selling was your second question. That is definitely an opportunity for us. We see it as a long-term opportunity. The team at Century has met with our team at FirstService Residential and they have been out introducing themselves to our local and regional leaders, starting to develop a relationship. We will see some activity in 2017, but that is more of a long-term opportunity for us.

Great, thank you.

Thanks, Michael.

We do have one more question from Stephen MacLeod from BMO Capital, please go ahead.

Thank you, good morning guys.

Good morning, Steve.

I just wanted to circle around on ancillary services’ contribution in Q4. I mean, was there something that made it particularly strong? And I guess, are you able to quantify what the outsized impact would’ve been in Q4? And how you expect that to move through 2017?

It was a little higher than Q3, Q2, but not materially. At high single digits it stood out relative to the lower single digit management fee revenue, so we called it out because it did pull us up to the 5% level. But there is nothing in particular that I would call out, Stephen, we just had solid activity across a number of different ancillary service offerings. And I would expect to see it at a similar sort of mid to high single-digit level as we get into the year. We do have some seasonality in Q2 and Q3 with our pool business, and some other property services, which may impact. But again, long-term ancillary service revenue should grow in line with management fee revenue.

Okay. And then you mentioned, Scott, that you expected sort of the low single-digit to mid single-digit growth in FSR, for the first half at least? Is there something between the first half and the second half that would change the trajectory of that growth?

Well, I think that we are just working our way through a lot of these accounts that we are repricing. And some of them come up in the first six months, and there were many that were resigned, or we were terminated from, as clients chose lower cost alternatives in the second half of the year. So it’s the year-over-year impact, I would say.

I see. Okay, and then just on the 8% FSR margin. Do you sort of – I know Jeremy talked about some of the low hanging fruits already been achieved. But would you expect to achieve that 8% target, potentially before 2018? With the timeline that you historically put forth?

I wouldn’t go before 2018. I mean we feel good with where we are, we said 2018 to 2019 – I’m not sure we are going to hit it before 2018. But we feel very good with 40 basis points to hit that target. With the low hanging fruit and the size of the business being over $1 billion, meaningfully over $1 billion, moving the needle that 40 basis points still takes a bit of work. So I think the mood from here is going to be a little more incremental than what we’ve seen the last few quarters and couple of years.

Yes. Okay, that makes sense. And then any change to that 10% consolidated margin target by 2018 to 2019 target timeframe?

No, it’s likely to lag the 8%, only because of the mix at FirstService Brands, and bringing Century Fire on and elevating our Company-owned activity. At the end of the day, we think we will get there. But what we are really focused on is adding good top line growth through acquisitions, augmenting our base organic growth. And if we are buying those businesses at good valuations, the incremental returns on capital are going to drive strong cash flows, good returns, and that is really what we are focused on. So the margin will fall out of it. That is a 10% margin is something we are not really focused on, exactly when we hit the timing on it. We will ultimately drive to it – unlikely to be in 2018, at some point beyond that.

Great. Okay, that’s great, thank you very much.

Thank you.

[Operator Instructions] We do have one question here from Brandon Dobell from William Blair & Co. Please go ahead. Thank you.

Thank you, good morning guys.

Good morning, Brandon.

I want to focus back on Residential for a second. What is the odds, or the likelihood that the exercise you are running through in some of the mature markets and trying to call some of the lower margin or lower term contracts, that you would take that same effort and focus it on the rest of business? Is there a risk that we can see this as kind of a protracted period of lower organic growth? Just because you have the opportunity to go through the rest of the contracts, and dig down a bit harder on the pricing-margin dynamics?

No. I think we’ve targeted every contract that isn’t meeting our margin profile, and much of that has been addressed. And I don’t want to overplay this.

Right.

I mean, I would just say that it is a more disciplined approach. And I go back to this healthy retention versus unhealthy retention concept, where we are thinking twice before we are keeping an account at all costs. Because we know that there are, in every market, lower-cost competitors.

Okay, okay. It feels like 2017 in the multifamily space is going to be one of the first years in a long time where supply seems to be catching up with demand, or vice versa? How do you guys think about the potential headwind from less development the next couple of years? Is there any, I don’t think this is the case, but is there any impact on rising vacancies or just I guess that supply-demand dynamic across multifamily, and how you think about it relative to organic growth?

The rental market has never really impacted condo development, clearly.

Yes.

So I think you are referring to the rental market. Condo development continues to be quite strong in most markets, it is slowing in some in South Florida in terms of new projects, beginning the permitting process, that is slowing. But New York City, Toronto, Dallas, parts of California, still continues to be strong and we have said that over the years it has accounted for about 20% of our organic growth. And I think long-term, that feels like a good number for us.

Okay. And then the final one for Jeremy. Below the line stuff, the non-controlling interest and those things, any major changes as you think about modeling 2017 compared to how 2016 played out? I include both NCI as well as tax.

So on the NCI side I would say 10% to 12% of after-tax earnings is a good number. You want to be more conservative with 12%.

Yes.

And tax rate for 2017 – low- to mid-30%.

Okay, perfect. Thanks guys, appreciate it.

Thanks, Brandon.

[Operator Instructions] Thank you. There are no other questions at this point in time, sir.

Thank you again ladies and gentlemen for joining us. And we look forward to reporting on our first quarter in late April.