First American Financial Corporation (NYSE:FAF) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

So, overall, we think investment is going to continue to be a tailwind for us, but certainly balances coming off has hurt us a little bit. I think we’ve always given this guidance for the last couple of years of — we would generate $15 million to $20 million of annualized investment income for every rate increase. Now we’re probably at the low end of that range given where our balances are.

Mark DeVries : Okay. Great. Thanks, Mark.

Mark Seaton : Thanks, Mark.

Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Mark Hughes with Truist. Please proceed with your question.

Mark Hughes: Yes. Thanks. Good morning.

Ken DeGiorgio : Good morning.

Mark Hughes: The ARPO, you talked about this phenomenon where you’re helped by the M&A on the residential side would have been 1% otherwise. When do you lap that? And does it go back to the kind of 1%?

Mark Seaton : We’ll lap it in the first quarter. So Q4 here is going to be the last quarter that we talked about that, Q1 will have a pure kind of year-over-year ARPO for the Southern California escrow issue.

Mark Hughes: Yes. Okay. And then success ratio still seems pretty good under the circumstances. Would you anticipate the success ratio should improve? It certainly all depends on order trends and a lot of things you can predict. But given what you see on the personnel front how are you thinking about success ratio?

Ken DeGiorgio : Hey, Mark, this is Ken. We think the success ratio will probably improve a little bit. But I’ll add too is we’ve always been real conscious about expense management and that level of consciousness will continue if the market continues to deteriorate, we’re forever conscious on expenses.

Mark Hughes: Yes. Okay. Thank you very much.

Ken DeGiorgio : Thanks.

Operator: Our next question comes from the line of John Campbell with Stephens. Please proceed with your question.

John Campbell : Hey, guys. Good morning. Happy New Year.

Ken DeGiorgio : Happy New Year, John.

John Campbell : Hey, just a two-part question here on the Specialty Insurance segment. Obviously, really good results there. We were thinking that pushed up a bit with the home warranty business, kind of, rising the surface. But you guys were well ahead of us. So the first question is could you maybe talk to what drove the sequential revenue growth in operating revenues and then why also the and other owes up so much? And then from a bigger picture do you think you’ve positioned that segment to return to growth this year?

Ken DeGiorgio: Well, I’ll give some high-level comments and then Mark can come in on the numbers. But I think, yes, it was a good quarter considering the pressure in the real estate market and the resulting impact on the real estate channel in our home warranty business. Our claims are still — the severity is still high on claims, but the frequency is down. So we think frequency is probably in more normalized levels. I’ll note that we’ve been deploying more resources in our direct-to-consumer business and we’re seeing good results there. And we’re also realizing some of the benefits of the price increases we’ve been making as well as a pretty meaningful pick-up in renewal rates.

Mark Seaton: Yes. The only thing I would add there John is at the end of the year in our home warranty business we do an annual kind of revenue true-up depending on how the claims patterns came in. And we got — our revenue true-up in home warranty was $8 million this quarter. So we did get a benefit of that. And there was about $2 million of expense associated with that too as we trued up our deferred acquisition costs. So it was about a $6 million impact to pretax for Home Warranty.