KB Home (NYSE:KBH) Q1 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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Stephen Kim: No, that was really great and comprehensive, so I appreciate that. Next question I had related to your outlook. Jeff, you gave this as a lot of detail and what it looks like is you’re certainly expecting to see some strong closing, some strong orders that you’ve already experienced thus far in March. And so your volumes are going to be pretty solid here in 2Q, which leaves for the back half of the year. It does seem that you’re being pretty conservative here with your closings outlook if I assume that your orders per community remain in anywhere close to that four to five range, let’s say in 3Q, it would look to me like I should be able to exceed your closings guide. So I’m curious, is there something that I should be thinking about with respect to maybe your backlog turnover ratio or something in the third or fourth quarter?

Is that going to sort of stay stubbornly kind of low? Because I would assume that that would move back kind of to the ranges that you had maybe pre-COVID or approaching that by the fourth quarter just because of some of the things that Rob McGibney was talking about with cycle times improving and things of that nature. So can you help me understand why the closing guidance seems kind of low there for the back half of the year?

Jeffrey Mezger: Yes. For starter, Steve, we still have an extended build time. So we have divisions that are pretty much started out for this year by the end of this month. So if we continue to see strong sales and we convert to strong starts in Q3, it’ll be more of an early 2024 benefit than it will 2023. And I think what I was trying to message, if you think about it, our business model went through a whipsaw where interest rates spike. We had buyers that hadn’t locked their loan, goes way up. We’re still protecting our backlog, so we’re not doing things to get gross sales, we’re getting hammered with cans and now we’re coming out of that. Our can rate, we expect will continue to moderate back to historical levels. At the same time, we’ve taken steps to get our gross orders up.

So the guide is reasonable for the year. We are projecting a little higher backlog conversion over the balance of the year, but if this €“ the current market conditions hold, it sets up a very good start to 2024.

Operator: And the next question comes from the line of Matthew Bouley with Barclays. Please proceed with your question.

Matthew Bouley: Hey. Good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for taking the questions. So just a question on the margin outlook and the sort of guidance you gave around kind of relatively consistent margins trending into the back half of the year. Just looking at the order ASP during the quarter, recognizing there was some mix in that. I think it was down. It could be wrong, maybe $50,000 to $60,000 sequentially. I think you also mentioned your starting homes was about $19,000 of cost reduction in there. So maybe part of the answer is going to be around mix, but just curious around, what else are you seeing and what kind of gives you confidence to say that that margin in the back half will be relatively flat given these price reductions that are occurring? Thank you.

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