David Hisey: Well, I think what Fred was saying is that we wouldn’t really be adding a lot of headcount, right? But what’s going to end up — what will end up happening is just because the first period is the seasonally slowest period, right? You’re not going to have as much revenue and so you’re probably on a percent basis, you might have a little bit of a spike and that’s going to be the time [indiscernible] and then as volume starts to come back, right, you’ll be getting the benefit of not adding people. There’ll always be some variable costs because there’s sales, expenses and things like that, right? But it won’t go up at the same rate as it’s gone up historically, right? So you’ll see a margin improvement over the period as the volume comes.
Soham Bhonsle: Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. And then just last one, your peers had cyberattacks and I guess, have you seen any sort of discernible change in just customer behavior or anything out there?
Fred Eppinger: No, I don’t think in the short term, there isn’t any material impact. In the long term, I think it’s quite helpful in that we’re one of the big four. We have one of the strong balance sheets. I think if you talk to agents today, they’re more kind of thoughtful about, boy, I got to spread my risk a little bit. And so — and that’s true, going to be true in commercial too. And the good ones, I think, always thought about it that way. But disproportionately, that should help us just because of our share position and how many — we don’t have a ton of agents that are fully dedicated to us or anything like that. So I think that people are going to be thoughtful about spreading their risk. And it’s a normal thing to think about, particularly in a business that’s such an oligopoly around four strong players.
Soham Bhonsle: Yeah. All right, thanks a lot, guys.
Operator: Thank you. We’ll take our next question from Bose George with KBW. Your line is open.
Fred Eppinger: Good morning, Bose.
Bose George: Hey, good morning. Wanted to ask just in terms of your margin expectations for the back half of this year, is that sort of looking at the year-over-year sort of improvement, or is that thinking sort of incorporating some potential pickup in macro? Just how are you thinking about later this year?
Fred Eppinger: It’s the macros, but it’s also both leveraging some of the work we’ve done, right? This excess capacity I talked about, it’s kind of sitting on the sidelines, right? And so, it’s both leveraging the volume increase, but also the kind of new profile of the business. And so it’s a little bit of both, but it’s driven by law. I mean, the issue is we just have so little purchase volume in the system right now versus a normal year that we’re kind of at the bottom as far as what we can do with expenses and managing our resources. I’m very proud of what we’ve done. But you would want to cut much more out of system. And that’s why this first quarter is challenging because we are going to be bouncing on the bottom in this first quarter.
Bose George: Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. And then actually the other orders number again had a pretty good jump. Is there sort of bulk activity? And can you just remind us what’s in there, is that mostly for the purchase?
Fred Eppinger: Sure. This is the last quarter where the BCHH acquisition comparison helps us, right, because we bought them at the beginning…
David Hisey: At the end of 2022. So they weren’t in last year, much in last year.
Fred Eppinger: Right. So it’s driven by that business, which is doing very well.
Bose George: Okay. So that order count for the quarter is kind of a reasonable run rate. And is there seasonality in there or is that more just sort of transaction based?
David Hisey: Yeah, it’s a transaction-based business, Bose. You think about that as sort of the buy-to-rent, built-to-rent business, and then there’s securitizations and the like. And so there’s property aggregation and then there’s disposition and securitization. So it’s a lumpy business and tends to move in chunks.
Bose George: Okay, great. Thanks.
Operator: Thank you. We’ll take our next question from John Campbell with Stephens Inc. Your line is open.
Fred Eppinger: Good morning, John.
John Campbell: Hey, guys. Good morning. So you guys, in the past, you’ve talked to — and Fred, I think you’ve talked specifically to maybe $20 million of ongoing investment or kind of discretionary spend around the long-term strategic initiatives. But Fred, in your prepared remarks, you talked to kind of a cautious approach for the first half, kind of from the macro standpoint. And then the prior question you talked to not really needing to add many heads from here because you’ve kind of built that excess capacity. So I think you might have somewhat answered this question, but the question here is, do you feel like that $20 million spend from last year is going to kind of hold steady this year? And will that be the case that the market recovers as much as the forecasters have pegged, or might you kind of glean into that possible market strength?
