M/I Homes, Inc. (MHO) Q3 2024 Earnings Conference Call October 30, 2024 10:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Phil Creek – Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
Bob Schottenstein – President and Chief Executive Officer
Derek Klutch – President-Mortgage Company

Conference Call Participants

Alan Ratner – Zelman
Kenneth Zener – Seaport Research
Alex Barron – Housing Research Center
Buck Horne – Raymond James
Jay McCanless – Wedbush

Operator

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the M/I Homes Third Quarter Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all lines are in listen-only mode. Following the presentation, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] This call is being recorded on Tuesday, October 30, 2024.

I would now like to turn the conference over to Mr. Phil Creek. Please go ahead.

Phil Creek

Thank you. Joining me on the call today is Bob Schottenstein, our CEO and President, and Derek Klutch, President of our Mortgage Company. First, to address regulation fair disclosure, we encourage you to ask any questions regarding issues that you consider material during this call, because we are prohibited from discussing significant non-public items with you directly. And as to forward-looking statements, I want to remind everyone that the cautionary language about forward-looking statements contained in today’s press release also applies to any comments made during this call. Also, be advised that the company undertakes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements made during this call.

With that, I’ll turn the call over to Bob.

Bob Schottenstein

Thanks Phil. Good morning and thank you for joining us today. We had a very strong third quarter highlighted by record homes delivered, record revenue and record income. We are particularly pleased with our results given the various macroeconomic headwinds and other challenges our industry faced during the third quarter. A variety of outside factors impacted traffic and demand and led to generally choppy selling conditions throughout the quarter. We saw a lot of movement in interest rates, initially trending down in anticipation of the Fed 50 basis point rate cut and then for some somewhat unexpectedly going up with mortgage rates hovering in the mid 6% range before rising to just above 7%.

And with Florida representing about 20% of our overall business, we were clearly impacted in the latter part of the quarter in our four Florida markets by both Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton. Fortunately for us, our homes held up very well, very little to no damage in any of our communities or certainly nothing significant, but clearly an impact on our operations, the ability to open our sales offices and the impact it had on traffic and demand during the latter part of the quarter. And then finally, the upcoming presidential election has also had some impact on consumer behavior. We all look forward to that being behind us. Despite all of this, our results stand strong as we executed at a very high level throughout the quarter.