Tribe Property Technologies Inc

XTSX:TRBE

Earnings Call Transcript

[Operator]

Thank you for standing by. This is the conference operator. Welcome to the Tribe Property Technologies First Quarter 2023 Results and Corporate Update Conference Call. As a reminder, all participants are in listen-only mode and the conference is being recorded. [Operator Instructions]I would now like to turn the conference over to Shobana Williams, Vice President, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

[Shobana Williams, executive]

Great. Thank you, and good afternoon, everyone. Thank you all for joining us today.On our call today, we have Tribe's CEO, Joseph Nakhla; and our CFO, Jim Defer. Yesterday after market close, Tribe issued a news release announcing our financial results for our first quarter of 2023. This news release is available on Tribe's website under the Investors tab and is filed on our SEDAR profile.Before we begin, I would like to remind you that our discussions will include forward-looking statements that are based on management's current views and assumptions, and that this discussion is qualified in its entirety by the cautionary note regarding forward-looking statements that is appended to our news release. Please review our press release and Tribe's reports filed on SEDAR for various factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from the projections.In addition, reconciliations between any non-IFRS measures to their closest reported IFRS measures are included in our earnings release to the Canadian securities regulators. Please note that all financial information is provided in Canadian dollars unless otherwise noted. Following prepared remarks by Joseph and Jim, we will conduct a Q&A session, during which questions will be taken from analysts.With that, I will turn the call over to Jim, who will review our Q1 financial results. Jim, please go ahead.

[Jim Defer, executive]

[Audio Gap]In terms of gross profit, the gross profit for the first quarter of 2023 was $1.8 million at 39.2% compared to $1.8 million, 43.7% in the first quarter of 2022. In terms of adjusted EBITDA, which we believe is a more reflective measure of the company's cash flows, for the first quarter of 2023, adjusted EBITDA outflow was $1.86 million compared to $1.48 million for the first quarter of 2022. The company continues to have increased costs associated with being a public company and continues to invest in building its technology platforms and service personnel to prepare for anticipated organic and acquired growth. Please refer to our management discussion and analysis filed on SEDAR and our press release yesterday for further details on how we calculate adjusted EBITDA.Joseph, over to you.

[Joseph Nakhla, executive]

Good morning/afternoon, everyone. Joseph Nakhla with you. Thanks for taking interest in learning about our Q1 results.We've been busy again. Q1 started quite actively for us, especially with a number of activities around new business that we've been onboarding, I'll get into that in a second. Really from a high-level point of view, we've obviously closed on an acquisition -- an asset purchase acquisition of Warrington PCI Management that took quite a bit of work because it was a wonderful suite of buildings that needed to completely be digitized immediately because they're -- how new they were in terms of operations. That relationship is very important for us because Warrington PCI, as some of you may know, is one of Western Canada's largest developers. And by us taking over and purchasing their division of management, it also allows us to have a deep relationship with them for all their active developments occurring in the future. Hence, why they were very keen to put that particular division of theirs in good hands.We've also announced a full integration with the partner of ours, VendorPM, it's a digital service provider that actually has a full RFQ process. They essentially bring us more than 30,000 vendors to be integrated into our ecosystem, whereby our buildings can have access to a digital RFQ engine that allows any of our condo or rental communities to seamlessly be able to run an RFQ process for any of the projects. And it does open up the door for not only improvement of gross margin, but also revenue opportunities in the near future.We also concluded and deployed our Tarion integration. Tarion is a consumer protection warranty engine that operates in Ontario. It's very, very critical for anybody buying brand-new condos through presale through completion as this is the body that manages all warranties and keeps frankly, the developers, the construction companies and the operators honest as it pertains to the responsibilities when it comes to delivering a brand-new building or brand-new home for a buyer, this kind of pre-completion and post-completion warranty management. And we're the only company that has a full integration with them in Ontario. This opens up massive opportunity for new developers that are actually building new communities in Ontario to come to us due to the fact that this integration lowers their operating expenses associated with completion of the building.Our data now shows that a developer that uses our full suite of products lowers their operating expenses by about 60% in terms of HR, in terms of human resources required for a tower to be completed significant dollars. This number used to be about 40% 2 years ago. This is just bodes really well and it's reflected in our new agreements with new developers moving forward. And then we're incredibly pleased to have announced that we appointed Dan Feeny, our former CTO to take the role of Chief Operating Officer. That is really an indication of how closely our technology and our service delivery are coming together as an organization.As many of you may know, we've made 11 transactions to the 11 acquisitions to date, integrating them has meant a full integration of the technology of the IT infrastructure and also full digitization of these communities that we manage and it makes complete sense for us to pick our most experienced leader from a product and engineering point of view and put them in the heart of all of our operations. We're already starting to see wonderful results there.Highlights, as mentioned earlier, $4.66 million of revenue, about 10% increase over the same quarter last year. We have 6 new property developers. These are brand-new developers. So a developer could be built in multiple communities. And these developers signed with us to digitize all the communities based on the model that I referenced earlier. We've also signed 5 new projects for new constructions in both BC and Ontario. And in the Q1 period, we've also, in addition to that signed 9 management agreements, this would be transition a new build, so a management agreement.So obviously, a software agreement means they're using all of our digital services for the preconstruction right through construction and completion and transition means building that already exists somewhere else, managed by somebody else and comes to us leading that particular company. We still put all of our technology into these communities. And it just happened would like to also be an additional 9 communities were onboarded and began generating revenues because as you can imagine, signing a brand-new building in this period is not necessarily it's going to translate into revenue in this period. It often means that you sign it, you deploy it and then you start recognizing that revenue basically based on the future quarters coming through.And then another metric, which I think is important is 3 additional phases of drive-managed communities. And this is really reflecting on developers that are building multiphase communities, a developer that would go out and build 3 or 4 towers in one development. The first tower is up and running. People moves in, and we keep track of how often we win the next second and third and fourth phase. And with that as close to 1,000 to that number as possible. So we're very proud of that, but this would be additional 3 communities that in the same markets we were already in that we're already starting to manage further.High-level analysis in terms of the revenue. I think the one metric that we keep a very close eye on is our revenue per customer, and we constantly seek to drive that up. So if you look at the graph on the right-hand side, you'll see that we've lifted again. We've had the highest revenue per customer we've ever -- in Q1 we've ever accomplished. And that's after a bit of a dip that occurred a couple of quarters ago. And again, remember, when we do buy companies, they often do not generate as much revenue per customer as we do. And we basically take these assets. We digitize them, we start delivering solid service allows us to increase the revenue per door in addition to the fact that we have tools on our applications that allow us to generate more revenue per door, and you'll see that lift as you see there.We do often cobble up a number of low revenue-generating communities. And in different markets, we have relationships with other property management companies whereby smaller or communities that may not be a perfect fit for our full service delivery that we acquired through one of our acquisitions, we'll cobble those up and make them and put them in the right hand in that market with somebody that's arguably low tech or paper heavy due to the fact that they may be charging less and it might be a better fit for that community.Just to remind everybody how we make money, the 3 revenue generators for us. We have software and service, which is our MRR, very heavy business that's a high percentage of our revenue comes from that line. And that includes our brand-new buildings that are coming through the door, brand-new construction buildings. And we also include the transition buildings, transition would be buildings that are currently managed by a third party that's competitive of ours, that's traditional. And then we essentially through lead generation and nurturing win that business.You'll see here transactional fees. Again, we had a great quarter whereby we generate revenues in person or in-app purchases. This is a long list of items that is some of the key items there. In this year, we're focusing quite a bit on our banking services and financial transactions. We'll finally hit a pretty high benchmark of the amount of dollars that we actually manage, especially on the condo side, we're starting to approach close to $200 million of deposits on behalf of our communities. And that number is significant enough to allow us to deliver some further services or buildings that you're going to be hearing more about in '23. And finally, we do have a digital services and partnerships revenue. This is the ability for us to generate revenue through our financial services, insurance services in the home marketplace, and those numbers continue to grow per door.Key for us for '23, the key goal is to continue to increase our monthly recurring revenue. This is both through organic and acquisition means expand our acquisition pipeline. I've always signaled that we would like to strengthen. I feel really strongly about our presence currently in British Columbia, Alberta, but I would like to strengthen our position in the GTA market. So we'll continue to be very active in those areas. And you'll see us be making moves there. We'll continue to drive efficiencies in the business, resulting in improved gross margins. We had an improvement in our gross margin in Q1. And I've indicated that I believe our business can be in the 45% to 50% gross margin rate. We did almost 40% in Q1, and I think you'll see improvements on that.Moving forward, continue to invest in our products and innovate to add functionality. We've deployed a large number of features in the last 2 quarters, and we'll continue to do that. This is directly resulting in our opportunity to add more revenue per door and also gross margin. And then the kind of -- the fact that we deployed in Q3, Q4 '22, our digital services, we'll continue to add more to that. Watch for us being active in adding more partnerships in that marketplace.Growth outlook. Despite inflation, interest rates and construction trends and depending on where you are in the country, different outlook on real estate. We do not see any signs of business slow down. Q2 is looking very, very strong for us. 9 new construction projects already signed for Tribe HomePro software. All that is showing is just an indication that more and more a matter what has happened in the market, more and more developers and people that are building brand-new communities are seeking automation and seeking tools like ours to lower their operating overhead as they enter into completion of these communities, extremely healthy pipeline with record proposals sent by both software and management services sales teams. We've never had the number of leads, numbers that we're currently dealing with and the number of proposals that we're putting out to either developers or transition buildings.We are very, very active. We continue to be active in our cost saving strategies in Q2. We're starting to realize the benefit of being a national player, where we have a number of active projects as we speak about bringing all of our accounting services under one umbrella, all of our operating services and support under one umbrella, and we're starting to see improvement in our gross margins, and you'll see improvement of that in our EBITDA as well and especially the results will start showing up in the back half of 2023. We're currently actively negotiating a number of M&A opportunities. And no surprise to you that I've already indicated where those markets of interest are.So I'll pause here and see if there's any questions that would -- any of the analysts would like to ask. If there's no questions, if you will hand it back to -- no, there's so many people in the queue. My apologies.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] The first question comes from Fred Blondeau from Laurentian Bank Securities.

[Frederic Blondeau, analyst]

Two quick questions for me. First, on the gross margin. I was wondering if you could give us a bit more -- I guess, a bit more color on how we should view it this year and next? Is it fair to say that we should start seeing more meaningful improvements in Q3 numbers and then even more significant improvements in 2024? Or will it be more linear?

[Joseph Nakhla, executive]

In the gross margin, you'll see improvement just to kind of further shed light on that, Fred. Obviously, the analysts know, but just for everybody who's listening, inclusive of our cost of goods is all of licensed property managers, licensed property accounting teams, all of compliance and all of our digital services that are underpinning our overall services for these buildings. And due to the lack of predictability of completion of new construction that occurred Q2, Q3 and started to improve in Q4, Q1 and this year has started with a bang in terms of new construction, new buildings being completed. You'll see us being very active in onboarding those buildings and as we're speaking, Q1, Q2, Q3, if there be quite a bit of activities there. The reason that's relevant is because these buildings are complete, we start realizing the MRR, and we'll also start realizing and recognizing the revenue on the digital services side. So you'll see an improvement in our gross margins. I do think our business have fully kind of integrated operating will start pushing between -- in the mid-40s and I anticipate this in Q3, Q4 to be in that neighborhood.

[Frederic Blondeau, analyst]

Okay. No, that's great color. And then just going back to the acquisition pipeline you mentioned, Joseph. Is it more focused on transformative types of transactions or I guess, your usual more nimble opportunities or both? And I understand it's a bit unfair question.

[Joseph Nakhla, executive]

No worries. Well, it's no surprise to anybody that knows us that we're -- first things first. We do not announce and we use or very close to come and on board even M&A activities. We kind of put our head down. We do overall majority of our due diligence and then obviously, we make an announcement. So in our business, there's a lot of companies that we really, really look for specific profiles that fit our needs. And it's also important for people to know that we're moving towards the higher end of the scale when it comes to the MRR or the ARR, the annual recurring revenue that we seek in these deals. So the smaller stocks unless they're really, really, really either convenient and/or accretive, we're looking at less and less of them, and we're looking more at larger transactions.So that being said, I've already indicated that we really would like to see a bigger presence for us in the GTA market. And the very specific reason behind that is we have a lot of developer relationships. A lot of developers building brand-new communities in that market that cannot give us their management business, which is the business after the building is completed, and we all know that's an important part of our service delivery because we're the only contact company in North America, frankly, that has the suite of solutions that we have. So they actually would like to give us more business, but we just didn't have the footprint there. So that's really a big area of focus for us. So that would be -- those would be more of -- I mean, I would call them transformational just by way of opening up those markets for us, maybe not in size compared to where we are right now. That being said, there are larger opportunities that kind of on both sides of the border that we're very interested in. And we're having those types of conversations, but I'm certainly not ready to signal that anything is M&A.

[Operator]

The next question comes from Kiran Sritharan from Eight Capital.

[Kiran Sritharan, analyst]

I just want to start with what you said that [indiscernible], like looking at your developer relationships in BC, like what is the overlap in Ontario? And you touched on footprint being the only constraint. Is there anything else that you think from an investment perspective that you need as they build and you get your fulfillment in the door?

[Joseph Nakhla, executive]

Kiran, forgive me. I would say I heard half of your questions about the overlap of developer relationships across the country. The second half did not come through to me clearly.

[Kiran Sritharan, analyst]

Just wanted to see if there was any further investments beyond just footprint was any from a regulation point of view or other factors to consider as you kind of take your foot in the door with the developments here? That's the second bit.

[Joseph Nakhla, executive]

Got it. That's a great question. The first part of the question about overlap of developers building in multi-markets, it's actually just less than a handful of developers in the country that are active in more than their backyard, if that makes any sense. And surprisingly, it tends to be West to East versus East to West, meaning there's more developers, not a lot, but there's more developers building in the British Columbia market that may work their way out to the Ontario market or Alberta or Ontario than there is in Ontario coming this way.So really, when I speak about new relationships with developers, they tend to be regional, and there's not a ton of overlap there in those markets. When we have a long list -- I think a couple of months ago, we had our 100th developer relationships. So this is not 100 building. It's 100 actual real estate developers. And you can imagine some of them are incredibly active, some are less active. So we pretty much are the player, the dominant player in the market when it comes to working with developers for brand new communities. And the overlap is not huge, if anything, I would say I would venture to say it's very, very little between the 2 different areas.And then on the second half, yes, we are active in looking at other opportunities. We are looking for potential even tucks that are companies that are building Interesting tech, interesting apps that are really complementary to our service delivery, either open up the door for further revenue streams or for the ability for us to generate or improve our gross margin due to more efficiencies, then you'll see us be active in that. There's also opportunity for us to make investments in very specifically smart building, smart building technology companies where we can actually make a massive difference for them due to our footprint. Now there's only 3 national players in the condo space and the rental space really in Canada, and we're one of them. So really, we are -- we can make a massive difference to some of these companies that have built really interesting smart building technologies because we can allow them to have quite a bit of opportunities to increase their footprint in terms of customer base and there are opportunities to make smaller investments into these companies as well that we're looking at and contemplating.

[Kiran Sritharan, analyst]

Staying on topic here. How does the cost structure in Ontario compared to BC, like would the labor market conditions here or regulations or are there other factors to consider that might change your cost profile?

[Joseph Nakhla, executive]

That's a great question as well. The labor conditions, very specifically in our ecosystem really reflect licensed property managers. Just like Uber can do a whole lot without drivers, we can do a whole lot without licensed property managers in our space. Western Canada, specifically British Columbia, our ratio number of communities to manager is much higher. We can do due to the remote tools that we've got. We can -- you can have a manager that manages multiple communities and it can all be done remotely and virtually.In the case of Toronto, very specifically, the GTA and the downtown core, it's a bit of a different market because the density there is higher and there is a much lower ratio. So you could have one community or one building that's managed by one licensed property manager. Latest data shows there's a shortage of approximately 1,000 licensed property managers in Ontario, and that's a function of new licensing coming in and more and more of the grandfathered property managers that don't want to get licensed or live in the space. So it really bodes really well for a company like us that can come in and do 2 things.One, to attract a lot of younger people to this space, and we've been -- we've got a great track record of attracting kind of younger people that want to use a lot of technology in the way they deliver the service. And the second reason is we believe there's a better improved ratio that can allow somebody to manage 3 massive towers or 4 massive towers of Ontario because they have the technology to support them to deliver the service. So we think the revenue generation per door in Ontario profile will be much better, which will improve our gross margin. So that's going to -- these are kind of the big highlight, I would say, about that market.

[Kiran Sritharan, analyst]

Appreciate that, Joseph. And one last question here. It's basically on the pace of the new communities coming online. Do you see that evolving? Is there -- like how are the approval processes going? Any supply chain dynamics that are still persisting? Any color there would be helpful. And I'll leave it there.

[Joseph Nakhla, executive]

Brand-new construction is almost back to normal from our peak, thankfully. The last 3, 4 quarters, you heard me indicate that I was a little concerned about number of communities that are essentially -- that are just not moving fast enough, not delivering fast enough. And we got -- get caught in the middle because we hire, we digitize, we make the building ready to go from people moving in, so we can start generating MRR and people are not moving in on time simply because of either supply chain issues or regulatory reasons due to cities not being able to move fast enough to approve the occupancy. That is going away.We're seeing a significant improvement. If anything, my biggest challenge now is how fast I can make those communities ready to go. Our staff is working incredibly hard to do this. We've never onboarded, and we've never been onboarding as many communities as we are right now. So that number is significantly -- is definitely moving in the right direction. I feel really good about it. And then like the supply chain issues that we were dealing with are no longer there. If anything, people are fearing closing at Q4. So something interesting is happening. We're seeing more and more of Q4 scheduled buildings actually being pushed out to Q3 or at least before Christmas period. So that's also adding a little bit of stress on our onboarding process.

[Operator]

The next question comes from Suthan Sukumar from Stifel.

[Suthan Sukumar, analyst]

First one for me, I want to touch on the 9 property management agreements that you signed during the quarter. To me, it kind of feels like it's a bit of an uptick here. Can you confirm is that all displacements? And I understand that, what markets are you seeing this traction? And who are you displacing?

[Joseph Nakhla, executive]

Yes. Great question. Let me confirm your statement. Yes, it is a sizable uptick in the number of new communities that we're adding to our ecosystem. So new -- a number of new customers to us. So actually, we have an uptick compared to what we've done last year on new construction agreeing to new construction communities agreeing or developers agreeing to put those communities from an MRR point of view on our platform as well as software as well as transitioning from existing buildings that are being managed by third parties and coming to us. We usually have our internal data that lets us know where these existing communities are coming from. We don't usually like to loud speak to who we're winning this business from just because we don't want to come across dispersing. Just the matter is we win it from everybody, but some of the bigger because of our size now, especially in British Columbia, we are winning from the bigger players in the space. So that's pretty evident. And we're never winning on price. I just do want to remind everybody that. We are never ever, ever winning on price.In terms of geography, once we put our stick in the ground significantly in the GTA market, and we're working very, very hard on that, and we certainly want this year to be the year where we put all of our pitch the tent into their heart of the downtown core of Toronto, a lot of business is going to be coming from that side. But currently, a good chunk of our business coming in Western Canada in terms of winning that transition business.

[Suthan Sukumar, analyst]

Great. And then Joe, I just wanted to dive into some of the commentary you talked about the expansion opportunities with new faces within the community project. I think it's good to see that you're seeing those organic expansion opportunities play out. But really given your really valuable value prop, what are some of the scenarios where you would not be selected for a follow-up phase with a given new community development?

[Joseph Nakhla, executive]

Yes. I mean that's a fair question, and I'm happy to shed a lot of light on it. I'll start by giving a little bit of a stat that's industry-wide. And just to shed light on how difficult it is to help a brand-new community, a brand-new tower navigate through the difficulty of the first year. So again, I'm not offering any of our developers. I'm referencing -- essentially, I'm referencing all developers in North America. So a lot of these statements are general statement, but it's a true statement, data backed. When a developer builds a brand-new community, so think of that process of making it look incredibly desirable, got doing all the market research to ensure that it's fitting and attracting the right demographic. They often have to, at one point, where there ever hits the road, you walk into a sales center, you learn more about the community.And then you asked a simple question, what is my maintenance fee in this community. And these maintenance fees that are communicated to you at the sales center well before communities builds are operating are all usually designed the financial modeling design by what will be the property management company that is going to essentially or eventually take over that building. Historically, a developer wants that number to be as low as possible because you want a potential buyer to walk in and hear that the maintenance fees are going to be incredibly low versus the incredible amenities that they're going to be receiving. It's just a matter as reality hits in.So what the government has done realizing that this was a native problem is he said, look, Mr. Developer, we expect you to ensure that the budget for the first year and if any deficit in that budget that you've communicated to the homeowners, meaning the second year is going to the budget is going to increase, we expect you to be on the hook of that. And when people move in, and they think the manages 250 a month for the 1,000 square feet, which is incredibly low, the year finishes, everybody has moved in. There's some very little liability on the developer at that point. The first people to get agree with when they hear that the fees are going up are the property management companies as well as any potential efficiencies or problems with that building. So the rate of a property management company at a brand-new building to be inspired at essentially what will be the second AGM. So the first time to ratify their budget is 50%.One out of 2 property management companies are going to be fired. So that's a little bit of color commentary for you. And the reason I say that is because I want you to know that we've only lost 3 communities that are brand new, where we were actually the company that were involved from preconstruction right through to date. And that's 3 out of close to maybe 70 or 75 communities who are brand-new construction helping them right through the first year. So our number is significantly lower. So the reason I share all that with you is because why, why is it that we don't get fired and why is that we retain this business? There's 2 main reasons: number one, the level of transparency. We are the company that built the software that allows you as a homeowner and a building condo corporation that can actually have full visibility, all the efficiencies, nothing to hide. We're not trying to protect the developer, if anything, we improve the ability for the developer to be accountable.And the second reason is, quite frankly, and directly, we don't work with developers that want to lowball the maintenance fees. So we've given data. And as you may know, we run -- we have an AI engine that comes up with and anticipates the usage per category. So here's how much we think a building like that we'll spend in gas or water or whatever. So our budgets are very, very accurate. So there is no sticker shock usually at the end of the first year because our budgets that we either work with the developer on our first our hand with the developer on are actually very close to the second year. So there may be inflational increases or discretionary increases, but nothing over the top, no big shocks. So that's why it's very, very critical for us to win those big master community buildings or master community simply because so much revenue to be generated there and our retention rate is incredibly high.Sorry for the long answer, but you needed to understand how delicate and why we're very proud of that data.

[Suthan Sukumar, analyst]

I do appreciate that color. Joe, the next question I had was around your pipeline of new builds coming online. On the Q4 call, you talked about having a platform of 23 new builds. Has there been any change to that number? And how should we think about the pace of revenue contribution of these builds over the coming year?

[Joseph Nakhla, executive]

Yes. We've signaled between 20 to 25 buildings that are going to be onboarded. We're right on track there. We think there may be even some improvement to that. But early days, depending on in the Q4 being a very busy time and logistically could prove to be challenging for some of the developers. So no, we're well on our way to kind of beating our numbers well beating our numbers for '22 when it comes to new construction.

[Suthan Sukumar, analyst]

Got you. Okay. Good. And just one last one for me on the OpEx and cash side. It sounds like cost discipline remains a core focus going forward. Just given the current cash balance and some of the improvements that you made on the OpEx front, how are you thinking about the time line to adjusted EBITDA breakeven? Is this kind of a 12-month milestone, 12- to 18-month milestone? Just curious how you guys are thinking about that?

[Joseph Nakhla, executive]

Yes. We've all signaled that we think we're going to be closer to that milestone in Q2 of next year. That is without transformational transactions and/or further accretive, I mean, all the transactions we've historically done have been accretive at least without anything meaningful into our ecosystem. We're quite pleased with some of the projects on -- I know they're not reflected in Q1 here, but quite pleased with the cadence and the speed we're moving with there. And again, I just do want to remind everyone that we see our path to profitability to different -- through 2 different areas. One is obviously doing more with less, but we also were proceeding on our side is starting to open up revenue streams for us that weren't necessarily available to us due to size and/or digitization process and/or integration process. And '23 is the year where we start realizing the uptick in all these.

[Operator]

This concludes the question-and-answer session and Tribe's First Quarter Financial Results and Corporate Update Conference Call. A replay of the conference call will be available and can be accessed following the instructions provided in the company's press release issued early today. Thank you for attending today's call, and enjoy the rest of your day. Good bye.