Vacasa Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

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Provided by Quartr
May 9, 2024

There are 9 speakers on the call.

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon. My name is Aaron, and I will be your conference operator for today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Vacasa Q1 2024 Earnings Conference Call. When your line is selected. Thank you.

Operator

I would now like to turn our call over to Ryan Domanstyk, Investor Relations. Ryan, you may

Speaker 1

now begin. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us for today's call. I'm pleased to be joined today by Picasa's CEO, Rob Graber and CFO, Bruce Schumann. We have posted a shareholder letter on the Investor Relations section of our website at investors. Picasa.com that will be referenced by our speakers.

Speaker 1

Comments made during this conference call and in our letter contain forward looking statements. Such statements include those about our restructuring actions, including cost savings, future expectations, beliefs, plans, projections, targets, estimates, objectives, events, conditions and financial performance, including guidance for future period results. We caution you that various risks and uncertainties could cause actual results to differ materially from those in our forward looking statements. For additional information concerning these risks and uncertainties, please read the forward looking statements section in our shareholder letter we issued earlier today in the forward looking statements and risk factors sections in our filings with the SEC. During this call, we may refer to various non GAAP financial measures.

Speaker 1

Information regarding our non GAAP financial results, including a reconciliation of our non GAAP results to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures, may be found in our shareholder letter. These non GAAP measures should be considered in addition to our GAAP results and are intended to supplement, but not substitute for our performance measures calculated in accordance with GAAP. And now, I will turn the call over to Rob Graebhardt. Rob?

Speaker 2

Thanks, Ryan, and thank you everyone for joining us this afternoon. I'll be giving some opening remarks and commentary on the business. Bruce will follow with a review of Q1 financial results and then we'll open that up for Q and A. Our guests and the people who serve them. We've actioned a variety of improvements across the business and I'm proud of the team's progress to date.

Speaker 2

We remain on that transformation journey and in the midst of an unexpectedly ongoing challenging industry environment, we continue to evaluate opportunities to optimize our business model and shareholder value. I shared with you on our last call that 2024 got off to a difficult start. The short term rental industry continues to adjust to softening economic demand for domestic non urban vacation rentals, as well as increases in the supply of short term rental units. The year began with bookings variability and started off slowly, then showed some signs of stabilization. However, over the last several weeks, which are some of the key weeks for summer bookings, it has become clear that the bookings weakness we saw at the start of the year is likely to persist through the remainder of 2024.

Speaker 2

These trends are putting real pressure on our revenue per home and profitability. With difficult industry dynamics continuing, we are accelerating the business transformation that is already underway to further empower and enable our local teams with the goal of strengthening our business model. Today, we are reorganizing the way we operate by further equipping our field teams to locally manage and be accountable for their markets, and we are significantly reducing our central corporate footprint. We believe that empowering our local teams will drive the strongest impact on the homeowner and guest experience, which in turn should result in better business outcomes. As an organization, we believe we must embrace a more local business model and double down in the way we manage our portfolio of vacations homes at the market level.

Speaker 2

Directing our resources to local teams and to the processes that bring the most value to our owners and guests will allow us to better support our focus on profitability and free cash flow. Our field teams will be organized and equipped to run their operations in their markets as we further localize functions, including sales, onboarding, revenue management and marketing. For example, we are transitioning our individual sales approach to be directed by our local teams leveraging their local expertise and giving them end to end ownership of the homeowner relationship. Homeowners trust our local teams with the care and maintenance of their vacation homes and the experiences their guests have in these homes. Furthermore, our local operations teams know their markets best and are therefore best positioned to identify homes and homeowners who are a good fit for our service models.

Speaker 2

The homeowner experience from onboarding to welcoming guests in their homes is most seamless when our local teams guide them through that journey. As we move to empower our local teams, we are also refining our corporate footprint, sharpening our focus on what is best needed to support those teams. This also allows us to significantly reduce our corporate overhead costs with the goal of becoming profitable in the future. We are also shifting our technology strategy to focus even more on ensuring that we have the tools that increase efficiency and improve the experience for our owners and guests and the team members who support them. This focus will guide what technology we invest in internally and externally and will allow us to take greater advantage of step function improvements in industry third party applications.

Speaker 2

The actions we have announced today will result in a reduction of our overall headcount by about 800 people or 13% of our workforce. While a difficult decision, we determined it was necessary to accelerate the transformation of our business given the current industry dynamics. Reductions were aligned with our strategy to prioritize resources for the local market teams in the field. On the corporate and central operations side, we eliminated 40% of roles across all functions. In comparison, we reduced field team positions by approximately 6%.

Speaker 2

While we are making some adjustments in the field, they are relatively small compared to our overall field cost base and designed to maintain service levels to owners and guests even as we adjust to changing market conditions. There's significant work ahead of us to drive the success of this transformation. It will not be easy and will require precision in execution, but we believe we have the right team in place to implement these important steps in our transformation. The business will be much lighter from an expense perspective and we believe better positioned. I'm confident we are making the right strategic decisions to allow the business to reach its full potential.

Speaker 2

I'd now like to pass it over to Bruce to discuss our Q1 results.

Speaker 3

Thanks, Rob. I'll start by reviewing our Q1 results, then provide some additional details on the business transformation Rob just outlined. Unless noted otherwise, I will be comparing our Q1 results to the Q1 of 2023, and I'll be referencing the operating expense line excluding the impact of stock based compensation, restructuring costs and business combination costs, which you can find outlined in our shareholder letter. For the Q1, gross booking value, which is the combination of nights sold and gross booking value per night sold, was $427,000,000 down 18% year over year. Nights sold were $1,300,000 in the Q1, down 12% year over year.

Speaker 3

Gross booking value per night sold was $3.40 in the Q1, down 7% year over year. As a reminder, there is a strong correlation between nights sold and gross booking value per night sold, and it's difficult to look at either in isolation. Our revenue management algorithms and data team constantly evaluate the trade off between price and occupancy and the mix of nights sold and gross booking value per night sold with the goal of optimizing homeowner income. Over the past several quarters, we've discussed the year over year declines in average gross booking value per home as the industry normalizes off of the record highs from the past few years and we saw this dynamic play out again in the Q1 with average gross booking value per home declining by about 15% year over year. We finished the Q1 with approximately 41,000 homes on our platform, down from approximately 43,000 at the end of the Q1 last year, reflecting the ongoing churn dynamic that we have been seeing.

Speaker 3

The short term rental industry continues to adjust to various headwinds such as increased supply and lower average gross booking value per night sold. We also continue to see owner concerns with rates and the resulting income as a leading cause of churn as the industry wrestles with these factors. Revenue, which consists primarily of our commission on the rents we generate for homeowners, the fees we collect from guests and revenue from home care solutions provided directly to our homeowners was $209,000,000 in the Q1, down 18% year over year. Now turning to expenses. Cost of revenue was 50% of revenue in the Q1 versus 48% of revenue in the same period last year.

Speaker 3

Cost of revenue in dollars declined by 14% year over year compared to a 12% decline in nights sold. Operations and support expense was 28% of revenue in the Q1 versus 23% of revenue in the same period last year. Operations and support expense dollars were up 1% year over year. In terms of our other operating expenses, sales and marketing expense, which includes the fees we pay our 3rd party distribution partners declined 12%. Technology and development expense was up 7% and general and administrative expenses declined 2%.

Speaker 3

Adjusted EBITDA was negative $36,000,000 for the Q1 compared to negative $12,000,000 in the same period last year. Despite progress on our expense reductions, adjusted EBITDA continues to be affected by bookings variability impacting nights sold, gross booking value per home and ultimately revenue. As Rob indicated, we are experiencing unexpected continued bookings weakness in terms of both price or gross booking value per night sold and utilization or nights sold per home as we approach our summer peak. While January started off slowly, we saw an uptick in bookings intakes in February. However, over the last few weeks, as the summer booking curve has come into view more clearly, we have seen both the number of bookings and the price at which those bookings are made come in below our initial expectations.

Speaker 3

This weakness is translating into lower revenue and in turn lower adjusted EBITDA and we must take action. We've been on a transformation journey over the past year with the local markets making or influencing more of our business decisions. Given the industry backdrop we now expect to face throughout 2024, we must accelerate this transformation. While this carries execution risk, we believe that further empowering our local teams and reducing our corporate cost structure is the right decision to optimize our business model and shareholder value. As part of the restructuring announced today, we are reducing our headcount by about 800 employees or 13% of our total workforce with the largest impact to our corporate teams as Rob noted.

Speaker 3

We expect these adjustments to provide over $50,000,000 of cost savings in 2024 and over $120,000,000 on an annual run rate basis. The in year cost savings are expected to be largely realized in the 3rd 4th quarters with meaningful reductions anticipated across our technology and development, sales and marketing and general and administrative expense lines. At this point, it remains difficult to provide guidance for 2024. The ongoing industry dynamics and their impact on bookings variability, average gross bookings per home as well as continued elevated churn creates a wide range of outcomes for revenue, which then flows through to adjusted EBITDA. While the changes we have announced today are expected to reduce our cost structure for 2024, Given the current revenue dynamics, we don't anticipate reaching adjusted EBITDA profitability this year.

Speaker 3

Lastly, given the uncertainty in market conditions, the variability around the timing of our bookings build into the summer peak season and as we are executing on our corporate transformation, we have taken the prudent step of drawing about $80,000,000 under our revolving credit facility to supplement our liquidity. With that, Rob and I will take your questions. Operator, please open up the lines.

Operator

Thank you. Our first question is from the line of Jed Kelly with Oppenheimer. Your line is live.

Speaker 2

Hey, great. Thanks for taking my question. Just on the local market strategy, should we anticipate that you're going to kind of focus on the markets where you have a higher density and you can drive more profitability and maybe, I don't know, unload some of the contracts where you don't have as much density or are generating as much profitability? Thank you. Hey, Jeff.

Speaker 2

Thanks very much. Appreciate the question. So look, for the past year, we've been on this journey of transforming the business. We've been looking as part of that work closely at where we can do more to empower to enable our local teams to drive more of the business. We see opportunity as we've been executing as a team to improve service for our owners, service for our guests and our financial results.

Speaker 2

We think we demonstrated that as we move through the year in 2023. There is some opportunity to focus more in some markets over others, but really it's more about sort of how we are how we're allocating capital and what we are seeing in terms of higher velocity or lower velocity sales progress in some markets, for example. So we don't have a lot more to share about those pieces, but it's something that we certainly are mindful of. We're lucky to have a market footprint that we think is very attractive and encouraging going forward. But these are industry wide dynamics and so we're wanting to be very sensitive to that and to make sure that we're gearing business in the right way for what's ahead.

Speaker 1

And then,

Operator

thanks for your question. Our next question comes from the line of Ben Miller with Goldman Sachs. Your line is live.

Speaker 4

I guess following up on that, with the headcount reductions more focused at the corporate level than the local market level and having decisions now pushed to be more locally managed, can you give any color on what local market economics look like? In other words, what would a local market P and L or contribution margin look like today before layering on the corporate costs and what that says about the incremental scale you might need to offset those corporate costs to get back to profitability? Thanks.

Speaker 2

Yes. I appreciate that question. When we look at our markets, we've been doing a lot of work as you know through the last year to drive better, not just better performance, but better awareness, better feedback loops, better reporting for the local market teams on how their businesses are performing, what the remaining potential is. This is really about continuing that work. This is something that we've pulled forward in the timing of the way we've been executing it, but something we've been working on for a long time.

Speaker 2

I think that there's a lot of opportunity in sharpening the incentives in the work that we are that we're enabling our teams to do out of their silos and in a more kind of coordinated and aligned way locally. So maybe Bruce can comment on the cost structure. We haven't shared a lot about how we do our reporting and kind of management internally, but maybe he can share a little bit more about what we put in contribution margin and how we think about that.

Speaker 3

Yes. Thanks, Rob. Yes, Ben, one way to think about it, if you look at our cost structure, roughly our cost of revenue number 1 and then secondly our operations and support costs, You put those together, they primarily represent our local market costs. That's about 70% of our cost structure, broadly speaking. So as we really lighten our corporate overhead cost load, I think we're going to really be able to unlock more of the inherent value associated with those local markets.

Operator

Thank you for your question. Our next question comes from the line of Doug Manthey with JPMorgan. Your line is live.

Speaker 5

Hey, this is Dave. Thanks for taking the question. So thinking of the theme of shifting some of the roles here in local market, it sounds like your field teams will need to wear many hats going forward. So just wanted to make sure like could you explain like how like what patients are confident that they can take on more responsibilities and perhaps roles, perhaps activities that require different skill sets and be successful. And is this something that is more temporary or do you think this is more I see like we just know it's a permanent change that will work in the future as well.

Speaker 2

Yes. So when we look at the transformation work that we've been doing, this has been something that as I mentioned just a moment ago, we've been working on for a long time. So this is not about a change that we have been contemplating for just a moment, but rather something we've been moving toward. And as we shared with you transforming the business toward over a period of months quarters. The skill sets of the team in my experience when I've been out in the field talking with owners and talking with our teams where we operate best is on some level where our sales teams know what the ops teams want to manage and serve and where the operations teams know where sales should go and build relationships.

Speaker 2

And to the extent that we can do more and more to try to formalize those relationships to try to break down the silos that sort of would keep those teams apart to align their incentives. That's really where we see and we believe there's a real opportunity for the business to unlock a next level of performance. But there's a lot of work to do to get it done. The teams are excited to make that happen. And we believe that that is the best way for us to serve our owners and our guests and the people that take care of

Speaker 3

them as we go forward.

Operator

Thank you for your question. Our next question comes from the line of Bernie MacTiernan with Needham and Company. Your line is live.

Speaker 6

Hi. This is Stefanos Crist calling in for Bernie. Thanks for taking our question. Just wanted to ask about churn versus the increasing market supply and could you talk about what you're seeing in gross adds? Thanks.

Speaker 2

Yes. So on churn, when we look at churn, as we've shared on prior calls, churn is not where we want it to be. The industry continues to come off the highs that we saw in 2021 and 2022. We do see owners continuing to our owner NPS through the last 12 months. We've made substantial investments in working with our owners on one of the other top reasons that they cite, which is around owner communication.

Speaker 2

So the tools, the processes, the work that we're doing there, we are very focused on those two things as well as working with them on understanding, on delivering revenue premiums wherever we can on making sure that they understand how we are thinking about pricing and pricing strategy and understand the market dynamics. At this rate, churn has not gotten to where we wanted to be. We haven't seen those things translate into less churn at this stage. In terms of ads, we're continuing to focus on our organic sales performance with the transformation. As I mentioned, we're focused on empowering our local teams to have more responsibility, more say in this, be able to be more aligned and as they're building those relationships with owners, we're building those things into incentives.

Speaker 2

And we believe that the teams that are going to be closest to our owners working together more and more, they know the owners best, they know the local teams best, and they'll have that ability to drive better outcomes over time.

Operator

Thank you for your question. Our next question comes from the line of Lee Horowitz with Deutsche Bank. Your line is live.

Speaker 7

Thank you for taking our question. This is Ashant on for Lee. So in terms of trends, Feb saw slight uptick in the nights. So can you give some more color on what would that have been excluding the impact of extra leave day? And in the shareholder letter, it is mentioned that Knights and GBV per Knights are coming below your expectation.

Speaker 7

Can you help us understand how does that compare to the 1Q? Thank

Speaker 1

you.

Speaker 2

So a couple of things and I'll ask Bruce to jump in just on the evolution of nice sold and so forth. So from an industry perspective, when we spoke at the back in February, we had indicated that we were seeing a very dynamic environment in the industry and we saw this being a function of 2 things, the softening of demand for vacation rental in vacation rentals in the markets that we serve, primarily domestic, non urban markets. And then the second thing was around increases in the supply of short term rental units. So for us, we saw these kind of weak and volatile intakes in January. We did see some stabilization and signs of improvement as we got into February.

Speaker 2

And that was encouraging as we approach some of the booking windows for our summer peak season, but we were obviously watching that very closely. However, during March April, the bookings build for our peak summer season has remained below our expectations. And so as we look at that and we look out through the rest of the year, it's become clear to us that the summer season and the dynamics through the year will be very challenging and likely down again on a year over year basis. So there's some longer term trends here that we think are in play on just sort of softening consumer demand. But that's what we were seeing as we were looking out at the beginning of the year.

Speaker 2

Yes, perfect. And just

Speaker 3

to give you this is Bruce. Just some additional color on how the quarter played out to your question. Revenue obviously declined 18% year over year, while homes under management those declined by about 5%. So think of the rest of that gap is really due to the lower monetization of the homes on our platform. And again, based on the data we see, we think this is happening across the industry.

Speaker 3

It's not really specific to the Casa. And that lower revenue specifically because of the ADR, the pricing component that drives some deleverage for us across the cost structure as you just can't lower your cost structure that fast in the quarter by 18% even though we're much more variable than we were. That really drove the declines in adjusted EBITDA year over year for the quarter. Given we believe these gross booking value levels to Rob's point are going to persist. That's why we you saw us take the action today to really accelerate our company transformation and significantly reduce our corporate expense load.

Operator

Thank you for your question. Our next question comes from the line of Nick Jones with Citizens JMP. Your line is live.

Speaker 8

Hi, this is Tim on for Nick. Thanks for taking our questions. Just wanted to kind of piggyback on that question. You're just kind of talking about ADRs and driving deleverage in the business and your guys' priority to maximize income for the homeowners. Can you talk a little bit about what you're seeing in terms of occupancy rates and how that dynamic is playing out with ADRs and maybe how you guys could manage that to maximize income?

Speaker 8

Thanks.

Speaker 3

Yes, sure. So maybe I'll kind of share with you a little bit about sort of occupancy and ADR dynamic. I think that's your question. So our homes declined about 5% year over year. Our nights sold declined about 12%.

Speaker 3

So that kind of implies the nights sold per home. That was kind of the difference there. And then to drive those nights sold obviously we want to make sure we're optimizing price to drive that sell through and gross booking value per night was down about 7%. That kind of gives you the interplay there between the occupancy and the ADR side.

Operator

Great. Thank you for your question. Ladies and gentlemen, with that, that will end today's Q and A session for today's call. And I would like to turn it back over to Rob Graber for any closing remarks.

Speaker 2

I want to thank everybody for joining the call today. I also want to take a moment to thank our owners for entrusting their homes to us, to our guests who are making memories with us and to all of our colleagues at Picasso who are working so hard to make all of this happen. Thank you all very much for joining.

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Vacasa Q1 2024
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