Howard Hughes Q1 2025 Earnings Call Transcript

Quartr
Provided by Quartr
May 8, 2025

Key Takeaways

  • Howard Hughes delivered $63 million of adjusted operating cash flow (or $1.27 per diluted share) in Q1 and drove MPC EBT to $63 million—up 161% year-over-year—on the back of robust land sales and higher average price per acre.
  • Operating assets set a new quarterly NOI record of $72 million (up 9% year-over-year), led by improved office occupancy in The Woodlands and Summerlin and strong multifamily lease-up.
  • The company’s condo pipeline now represents $2.7 billion of future revenue with Yulani sold out, Park Ward Village 97% presold, and Le Nou already 64% contracted, positioning new deliveries between 2025 and 2028.
  • 2025 guidance was reaffirmed, targeting MPC EBT of $375 million, operating asset NOI of $257–267 million, condo sales of $375 million, cash G&A of $76–86 million, and $325–375 million of adjusted operating cash flow, backed by over $800 million of available liquidity.
  • Pershing Square has committed $900 million of new equity, with Bill Ackman returning as Executive Chairman and a plan to transform Howard Hughes into a diversified holding company that will pursue high-return acquisitions, including a potential insurance platform.
AI Generated. May Contain Errors.
Earnings Conference Call
Howard Hughes Q1 2025
00:00 / 00:00

Transcript Sections

Skip to Participants
Operator

Thank you for standing by and welcome to the Howard Hughes Management's First Quarter twenty twenty five Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in listen only mode. After the speakers' presentation, there will be a question and answer session. As a reminder, today's program is being recorded. And now I'd like to introduce your host for today's program, Eric Holcomb, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.

Eric Holcomb
Eric Holcomb
SVP, IR at Howard Hughes Holdings

Good morning, and welcome to Howard Hughes Holdings First Quarter twenty twenty five Earnings Call. With me today are Bill Ackman, Executive Chairman David O'Reilly, Chief Executive Officer Jay Cross, President Carlos Alea, Chief Financial Officer Dave Streiff, President of Asset Management and Operations Joe Vilain, General Counsel and Ryan Israel, Chief Investment Officer. Before we begin, I would like to direct you to our website, howardhughes.com, where you can download both our first quarter earnings press release and our supplemental package. The earnings release and supplemental package include reconciliations of non GAAP financial measures that will be discussed today in relation to their most directly comparable GAAP financial measures. Certain statements made today that are not in the present tense or that discuss the company's expectations are forward looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws.

Eric Holcomb
Eric Holcomb
SVP, IR at Howard Hughes Holdings

Although the company believes that the expectations reflected in such forward looking statements are based upon reasonable assumptions, we can give no assurance that these expectations will be achieved. Please see the forward looking statement disclaimer in our first quarter earnings press release and the risk factors in our SEC filings for factors that could cause material differences between forward looking statements and actual results. We are not under any duty to update forward looking statements unless required by law. I will now turn the call over to our CEO, David O'Reilly.

David O'Reilly
David O'Reilly
Chief Executive Officer at Howard Hughes Holdings

Thank you, Eric, and good morning. On our call today, I'm going to begin with a recap of the first quarter and cover segment highlights from our master plan communities. Dave Streiff will cover the operating assets, Jay Cross will provide an update on our strategic developments, Carlos Ole will review our guidance and balance sheet, and then finally we're going to have Bill Ackman and Ryan Israel join us to discuss the recent transaction and the future strategic direction for the company before we open up the lines for Q and A. Jumping into our results, we experienced continued strong momentum across our segments in the first quarter, delivering adjusted operating cash flow of $63,000,000 or $1.27 per diluted share. In our MPCs, homebuilder demand for residential land remained robust, leading to sequential and year over year growth of land sales, acres sold, price per acre and EBT.

David O'Reilly
David O'Reilly
Chief Executive Officer at Howard Hughes Holdings

With this strong start to the year and significant land sales expected in the second and third quarters, we have strong confidence in our full year EBT guidance of $375,000,000 Our operating assets delivered $72,000,000 of NOI, representing a new quarterly record, with impressive 9% year over year growth. In strategic developments, demand for our condominiums remains solid. Our condo pipeline now represents $2,700,000,000 of future revenue that will be earned between 2025 and 2028. From a financing perspective, we closed on several important financings that increased liquidity and extended our maturities that Carlos will detail later. Looking deeper into our results of the MPC segment, we delivered solid MPC EBT of $63,000,000 in the first quarter, representing an increase of $39,000,000 or 161% year over year.

David O'Reilly
David O'Reilly
Chief Executive Officer at Howard Hughes Holdings

This growth was underscored by a $39,000,000 increase in land sales, which was primarily driven by two SuperPass sales totaling 29 acres in Summerlin for more than one point five million dollars per acre. Land sales in Texas were also strong with 41 residential acres sold in Bridgeland and The Woodlands, Woodland Hills that is, up 31% year over year. Overall, we achieved an impressive average price per acre of $991,000 during the first quarter, reflecting both sequential and year over year improvements. MPC EBT growth was also favorably impacted by an $11,000,000 increase in equity earnings, primarily related to improved results from our Summit joint venture. At our Florio joint venture in Arizona, we sold another 11 acres of residential land for $793,000 an acre in the quarter.

David O'Reilly
David O'Reilly
Chief Executive Officer at Howard Hughes Holdings

Lot and infrastructure development in Florio remained on track, and we expect homebuilders will start construction on model homes this summer. Turning to new home sales, we continue to see solid demand across our MPCs with a total of five forty three homes sold in the first quarter. Although this represented a decline compared to last year's outsized first quarter, which saw the highest quarterly results in three years after mortgage rates began to subside, it did represent a sequential improvement. In fact, new home sales outpaced both the third and fourth quarters of twenty twenty four by 116% respectively, providing a strong indicator of underlying demand and increased confidence in our land sale projections for the year. Sequentially, our most notable gains were in Bridgeland and Summerlin, which saw home sales growth of 129% respectively in the first quarter.

David O'Reilly
David O'Reilly
Chief Executive Officer at Howard Hughes Holdings

During a quarter when the national housing market showed some signs of softening, our home sales are a testament to the resilience of our MPCs and the exceptional quality of life they provide their residents. Overall, with solid demand for new homes in all of our communities, as well as continued undersupply of vacant developed lots, we expect homebuilder demand for incremental acreage will remain elevated. This will ultimately drive what we expect will be record residential land sales, price per acre and MPCEVT for the full year 2025. With that, I'm going to turn the call over to Dave Streiff for a review of our operating assets.

David Striph
David Striph
President of Asset Management & Operations at Howard Hughes Holdings

Thank you, David. In our operating assets segment, we started the year in a position of strength, delivering NOI of $72,000,000 including the contribution from unconsolidated ventures. This represented a new quarterly record and a 9% improvement compared to the prior year, driven primarily by enhanced performance in our office and multifamily portfolios. Starting in office, we reported NOI of $33,000,000 or an 8% year over year increase. This growth was primarily the result of improved occupancy and strong lease up activity in The Woodlands and Summerlin, most notably at 9950 Woodlawn Forest and 1700 Pavilion, which ended the quarter 99% leased and 92% leased respectively.

David Striph
David Striph
President of Asset Management & Operations at Howard Hughes Holdings

Our multifamily portfolio also performed well in the quarter delivering NOI of $16,000,000 or at 14% year over year increase primarily driven by strong lease up at our unstabilized assets and improved overall leasing at our stabilized properties which ended the quarter 96% leased. In our retail portfolio, NOI was $14,000,000 which reflected a 2% decrease compared to the prior year. This modest reduction was primarily due to some tenant reserves in Ward Village, partially offset by improvement at Marlowe and Juniper's ground floor retail in Downtown Columbia, as well as Hughes Landing at The Woodlands. In Downtown Summerlin, we continue to make progress on our tenant upgrades and recently signed new leases with several future tenants, including garage, LO and build basics. At quarter end, we had only five retail spaces available, most of which are currently in negotiations, representing about 17,000 square feet.

David Striph
David Striph
President of Asset Management & Operations at Howard Hughes Holdings

With that, I will now turn the call over to our president Jay Cross for an update on our strategic developments.

L. Jay Cross
L. Jay Cross
President at Howard Hughes Holdings

Thanks Dave and good morning everyone. In the first quarter condo presales were solid with 27 units contracted representing incremental future revenue of approximately $51,000,000. Nearly all of these presales were at the Le Nou, our eleventh condo project in War Village, bringing this tower to 64% presold. With such strong presales, we expect to start construction later this year with an anticipated delivery in 2028. At our other condo towers under construction, we are on track to deliver Yulana, a workforce housing development that is completely sold out in the fourth quarter of this year.

L. Jay Cross
L. Jay Cross
President at Howard Hughes Holdings

The Park Ward Village, which is our next market rate tower was topped off during the quarter and remains on schedule for delivery in 2026. This tower is 97% pre sold with only 17 units remaining to contract. At Goli, which is already impressively 93% pre sold, we've made considerable progress with construction and continue to expect completion in 2027. And in Texas, construction on the Ritz Carlton residences, The Woodlands is advancing nicely with topping off anticipated later this year and completion in 2027. At quarter end, this luxury development remained 70% pre sold.

L. Jay Cross
L. Jay Cross
President at Howard Hughes Holdings

We have continued to hold the majority of remaining units off the market in an effort to capture incremental value closer to the project's completion. As we discussed in our last earnings call, the governor of Hawaii approved amendments to local development rules in January, which we believe will provide the potential for an additional two and a half to three and a half million square feet of residential entitlements. We're currently reviewing how this will impact Board Village's master plan, but expect these entitlements will enable the construction of additional condo towers in areas of the communities that have not yet been redeveloped. We will share more about our plans as information becomes available in the coming quarters. Shifting to our commercial construction projects, currently we have three projects underway in Texas, which will generate approximately $12,500,000 incremental NOI to our operating asset segment upon stabilization.

L. Jay Cross
L. Jay Cross
President at Howard Hughes Holdings

These projects which include the 1 Riva Row multifamily and Grogens Mill retail redevelopment projects in The Woodlands and the one Bridgeland Green mass timber office in Bridgeland are all on budget and on schedule with completion expect this year. I would now like to hand the call over to our CFO Carlos Olea, who will review our guidance and the balance sheet.

Carlos Olea
Carlos Olea
CFO at Howard Hughes Holdings

Thank you, Jay, and good morning, everyone. With the strong momentum that we experienced across our segments during the first quarter, we remain confident in our ability to deliver our 2025 guidance as issued on our last earnings call. Looking briefly into each segment, in NPCs we continue to project robust EBT of $375,000,000 at the midpoint, led by record residential land sales and price per acre. This represents a five to 10% year over year increase compared to last year's record performance and would constitute a new all time high for us. In operating assets, we continue to project full year NOI between $257,000,000 and $267,000,000 or a range of flat to up 4% compared to 2024.

Carlos Olea
Carlos Olea
CFO at Howard Hughes Holdings

At the midpoint of approximately $262,000,000 this would also represent a new full year record. Condo sales revenues are projected to be approximately $375,000,000 in 2025 and driven entirely by the closing of units at ULANA, which is sold out and expected to be completed in the fourth quarter. Because Ulanah is a workforce housing tower, we do not expect to earn any condo gross profit from this project. The Parkward Village, our next market rate condo development that will deliver in 2026, is nearly sold out with contracted revenues just under $700,000,000 And finally, we continue to expect cash G and A to range between $76,000,000 and $86,000,000 or a midpoint of $81,000,000 excluding approximately $9,000,000 of anticipated noncash stock compensation. Overall, we project our adjusted operating cash flow will range between $325,000,000 and $375,000,000 in 2025, with a midpoint of approximately $350,000,000 or approximately $7 per share.

Carlos Olea
Carlos Olea
CFO at Howard Hughes Holdings

At the end of the first quarter, we had $494,000,000 of cash and $317,000,000 of available lender commitments that can be drawn on for any development project or any corporate use. Combined, we had over $800,000,000 of available liquidity, leaving us well positioned to allocate capital to our current projects and weather today's economic environment. At the March, the remaining equity contribution needed to fund our current projects, which will not all be spent in 2025, was approximately $251,000,000 From a debt perspective, we closed on a $200,000,000 upsize extension to the non consolidated credit facility for Floraio in Tarovalas. We also executed a $20,000,000 construction loan for a new build to suit medical office building in Richland, which we expect will commence construction in the second quarter of this year. Overall, we have $5,200,000,000 of debt outstanding at the end of the quarter, with $425,000,000 of maturities in 2025.

Carlos Olea
Carlos Olea
CFO at Howard Hughes Holdings

Subsequent to quarter end, we made meaningful progress with these maturities, extending the loan on our Marlowe multifamily project to 2027. And with this extension completed, our remaining maturities for this year are now $350,000,000 and primarily consists of 6,100 Merriweather, 17 hundred Pavilion, San Diego and Wingspan. We expect all of this will be successfully refinanced during this year with advanced discussions already underway. And finally, just this week, we closed on a second sale of MUD receivables in Bridgeland, generating cash proceeds of approximately $180,000,000 We expect to use these proceeds to pay down the Bridgeland notes, providing significant additional liquidity and optionality for the company going forward. With that, I would now like to turn the call over to our Chairman, Bill Ackman, to discuss the recent transaction with Pershing Square and for closing remarks.

William Ackman
William Ackman
Executive Chairman at Howard Hughes Holdings

Thank you, Carlos. I thought it actually would be useful just to rewind the tape a bit and to talk about how we arrived at the current transaction. So we've been obviously shareholders of Howard Hughes for fourteen years. We've watched tremendous progress in the business. And really, as evidenced by the most recent quarter, you know, the focused, MPC company has delivered really outstanding results.

William Ackman
William Ackman
Executive Chairman at Howard Hughes Holdings

What we haven't achieved as a company is creating a lot of shareholder value. And this has been a challenge for us that we've tried to address, you know, over the last sort of many years. We're after spinning off the Seaport and really getting, not much of a reaction from the market to the pure play company, our original thinking was perhaps we have to just take the business private. And we started down a path to that end beginning in September looking to raise capital to take the business private. And we met with many, I would say, every potential investor that would be interested in a transaction of this scale.

William Ackman
William Ackman
Executive Chairman at Howard Hughes Holdings

And the reaction we got was everyone thought the business was a great business, but we could not find investors who were prepared to sign up for a very long duration investment in the company. Every investor we spoke to wanted ultimately to receive liquidity within five years and seven years or ten years, and that was not something we could create in the context of Howard Hughes, which is why we, kinda considered other alternatives. What we finally arrived at was a transaction in which we convert Howard Hughes from a pure play real estate development company into a diversified holding company. And our thinking in that on the decision to go in this direction was driven by the fact that, ultimately, what we've concluded is that in the public markets, a pure play, non investment grade real estate developer of master plan communities is a business that the market assigns a very high cost of capital to. The market perceives this business on a long term basis as subject to exposure to economic conditions, leverage, non investment grade, and ultimately shareholders want to receive or assign a return on cost of capital that's really above what the business can achieve on a regular basis going forward.

William Ackman
William Ackman
Executive Chairman at Howard Hughes Holdings

And business needs to earn a return on its capital in excess of its cost of capital in order to create shareholder value, and we've not been able to achieve that as a stand alone pure play company. So what we've decided to do, and in negotiations with the special committee, was to invest $900,000,000 of fresh capital into the company by acquiring 9,000,000 shares at $100 a share and transforming Howard Hughes into a diversified holding company. We are adding to the company. I'm returning as the executive chair. We're adding a new position.

William Ackman
William Ackman
Executive Chairman at Howard Hughes Holdings

Ryan Israel, CIO of Pershing, is joining the company. And, yeah, the Howard Hughes team remains the same and will work with us on this, objective. The board, we have Ryan and I kind of returning or myself returning. Ryan, a new addition to the board. New independent director, Jean Baptiste Wojciet.

William Ackman
William Ackman
Executive Chairman at Howard Hughes Holdings

JB, as he is called, spent a, you know, twenty five, thirty year career in private equity, most recently at BC Partners where he was the CIO for more than a decade. The business plan is to acquire what we call durable growth companies that meet our standards for business quality and defensibility. These are businesses that earn high returns on capital that we want to prepare to own for decades and businesses that will diversify Howard Hughes's exposure to real estate and earn returns on capital higher than could be earned in a pure play real estate company and offer greater long term growth. The kind of long term plan is for Howard Hughes to become a investment grade company for us to build a valuable business over a long period of time. So I'd be delighted to answer any and all of your questions.

William Ackman
William Ackman
Executive Chairman at Howard Hughes Holdings

Obviously, questions about addressed to management about, the quarter. Also, be happy to address questions about our business plan going forward. Thank you, operator. Let's open it for questions.

Operator

Certainly. And our first question comes from the line of Anthony Paolone from JPMorgan. Your question please.

Anthony Paolone
Anthony Paolone
Executive Director at J.P. Morgan

Thanks and good morning. Maybe for Bill to start here. You've been in this process for a little while now and you've talked pretty clearly about what you want to do with it. So, wondering what you think the timeline is to see the first transactions completed and is this something that you've got a pipeline teed up and ready to go or do you just now start to go into the market and find deals?

William Ackman
William Ackman
Executive Chairman at Howard Hughes Holdings

Sure. So first of all, I think it might be useful to talk about what we believe our competitive advantages are in acquiring companies. You know, the competition today for private businesses is principally private equity. And private equity investors have a lot of capital, but there are certain things they can offer to a seller. So, you know, I had an interesting meeting with the, the governor, of Virginia, former co CEO of Carlyle, and he was saying, you know, kind of, if you will, admiring what we're trying to accomplish with Howard Hughes.

William Ackman
William Ackman
Executive Chairman at Howard Hughes Holdings

He said, look. When I as a private equity investor, I had to tell every company I ever engaged with that by ultimately selling to us, they were kind of joining the merry-go-round. Meaning, in five or seven years, we have to sell the business to someone else. And there are many owners of businesses that over a lifetime you know, let's say you got a seven year seven year old owner of a business, built a company over a lifetime, not excited about the idea of selling the business to a private equity firm that's gonna put a lot of leverage on the business, and they don't know who's gonna own it, you know, five years, ten years, fifteen years from now. And, you know, these are founders that have built a business, built, you know, relationships with employees over decades, you know, built a company and a community, and really wanna make sure their business, which is their legacy, is in kind of strong hands.

William Ackman
William Ackman
Executive Chairman at Howard Hughes Holdings

And, you know, Warren Buffett has done a great job acquiring sort of family owned, family controlled businesses that sort of meet those criteria. And, but the issue for Berkshire today is it's you know, as a trillion dollar enterprise, acquiring, you know, anything other than a $20,000,000,000 company is not really gonna move the needle for the business. So we think we Howard Hughes becomes uniquely positioned to acquire founder controlled, high quality, great businesses, starting at relatively small scale. We have the ability, once our stock trades closer to intrinsic value, to offer a tax free execution to someone who wants to become part of a diversified enterprise. And we think that creates interesting competitive advantages for us.

William Ackman
William Ackman
Executive Chairman at Howard Hughes Holdings

Obviously, since we did not complete the transaction until Monday, we've not really had substantive discussions with any counterparty. We sort of tested the concept on one potential counterparty, was quite intrigued. Obviously, that will be one of our initial discussions. Something else that we intend to do, we've admired the value that's been created at Berkshire Hathaway by their buying and building the most dominant insurance company in the world. That's provided profits from the insurance business, but also very low cost float that has been able to be invested in much higher returning assets than a typical insurance company is able to invest in, because as the Berkshire Insurance operation is part of a diversified holding company, the regulators give them much more flexibility in investing in that portfolio.

William Ackman
William Ackman
Executive Chairman at Howard Hughes Holdings

One of the things that Pershing Square brings to the table here is a long term track record investing in marketable securities as part of our arrangement with the company. If we were to build an insurance company inside of the Howard Hughes Corporation, we would invest the equity portfolio of that insurance company for free, which would, of course, give that insurance business a competitive advantage in terms of the kind of returns it can earn on its assets. The insurance idea operation is a high priority for us. We have identified a superb potential leader of that business. I would say we're very early days in terms of discussions, so no certainty that anything will come up with those initial discussions.

William Ackman
William Ackman
Executive Chairman at Howard Hughes Holdings

But now that we've, announced the transaction, that is a very high priority for us. So I would say either a realistic outcome would be, you know, sometime by the fall, we have an announcement of a potential transaction.

Anthony Paolone
Anthony Paolone
Executive Director at J.P. Morgan

Okay, that's really helpful. And if I could just ask a follow-up to all of this. You have the $900,000,000 it's substantial, but I think it sounds like your plans are also quite substantial. So how does capital allocation work going forward related to what goes into new businesses versus the traditional real estate Howard Hughes. You have probably over $1,000,000,000 worth of apartment assets.

Anthony Paolone
Anthony Paolone
Executive Director at J.P. Morgan

You're getting this density in Hawaii that increases the value there. I guess, like do you envision changing or moving capital you know, out of the legacy real estate into other areas, or does that all just be left alone?

William Ackman
William Ackman
Executive Chairman at Howard Hughes Holdings

Sure. So we're obviously enamored with the MPC business, and we understand the long term economics of that business. And it's critically important that we build out MPCs to fulfill the demands and needs of the community, communities to make these sort of highly desirable places to live kind of long term. So really no change to kind of the business plans, if you will, for any of our communities. But the good news, I would say, is, you know, with the passage of time beginning over the next several years, we expect the MPC business to start generating cash in excess of what is, which should be recycled, if you will, into equity investments and new apartments and condominiums and kind of other assets.

William Ackman
William Ackman
Executive Chairman at Howard Hughes Holdings

And then with the longer term passage of time, we expect the MPC business to be generating a large amount of cash that can be repatriated to the holding company to invest in other assets. But we would not ever, if you will, starve an MPC to free up capital to do something else. And we're contemplating the reason why we are, one, buying primary shares from the company, as opposed to secondary shares, is because we, you know, want you know, give the business a head start in terms of, injecting capital into the enterprise. But we're gonna manage the MPC business and our communities, the way we have, historically, and we're gonna invest in projects that make sense, and we're gonna continue to make these the most desirable, award winning places to live.

Anthony Paolone
Anthony Paolone
Executive Director at J.P. Morgan

Thanks.

William Ackman
William Ackman
Executive Chairman at Howard Hughes Holdings

By way, just to be clear, you know, David, Carlos,

William Ackman
William Ackman
Executive Chairman at Howard Hughes Holdings

Ryan, I will be, you know, part of that process. Everyone is economically incentivized to maximize the long term value of Howard Hughes. And, you know, when I first you know, when we first spun off Howard Hughes and the MPC business to shareholders, you know, when it was owned by General Growth, what they did was basically starve the MPCs. They would extract, they would build an asset, and then they would sell it, they take the profit, and they would use it in the mall business. One of the first things we did is we stopped that behavior.

William Ackman
William Ackman
Executive Chairman at Howard Hughes Holdings

We basically have retained every asset we've built other than hotel assets where we made this kind of a strategic decision that we did not believe they were necessary for us to own them on a long term basis. But we've taken a very long term view in overseeing and managing, these communities ever since I joined the board of the company, and that will continue going forward.

Anthony Paolone
Anthony Paolone
Executive Director at J.P. Morgan

Okay. Appreciate all of the the context, Bill.

William Ackman
William Ackman
Executive Chairman at Howard Hughes Holdings

Of course.

Operator

Thank you. And our next question comes from the line of Connor Mitchell from Piper Sandler. Your question, please.

Connor Mitchell
Connor Mitchell
Equity Research Analyst at Piper Sandler Companies

Hey, good morning. Thanks for taking my question. I guess just thinking about David being the CEO of the holding company now and then longer down the line when there's a few more companies or portfolio companies underneath the holding. Is the plan for for you guys to appoint somebody to oversee the MPC business, or will David kind of be still in charge of, you know, the CEO of the company overall as well as the MPC business and maybe maybe just put in department heads or company CEOs for for the different acquired businesses down the line.

William Ackman
William Ackman
Executive Chairman at Howard Hughes Holdings

Sure. So, you know, David will remain CEO of the overall company. I think he'll be spending certainly the substantial majority of his time on the kind of Howard Hughes real estate part of the operation. And we will you know, the kind of way we're allocating resources, Ryan and I will be focused on, you know, acquiring kind of new businesses. We expect those businesses to be run-in a pretty autonomous fashion with us overseeing kind of overall, I would say, capital allocation, and that will be a shared responsibility of the senior leadership team of the company and and, ultimately, the board of directors.

Connor Mitchell
Connor Mitchell
Equity Research Analyst at Piper Sandler Companies

Okay. I appreciate that. And then you mentioned that maybe you want to bring the the debt up to investment grade. Can you just walk us through some of the steps that might be needed to change or improve the balance sheet in a way to to reach the investment grade that you're aspiring to?

William Ackman
William Ackman
Executive Chairman at Howard Hughes Holdings

Sure. So just to be number one, putting in 900,000,000 of cash is a helpful thing to the overall credit quality of the enterprise. The, The goal is to have the holding company ultimately be investment grade, query whether we can get the real estate subsidiary to investment grade, but one of the things that will help the overall creditworthiness of the sub is to have a very strong parent that owns it. You know, one of the things that rating agencies consider in the way they rate a subsidiary is the creditworthiness of the parent. And here, we started out with a debt free parent that's gonna deploy capital in high quality, durable growth companies.

William Ackman
William Ackman
Executive Chairman at Howard Hughes Holdings

And we think that just that infusion of capital and if you think about Howard Hughes today, it's a pure play real estate company and suffers from, if you will, to some degree, the economic volatility certainly over shorter term periods of time. If the owner of that business is not simply a kind of corporate shell, but a very well capitalized corporate parent that owns businesses that generate recurring cash flow. We expect that to drop you know, to really be a credit positive event for, you know, the principal real estate subsidiary of the company.

Connor Mitchell
Connor Mitchell
Equity Research Analyst at Piper Sandler Companies

Okay. And then just to follow-up quickly, is is the the 900,000,000 cash infusion, is any of that kinda plan to pay off any of the debts for the Howard Hughes at the moment, or is that really just being held to acquire the new businesses or develop the insurance business or more along the lines of the parent company movements?

William Ackman
William Ackman
Executive Chairman at Howard Hughes Holdings

The good news is that the first of all, our view is that the rating agencies underrate, if you will, the subsidiary. And we're gonna work to improve their understanding of the business so we can help make some progress there. But the business historically has consumed a hundred plus percent of the cash it's generated in terms of, you know, the most part, desired need to continue to reinvest in the subsidiary. With the passage of time, if we don't acquire another MPC type asset, is not served in the business plan, just the maturation of our various communities will turn Howard Hughes from a business that, you know, has reinvested the substantial majority of its cash in, you know, building out new assets to a place where even, you know, meeting the demands of the communities, going forward, there's still excess cash left over, thereafter. So we we don't envision needing to put holding company cash into the subsidiary.

William Ackman
William Ackman
Executive Chairman at Howard Hughes Holdings

We do envision kind of over the intermediate to long term, the subsidiary being a cash rich and in a position to return capital to the holding company.

Connor Mitchell
Connor Mitchell
Equity Research Analyst at Piper Sandler Companies

Okay. I appreciate all the color. Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of John Kim from BMO Capital Markets. Your question please.

John Kim
John Kim
Managing Director - US Real Estate at BMO Capital Markets

Thank you. I had a similar line of questioning. If you look at the cash flow statement of Howard Hughes, cash flow from operations has positive two of the last three years. It turned negative this quarter, partially offset by cash flow from investments. I think a lot of that is property development.

John Kim
John Kim
Managing Director - US Real Estate at BMO Capital Markets

But the point is it's very lumpy, investments, especially condo and commercial developments. So my question is, is Howard Hughes is the cash flow generation going to accelerate over the next few years and be self funding? Or will it really be after the current condo developments planned come into fruition sell?

William Ackman
William Ackman
Executive Chairman at Howard Hughes Holdings

Carlos, would you like to Yeah, John, thanks for the question.

Carlos Olea
Carlos Olea
CFO at Howard Hughes Holdings

Look, as you know, we size our developments and our new investments in our communities based on the existing free cash flow of the business. We're just a self funding vehicle where we are only investing in new developments to the extent we put the cash on the balance sheet to fund 100% of that project. Going forward, as we see the continued maturation, as Bill discussed, and the infrastructure needs and the horizontal costs diminish over time, the free cash flow generation of each of these MPCs increases. Combine that with the stabilization of the recurring NOI from our operating assets, in the next three, five, seven years, the excess free cash flow of the real estate subsidiary should grow meaningfully. In any particular quarter, looking at our cash flow statement, there are ups and downs and lumps based the required horizontal infrastructure that goes into any MPC, but if you look at it over a trailing twelve month period, I think you'll see that all the new investments have been sized appropriately relative to the free cash flow we generate.

John Kim
John Kim
Managing Director - US Real Estate at BMO Capital Markets

Okay. And David, you talked about during the quarter home sales up sequentially, down year over year off a strong quarter last year. But how has activity in the home sales market been since Liberation Day?

David O'Reilly
David O'Reilly
Chief Executive Officer at Howard Hughes Holdings

It still remains strong within our MPCs. You know, we are very cognizant of the national headlines and what's going on across the country. We haven't seen those headlines in our communities. And I think that that speaks to the quality of what we have, but also the appeal of master plan communities relative to buying a home that's not within a community that delivers a higher quality of life in our view. To date, we've seen great activity.

David O'Reilly
David O'Reilly
Chief Executive Officer at Howard Hughes Holdings

We've seen great traction. I know you noted in your report that our builder price participation was down compared to last year, but to me, that's not a canary in the coal mine, if you will. Builder price participation is when home prices appreciate meaningfully between the time we sell land and the home is sold. Over the past two years, we've seen rapid appreciation in the homes in our communities that's materialized in great builder price participation. Over the past quarter, that home price appreciation has slowed, meaning that we're going to receive less builder price participation, but that's not an indication of a slowing housing market or fewer home sales.

David O'Reilly
David O'Reilly
Chief Executive Officer at Howard Hughes Holdings

Our sales were strong this quarter. Subsequent to the end of the quarter, they've continued and it gives us great confidence in reaffirming our guidance.

John Kim
John Kim
Managing Director - US Real Estate at BMO Capital Markets

Okay. My final question is for Bill. The $900,000,000 cash injection into the company, how much of that will be earmarked for the insurance investment versus other investments that you're looking at? And what are your return invested capital hurdle rates on new investments?

William Ackman
William Ackman
Executive Chairman at Howard Hughes Holdings

So I would say TBD on how much we invest in the insurance subsidiary. It sort of depends on whether we're hiring a team or whether we're buying an existing asset and putting capital into it. In terms of return on capital, I would say, I would just sort of point you to Pershing Square over the last twenty one years. We view what we do as a very high return strategy. The historic business of Pershing Square is to buy minority stakes in really high quality businesses, generally at a time when the market is sort of under appreciating them or they're they've, you know, had some management or governance or other challenges and help make those businesses more successful.

William Ackman
William Ackman
Executive Chairman at Howard Hughes Holdings

We have not been an investor in private businesses. That being said, over the years, we have received many, I would say, a huge amount of deal flow, in the private space that we really haven't had a platform that we could use to execute on that. And part of the theory here is to take advantage of that deal flow, in the context of of Howard Hughes. But our I would say our return objectives are are high. You know?

William Ackman
William Ackman
Executive Chairman at Howard Hughes Holdings

I I what high is, I guess, is, the eye of the beholder, but, you know, we're looking to generate high returns on capital.

John Kim
John Kim
Managing Director - US Real Estate at BMO Capital Markets

Appreciate it. Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. And this does conclude the question and answer session of today's program. I'd like to hand the program back to David O'Reilly for any further remarks.

David O'Reilly
David O'Reilly
Chief Executive Officer at Howard Hughes Holdings

I want to thank everyone for joining us today. As always, if there are additional questions, we're always available. Finally, we're hosting an XBASE session to discuss our transformation to a diversified holding company and take additional questions. The event starts at five past eleven eastern, and you can access that session by going to x.combackslashbillackman. Or if you're logged in to x already, there's a link to the event under Bill's account, which is at bill ackman.

David O'Reilly
David O'Reilly
Chief Executive Officer at Howard Hughes Holdings

Look forward to speaking with you there on our next earnings call. Thank you again for joining.

Operator

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for your participation in today's conference. This does conclude the program. You may now disconnect. Good day.

Executives
    • Eric Holcomb
      Eric Holcomb
      SVP, IR
    • David O'Reilly
      David O'Reilly
      Chief Executive Officer
    • David Striph
      David Striph
      President of Asset Management & Operations
    • L. Jay Cross
      L. Jay Cross
      President
    • Carlos Olea
      Carlos Olea
      CFO
    • William Ackman
      William Ackman
      Executive Chairman
Analysts
Powered by Quartr