Stewart Information Services Corp Q1 FY2026 Earnings Call

Hello, and thank you for joining the Steward Information Services First Quarter 2026 Earnings Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, you will have an opportunity to ask a question during the question and answer session. Instructions will be given at that time. Please note, today's call is being recorded. Lastly, if you should require operator assistance, please press star zero. It is now my pleasure to turn today's conference over to Kat Bass, Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead. Thank you for joining us today for

Stewart's first quarter 2026 earnings conference call. We will be discussing results that were released yesterday after the close. Joining me today are CEO Fred Eppinger and CFO David Heisey. To listen online, please go to the stuart.com website to access the link for this conference This conference call may contain forward-looking statements that involve a number of risks and uncertainties. Please refer to the company's press release and other filings with the FCC for a discussion of the risks and uncertainties that could cause our actual results to differ materially. During our call, we will discuss some non-GAAP measures. For reconciliation of these non-GAAP measures, please refer to the appendix in today's earnings release, which is available on our website at Stuart.com. Let me now turn the call over to Fred.

Thank you for joining us today for Stuart's first quarter 2026 earnings conference call. Yesterday, we released the financial results for the first quarter. I will kick off today's call with an overview of our results and our current macro housing outlook, followed by a review of our results and strategic direction by business line. After my remarks, I will turn the call back over to David so he can further cover our results for the quarter. I am very pleased with the results of the first quarter this year. As you know, the first quarter is typically the most impacted by seasonality, and on top of that, the residential transaction activity continued to be at historically low levels. In that environment, we delivered one of the best quarters in the company's history with adjusted EPS of $0.78 and revenue growth of 28%. In the first quarter, each of our businesses showed strong revenue growth and improved earnings as we executed on our strategic priorities. Though first quarter existing home sales were muted, our direct operations, agency services, and national commercial services benefited from strong commercial growth. Our real estate services segment also delivered strong results year-over-year, bolstered by our recent acquisition of MCS. In the first quarter, along with a 28% adjusted revenue growth, we delivered adjusted net income growth of $24 million, up from $7 million in the same quarter last year, and allowed us to deliver a 4.3% margin for the quarter up from 1.8% in the first quarter of 2025. On our last call, I shared that we expected existing home sales to improve around 6% to 8% in 2026, beginning our journey back to more normal existing home sales. While we anticipate some growth in the housing market, we foresee the potential for growth to be a bit more muted this year, given the broader macro and geopolitical conditions and where we have seen interest rates move as a result. We anticipate that we will continue to maintain our business momentum in the second quarter, but we could see the residential market continue to bounce along the bottom of around 4 million existing home sales for the next quarter, if ongoing geopolitical tensions prolong. In the first quarter, housing signals were mixed. As mentioned, existing home sales were relatively flat, down 1% compared to 2025. Medium sale price growth was a bit weaker than in the past few quarters. However, it was positive, up just under 1% for the quarter. The pricing story currently varies very significantly by market, and we are seeing more price negotiations, which may be helping home buyers to balance rates. Interest rates remain a critical gauge for homebuyers entering the market, and though we were confronted by difficult weather across the country in January, early in the quarter we saw rates move closer to 6% and felt both momentum, both in purchase and refinance activity. March, however, saw the impact of rising global tensions, and rates exited the month around 6.3, cooling activity a bit due to the increase itself, but also because of the quick shift in rate and sentiment. We do anticipate some momentum will continue into the second quarter as rates remain below, kind of at or below 20-25 levels heading into the spring. All in, our view of the residential market growth will be closer probably to 3-5% for the year. We believe commercial, on the other hand, will remain more resilient and continue to have solid growth. Turning to our business line results. Our direct operations business grew 10% in the first quarter compared to the same time frame last year. The growth came from improved transaction activity. We have not deviated from our longstanding focus on gaining share in target MSAs through organic and inorganic efforts. We continue to see positive momentum in our strategic initiatives to grow commercial business out of direct operations, which we often refer to as Main Street commercial. In the first quarter, our direct operations grew Main Street commercial by more than 20% year-over-year. Looking forward, we believe we will grow this operation in part through targeted acquisitions, and we have seen a pickup in opportunities in our pipeline for direct operations as well as opportunities that benefit our other business lines. We are thoughtful in our assessment of opportunities and expect to continue to grow the company in part through being acquisitive. our national commercial services business delivered another impressive energy continues to be our largest asset class but other notable gauges in the quarter were our industrial site development data center and retail asset classes in total we grew national commercial services by 40 percent in the first quarter we remain focused on growing all of our asset classes through geographic expansion and acquisition of leading industry talent. Our agency services business delivered a very strong first quarter, with revenues up 25% compared to the first quarter of 2025. Our agency partners confront the same housing headwinds as we do, so we consider this growth to be especially solid considering conditions. We are focused on growing this business through ramping up new agents and wallet share expansion of existing agents, with the emphasis on 15 target states. We sought strong progress towards our goals this quarter with solid year-over-year premium gains across most of our states. In addition to geographic growth, we are focused on expanding our commercial offering for agents, and we are seeing success there growing 46% in the first quarter compared to last year. This goes along with a 15% residential growth as well. We will continue to build on the momentum we have made in recent years for our agents to differentiate our service and better our offerings for our agent partner. Our real estate solutions business grew revenues by 66% in the first quarter compared to last year. Our recent transaction of MCS helped to strengthen our results for the first quarter. However, all of our other operations combined to grow over 20% when compared to the first quarter for 2025. The addition of MCS allows us to further our strategic priority for this segment, which is to win more share across the top 300 lenders and further our cross-selling efforts across our expanded product lines with existing customers. In the first quarter, we added to our real estate solution segment once more with the acquisition of National Appraisal Network into Steward Valuation Intelligence, Our appraisal company, National Appraisal Network, also known as NAND, helps strengthen our appraisals both to scale and deepen our talent base. In the first quarter, we delivered 12.5% adjusted margins, up from nine last quarter. For the full year, we fully expect to improve margins and deliver in the low teen range for this segment and expect that our recent acquisition of MCS will help us improve our historical margin outlook. Moving to our international operations, we are focused on broadening our geographic presence in Canada, increasing our commercial penetration as well. In the first quarter, we grew our non-commercial revenue by 9% and our commercial revenue by 14% in a very challenged housing market. We believe we can build on our strong position in these markets and continue to grow share. As an enterprise, we are dedicated to being the premier titles and real estate services company. We are focused on strengthening the company for lasting success through targeted multi-pronged growth plans by business to further fortify our position. We thank our customers and agent partners for your trust and dedication to Stewart. We are committed to doing our best to continually improve our services for your benefit. For the Stewart team, thank you for your dedication and focus on growing this company together. We are able to execute at this level because of your steadfast commitment to our journey. In the first quarter, we celebrated our inclusion on the Forums of America's Best Large Employers list. We thank our employees for this recognition and are committed to being a destination for industry-leading talent. I am very proud of the progress we have made on our journey and feel that progress is visible in the results we delivered this quarter in spite of both macro and housing headwinds. David, I will turn it over to you to provide the update on our results.

and thank you, Fred. I appreciate our employees and customers for their steadfast support amid a continuing challenging residential real estate market. Yesterday, Stuart reported strong first quarter results with both revenue and profitability improvement. Total first quarter revenues were $781 million, resulting in net income of $17 million or diluted earnings per share of $0.55. On an adjusted basis, net income was $24 million, or diluted earnings per share of $0.78, compared to $7 million and diluted earnings per share of $0.25 last year. Appendix A of our press release shows adjustments to our consolidated and segment results, primarily related to net realized and unrealized gains, acquired intangible asset amortization, acquisition related expenses, and severance costs, which we use to evaluate operating performance. In our title segment, operating revenues increased $104 million, or 21%, driven by strong results from our direct and agency title operations. As a result, title pre-tax income increased $13 million, or over 100%. On an adjusted basis, title pre-tax income increased $14 million, and also over 100%, percent with adjusted pre-tax margin of four percent compared to two percent last year title business direct title revenues increased 38 million or 17 percent while total open and closed orders improved from last year domestic commercial revenues increased 25 million or 35 percent driven by higher transaction size and volume with growth across asset classes led by energy industrial, site development, data centers, and retail. Average domestic commercial fee per file improved 33% to $21 million compared to $15,800 last year. I'm sorry, compared to $15,800 last year. Average domestic residential fee per file in the first quarter was 33%.

Star 1 on your keypad. To leave the queue at any time, press star 2. once again that is star and one to ask a question and we will pause for a moment to allow everyone a chance to join the queue we'll take our first question from both george with kbw please go ahead

your line is open hey good morning um so just wanted to start on commercial you know see the fee profile was up you know very nicely year over year when you think about the trends over the next few quarters. How do you see the cadence of that year-over-year growth? Is it, you know, could it persist for a little while? When do the comps get a little more challenging?

That's a great question, Boaz. What's happened is our pipeline's really quite good, and what we're obviously seeing across the industry is the frequency of very large deals have increased. The other thing for us is we're leading more deals as we've had a good two-year run here of growing skill and capabilities. And so it's natural for our cover at this higher level. The other interesting thing for us, if you compared us to others, because we were small four or five years ago, our refi percentage is less. So we're a little bit bumpier on size of deal because it tends to be less refi kind of softening. And so I'm pretty confident that the business will continue. It'll jump around. The growth year over year will jump around, I think, on us a little bit. Just because, if you recall, a couple of quarters last year we grew, and there might be some comparisons, but I'm pretty bullish on our continued success as we go through the year on commercial. And I would say the commercial in our direct operation, part of that is generated by our own staffing, if you will, putting skills back into the direct offices. So I believe that has some momentum, both continuing but could increase over time for us because of the investments we're making there. So that's the other thing that's a little different by us because we were underpenetrated of commercial, what I call Main Street, the smaller end of commercial than probably the big guys.

Okay, great. And then, actually, switching over to the ancillary, can you just talk about the year-over-year growth rate outlook there, just with MCS now is kind of what we saw in the first quarter kind of a reasonable level for the rest of the year? And I think you guided to a margin in the low teens for that segment for the rest of the year.

Yeah, so exactly. So before I – on the margin first, I would say 11 to 12 was good, 13, maybe even a little more. We've got some work to do on some consolidation stuff, but it's going to tick up to that 12 and a half to 13, maybe a little 13 plus. So I feel good about the – and then your other question was growth. So, again, we grew most of the businesses outside of MCS. In total, I think there were 21 or something. And so there's good penetration in that business. I think it could soften a little bit, but you're going to see pretty strong coming out of that. There's a lot of momentum in those businesses, so I'm pretty good about it. And, again, the question overall, you know, to me, you know, given my view that the res growth is going to be marginal, particularly for the next quarter or two, you know, I feel we can sustain with our momentum somewhere around the 50-year-old company. You know, it might be a little less, but I feel like when I look under the hood in all of these businesses, even with a low res, and the trends feel pretty good. So that's how I think about it in total. I think we've established a little bit.

Okay, great. That's helpful.

And, Bo, just real quick on that to give a little more color. So we had mentioned that MCS was a little over $160 million a year, so, you know, it's roughly $40 million a period on revenue. So you can sort of, when you take that effect out, you can sort of get to that 20% that Fred was talking about.

And it's slightly seasonal, so it was a little less than that in the first quarter, but the 40 is good.

Okay, great. Thanks for that, caller.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Jeffrey Dunn with Dowling & Partners. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Good morning, Jeff.

Good morning. First, could you share what the next up commercial is in your agency line?

Yeah, I would – it's going to be parallel to kind of what we have, but it won't have, like, a lot of energy and big stuff. Agents don't have – typically don't have those mega kind of small in the data center. But – so it's a pretty broad, you know, CRE kind of mix, but without kind of the, again, energy and the huge tend to be direct mixes. And I really feel good about it in agency. If you recall, we've always been a strong kind of underwriter for agents, but our commercial was very skewed to New York. I mean, that's historically the company was very good in New York. But our ability to reach our commercial capacity to other big kind of commercial-oriented agents across the country was much weaker. And we also didn't have the facility when we had big multi-location deals. to kind of facilitate that. So we created something called a concierge service that facilitates businesses around that 12% margin, and those are the ones we have our volume in. We don't really have, you know, we have, like, you know, like our remote online notary tools are very teeny business. It's really a tool for our business. We do a little bit of outside sales, but it's really for delivering for ourselves and our agent partners. So it's not really a core of the growth we're talking about or the margin. So I feel pretty good about the breadth. What I would also say is the seasonality, obviously, in the appraisal and the notarization business, the signature, the kind of schedule business, those are very cyclical. They're just like the rest of our businesses where MCS is a tad counter-cyclical to that because it's the default area and it's less fall. And so the pattern of that is helpful. But again, I think I said out loud, we're getting this 12 into the 13, 14 range. And if the market comes back, right, if the market's at a 5 million, just like our other businesses, that thing could get to 15 to 60, right, because they have some cyclical nature to them because of the volume. So it's a very solid kind of portfolio now, and it's a lot stronger now that we've got the scale-up in appraisal and we've got –

Okay. Great. Thank you. Yeah.

Thank you. Once again, if you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 on your keypad now.

We will move to the financials, both in terms of revenue and margins.

Yeah. So NAN is small. Well, it's about a $40 million thing, so you've probably got $30 million going to run through the three quarters or so. It's kind of the incremental margin is what I described. We should get in the double-digit, kind of low double-digit. There's going to be some integration costs and transition costs that you're going to have out of the gate here, so it's not big. As far as the proceeds, if you recall in December what I said when we raised $150,000, what I said is that I saw some real promising, interesting things that I wanted to do in the business. And so there's a half a dozen or so things that were quite warm that helped both in the res area and in the direct operations area. And so that's what we're pursuing. And so we had free cash on hand that we used for that. And we have other dry powder for the other transactions I'm talking about. What I'm trying to do is in each of these businesses, really fragmented businesses that are kind of rolling up, and what you're seeing is the financial buyers in a lot of those businesses, they bought in 21, they overpaid, et cetera. They're withdrawing, right? And so it's made a lot of people pause. And so what you're going to be able to do, at least I think in some of these businesses, is build a leadership position, which we've done in Property Pres. And, again, it sets up nicely for us to get the – and then in the direct side, what's happened is because the commercial market's a little bit better and because there's a little bit more light at the end of the tunnel, agents are making a little bit of money. and they're much more willing these folks that we've been talking to for months um we're getting at trading prices that are kind of make sense for both of us with a with an earn out and there's you know we have our target list there's a couple in particular uh that i feel are higher probability in the next six months that's why we raise the money that's what we have so good we'll see how it happens you know one of the things that we do is we we spend a lot of time uh kind of reaching out making contacts developing a pipeline things fit and how they help our talent base and things are going to start you know my view is there's a chance here that things are going to start happening and I want to make sure that we're baffled enough to take advantage of it because we don't like competing or what we do is we try to make this happen just that's very helpful so

I have a couple follow-ups related to that so do you have an updated expectation on given what you mentioned about the pickup in the pipeline, about how much capital you could be deploying through the end of the year, and also if you can share some of your learning so far

related to the MCS and integration process. Yeah, the MCS, I'm thrilled. I think, you know, as you know, MCS was a leader in their space, and I couldn't be more pleased with the leadership team and their ability to continue to grow and set us up with a high reputation in that space. And so I'm thrilled. It also completed a little bit of, you know, there's some other places I'm looking for DeVault capabilities, but it really rounds out kind of, you know, our presence in the DeVault marketplace. Because of the nature of that business, there isn't a lot of integration with the rest of the company, except for the normal things you think about, financial stuff. And so it's a pretty standalone business model. But there is, I believe, going to be cross-sell opportunity, relationship opportunities that are going to come from it. So as I said, it's doing everything we expected it to do, and I'm thrilled by it. As far as capital, again, the things that I that I talked about in December are well within our excess cap. And so the money we raised and probably we had $70 million on top of that available. So it's in that range of availability as we go forward. What's the probability of it happening? I don't know. You know, these things are, you know, I just wanted us to be prepared to be. Now, I would also tell you that I think in the next two or three years, say two years, I think there's going to be a few of the gems in our marketplace are going to come available, right? There's only a handful of things in the title business, you know, significant, a little bit bigger, say the 200, 300 range. And somewhere in the next couple, three years, my feeling is they could become available. But I don't think, I don't do capital planning for those because they're so rare and it's not, it's one of those things that zone and justify the returns if we do it. But in the normal course, as you know, Most of the deals we do are in that $20 million to $50 million range, and again, we have a really good line of sight to the pipeline, so I don't think they're going to use anything but our available capital. Super helpful.

I'll get back in the queue.

Thank you. And at this time, there are no further questions in queue. I will now turn the meeting back to Fred for closing remarks.

Thank you so much for your interest in Stuart. I just have to summarize. I feel very good about the company. I don't think we've ever been this strong as far as talent and position in the marketplace. And hopefully, even with a difficult market, we can continue our momentum. And I'm pleased with the progress we're making so far. So, again, I just want to thank everybody for their interest in the company.

Thank you. This brings us to the end of today's meeting. We appreciate your time and participation.