Thank you for standing by. This is the conference operator. Welcome to the Tribe Property Technologies fourth quarter and full year 2023 results conference call. As a reminder, all participants are in listen-only mode, and the conference is being recorded. After the presentation, there will be an opportunity for analysts to ask questions. To join the question queue, you may press star, then one on your telephone keypad. Should you need assistance during the conference call, you may signal an operator by pressing star, then zero. I would now like to turn the conference over to Jennifer Laidlaw, Vice President, Marketing and Communications. Please go ahead.
Thank you, operator, and good morning or afternoon, everyone. Thank you all for joining us today. On our call, we have Tribe's CEO, Joseph Nakhla, and our CFO and President, Angelo Bartolini. Yesterday, before market opened, Tribe issued a news release announcing our financial results for our fourth quarter in fiscal year 2023. This news release is available on Tribe's website under the Investor tab and is filed on SEDAR+. Please note, portions of today's call, other than historical performance, include statements of forward-looking information within the meaning of applicable securities laws. These statements are made under the safe harbor provisions of those laws.
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. We use terms such as gross profit, gross margin, Adjusted EBITDA, and MRR on this conference call. These are non-IFRS and non-GAAP measures. For more information on how we define these terms, please refer to the definition set out in our management discussion and analysis. In addition, reconciliations between any Adjusted EBITDA and net income are included in the press release issued yesterday.
The company believes that Adjusted EBITDA is a meaningful financial metric as it measures cash generated from operations, which the company can use to fund working capital requirements, service future interest and principal debt repayments, and fund future growth initiatives. Adjusted EBITDA should not be construed as an alternative to net income or loss determined in accordance with IFRS. Please note that all financial information is provided in Canadian dollars, unless otherwise noted. Following the prepared remarks by Joseph and Angelo, we will conduct a Q&A session, during which questions will be taken from analysts. With that, I'll turn the call over to Tribe CEO, Joseph Nakhla.
Thank you, Jennifer. It's a pleasure being with all of you today. It's a summary of our Q4 and year-end result of 2023. We're quite pleased to point to the fact that we've achieved another record revenue in Q4, and also for the full year of 2023, despite some of the challenges that have been in the market. We've also saw a significant improvement in our Adjusted EBITDA year-over-year, approximately 51%, mainly driven by cost reduction optimization. It's always indicated in our most previous calls that we're aware of what the market expectation is, and growth at any cost is not something that the street is interested in, and we completely agree.
We've made some adjustments, as you can see, in our EBITDA numbers, and I'll be speaking a little more about that as we go. Our gross margin improvement is very strong. It's 47% in Q4, compared to 37% in Q4 of 2022, the year before. The big highlight there, and I'll be speaking a little bit about that later, is that it's some adjustments. This is apples to apples, but we've also made some adjustments to the way we calculate our gross margin, just to really give the analysts on the street a little bit more insight into the quality of the product and services that we have. We have a strong outlook for 2024. We're pretty darn excited about this year and what it holds for us.
A really strong pipeline of M&A, and as those of you that know our story, we're working our way up the pyramid in terms of quality, in terms of size and revenue composition of the M&A companies that we're looking at. And we're fortunate to be in a place where we have the ability with banking relationships that allows us to make moves like that. We did in Q4 complete our acquisition of Meritus Group. We had the benefit of a bit short of a month in terms of its revenue addition to our quarter. I'll hand this over to the next two slides about the financials to Angelo. Angelo will be walking through it. Go ahead, Angelo.
Oh, great. Thank you, Joseph. Since joining Tribe, I've been captivated by the immense potential within the business and the trajectory it has in transforming the property management industry. Despite the market challenges, Tribe once again delivered a strong financial performance in Q4, with revenue of CAD 5.1 million, an increase of 8% compared to CAD 4.75 million in Q4 of 2022. Gross margin percentage was 47% in Q4 2023, compared to 37% in Q4 of 2022. Adjusted EBITDA for the quarter of 2023 was an outflow of CAD 1.03 million, an improvement of 51% compared to an outflow of CAD 2.08 million in the fourth quarter of 2022. We are very proud of having achieved this 51% improvement in our adjusted EBITDA.
Our cost-cutting and restructuring measures are having an impact, and we expect more. Revenue for fiscal 2023 was CAD 19.39 million, an increase of 9% compared to CAD 17.81 million for fiscal 2022. The increase in revenue was due to an increase in software and services fee as a result of more properties on the Tribe platform and the acquisition of Meritus. Gross margin percentage was 41% in fiscal 2023, compared to 38% in fiscal 2022. The increase in gross profit percentage was a result of the addition of service contracts through organic growth and acquisitions and restructuring efforts. Adjusted EBITDA for fiscal 2023 was an outflow of CAD 6.56 million, compared to an outflow of CAD 8.18 million for fiscal 2022, an improvement of 20%.
The improvement in Adjusted EBITDA was achieved as a result of an increase in revenue and cost-cutting efforts. This year, we were fully dedicated to improving profitability by reducing costs and optimizing efficiencies in our operations. Tribe's commitment to achieving profitability is unwavering, as strategic steps are being taken every day to position the company for sustainable financial success. Last quarter, we implemented additional cost reduction strategies, which included employing process improvements, cost optimizations, headcount reduction, and consolidation of back-office systems.
These expense reductions proved to be effective, as shown by the company's impressive 51% year-over-year improvement in Adjusted EBITDA, an improvement in our gross margins going from 38% in 2022 to 41% in fiscal 2023. We expect these expense reductions to continue benefiting Tribe's financial performance heading into and throughout 2024. In summary, Tribe remains in a solid financial position with growing revenue and improving profitability. We remain excited about the company's growth prospects and continue to be committed to improving our profitability while increasing revenues and strengthening our market leadership. That concludes my financial update. Back to you, Joseph.
Thank you, Angelo, and thanks to the team for working through the interesting times we've experienced in the last quarter. As I give you a little bit more insight into what the organization has been up to, it's always helpful to give a little bit of insight into the microeconomics and the revenue per home, revenue per customer, all those types of key KPIs that we've accustomed the street to learning more about. We had a great Q4. Our revenue was up 8% year-over-year. What was really interesting there is also our overall MRR. When you look at the graph on the right, you'll see that actually our MRR per community was approximately CAD 2,500.
So this is monthly recurring revenue per building, which is an improvement of about 9% from Q4 of last year. What's interesting is also we did not include the improvement or the addition of Meritus into this graph. So that way, we can just compare it without, because we only had Meritus for 3 weeks-4 weeks. What's really helpful for everybody to understand about this is we continue to be able to generate more revenue per customer due to the service delivery. And as you may have remembered from my last quarterly result, I indicated that we actually had made some optimization of our revenue breaks through our customers.
So we essentially identified customers where the revenue mix was not suitable to our service delivery model and wasn't yielding enough gross margin. And that adjustment is... We'll continue to do that, but it has been to a big extent done in Q4. You'll also see our monthly recurring revenue per home in the table below is still very healthy. We're still approximately CAD 30, almost CAD 32 per month per home, with transactional revenue still trending in the right direction, yielding about CAD 36.90. Again, this does not include revenue from our latest acquisition, Meritus, which would be added in the next quarter as we report these numbers.
Back to that, just to, by way of reminder, we needed to make a move for the GTA market in the condo space. You know, you have to be under a rock to not recognize the change of the GTA skyline. And we had been on the periphery of that market. We've been licensing our software to developers there, but we didn't really have a big presence in there in terms of boots on the ground and licensing to be able to go out and leverage it. So, this great acquisition of ours that we've made, and Meritus is a great company, great leadership. We've added more than 5,000 homes under management. Quite a bit of experience there.
The great news is, here we are a quarter past, is that we're starting to get leads into that market, that we're actually essentially pointing to our service delivery model to enhance the service delivery that Meritus has historically done a great job with, but even give them a bit more of a digital edge to take to the street there. And that's starting to yield results as we speak here in end of Q1. High level Q4 updates. Obviously, the revenue line has been a record for us. We've added new property developers, you know, utilizing all of our software for efficiency management and warranty management and Tribe Management Services. We call that holistic sales.
This is whereby we put all of our products and services that exist and actually into the hands, into a community and in the hands of a developer, and it often leads further sales in the future. So we don't usually just sign one or two. This is the stuff that came up on in the last quarter, but usually we have larger agreements with them to reflect on new construction in the future. We've tried Tribe Home Pro software. We've added just pure software, added eight new projects with the hope of winning further management and recurring business from them as they're erected and up and running and people move in with them. 14 projects using our platform. These are contracts that we had signed previously, but they're up and running in the quarter.
And 18 management agreements in what we call new communities to us. So these are essentially new agreements with existing buildings that decided to leave their existing service provider and come to us, and 22 communities were onboarded. So these would be agreements that were signed prior to this quarter, but they're not completed, or the movement or transition of these buildings to start generating revenue from did not happen until a point of Q4. You know, for those that would remember how we generate our revenue, we've historically spoken about three revenue buckets. We've got software and services, our MRR sticky business through our partnerships with other REITs and/or condo corporations. We have transactional revenues.
This is, we call this, like, in-app purchases, essentially things that are related to your building. Then we have digital service and partnerships. Probably our last year, well, it will be our last quarter presenting it this way. We're gonna be breaking these into two big buckets. One will be the software and service recurring revenue, and the bottom two are gonna come together because of the number of partnerships that we've added and how the line is getting blurry between transactional revenue, back office revenue. So you'll see us represent that in two big buckets that we'll be reporting on moving forward. Key goals for 2024, will always be in the business of adding more contracts and increasing our, MRR revenue, and, and we, we feel really good about, about, a performance of Q1, and, and we've got some exciting stuff coming in.
Past that, we gonna complete additional acquisitions where we've made it very clear that acquisition will continue to be a big part of our strategy. The biggest difference is you'll see us move up the acquisition pyramid with bigger transactions and bigger EBITDA effect on our bottom line. We'll continue to drive efficiencies in the business. We've invested heavily in our back office and bringing all of our accounting systems under one umbrella, and it came with a big investment, a big expense to the company, but it is really yielding us the ability to be able to be a lot more nimble, move quicker, and continue to sustain the growth that we're experiencing.
You'll also see an increase in our partnership revenue as we continue to identify either efficiencies or opportunities for our buildings to lower their operating costs while generating more revenue for us, and it's kind of the absolute win-win scenario, and we'll be a little bit more clear on indicating what some of these projects are in the next quarterly call to kind of illustrate the value to the bottom line on that. Our outlook for next year continue to drive towards profitability. It's not gone missing on us, how important that is to the business, and I think the team has done a wonderful job identifying the opportunities and executing on it, and we've got a long list of areas and initiatives that will continue to improve the bottom line.
Interest rates and inflation have obviously been a bit of headwinds. We haven't really been affected that much. We've been able to navigate through it. At the end of the day, buildings have to be managed. I would argue buildings have been managed more efficiently, and we will be a little bit more clear in our messaging to the street in 2024 about how well the buildings we're managing are doing compared to buildings that we're not managing in terms of health and cost per category, per door. That will be a big part of our marketing moving forward. We'll continue to execute on our cost saving efforts. We'll improve gross margin on EBITDA in 2024. We have a very, very healthy pipeline of proposals.
There's no lack of opportunities. We just got to make sure we do the deals that make sense for the business, that still delivers that value. Now we are officially a national player with a large scale. This large scale allows us to do significant amount of partnerships and clever solutions that will deliver directly to the bottom line. We'll be speaking more about that in Q1. And we'll continue to be active with M&A. That's a part of our DNA as an organization. That won't be stopping in 2024. I'll pause here and see if there's any questions that anybody would like to ask from the analyst community.
Thanks. We'll now begin the question and answer session for analysts. To join the question queue, you may press star, then one on your telephone keypad. You'll hear a tone acknowledging your request. If you're using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing any keys. To withdraw your question, please press star, then two. Our first question comes from Kiran Sritharan with Eight Capital. Please go ahead.
Thanks for taking my questions, guys. Good to see the progress on profitability. Can you talk about how the new initiatives, you enacted should flow through the year? Can you also discuss the hiring plan ahead of the opportunity GTA?
Yeah, thank you for the question. We're basically, you know, the way we looked at it is we've made almost 11 tuck-in through our history, and to be very specific about the way we integrate these businesses, so obviously the client-facing side of the business, we put our software in there, we digitize all their activities and kind of change the service delivery to what we believe is a much richer experience. We obviously, by digitizing these communities, we open up revenue streams that weren't there before. One of the areas we've made a very clear area of focus for us in late 2023 and early 2024 is bringing all the back office of all these communities.
Just to give people a perspective, there's probably in the neighborhood of, I would say approximately between CAD 250 million-CAD 300 million that go through our rails and microtransactions, annually, somewhere in that neighborhood. So the reason that's significant is envision, all these have to be accounted for, have to be reported on, and you know, accurately and be compared to every single community's budget. This is a mother of an undertaking, obviously, when it comes to AP/AR and all the activities around that. So the biggest initiative we embarked on last year was not only integrating our front solutions with our back offices, but also amalgamating all of our back offices.
I'm talking specifically about accounting, AP/AR, all the solutions that sit on an island in one area and one place, whereby we can actually generate all these financials right across to all of our customers, regarding, regardless of where they are geographically. So that, that took a massive initiative. That was a massive initiative. I'll be honest, I, I, I would say there's nobody in the country that does that, but I would say there's almost nobody in the country that does that. We're definitely pioneering that. And the reason that's relevant is because it really introduces massive efficiency by visibility, not only for our homeowners and our communities, but also for our, our, our teams to start seeing and catching trends for some of these buildings based on amount of, you know, utility they're using, gas or hydro, or what have you.
So that's a massive initiative. On the hiring side, I like to think our staff has been doing more, you know, is doing a lot more with a lot more of the technology that we've implemented. We're piloting three or four initiatives on the technology side that can be really game changers in terms of allowing us to continue to manage more communities with less people and allow them to do the more important things versus just basic communication daily. So you'll see, you'll see as we continue to grow, you're not gonna see the graph move the exact same way as it pertains to our hiring staff for 2024.
That's a good call, Joseph. Thank you. And now you called out inorganic priorities. How is the pipeline progress here? Can you also remind us of a typical targets profile?
Yeah, fair question. Pipeline is very, very healthy. We're constantly in deep negotiation with transactions. I constantly refer to the visual of a pyramid. If you think of property management companies in Canada and the U.S., you know, the overwhelming majority of them are tiny, CAD 2 million or less, or in that neighborhood of recurring business annually, maybe running at about between 5%-12% EBITDA. But if, as you work your way up the pyramid, there's less and less companies, obviously, but also the quality improves and the scale that they have, and the verticalization, because, you know, property management aren't all serving the same verticals. There's multiple verticals that we're very interested in. Government is a big one. Student housing is another big one.
Even rental looks to the naked eye as one vertical. Actually, it's sub-categorized in multiple areas. So for those that know the industry know that as we work our way up the chain, you get better, better, better accessibility and solutions on product to service these, these verticals, these new verticals, ones that we're not as deep in. And also you start seeing opportunity to leverage and the EBITDA profitability that can actually be layered on our direct or positive, potentially path towards our own profitability as well. So it'll just accelerate that. You know, so keep, keep an eye on us. We'll be speaking to these activities as soon as we get them over the line.
That's helpful. And then, finally, here, take a step back. Can you comment on some of the housing starts and some of the trends you're seeing in the space into this year, and how your progress has been expanding into some of these new projects?
Yeah. For most people who aren't as close to the space, it probably almost requires a dictionary for people to really understand some of the initiatives that the government is embarking on. So here's my best version of speaking to that. Truth of the matter is we're incredibly short on housing, period. This is all categories, not just one category, and that's rental housing, mainly, even if it in the world of condos. So you'll see more verticalization. If anything that's really interesting is places like BC are coming up with some, you know, arguably clever solutions to even allow people with single-family homes to get rezoned to quads. A lot of people will have heard about that, in some areas, even multiplexes of six units.
That's gonna be an initiative because none of those can go into the market without being what we call stratified or treated like condos. So we actually think our software solution will be really suitable for that. But on the rental side, where a lot of the noise has been made, I think what's really gonna happen is bigger partnerships between the, you know, public and private, essentially, than the day that the government isn't gonna be able to go out there and lead the construction and the development that's required to satisfy the needs of the market.
So, you know, they're giving incentives and creating some opportunities for privates to go in. We're in large conversations with a number of developers on what we call master planned communities, whereby the city's coming in and saying, "Look, we need you to build some below market or at market rental communities there." We come in to consult with them. We're seeing quite a bit of activities around that. That obviously doesn't yield revenue for us for a year or two, depending on the stage of construction.
But we're seeing quite a bit of movement there. And I'm for the sake of our children, I'm hopeful that a lot of these initiatives will ease some of the pent-up demand. But for the business, there's no doubt that there's never gonna be, you know, lack of need on the property management, especially companies that can digitize and can ensure that these buildings are healthier.
Thanks, Joseph. I'll pass the line.
Thank you.
Once again, if you have a question, please press star, then one. The next question is from Suthan Sukumar with Stifel. Please go ahead.
Good morning, gents. The first question, I wanted to touch on things from an organic growth perspective. Now, you guys reported some healthy KPIs to close out the year. Can you provide color on how these KPIs may have been trending post the quarter?
Suthan, I don't know if it was just my phone or everybody else's. You broke up a little bit. Was your question regarding how the KPI is trending for the quarter? Did I hear that correctly?
Correct. Yeah, just wanted to get a sense of how KPIs have been trending, year- to- date, you know, post Q4.
Got it. Thank you so much. Yeah, we think we're gonna, you know, Q1 was healthy from a revenue point of view. We usually experience, when we make an acquisition, a bit of dip in and a bit of churn in the customer base. I'm pleased to say that the Meritus Group has done a really good job sustaining the business, and it seems to be quite a bit of an excitement around the buildings that we've acquired with them or through them. Even though we're just cutting our teeth on the full digitization process because it's a bit of an Ontario market, and our technology has to play nice with all the regulation there. So that's going well.
New construction seems to be on track. I think sales, due to the interest rates, have dipped a bit, but I still think good products that are being priced properly in the market are there. We have seen a couple of projects that have been hit hard by their inability to complete, whether it's due to a developer having financial struggles or people kind of reneging on the pricing because maybe it was overpriced to start with in the market. But our KPIs, as far as new construction onboarding look good in Q1, is gonna be very strong in Q2. Our gross margins continue to be trending in the right direction. The second bucket of our revenue, that is, the higher margin items associated with partnerships and digital services .
We'll definitely have had our best quarter ever in history, Q1, and we'll speak more freely about that when we put our results, and we'll point to the drivers there, but we're quite pleased with that, and we see a massive opportunity to replicate a lot of these types of solutions that we're taking out to leverage that out to in Q1. You'll see that in our revenue per door as it pertains to this, the transaction revenue side of it. You know, we're just coming out of the big integration project around accounting.
I would say that Q1 probably was the most we've arguably spent on getting that project over the line compared to Q4, but it's in the neighborhood. But the big outcome of that will be a cost reduction that's gonna be realized in Q2 and mostly Q3, really, when everything normalizes around our revenue or our cost per door. That will be trending in the right direction, has been, but it will be really trending in the right direction later in the year.
Okay, great. Thank you. Wanted to touch on the Meritus acquisition, you know, in terms of how it's setting up Tribe for growth in the Ontario market. Can you talk a little bit about your broader growth strategy here in Ontario? Is it, you know, do you need to make more organic growth in investments here, or is this really more about consolidating the Ontario market to gain more scale?
Yeah, it's a fair question. Look, Ontario has experienced tremendous growth in the last 10 years, and we feel that we're just scratching the surface on our presence there. On the condo side, we've got a couple of offices now that play in that space. We've been both led with our technology first. A lot more developers use our technology than they use our holistic solution, which is saying a lot of the buildings that you see in the downtown core being built are using our technology, but we hadn't had boots on the ground to secure the recurring business associated with the management. And that's changing.
So, Meritus has given us that footprint, and we're actually, we spent quite a bit of Q1 meeting with the developers that we've worked with there or the license or technology to let them know about our ability and services. And that's gonna yield really well for us in terms of getting brand new condo buildings that we will be fully managing with our technology and our services. But there is significant amount of verticalization in the market that we don't play heavy in. We don't play heavy in institutional rental in the Ontario market or the GTA market, and you'll see us make moves there.
We don't play at all in the government market, and we think our government housing, which we think is a completely massive opportunity, and there's a very few companies with our national footprint that can actually deliver to government entities, the security and the opportunity that we can give them. And then you'll see us also be very active in places like student housing, more kind of institutionalized student housing. We like that space a lot. We think it's a big opportunity there. So the quick answer on that is we will be very active in those areas, and you don't need to make multiple acquisitions. Sometimes one or two can actually do the job for you if they're the right size with the right leadership.
Okay, great. No, thanks for that color. Last question from me, Joe and Angelo, just on the margins. You know, you guys have made some pretty good progress here on the path to profitability. Can you remind us on what your targets are for gross margins, you know, in the medium to long term, and on EBITDA, you know, how do you think about your timeline to break even? And what are your, you know, what are some of the key areas of investment that you still plan to make kind of looking ahead here?
Yeah. I'll take those high level and work my way through it. So on the margin, and I referenced that earlier, what we wanted to do is really allow our shareholders and our on the street to really understand the composition and the value of our product and revenue streams. And we felt that things that are passed through, not a big amount of our revenue, but some of our revenue is kind of clouded in that conversation. For example, we have an entity called RDC that really allows a lot of the REITs to manage the employees on site. They're not really working for us, but they kind of sit there as pass-through items or ancillary services, and they're not a big number of our revenue, but they kind of cloud that.
So one of the exercises we did, and we saw the impact of that here, is we kind of removed that aside. It's not a big amount of revenue for us. It's percent-wise, it's like, you know, 7% or 8%. But what we've done is we've taken that out, and we've put that aside and said: Look, you know, you wanna look at our gross margin, apples to apples, we wanna be... We think we can get to between... I've always said 40%, about 50%, 47%-48%. You know, I think we can actually hit 50%.
I think the increase of our partnerships revenue, which is really high gross margin bucket, will really start driving more value there, and you'll start seeing signals of that in Q1, but Q2 and Q3 are gonna be really telling a very specific story to that. So we should be in the, you know, hitting those. I think a big national player like us, we're always pulled back every time we make an acquisition because most places aren't operating at the same level of gross margins we are, but generally, we should be aiming for that 50%+.
In terms of initiatives to further improve our gross margins, I mean, the most obvious one I spoke heavily about today is obviously, you know, generating all of our accounting service delivery on one platform, through one platform, with one processor. That's gonna really yield us quite a bit of help. We don't see that yet. We haven't had the benefit of that yet, but the work has been done to get us there. So you'll see the impact of that in Q2 and Q3. It's a pretty obvious place to go. But also our ability to introduce more technology and more digitalization in the buildings that we manage will also allow us to continue to manage, you know, more homes and address more inquiries with less people.
I think that's the big initiative that we're embarking on. We think AI plays a role there. AI currently plays a role in allowing us to benchmark the performance of our buildings in different categories, which I think is gonna open up new opportunities for revenue. Because, you know, it's one thing to say, "Hey, we deliver better service than the company next door." It's another to say, "Look, our buildings use less administrative cost or have less administrative costs or less utility bills than the building next door to it due to our technology or solutions that we've deployed." And you'll hear us speak more about that in the next quarters.
And as far as EBITDA profile is concerned, you know, we see a direct path to 15%-20% EBITDA in a fully baked national player with all the acquisition and integration that we want. We're already starting to get into that space. You know, there's only three national players that play in the condo space, and we're obviously the youngest and smallest, but we're there. And there's only three or four big national players that play in the rental space, and I would argue really two, but three or four claim that, and we're there. So we're taking our rightful place in these places. The difference with us, we're just continuing to grow.
Okay, great. Thank you. I'll pass the line.
This concludes Tribe's fourth quarter and full year 2023 results conference call. A replay of this conference call will be available on Tribe's website in the coming days. Thank you for attending today's call, and enjoy the rest of your day.