Welcome to the Angi 1st quarter 2026 earnings conference call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by 0. After introductory remarks, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press Star then 1 on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press Star then 2. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Julie Hoarau, Chief Financial Officer. Please go ahead.
Good morning, everyone. I'm Julie Hoarau, the CFO of Angi Inc. Welcome to Angi Inc.'s first quarter earnings call. Joining me today is Jeff Kip, CEO of Angi. Angi has published a shareholder letter, which is currently available on Angi's website in the investor relations section. We will not be reading the shareholder letter on this call. I will soon pass it over to Jeff for a few introductory remarks and then open it up to Q&A. Before we get to that, I'd like to remind you that during this presentation, we may make certain statements that are considered forward-looking under the federal securities laws. These forward-looking statements may include statements related to our outlook, strategy, and future performance and are based on our current expectations and on information currently available to us.
Actual outcomes and results may differ materially from the future results expressed or implied in these statements due to a number of risks and uncertainties, including those contained in our most recent quarterly report on Form 10-Q, our most recent annual report on Form 10-K, and in the subsequent reports that we have filed with the SEC. The information provided on this conference call should be considered in light of such risks. We will also discuss certain non-GAAP measures, which, as a reminder, include adjusted EBITDA, which we'll refer to today as EBITDA for simplicity during the call. I will also refer you to our earnings release, shareholder letter, and public filings with the SEC, and again to our investor relations section of our website for all comparable GAAP measures and full reconciliations for all material non-GAAP measures. Now I will pass it off to Jeff.
Good morning. Thank you all for taking the time to read our letter and join us today. We know everybody's busy. Just to repeat a little bit of what I wrote in the letter, we believe we're in the middle of the most transformational time in technology in a generation. We think AI agents and agentic coding present Angi opportunities that we did not have in the same way or fashion 12 or even a few months ago. We believe it's incumbent upon us as good stewards of the company and its capital to move aggressively to take advantage of these opportunities. Moving from our legacy platform to a new AI native technology platform for our core business and flywheel much faster is the first.
Building agents to multiply the effectiveness of our core customer experience and offer new capabilities to our pro customers, what we are now calling the Angi Pro Chief Revenue Officer, is the second. Finally, leveraging agentic coding to build these agents in the platform twice as fast as we could before is the third. We have great assets. We're confident that our existing flywheel is one of the best in the industry, if not the best. We have 30 years of brand equity. We have nearly 200,000 active pros across North America and Europe. We have the most powerful customer acquisition engine there is in the industry. Our flywheel is going to spin even faster as we deploy agents to improve our customer success rates and serve as a phenomenal distribution base for our new product that anyone building AI software would love to have.
We think we have a tremendous head start and great leverage against the opportunity. For the last 3 years, we've been working hard quarter by quarter to incrementally improve our customer experience and business on an old, brittle legacy stack. The resources we've been using to do this are really critical to moving forward as quickly as possible against the much greater opportunities I just described. We have made real progress on the customer experience. I won't list everything I've listed in the past. Moving NPS 30 points and improving pro churn by 30% are key markers during that period. We've also made good incremental progress moving AI into our key revenue flows, with 50% of our homeowners now touching our AI helper in their path. We've also not been 100% consistent at delivering incrementally with our legacy technology.
The time and costs are extremely high. The incremental approach we've taken and we are taking is not enough, and it's not frankly worth the opportunity cost versus what else is in front of us. We just can't afford to keep our product development teams battling with the core technology to improve quarterly revenue and deliver against specific targets. We're gonna release our resources against the opportunities I just described. Getting the new AI native platform is critical because it's going to allow our core product to function more effectively and drive AI-first innovation, improve the customer experience and the efficiency of the business far better than we can on the decades-old code our current technology is made up of. Our core flywheel is gonna spin faster, and our core experience on both sides of the marketplace is going to be better.
Shifting and focusing on building the new Angi Pro Chief Revenue Officer is an incredible opportunity because, first, we're going to generate materially more value for our core pro customers by making sure they win more of our leads, driving retention, engagement, multiplying lifetime value, which in turn will spike acquisition opportunity of new pros. It's the strongest bet we can make in this business. Secondly, we effectively will have a new business because our pros will be able to use the Angi Pro CRO for non-Angi leads, the rest of their business, grow and enjoy more success, which is, of course, our core mission. Get more jobs done well for our homeowners and more jobs won well by our pros. We have a twofold market opportunity and a huge as yet undisrupted market where we have the leading assets and leading market position.
Multiple things can be true at the same time. Our mission has not changed. We're focused on jobs done well, as I just said, and jobs won well for our pros. Our goal is deliver profitable and accelerating growth over time. We are also making a clear pivot on how we execute our strategy, given again, what we think is a remarkable opportunity in front of us in our space, and we think we are well positioned to win. With that intro, we will move to questions.
Our first question today comes from Daniel Kurnos with StoneX. Please go ahead.
Thanks. Good morning. Jeff, I guess the first obvious question, just to follow up on this, you know, we're calling it a pivot, but it's really more of an enhancement to the way I think you guys are trying to win business. You know, with the, with the reduction of guidance here or the pull of guidance, I guess, for the short term, maybe you can just frame for us how much this is going to impact, in your mind, revenue and EBITDA and over what timeframe. I wanna kind of follow up on sort of how you perceive the market opportunity.
Thanks, Dan. Good to hear from you. First, it is again, two things can be true. We have been going down the path we've been going on. I think it's a material pivot in the way we deploy our resources and execute, and I think it is a whole new opportunity that we are going to build as well. In terms of your question on revenue, EBITDA, cash flow, you know, we made a clear decision not to give guidance. We think that setting guidance and the pursuant distraction it is from executing against larger opportunity is not where we should be focused. What I would say is our existing business and flywheel generate and will continue to generate solid operating cash flow, which we think of as adjusted EBITDA minus our CapEx.
We plan to continue to generate solid operating cash flow. We're not looking to destroy our EBITDA margins or take our cash flow anywhere near zero. We're effectively going to fund our platform and product strategy internally, meaning we're only gonna add to our cost base where we see more opportunity. For example, our AI software and token costs will be several million dollars more than we anticipated even a few months ago. By taking resources off the legacy technology and acknowledging that we're no longer going to focus on quarterly revenue, there will be an opportunity cost measured in some amount of lower revenue implicit by not working on the core technology to deliver incremental revenue wins. To be clear, we don't plan to use the cash on our balance sheet to fund the transformation.
Rather, we actually anticipate continuing to build the cash on our balance sheet by continuing to produce cash flow.
Does just to be clear on that before I ask the kind of TAM question, Jeff, you know, it's obviously not a distraction. You're aiming for a bigger target here. Some revenue opportunity loss, but you know what I mean, we're still focused on the core business, and we don't anticipate I mean, is there any way to kind of frame how big a disruption you think this might be to the core business in general?
Look, I think we plan to operate with a cash cushion. Without this being a commitment or guidance, I think we'd be happy with a cash flow cushion and give or take the range of $50 million a year. That's adjusted EBITDA minus CapEx. That's not a goal, a budget, a commitment, or a plan or guidance, but that's directionally how we think about a floor. We think that that's a good number that allows us to internally fund the transformation and continue to deliver cash flow to the business. We think that our core business will continue to generate solid profitability. We think that once it gets onto the new platform, we will have the opportunity to accelerate with innovation and efficiency there.
I think we'll have the opportunity as we put our agents in place and get penetration over the next several quarters. We think we'll have the opportunity to accelerate materially, following getting the new Angi Pro CRO infrastructure into place.
With, with that, Jeff, I think in the letter, you basically said that your $700 billion TAM that you're referencing is just job value. For you guys to get to your $5 billion revenue opportunity, which you lay out there, it just seems like doubling your win rate. I mean, what you're suggesting here is that by building the CRO for pros, I mean, you have an opportunity for them to utilize this both on and off platform. There seems like there's a software element to this. Maybe you could unpack for us how you think about getting to that $5 billion.
Separately, is there a separate TAM that we aren't discussing yet today or in the shareholder letter, that could be achieved or attacked from a software perspective, given that most pro marketing budgets are viewed as % of job value, but software is typically a separate expenditure line and kind of viewed as a separate TAM when they think about costs of service.
A great multi-part, but very smart question from you, Dan. I should expect nothing less. Yes, $700 billion TAM is residential construction, specialty construction, home services, total job value, that we think is our target market for our platform and customer base. Today, we capture below 1.5%. The market is split 75% larger pro, 10 employees or more, 25% smaller pro. We think we have 3%-4% share in the smaller pro market, and we're under 0.5% in the large pro. We have a strong view, AI, no AI, we can replicate the share of the small pro market in the large pro market. We think we've underinvested and not executed well there over time.
Doing just that, and getting to that share would give us $2.5 billion of revenue at a 10% take rate, which is about our current take rate, which is pros pay $50 a lead. They win 1 in 7, 1 in 8. The average job is about $4,000. We think about it that way. I'll come back to that. On our platform, 10 homeowners submit jobs. 7 of the jobs get completed, but only 2 of those are won by our pros. If you look at our 4 longstanding, strongest brands and businesses in Europe, which would be the U.K., Germany, and the Netherlands, they win more like 3.5. We believe that doubling that 2 is well within reach.
If pros are winning 2 as many, you know, 4 out of the 7 instead of 2 out of the 7, that takes your share of the total job value in the market from 3 to 4 to 6 to 8 or 7 as a proxy. If you come back to the take rate, pros are looking at their overall P&L and their share they're paying to support their revenue. We think 10's a pretty good marker where you're driving good value. By improving the win rate, we would lower the take rate unless we took lead pricing. Taking lead pricing is 1 way to keep the take rate a fair take rate. Another way is charging some for the software. You're correct. There's 2 markets there.
There's the lead market, where maybe we'd like to be a little less than 10, to drive real value there. There's also the software market. Based on our research and looking at if you take 10% of that $700 billion job value market, it's $70 billion, that's the potential revenue. We think that there is a comparably sized market, you know, $50 billion-$70 billion maybe, in services and software to sell to pros that is likely growing as software transforms with AI. On some level, you know, there's $140 billion of revenue out there. I think our focus is on delivering against the $70 billion, delivering for our pros. It is a product that while we're first focused on Angi Leads, our pros should be able to use for other leads and frankly, running their overall business.
You're not wrong. When we think about our $5 billion revenue target, one way to do it is to get 7% of the market at a 10% take rate. Another way to do it is to get a lower percent of the market and effectively have software and services revenue. The third leg we have is actually accelerating growth even faster in Europe, which can be a material contributor because there's another $500 billion or $600 billion of TAM in Europe, which we've been less successful at penetrating. We think that's tied a bit to market structure, and that's a different conversation. We think we have multiple ways to get to the $5 billion, and I think you've hit well on a couple of them.
Got it. Well, very ambitious, Jeff. Thanks for all the color. Appreciate it.
Thank you.
The next question comes from Youssef Squali with Truist. Please go ahead.
Hi, this is Robert on for Youssef Squali. Thanks for taking our questions. On the Q1 performance, can you just explain the levers relative to 90 days ago, which areas of the business are outperformed, and how sustainable is that outperformance? What are you guys doing in new LLM traffic channels? Thanks.
I'll take the first question. In terms of revenue, we had a strong like January and February, but then March pulled us to the lower end of our revenue range, driven primarily, we believe, by macro factors. Service request mix shifted away from larger jobs in category where we have the most extra capacity, such as like roofing and HVAC, and towards smaller jobs. We survey thousands of pros and homeowners, and it's clear that homeowners backed away from projects like more in March than in previous months. As a result, like pros reduced lead budget because they believe they would land less jobs, meaning overall we had lower capacity. On EBITDA, our EBITDA came in at about $23 million. That's above our $10 million-$15 million guidance range. There were two contributing factors.
First, we capitalized about $2 million more of engineering labor than we thought in our initial guidance. We follow our accounting policy here, and we went by the book, so it went a little bit higher. Second, we had a couple one-time benefits and expense and some timing, and so we came out above our guidance for Q1.
I would again say editorially, we look at all in adjusted EBITDA minus CapEx. When we have these swings, you can blame Julie for following our accounting policy. If given our druthers, we wouldn't capitalize it, and I don't mean to speak accounting heresy, just, we think it makes things more complicated and the cash ends up in the same place. We're just calling out that benefit. Let's talk a little bit about LLM traffic. We have been investing a fair amount in making sure that we are there for the LLM traffic. We've been buying OpenAI ads successfully. We're near break even on that buy. There's been a bunch of noise out there on it, but we're happy with it.
We're in their beta test, and we know they are working on optimizing, and we're confident that we're going to be able to grow value and expand there. We've launched our app successfully on ChatGPT. We'd like to see them move their app ecosystem into deeper integrations, and we're working with them on that. We're going to launch on Amazon soon, and we are live working on multiple other integrations with major players, which we expect to announce in the next 2 months. The overall share of traffic from these sources is pretty low right now, but I think we are all seeing consumer usage shift, and will increase, and that we think the platforms are going to figure out how to leverage this traffic and will be very interested in working with us.
If you think about, I wrote this in the letter, but if you think about our approach, our approach and our pivot is about making sure our pros get better results. When our pros get better results, our homeowners get better results. When customers get better results, the LLM wants their customers to go there. We think that in the same way that our results on SEO once kinda won SEO when we were HomeAdvisor and Angie's List, and we have most recently taken really leading positions in SEM and buying on social for the same reason, we think we're gonna do the same here. We're pretty excited about it. Our approach has been, we've developed technology where we can pick up the conversation in any part of the chat, with the context in the chat.
If you were to say, "Hey, ChatGPT," or, "Hey, Claude," or whichever you're talking to, "I have water on the floor in my bathroom," we could effectively let the LLM know, and we will have let the LLM know, that we can pick up the conversation there and ask questions which are LLM-driven, but with our proprietary domain knowledge fine-tuning the LLM chat. We also can pick it up somewhere in the middle or at the end when Claude or ChatGPT or Perplexity or whomever has diagnosed that, oh, you have a crack in the base of your toilet and you need a new toilet. We can say, "Here are some pros, Mrs. or Mr. Consumer," and get the job done there. We're already taking the same approach with our core homeowner experience.
We have in test, an LLM first chat that effectively mirrors this experience. It's right now a conversion deprecation, which we wanna narrow before we move it broadly. We do plan to lead with this experience when we're working with partners and new traffic channels because we do believe that ultimately where we wanna be is having a full chat with a homeowner, getting whatever information they're capable of, and homeowners aren't always very good at giving the information or assessing the information and being able to provide price estimates, advice, information and of course, our pros through the experience. That is where we see things going, and that being beneficial to the pros on the other side as well. That's how we're looking at it all holistically. I hope that kinda answers your question.
Yep. Thank you for the color.
The next question comes from Sergio Segura with KeyBanc. Please go ahead.
Hey, good morning. Thanks for taking the questions. first, I was hoping you could just provide a little bit more detail on what the Angi CRO is gonna look like at the product level, the any kind of required investment for that product and, you know, just maybe a little color on why this is the right jobs to be done to focus on right now. secondly, relatedly, maybe how did your go-to-market strategy change with this new AI approach? if you could discuss any challenges or opportunities of targeting those smaller pros that you mentioned in the letter for this product. Thank you.
Right. The reason this is the right job to be done right now is, on a simple basis, this is, we believe, the best way to achieve our mission and deliver the best customer experience to both sides of the market. What we're trying to do is make sure that when a homeowner comes to our platform, they hire a pro from our platform, and the job gets done well, and the pro feels like they've won a job well, everybody's happy. When that happens, customer NPS is +50, pro retention and satisfaction jumps, and the pros pay us, and we make more money, and everybody's happy. Our biggest gap, as I walked through earlier when I was responding to Dan, is the number of jobs that are actually completed versus the number our pros win.
To drive that North Star experience, our pros need to win more. There's been just a dramatic change in the possibilities available to us with AI agents and agentic coding in just the last few months. We have been assessing and digging in and looking at what we're doing. We believe that agents offer us the opportunity to close the loop and take that metaphorically 2 out of 7 to 4 or 5 out of 7 that I referenced earlier, and double the win rate, double the effectiveness for the homeowner, double the effectiveness for the pro and really grow value in the business and the ecosystem. In terms of how we're approaching this, how it's gonna look, effectively, what we're doing is starting with the core lead to close cycle. Lead received.
First agent would be what you might call an AI call center and booking agent. Outbound call can be made to the homeowner. Homeowner doesn't pick up. Outbound text can call back in. Booking agent gets more information, confirms the needs, books into the pro's calendar, sends reminders to the homeowner and the pro, makes sure there's a rescheduling, makes sure the pro shows up. Getting the booking is really the first key anchor in getting the job one. A lot of our large pros look at booking rate as their key metric. You can go from there and imagine that you can coach the pro on the sale going in. You can record the visit. I don't know if anybody uses Granola for their meetings and transcribes their meetings. You can do something very comparable.
You can send notifications with coaching advice to close the sale during the visit, and you can also take the transcription of the call, and the agent can put together a draft quote by the time the pro gets out to her or his truck or van and is able to then dispatch a quote right away. 1 of the gaps in the winning process is delivery of quote in a timely fashion and accurately. Once you have the quote, you have follow-up, you have checks on changes, you have closing the deal, you have asking the pro to intervene with a visit or a call to close the deal. You can go from there and your imagination can take you to different places.
What we're gonna do is carefully assess the needs and the opportunities to make sure when the homeowner submits a service request and creates a lead for our pro, one of our pros is consistently winning it. You know, in our mindset, we should have our first agent in its first test, in the next several weeks. We will then, as that gets going and we complete our agentic software development life cycle, which is the platform on which you do your agent development, we will work on getting our second one out, and we're working on prototypes, and we get to our investor day in the fall. We hope to demo this for everybody who wants to come. Look, we're pretty excited.
We think that the opportunities opened up here to really deliver value for our customers and ultimately really accelerate the business to deliver value for more and more customers that are shareholders, are incredible right now.
The next question comes from Stephen Ju with UBS. Please go ahead.
Hi, this is Vanessa on for Stephen. I just wanted to ask a question on the guidance. Can you add some color on what forecast item is getting more difficult for you to rescind guidance on? Is it more on the cost side as you build out the product? Thank you.
I wouldn't say that we're having difficulty forecasting. We have high visibility in our business. We pay careful attention to what we're doing. It's just very simply, we're not gonna give guidance because there isn't a reward for managing to quarterly or annual guidance. There's not any reward for hitting the range on our quarters. There's not any reward for dedicating resources to getting the next $1 million in the quarter versus the next $1 billion of value that's in front of us. To be honest, the market's telling us that. We're gonna stop trying to invest and improve our revenue on our old platform, which is really just fighting the last war.
We believe the upside in our AI native strategy is on some level uncapped. We believe that anything that distracts from the tremendous prize management, engineering resources, anything that distracts from the tremendous prize we have in front of us is effectively kind of a waste of time. We still plan to run our commercial machine and drive the business back to pro growth and ultimately revenue growth. We're just not putting a timetable on that. Our milestones that we're thinking about is we're targeting getting onto the new platform in the next 12 months or so. That's a key marker in terms of getting into a place where we can innovate and work on the core business.
Secondly, what I was just talking about in response to Sergio's question, we're gonna sequentially build, test, and roll out our Angi Pro Chief Revenue Officer agents. As we get that into place and the new platform rolls out, we anticipate being able to accelerate our revenue in 2027. you know, we think it should be material, otherwise it's not really worth playing for. I think without giving guidance, that's how we're thinking about it, and it's not a problem on visibility or difficulty. It's simply a matter of where we're prioritizing resources, and frankly, the feedback we're getting from the market on the value of doing that.
The next question comes from Cory Carpenter with JPMorgan. Please go ahead.
Hey, this is Danny Pfeiffer for Cory. Thanks for the questions. For the first, Jeff, can you talk about what this pivot business strategy means for the consumer and homeowner experience and how it may change? Then for the second, can you talk about the rationale for the debt repurchase in 1Q and 2Q quarter-to-date, and maybe provide an updated capital allocation strategy? Thanks.
Let me talk about the homeowner experience. I'm gonna let Julie Hoarau talk about our bonds, and then I'll add any color there. I talked a little bit earlier about the development of the LLM surfaces as traffic sources and our strategy there. That was sort of very practical. How are we approaching this now? How are we working with the LLMs, and how does that opportunity work? If you go a step further, what many people see right now, and you can just go back to the development of OpenClaw as really the key marker here. Consumers are gonna have personal agents more and more, and those personal agents are gonna be able to go out, perform tasks for them without them necessarily interfacing with a, in their minds, a website.
What we strive to do is to be the best place for a homeowner come to get their job done well. We think that the strategy we've laid out continues to be the best thing. As I said, we think that the strategy we've laid out is the best approach to delivering signals to the LLMs to make the LLMs choose us. Effectively, get the job done, get the traffic. Demonstrate that you're gonna get the job done, get more traffic. When we think about personal agents, personal agents are effectively trained LLMs, trained on personal preferences. If we can train the LLMs by delivering results to be a choice place to send homeowners, we will also train the personal agents.
What we wanna do is we wanna position ourselves not only to be a place where a homeowner can come and use us as their agent to get their questions answered and find their pros, but the homeowner's personal agent will come and do that. We think we do that by, you know, delivering jobs well for our pros, which means jobs done well for our homeowners. I described a little bit earlier our thinking about the homeowner experience, and when you think about what I was saying with the ability to deliver estimates based on the information the homeowner gives us, again, homeowner information is not always perfect, so there'll have to be caveated estimates. Take in photos, take in info, have an iterative conversation, make requests of the homeowner for certain measurements, et cetera. You can imagine the way the interactive experience can develop.
Ultimately, that means the pro has better information. We get better matching. The pro can match the technician and the equipment that they send, and we can have a much stronger ecosystem. This can happen either by a homeowner coming through an LLM, coming to Angi, coming through a partner. We have several partners who deliver us traffic, or frankly, a homeowner's trained personal agent. We see the world evolving this way, we think the homeowner experience will evolve this way, and we need to deliver against it.
In terms of, like, capital allocation, as Jeff said earlier, we're confident in our ability to produce consistent cash flows. In terms of M&A strategy, we're conservative, we capped our share repurchase ability until next year. We have repurchased about 20% of our share outstanding at the time of the spin-off. That's the limit of the safe harbor for tax-free spin, that's for a period of 2 years following the spin-off, until April 2027. As a result, we thought that buying bonds was a good use of capital. We bought about $100 million worth of bonds, that's about 20% of the debt outstanding at an almost, like, 9% discount.
Just to follow on, we are clearly not against buying our shares at favorable prices, but we can't do that until next year. We're clearly not against buying our bonds at favorable prices. As Julie said, we just bought a bunch. We do have to be mindful of creeping tender rules, and how that works. We're not averse to doing it, but we have to in the same way we have to pay attention to the structures around share repurchases, we have to pay attention to structures around bond repurchases. As Julie said, you know, we are not in an aggressive mindset. We're in a disciplined mindset about M&A.
We would take a great value and a great opportunity that augments our strategy, but we're not trying to go and take the cash off our balance sheet and buy brand-new things that are outside of what we've told you our core strategy is. I think that's our, that's our thinking on capital.
Thanks.
This concludes our question and answer session. I would like to pass the floor to Jeff.
Well, thanks very much. Thanks for all the questions. I think we've laid out what our thesis is here, which is there are really tremendous new opportunities in front of us that are provided to us by AI agents and agentic coding. We think we're remiss to continue to work on the old technology, which is not easy to work with, nor is it productive to keep chasing quarters and revenue guidance, et cetera. We are incredibly excited about what's in front of us because we think we have a clear line of sight on executing against our agentic strategy, and we clearly believe that we have the strongest distribution base between our brand, our pro network, and our acquisition machine in the industry. We think we can spin the flywheel standalone. We think we can add to it by building our agents.
I think effectively, Dan pointed out there's another market opportunity here for us as well. We're extremely excited. It's gonna take us the next several quarters to put it all in place with the new platform and the rollout of agents, but we will be talking to you over time about our progress and how we're looking at the metrics. We just think that this is a unique opportunity and we haven't seen something like this in the last few years for Angi. Thanks again for joining us, and we will talk to you soon.
The conference is now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.