Alrighty, thank you everybody for attending. Up next, we have Green Brick Partners, traded on the New York Stock Exchange under symbol GRBK. On behalf of the company, we have Jeffery Cox, CFO, Keith Johnson, SVP of Accounting.
Alright, good afternoon. Thank you guys for being here. I'm Keith, and this is Jeff. We want to just talk to you today about kind of the story of Green Brick. I'm going to kick off with a little bit of an overview of the company history and how we got started and how we got here, and a little bit on our Q3 results. Jeff will take you through our strategic imperatives and what we think makes us different. Here's a little slide on our company history. The company was founded back in 2009. Jim Brickman, our CEO, and David Einhorn of Greenlight Capital had been friends and partners on various business ventures.
Coming out of the Great Recession, saw an opportunity to buy land, and it was under development, and become a working capital partner for homebuilders that were stretched on cash. Put together a couple of funds in 2009. In 2011, we acquired our first builder, the Providence Group. They are based in the North Atlanta area, Johns Creek. From there, in 2012, 2013, added some of our primary Texas builders, CB JENI, founded Center Living Homes, Normandy, and Southgate. We went public in 2014. I think at that point, we recognized this was a business that David and Jim wanted to be in on a long-term basis. David had an operating company that basically had no operations. We merged those funds into that company and formed Green Brick Partners.
Hopefully on the name, you can see Green comes from Greenlight Capital, Brick from Jim Brickman, and Partners, our homebuilding partners that started with us in 2012 and continue on today. In 2015, we formed our title company. In 2018, we purchased GHO Homes, our builder in the Port St. Lucie, Florida area. We started from scratch, Trophy Signature Homes, which is now our largest builder by volume. Continuing on, in 2021, we moved to the NYSE and have just continued expansion into Austin in 2022, opened our first actual community in Austin in 2023, and in 2024, announced our expansion into the Houston market. We have been taking off from there. We are headquartered in Plano, Texas. As we said, we trade under NYSE. Market cap's just under $3 billion. Again, we are in three states, seven total brands.
We are still a controlling owner in the Providence Group, GHO Homes, and Center Living. Our other brands are 100% company owned. Last year, about 70% of our business, our closings were in the DFW area, probably another 20% in the Southeast. We are getting started in South Texas, in Austin, and Houston. In our very first annual report, 2015, we delivered 655 homes with a net income of $15 million. Last year, we delivered 3,800 homes in over 100 communities and generated over $2 billion in revenue and made approximately $382 million, with industry-leading gross margins of just under 34%. We have done that while maintaining a very conservative balance sheet, which Jeff will get into, with a very low net debt to capital that is really in line with our large peer homebuilders.
Here's a little bit on kind of what we did in Q3. Home closing revenue was down a bit over the same quarter previous year, and that's mostly a function of average sales price going down. Our closings of 953 was just off a third-quarter record that we achieved in 2024, so essentially right in line. What we noticed was our average selling price again declined about 4% to $524,000. Gross margins, we're really proud of our gross margins. We consistently lead our peer group. What we saw in Q3 of this year was a slight compression from last year, but still in the 30s. We've been in the 30% range for, I think, 11 quarters now, and that's just a testament to our success. SG&A at 11.6% of residential revenue.
Next year, we intend to break out our financial services business as a separate reporting segment that's going to help us reduce SG&A expense going forward. We had a great quarter for new orders. It was a record quarter, any third quarter in 2025 at 898 new orders. Revenue was down slightly year- over- year as a function of declining sales price. We have our monthly absorption rate of 2.9 homes per community per month was up almost 4% year- over- year. We are encouraged by that. We have a very low cancellation rate of 7%. It's really, it's one of the lowest in the industry. The homes that we sell, we're generally closing. You can see our quarter-end backlog came down just a bit from last year as we've moved from really being a backlog-centric builder to more of a spec builder.
With that, I will turn it over to Jeff, who will talk about our land position and our strategic direction.
Thanks, Keith. One thing I want to point out that Keith was kind of alluding to here earlier, I'll skip forward a little bit. When you look at our gross margins, we are significantly better than most of our peers. You can see on the left there, we're 31.1%. Peer average is 20.2%. We're proud of that. We're not always going to hang on the rim when it comes to margins in the 30s. We've been there now for 10 consecutive quarters. They have trended down. It's been a tough market. That's pretty well known, I believe, certainly within our industry. There's a lot of economic uncertainty, elevated rates. At this point, there's been an oversupply of homes, both on the new home construction side. I would say it's kind of built up a little bit, along with seeing more residential resale homes hitting the market.
Nonetheless, we feel like we've done a tremendous job here holding on to margins. We're focused on returns at the end of the day. We're really trying to make sure we hit a certain sales pace within our communities. A lot of these communities are in locations that we feel are generally irreplaceable. One of the things that makes us unique from our peers is that, like anything in real estate, it's all location, location, location, right? We are focused on some of the best markets we feel in the country. We're pretty concentrated. We don't have a big national footprint. Most of our volume is coming out of DFW. We are focused on the Sandbelt states. We want to be in business-friendly states that have good positive demographics, job growth. We are not going to be in highly regulatory states.
We feel there is a lot of opportunity for us to continue to grow our footprint in generally those areas, starting first with Texas. The other thing that makes us unique too, so the locations that we are in, we generally try to buy infill and infill-adjacent communities. We are not trying to race to the bottom like many of our peers. We are trying to grow volume. Certainly, we have got over 41,000 lots owned and controlled at this point, most of those being owned. We are really trying to stick to what we classify as A and B locations. These are locations that generally have better access to freeways, employment centers, better school districts. We generally do nicer amenity centers.
Although we've got a variety of brands that range from first-time up to second, third custom homes, we don't really get down into the true entry-level price point that we're seeing in our markets. Our product generally comes with a bit of a premium. Trophy, who's doing 50% of our volume, have an average price point in DFW that's $400,000. When you look at the average price point of new construction in this area, it's probably around $350,000. We are targeting buyers that typically have a little more discretionary income. They want to be in the nicer locations. They can stretch a little bit. That's played out well for us. These infill, infill-adjacent locations are typically the last to falter during a downturn and the first to recover.
When buyers are already stretched to be able to afford a house and they're stretching to buy in a C location, if sales prices drop, now they can attain something that's in a B location, something that we generally try to target. When you look at our incentives, our incentives are well below what the industry average is. Our incentives last quarter were, I think, 7.7%, sub 8%. A lot of public builders in today's market, we're seeing incentives that are in the double digits, significantly higher. Obviously, that goes into the margins that we see on this page here. We feel that our strategy has been successful and will continue to be successful over the long run. One thing I also want to kind of flip to here, and we'll see this on a couple of other slides. Here's the cancellation rate I mentioned earlier.
Our cancellation rate's 7%. Peer average is 14%, but you can see where a lot of the public builders now are easily into the double digits. In some cases, we actually ask ourselves if our cancellation rate isn't too low and we're not doing a good enough job capturing all of the traffic and converting that as it comes through. We do a great job of pre-qualifying our buyers too, and we collect typically an above-average deposit that makes it difficult for buyers to walk away from. We don't give them a, there's not a lot of time for buyers' remorse either. They're already in a good location and they close quickly. We don't see a large cancellation rate on our side. Speaking of infill, infill-adjacent locations, this is a map from Chris Byrnes, who's an analyst within the industry, very well respected.
The blue dots are communities that we're actively selling in. Those that are familiar with DFW, you'll notice that most of our dots are in kind of the darker green, lighter green areas. We do have some communities that are more on kind of the fringe C locations towards the south, but there's not a lot of volume there. Most of our capital investment is to the north area along the DNT. We've had a lot of investment within Prosper and Celina, McKinney, Princeton. These are the areas, like I mentioned, that typically command higher price points, require a little more discretionary income. Likewise in Atlanta. Atlanta for us is more of a true infill location. Our builder there has been in the industry his entire life, grew up in the business, knows Atlanta like the back of his hand.
They build primarily in and around the Alpharetta area, a lot of attached product, very high-end product, and they've produced tremendous margins and returns for us as well. The thing I wanted to flip over to here, and this might be a little hard to see, but when you look at our results in the top here, we're comparing ourselves against our peers below. Any area that's shaded in green is an area that we have outperformed our peer, and any area in red is one in which we did not. There are a couple of metrics that we underperformed, primarily revenue growth. We underperformed Hovnanian and Dream Finders. You'll see a lot of other competitors were actually negative on revenue year- over- year, and some quite significantly so.
When you look at our return metrics for return on assets, return on equity, we are performing the best. This excludes NVR. Those that are familiar with NVR, they're kind of an anomaly in the industry. Generally speaking, we perform extremely well, and we're very happy with the results that we've seen. The other thing that makes us unique and the reason we're able to achieve the margins that we do is we are focused very much on being a traditional builder developer. There's a lot of transition in today's market where builders are moving more towards a landlight model, and that's the NVR model that everyone's trying to attain.
Essentially, they're giving up a significant portion of their margin to have someone else come in, acquire the land, hold it off balance sheet, develop the land, and then take it down as needed with the idea that even if they're giving up a significant portion of their margins, their return should be higher. For us, we like taking a different approach. It's more of a contrarian approach. We like going into deals that don't fit the traditional mold. These landlight deals are highly competitive, and we tend to stay away from bidding wars. Because we have five brands in the DFW area, for example, we may go out and buy a large parcel that could be one or two thousand lots. We may be in that deal for five to ten years. Most home builders are trying to stay in communities between two to three years.
That's what makes them highly competitive. A lot of these deals you're happy to buy out in kind of the C tertiary locations. We will take these bigger deals. They may require some entitlement work. We almost never close on anything that has any zoning risk. We'll work with the sellers; that will most likely be a closing condition. More often than not, it'll require some entitlement work, getting approved development plans, setting up special financing districts, putting in the infrastructure for water and sewer treatment plants for those that are familiar with MUDs and PIDs here in Texas in particular. That takes time, time and capital, right? When we are underwriting these deals and we're trying to achieve a certain unlevered IRR hurdle rate, that means that the margins that are required to get these deals have to be better.
That is what we see in the results here. We have had some tailwinds in our markets. I do not think there is any question there. Texas has been good, and we think Texas will continue to be a good market for us. Generally speaking, I think that we will continue to have industry-leading margins going forward. The other thing that we are really focused on is building out our Trophy brand. As I mentioned earlier, Trophy is, and Keith mentioned this too, but Trophy is wholly owned. It is becoming our bread and butter. It is the one that is targeting first-time, first-move-up buyers. Half of our volume came from Trophy. It is about 40% of our revenue. We are looking to scale that brand. We are the third largest builder in DFW when you look at all of our brands, and Trophy is by far the largest. We are also rolling Trophy out to Austin.
We had our first closings there last year. We closed about 100 homes. We think that that could be a market for us that could be 500-1,000 units over the next several years. Houston's another large market, number one, number two, right behind DFW. There is a lot of opportunity for us in that market, and we're looking to scale it with Trophy as well. Love to see that one become a 2,000-unit division over the next several years. Trophy for us is easier to scale. Primarily a spec builder. We do not allow buyers to make changes to the product. What they see is what they get. It is very cost-efficient for us because we do not allow options. Everything's been curated for them. There are color packages and things to help kind of differentiate the homes from each other, but it makes it very easy to build.
It doesn't require as big of a construction administrative staff. The superintendents can carry more homes. It doesn't require as big of a purchasing effort to bid and do the takeoffs on these homes as well. They're easier to sell. We can build them in three months. Right now, excuse me, Trophy's under three months in the DFW market, which is really kind of a historic low for us. We're able to turn our inventory very, very quickly, achieve great margins, and get good returns out of that. That'll allow us to improve our scale in these markets to where at some point we would like to introduce some other brands into those markets and continue to build out our presence in those markets. Excuse me. Looking ahead, our priorities are clear. We want to scale Trophy Signature Homes in DFW, Austin, Houston.
We want to maintain financial flexibility and operational efficiency. We want to continue sourcing top-tier land deals through our local expertise and disciplined underwriting. We also want to expand our financial services across the markets as well. We kicked off, should have brought in some water. Apologize. We kicked off our wholly-owned mortgage company in December of last year, and that's something that we continue to roll out here in DFW, with plans to expand it into Austin next year along with Atlanta. We are excited about that. With that, I will open it up for any questions that you guys may have. Happy to, we're a little bit early, so I have about 15 minutes remaining, but if anyone has any questions, happy to answer them.
Did you say anything about the DFW market in terms of having a spec strategy when there's talk about overcapacity or overbuilding?
Yeah, the spec strategy has been very beneficial. Obviously, there's been a shortage of resale inventory that's been available. We're starting to see that tick up a little bit. Most buyers are locked into interest rates that are sub 5%, and we continue to perpetuate that as well. We're buying rates down to 5%, generally speaking. Buyers in today's world, they want certainty of payment. They're already stretched on price. They want to be able to lock in the rate. They don't want to wait six to eight months and hope that they can afford the house by the time it's ready to close. We're also seeing that even with our move-up and more of our custom product.
Generally, we've tried to keep spec homes very limited when it comes to the higher-end product, but we've heard feedback where buyers, again, want that certainty and they're looking for some quick move-ins. It might be 30 days. It could be 90 days. We have pivoted our strategy there a little bit too to where even our upper-end homes that are a million plus, we're trying to have some finished inventory on the ground. We are managing it. There has certainly been a buildup of finished new construction in the marketplace, and we are really trying to manage our starts to where they do not exceed our sales pace. You'll have noticed that earlier this year, we took our foot off the gas pedal a little bit on starts. Sales were surprisingly better than we expected, and we accelerated a little bit more, but we're staying cautiously optimistic.
Who else had questions?
Was Atlanta a one-off or is that part of the growth strategy too where you're trying to find that? I mean, build it.
Yeah, Atlanta's been good for us. We've got a 50% controlling interest with those guys, and they're pretty steady. I don't see them growing much beyond where they currently are. I think the biggest opportunity for us there is to introduce another brand, most likely Trophy at some point. This would be a brand that doesn't compete head-to-head with the Providence Group. The Providence Group is known as a high-end builder, higher price point, and we certainly don't want to tarnish that brand by asking them to build anything that's more affordable at this point. We would like to see some expansion there.
Do you see that BTR build to rent? How does that impact you?
Do you see a trend there developing with opportunities or?
We've looked at build to rent in the past. We're happy we did not move down that path. It's been very tough. It was certainly the darling at one point, but right now, the returns that we're hearing about on the build to rent side, it's less than their cost of capital at this point. I mean, they're working for the lenders. Rent has certainly filled the hole when it comes to the housing shortage that we've seen over the last decade, and there is a big difference in payment at this point. I mean, it's not, I don't think it's half necessarily, but there's a significant difference between the cost to rent versus the cost to own, which is why we're utilizing the rate buy-downs as much as we can to make the payment affordable.
I don't see us entering into the build to rent anytime soon. Somebody else had a question? Yeah. Any capital constraints in your opportunities with the longer time frame for deploying rent in these? That's a great question. I kind of skipped over that too as part of the presentation. When you look at our debt to capital, we are pretty conservative, and we've always been relatively conservative. You can see our historic numbers here. At some point, we gave guidance saying we didn't want to be over 30%. Today, we're saying we don't want to be over 20% debt to capital. That was an agreement that Jim Brickman had with David Einhorn when they kicked off the company and co-founded it. Those that get highly leveraged and over their skis are the first to go out of business. It's very capital intensive, as you mentioned.
We've always been opportunistic in looking at deals, and so we want to have some dry powder on hand. We want to have liquidity. Biggest challenge for us today, frankly, is deal flow in a down market, making sure we buy smartly, but we've got 41,000 lots owned and controlled at this point. We don't have to pull the trigger on deals that don't make sense for us just to keep a community count. We've got plenty of work ahead of us to grow that. As deals become more distressed in locations that for us make sense, we're not going to go buy in C locations. We will pull the trigger on those. Otherwise, we're looking at opportunities like share buybacks to help kind of offset some of those capital constraints.
Could you say more about your contrarian approach of not going for the landlight model?
What are the trade-offs on return on invested capital? You have high margins, but do you have a trade-off on denominator because of capital tied up?
Yeah. I think we've run a couple of different models looking at deals. It's certainly more capital efficient. We think that you lose, based on the deals that we're looking at, which are longer-term deals, probably 500 basis points plus or minus by doing landlight versus capturing all of the value, doing the entitlement development on our own. If you could take the excess capital that you save and you could reinvest that, increase your community count, you could certainly have tremendous top-line growth and great returns. I don't see enough opportunities out there today necessarily. Land's been too constrained. Land's very, very expensive to where that makes sense. For us, we've taken a longer-term position in some of these deals.
With landlight deals, like most land deals, you're putting down a 20% deposit on a lot. Some of you have probably heard me say this before that we've met with, but average cost of a finished lot in DFW is $100,000, right? You're putting down a $20,000 deposit. Half the lots that we own, we purchased for less than $20,000. We're able to actually sit on an owned lot, and we can slow play it or fast play it, depending on what the market's doing. We can phase it differently. We can introduce another brand if we want to, but it just gives us more control. We enjoy doing that as opposed to being at the whims of a land banker where if the market drops, you have to go back in and renegotiate deals, adjust your takedown schedule. They come with an escalator. They're very expensive.
While we're not trying to turn a blind eye to it, we feel that this strategy for us is better given where we are today. I certainly understand that some of the larger builders that are probably more in, they're more saturated at this point. I think it's harder for them to grow their top line than doing landlight may be a better solution to help improve returns for them. For us, we've got enough growth opportunity. We'd rather capture the margin and the profit and reinvest that in the company.
What about the labor situation? Are you having trouble keeping people?
We're not. No. That's a common question. It's a good one. Yeah. We're actually hearing of crews coming up from Austin asking for work, in fact.
The trades have started laying off some of their crews, but of course, these are the underperforming crews, and so they're typically keeping the better ones. We're seeing improvements in cycle time because of that. We're seeing improvements in quality. There have been talks about tariff impact, supply chain, and just increases in material prices. Haven't seen any of that really come to fruition yet either. If there are any material increases, it's been absorbed, generally speaking, by labor. It's kind of at least a net neutral. Our direct construction costs are down year- over- year at this point. We just haven't seen it being an issue. Any other questions?
May I follow up on that question? There's been press and Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas has even written about the impact of the migration from Mexico or lack thereof now and impacting labor.
I did hear the answer. You said you haven't had the impact. Are you seeing that anywhere within your contractors or anywhere that that component of labor has been a challenge?
Not in the markets that we're in. We haven't. No. At this point, there's been an oversupply of labor. No.
You mentioned infill lots are an important price strategy, finding smaller infill lots in existing geography. How do you kind of source those? Is that getting harder over time as Dallas needs to kind of build a product?
Yeah. Great question. Nice seeing you again. Infill is tougher to come by, especially in DFW. There are some infill sites that are still available, but generally speaking, they don't pencil today. Town homes have been hit especially hard, especially where rates are.
We've seen a lot of price declines on multifamily, trying to create a bigger delta on payment, especially when these multifamily sites come with larger HOA dues, for example. We've had to be a little more aggressive there. Those haven't really worked out as well for us. We've focused mostly, and Atlanta's kind of the exception. We're still seeing some infill deals there that work for us, but generally speaking, we're focused more on the infill adjacent neighborhoods. For us, it's going to be the Celinas that Prosper's essentially done at this point, but Celina, McKinney, Princeton, Pilot Point. We've got a new deal there that's fairly large, but really trying to just stick to the next kind of outer growth ring. It doesn't mean that when we say infill adjacent, it's immediately adjacent next to something that's existing.
There may be some areas of opportunity for other infill growth in and around them, but generally speaking, the infrastructure's in place. There are amenities. You do have a gas station, a grocery store. You're not having to drive 10 or 15 minutes to go fill up the tank. For us, that's played out pretty well.
Maybe to ask that a little bit differently, is there a range of infill size that makes sense or is clearly out of bounds, right? If we can't get more than, fill the blank, 10 lots, you don't want it.
I would say in terms of number of lots, probably something that's at least 50. Certainly, density is important, but it doesn't make sense to go into these little, little teeny deals. It's a lot of effort to underwrite them, to bid them out, get the plans approved. It just doesn't make sense.
Typically, something that is going to be a little bit bigger, but a lot of those larger infill ones just are not available anymore. Yes, sir.
How long do you think your runway is on the great land decisions you made in the past that I think are a reason that you mentioned for your gross margins? If you started today with a company, you could not replicate that because you do not have land, but maybe you think you could. I mean, how long, I guess, you flex up and down? You do not know exactly how long you are going to be in.
With 41,000 lots owned and controlled and having done just about 4,000 lots last year, it feels like we are long in the tooth when it comes to land, right? You can say it is a 10-year supply. Assumes no growth, right? Does not assume entering Houston or Austin.
I think if you strip out some of the bigger master plan communities that we have, these are the deals that are 5-10 years. Our average land supply is probably around 5 years. In terms of replicating what we've done so far, I don't know. Hard to say if we're always going to have margins that start with a 3 handle. We're not always underwriting deals that start with a 3 handle when it comes to margins. I think based on our underwriting and the way that we approach land, we'll still have industry-leading margins going forward. Now, if rates begin to subside a little bit, I mean, certainly, I think given the shortage of housing in our marketplace, we'll have a lot of pricing power, generally speaking, and we've already locked in the cost of our land.
When you look at land development, there are certainly some inflationary pressures as we move from one phase to the next phase. Since so many of our deals are here in Texas, a lot of those come with MUDs or PIDs, the special financing districts. Roughly 50-70% of our improvement costs qualify as public improvement costs. These are the underground utilities, water, sewer, sidewalks, streets, some amenities. Assuming housing prices stay relatively stable and rates do not go crazy, those special financing districts are able to issue a bond once development is complete. They reimburse us for those costs, and it actually acts as a really nice hedge against cost increases in the future.