Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for participating in Porch Group's fourth quarter and full year conference call. Joining us today are Matt Ehrlichman, Porch Group's Founder, CEO, and Chairman. Marty Heimbigner, Porch Group's CFO. Matthew Neagle, Porch Group's COO. And Nicole Pelley, Porch Group's SVP of Product and Technology. Before we go further, I'd like to read from the company's safe harbor statement within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 that provide important cautions regarding forward-looking statements. Today's discussion, including in responses to your questions, reflects management's view as of today, March 1st, 2022 only. We do not undertake any obligations to update or revise this information.
Additionally, we will make forward-looking statements about our future financial or business performance or conditions, business strategy and plans, and anticipated impacts from pending or completed acquisitions based on current expectations and assumptions. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties, which could cause our actual results to differ materially from those forward-looking statements. We encourage you to consider the risk factors described in our SEC filings for additional information. For reconciliation of non-GAAP measures, the most comparable GAAP measure is discussed during the earnings call. Please refer to tables included in today's earnings press release located at porchgroup.com and on file with the SEC. To submit a question during today's presentation, please log in to the webinar and submit it through the chat function. Management will do its best to take all questions within the allotted time.
As a reminder, this webcast will be available for replay shortly after the conclusion of this presentation on the investor relations section of the company's website at porchgroup.com. The slide presentation will also follow on the presenter's commentary and can be found on the company's website as well. Today, in addition to covering Q4 and year-end 2020 results, SEC filing information, 2022 guidance, and our KPIs, our team will provide an update on product M&A performance, forward-looking milestones, including future profitability. With that, let me turn the call over to Matt Ehrlichman, CEO, Chairman, and Founder of Porch Group. Matt?
Thanks, Walter. Hello, everybody. Good to be here. It was an exceptional first year as a public company. I wanna highlight a handful of things as I kick us off here today. First, we solidified our position as a leading software provider to companies in strategic home service verticals, including home inspection, mortgage, title, moving, and roofing, with market share expected to continue to grow nicely in 2022. Second, we continue to leverage these relationships with companies to meet consumers at advantaged and unique moments in time, and provide a differentiated experience to help make moving and homeownership easy. We now offer full digital quotes nationwide across insurance, local moving labor, full service moving, TV, Internet, and more.
In 15 states, we now offer our own insurance products and are integrating home warranty and maintenance services to create a full home protection plan. Third, our financial results were strong, demonstrating our ability to monetize our platform, improve margins, and execute the plan we laid out when we went public in 2020. At the start of 2021, our trailing revenue was $72 million, and we provided forward guidance of $120 million for the 2021 year. Our business finished 2021 at $192.4 million in revenue, which is a 166% growth year-over-year, 71% revenue less cost of revenue margin, 41% contribution margin, and - 13.8% adjusted EBITDA margin.
In terms of revenue, specifically, at our Homeowners of America business, note in our year-end closing process, we adjusted how we account for HOA's claim fee revenue under GAAP from gross revenue, which had been their historical approach, to net revenue, which is the correct approach. This was a $7.5 million adjustment to both revenue and cost of revenue that has no impact to HOA's business fundamentals nor EBITDA. It obviously improves then its revenue less cost of revenue margins. Marty's gonna cover this further in his remarks to follow on accounting and financial disclosure. Looking to 2022, the business is performing extremely well, and we anticipate continued growth and adjusted EBITDA improvements on both a dollar and percentage basis.
Revenue guidance for 2022 is $320 million, $302.5 million from the base business, $10 million from the planned CSE acquisition, which we expect to close in mid-2022, and approximately $8 million in revenue expected from the planned acquisition of Residential Warranty Services or RWS, which we signed just yesterday. We expect to deliver better than 400 basis points of adjusted EBITDA margin improvement, as well as an improvement in our actual adjusted EBITDA dollar performance. We're also guiding to $600 million in gross written premium for 2022. As compared to 2021, gross written premium is expected to almost double year- over- year.
In our deep dives later in the discussion, we are providing for the first time our expected timeline for future profitability, which we expect to manage towards in the second half of 2023 and for the full year of 2024, and to reiterate our midterm target of getting $1.5 billion in revenue. A lot to share. Looking forward to it. Let's dig in.
Looking here at Slide 6, we've been executing our unique strategy in the home services industry to provide software and services to select strategic verticals to help companies grow. By doing so, we generate B2B recurring software revenue, as well as gain early and ongoing access to home buyers who we help to improve their home buying home ownership journey and generate consistent B2B2 C transaction revenues by helping with the purchase of important services such as insurance. Starting from the top of Slide 7, our priorities for 2022 build on the success we had in 2021. Number one, to sell vertical software to more companies, our core go-to-market. Two, to embed key services and consumer experiences into our software products in a variety of ways to get in front of more consumers and increase our B2B2 C transactions.
Three, to continue to grow our insurance business, both rapidly and profitably, including launching new products and in new geographies. Four, continue to build out our data platform and start to leverage Porch's unique insights to improve pricing for our insurance and warranty products. Five, extend our key consumer experiences, such as our app, to consumers that we get unique early access to in order to increase conversion rates. Lastly, to continue to acquire select strategic and accretive companies that deepen our competitive moats and accelerate the growth of these companies. With that, I'll turn it over to Marty Heimbigner, our CFO, to discuss our Q4 and full year results and guidance for 2022. Marty?
Thanks, Matt, and good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining the call today. Let's turn to our business and the results. As we, as was mentioned, our business is performing very well. We entered 2021 looking to exceed our $120 million start of the year guidance. Ending the year at $192.4 million of revenue and 166% growth certainly was more than we anticipated at the beginning of the year, and a testament to the great work by the Porch Group teams. As you can see on Slide 9, the year-over-year comparison of our fourth quarter results were strong by every measure. Revenue less cost of revenue was 79%. Contribution margin 2021 versus the prior year was up 172% to $51.6 million.
As we look at the comparison to previous guidance here on Slide 10, our guidance number of $195 million of revenue included the assumption of HOA's claims fee revenue continuing to be booked on a gross basis as it had historically been. Instead, this estimate of $7.5 million should have been reflected as a contra claims expense and not as revenue because of our reinsurance ceding. Thus, our guidance number would have been $187.5 million of revenue had we reflected this change in guidance. The actual financial results of $192.4 million of revenue for the year ended December 31, 2021 have appropriately accounted for this issue with no net impact on adjusted EBITDA loss as reported.
We finished the year at $192.4 million in revenue, with each of our margin lines performing better than previous guidance. Adjusted EBITDA finished at -13.8% for the year and an improvement from -25% in 2020. Here on Slide 11, we show the substantial improvements in performance of the business over the last four years. A 75% compound annual growth rate and a 5x improvement in adjusted EBITDA margin. 2021, our first as a public company, was a transformative year. Before we move to 2022, a few quick comments on the status of our annual report for the end of 2021. Earlier today, we released our unaudited financial results for the quarter ended December 31, 2021.
As further detailed in our earnings press release and our Form 12b-25 filing from earlier today, we expect to publish and file our audited financial results in our annual report on Form 10-K by March 16, 2022. Of note, Porch Group became a large accelerated filer as of December 31, 2021. Due to the expanded requirements associated with Sarbanes-Oxley and the reduced filing time from 90 days to 60 days after year-end, we could not file the Form 10-K today without unreasonable effort or expense, particularly given the added complexity of being our first year as a public company, the Sarbanes-Oxley regulations, and the acquisitions Porch has completed. We do expect to determine that we have material weaknesses related to our internal controls over financial reporting.
We expect the financial results reported in the unaudited financial statements included with our press release will not significantly change when we file our Form 10-K. Rest assured, we understand the issues here and have solid plans to address our internal control environment in 2022. Now let's turn to 2022, in which we fully expect the momentum to continue. As Matt mentioned at the start, we are guiding to $320 million in revenue and $210 million in revenue less cost of revenue, what we use as a measure of gross profitability. These figures in the following guidance take into consideration the announced but not closed acquisitions of CSE and RWS.
We expect our revenue less cost of revenue margin percentage to be close to what we saw in 2021, with two slight impacts. The planned CSE and RWS acquisitions together do have a lower margin profile, and we expect some slight mix shift in services sold to consumers as we continue to convert better with movers, a bit lower margin service. In terms of adjusted EBITDA, we are guiding to more than 400 basis points year-over-year margin improvement, which produces close to -9% adjusted EBITDA margin. We'd also like to note that even if revenue performs well and exceeds guidance, we are also guiding to improved year-over-year adjusted EBITDA dollar performance. We want to be clear that we are marching towards our long-term adjusted EBITDA margin targets.
Related to our Insurance segment, we are also providing 2022 guidance for gross written premium of $600 million, approximately doubling from 2021. We are excited about the ongoing performance and momentum we are seeing here. Turning to Slide 14, you can see the strong year-over-year growth we expect. 66% revenue growth, 53% growth in revenue less cost of revenue, and 95% growth in gross written premium. During our Q3 2021 earnings call, we noted $226 million as our estimation of 2021 pro forma revenue inclusive full year impact of announced acquisitions. With the adjustment to HOA's revenue recognition, that figure would have been $220 million. On all measures, we are pleased with the growth we are seeing. Porch is growing rapidly and accelerating with strategic and accretive M&A.
You can see that here on Slide 15, where in four years, the business is expected to grow from $36 million in revenue to $320 million in revenue, a 73% compound annual growth rate. At the same time, the business has made consistent and significant strides towards our long-term 25% target adjusted EBITDA margins. We expect 2022 will represent another nice step forward in our adjusted EBITDA margins, improvement in our adjusted EBITDA dollar loss, and importantly, set us up to target profitable operations for the second half of 2023 and the full year of 2024, which we will discuss later in the call. With that, I'll turn it over to our Chief Operating Officer, Matthew Neagle, to discuss our operating segments and KPIs.
Thank you, Marty. Hello, everyone. I'll first jump in and share 2022 guidance for our operating segments, and then we'll look at our KPI performance for Q4. As you can see on Slide 17, the most valuable strategic and recurring elements of our revenues are growing the fastest. We generate revenue from our software through B2B SaaS fees and transactions. Overall, our Vertical Software segment is expected to be approximately $190 million in revenue in 2022. Of this, B2B software and services fees is the largest portion and is expected to be nearly $100 million, an increase of almost 2x from 2021.
The other high retention and recurring portion of our business is Insurance segment revenue, expected to be 40% of overall revenue, 132% year-over-year growth to approximately $130 million in revenue, which is approximately 21% of our expected $600 million in gross written premium. This is particularly important as it demonstrates our expectation in being one of the fastest-growing insurtech companies. Considering the scale, growth, and competitive advantages of our insurance operation, we believe our insurance business is highly valuable in its own right, and it only represents 40% of our revenue. Turning to Slide 18 in our KPIs, it is clear our business continues to perform well.
Beginning with companies, we saw growth in the average number of companies in Q4 to more than 24,600, which is up from approximately 11,000 last year or 121% year-over-year growth. If you look at revenue per company per month in Q4, it was approximately $700 per month, which is up 26% from the same quarter prior year. Just as a reminder, and as you can see in prior years, revenue per company is lower in Q4 versus Q3, as there's typically less transactional revenue due to fewer home buyers in the off-season. We've seen strong growth in new companies with certain verticals, namely mortgage, being lower revenue per company. We expect the growth rate of net new company adds to slow somewhat in 2022, which is something we haven't discussed previously.
If you go to Slide 19, we're excited to celebrate the milestone of having 1 million monetized services in the 2021 year. In Q4, we continue to see strong growth across all types of monetized services, with us recording 260,000 for the quarter, which represents 53% year-over-year growth. We saw $132 per monetized service, which is a 35% increase year-over-year. Insurance is still the fastest growing service, with moving as the next and with a lot of momentum. Let's now jump into additional disclosure related to our two operating segments. First, our Vertical Software segment. You can see it here on Slide 20. We realized $35.5 million in revenue in Q4, which is a $142 million run rate.
Of this, the majority is B2B SaaS fees, with the balance transactional revenue we generate from consumers who work with the companies we serve. Adjusted EBITDA margins for this segment generally are lower in Q4 and Q1, given the seasonal aspect of this business. If you look on Slide 21, our insurance business continues to grow rapidly and demonstrates strong margins. In Q4 2021, gross written premiums were $101 million, representing more than a $400 million annualized run rate as we ended the year. Segment revenue was $16.1 million. This represents approximately 16% of gross written premium. As a reminder, there is less but still some seasonality in this part of our business, with Q4 and Q1 typically being slower quarters, while commissions are prorated across the year, fee revenue is recognized when policies are sold.
We derive the significant majority of our Insurance segment revenue from insurance carrier commissions, reinsurer ceding commissions, and fees. Thus, as you see, we have strong underlying margins, including 21% adjusted EBITDA margin. Briefly on insurance KPIs. At the end of Q4, we had approximately 304,000 policyholders, and we're generating an average of $211 of revenue per customer per year. On a rolling 12-month basis as of December 2021, we had an 89% customer retention. We'll now kick off the deep dives for this quarter. First, you'll hear from Nicole Pelley, who leads our product and technology at Porch. She'll provide a product update, and then Matt will update on M&A, including past performance, as well as longer-term goals and milestones. Nicole, over to you.
Thanks, Matthew. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm excited to share an update on our Porch platform, our consumer app, and give a sense for where we're heading with our consumer experience. There's so much opportunity to help simplify the home from moving to improving and everything in between, and I'm really proud of the work that our teams are doing here. First, I'll take a moment to share our vision for the Porch platform, which is comprised of, first, the centralized consumer experience that integrates with our vertical software products, drives transactional revenues, and delights customers by helping make their move and home easier. Number two, a data platform that ingests unique and proprietary insights about properties, people, and home products, which we use to improve the consumer experience and pricing of key services such as insurance and home warranties.
Our consumer experience includes APIs, so our software companies can integrate very specific services in a seamless and native way. For example, we've nearly completed embedding insurance in a Floify's mortgage completion process. It can also be deployed as an entire digital and concierge experience for companies to provide to their home buyers. We launched our consumer app in Q4 2021 as another way to engage consumers, increase conversion rates and transaction revenue, and extend our relationship. To date, the app is in a closed beta only, available to consumers of home inspection companies. Let's go ahead and jump into a quick demo. Turning to Slide 24, when a consumer gets a home inspection, we can encourage them to download the app by providing supplementary information that makes managing their home easy.
When a consumer gets started with us, we want to help them accomplish all the services they need for their new home. We believe our app will help increase the number of consumers we help with their move, increase the number of services we help them with, and build a long-term relationship with the homeowner. The consumer is able to manage their entire home-related checklist here on Slide 26. We keep it contextually relevant, knowing when the consumer is moving in and what they next need to complete. Here you can see that insurance is prioritized, and we intend to continue to make it easier and easier over time to purchase. Today, we also help with movers, TV internet, security systems, change of address, handyman services, and more.
Next up is the My Home section of our app, where consumers can access their home inspection report and find their home details pre-populated based on this report. The majority of inspection reports include appliance and other system information. Any system included in the inspection report with a model number will be imported into the app with details we already know about that system, make and model, approximate age, and more. This makes it easy for the consumer to keep track of their home details and take care of their home. Looking ahead, by knowing the model number of a furnace, we will be able to notify the user of a recall and remind the user to replace their furnace filter regularly with a link to purchase the right size filter for their specific furnace.
I will say that it's been fun to see consumer reactions to this area of the app. Very high consumer delight and unique to what Porch can provide given our proprietary insights. Here on Slide 28, we want to make the Porch app to become the app to help consumers manage their home. As we make the app available to consumers across more of our software products, we will track and store all the contacts involved in their home purchase and all the professionals the consumer uses ongoing. We're just getting started on our app and have so much ahead in the coming years across our digital experiences. We are early days in terms of the opportunity to drive higher conversion rates. What's next? Here's a quick preview. This has not yet been built, but it's where we're headed.
We believe that Porch is poised in the future to become the app to simplify the move and manage the home ongoing. Only Porch has mortgage point-of-sale software, title software and inspection software. This means that we can provide the end-to-end mortgage and closing process, complete with key services such as booking inspection and paying at close, instantly attaching insurance with differentiated pricing and facilitating what consumers need for their new home. With that, I'll turn it back over to you, Matt.
That's good stuff, Nicole. I am certainly excited about what the next few years looks like. Again, to be clear, everything you saw there, except for that very last slide, that's some of the visions of what Nicole and her team are building. Everything else is live, and it has been exciting to get that early bird. I'd like to wrap earnings call today with two final deep dives. First is related to our M&A performance. Here on Slide 31, we're providing more concrete data related to what we have mentioned in the past. We've demonstrated significant and consistent ability to accelerate the growth of acquisitions when layering them into the Porch platform.
Companies acquired by Porch in the first half of 2021 grew revenue on average 6% in the year prior to the acquisition, and on average, achieved 28% growth in 2021. In addition to this overall performance measure, we thought it would be useful, quite useful on a one-time basis to provide specific information on the five largest acquisitions Porch has ever done. ISN, Homeowners of America, Rynoh, American Home Protect, and Floify. As you can see on the slide, the data largely speaks for itself. ISN has grown explosively over the years post-acquisition, with 45% growth during the year after the acquisition, with strong growth continuing since. This is through a combination of layering in transactional monetization, unlocking strong unit economics, and scaling to go to market. Homeowners of America was acquired in early Q2 2021.
Prior to Porch, the business had grown gross written premium at a 19% compounded rate. In 2021, growth almost doubled to 35% with strong momentum into 2022. Rynoh was acquired middle of last year with a similar story. Revenue growth has increased from 15% over the prior three years to 41% in 2021. American Home Protect had been growing policies nicely at a 26% CAGR for the three years prior to 2021, and has improved that growth to 41% in 2021. I'll say we're thrilled about the growth we're seeing post-Porch ownership and believe there's a large opportunity for us to rapidly scale our warranty businesses. Floify was acquired in Q4 of 2021 with a track record of 50% compounded annual growth from the three prior years. It's too early yet to show results for Porch's impact to 2022.
We expect to embed insurance into the Floify experience very soon and make the closing process better for consumers and loan officers. This, I will note, is a substantial opportunity, and we expect will be another strong proof point in the power of our platform and strategy. I'm also excited today to announce the newest acquisition, Residential Warranty Services or RWS. The RWS acquisition was signed yesterday, as I noted, with the closing expected in early second quarter of 2022, with certain parts of the business subject to regulatory approval. RWS is one of the key companies operating the home inspection space, providing CRM software, recall check software, and specific inspection-centric warranties to more than 1,000 home inspection companies. They also distribute full annual home warranty products through real estate agents across the country, which helps us move our warranty business and strategy forward.
For Porch, this is clearly a great fit after working as partners together for many years and strengthens our market-leading position in the strategic home inspection industry. RWS has unique and great products in the inspection and warranty industries that will plug right into our offerings with other changes we'll make to align with our visions and values. Here on Slide 34, as mentioned, we expect RWS to contribute approximately $8 million of revenue impact in 2022, based on annualized $10 million in revenue. This revenue is recurring and will be split between B2B software fees and warranty, which is part of our Insurance segment. Regarding growth, RWS has a three-year CAGR of approximately 6.5%. Given its very unique and strategically relevant products, we fully expect to accelerate the growth rate of this business.
Lastly, we expect the business to be slightly profitable in 2022. Purchase price of RWS was $33 million, $29 million of which. Before we wrap, I wanna take a moment to share updates on our path to profitability and midterm revenue targets. In 2021, we demonstrated strong revenue growth, M&A capabilities, and consistent ability to execute, continue to grow our vertical software businesses and our high margin and capital-light insurance business. As demonstrated by our guidance today of $320 million in revenue and $600 million in gross written premium. On the next slide, I'll provide some additional disclosure related to the target milestones of getting to profitability in the second half of 2023 and 2024. On the following slide, provide an update on our $1.5 billion midterm revenue target we shared at our IPO.
Here on Slide 37, in 2021, Porch operated at 41% contribution margins, demonstrating our very high underlying profit potential. At the 2022 guidance of -9% adjusted EBITDA margin, we aren't very far away from beginning to operate profitably, and this slide can help to provide visibility into why we're targeting profitable operations in the second half of 2023 and full year of 2024. As you can see in blue in the pie chart on Slide 37. The majority of our $74 million of sales and marketing expense in 2021 is related to B2B software and services. Selling, onboarding, supporting, incenting, and retaining and upselling to companies. Approximately 41% of sales and marketing is tied to consumers. It'll be our moving concierge team, all of our insurance agent teams, and more limited direct-to-consumer spend, such as by American Home Protect's direct mail programs.
Here, as we continue to create more self-service capabilities, such as the ability to bind insurance online, it creates opportunity for margin expansion. As for fixed expenses, we've historically invested aggressively in product and technology and other fixed expenses as we build out our platform and invest for long-term growth. We wanted to highlight specifically some of the larger of these investments, many of which do not need to be continuing areas of capital deployment over time. These investments include key strategic bets, such as the integration of data across our businesses into the Porch platform, creation of our consumer app and other digital experiences, development of new software modules across our verticals, proprietary pricing improvements for insurance, and the development and integrations of systems related to SOX and operating at scale.
As we look ahead, there is opportunity to slow fixed expense growth rates and continue to see margins improve. Lastly, here on Slide 38, we wanted to revisit our previous midterm revenue target of $1.5 billion. We remain confident in our progress toward this target in a midterm number of years and are ahead of our internal schedule after our strong 2021. As we discussed during the process of becoming a public company, we believe we are on the path to substantial revenue growth via growth in our existing software verticals, entrance into new verticals, likely through M&A, and the corresponding impact the demand and the data creates for our expanding insurance business, lastly scaling mover marketing for brands as well. We have the right strategy and levers to build a large enduring business.
With our massive $320 billion TAM, at $1.5 billion in revenue, we would be less than 1% penetrated against our opportunity. In other words, we are just getting started. To recap, we had a great year. I am fired up for 2022. With that, management team would now take your questions. Walter, if you can please open it up for Q&A?
Thanks, Matt. First question is from Jason Helfstein from Oppenheimer.
Hey, guys. Thanks. I'm gonna ask two. One on InsurTech. The market does not seem to like InsurTech lately because of risk and the view that these companies may not really have the systems to properly assess risk, which is part of the offering. The way you run your Insurtech business, you do sell the majority of that risk. I guess, you know, how do you get that message out there to the investment community that, you know, while it's InsurTech, it's not the same type of InsurTech model that others are looking at? Then the second, while we do appreciate the multi-year kind of detail, can you help us understand maybe organic or pro forma growth rates in the quarter? And is...
Is that just something we need maybe to wait for the 10-K for? Thanks.
Matt, did you wanna take the first one, and then I can take the second?
The reality is we are operating a capital light strategy with our insurance business. I think some of your question, Jason, is how do we get that out to the investor community? One of the things that I can point to is, in the next quarter, we will do a deeper dive, we'll be able to share in more detail what our insurance, our reinsurance strategy looks like holistically. What I can say, though, is we feel confident in our ability to continue with the approach that we have, which is a capital light approach. It's a low volatility approach. Some of the details I can share now, we renewed some of our reinsurance programs here in January. We'll renew another part in April.
We have a little bit of work to do. As we get all of that wrapped together, we'll share it with you guys, what we're thinking about for 2022. The only thing that I'll share is, you know, the reinsurance market has generally hardened, and so it does mean reinsurers are charging more, and that's impacting pretty much everybody, including us. But even with that backdrop, because of the way we operate our business, we are gonna have access to proprietary data, and we have historically done well from an attrition loss ratio perspective. We're an attractive partner. Just, it gives us confidence that, you know, the strategy we have employed is the right one.
in terms of getting out to investors, you know, maybe Matt, I don't know if you wanna add anything to that as well?
Yeah, sure. One last thing to add, and then I'll hit on the organic growth question. I think at the end of the day, Jason, it just comes down to the results. You know, our results are just dramatically different than the peers that you're talking about. You know, the margin, underlying margins, revenue less cost of revenue margin is just dramatically different. It's just a fundamentally different business. The amount that we cede out to reinsurers is fundamentally different. Part of this is just an investor education story for us because it is significantly different. The underlying results in terms of the actual loss performance is just fundamentally different. We'll just share that over time. In terms of the organic growth question, I'll take that.
As we've talked about, we don't break out organic growth specifically as one of the ways we grow our business is through the acceleration of companies that we have acquired. We do believe that credit, you know, goes to Porch and our platform, where they are also helping other businesses of ours, you know, grow faster. Just to make sure that the data is super clear, as Marty talked about. If you assume the 2021 acquisitions we had done last year, 2021, our 2021 pro forma revenue would have been $220 million based on that assumed revenue acquired at the time. You can compare that to $320 million in revenue for 2022, which is 45% growth.
You can compare it to $302.5 million, which would be 2022 revenue without CSE and RWS, like I mentioned, and that would be 37% growth. We're just making the different data points available, so that that's clear.
Thank you.
Next question is from John Campbell from Stephens.
Hey, guys. How are you? Thanks for taking the question. First one here, just given the improvements in gross margins, can you talk to us again about some of the expectations around margin progressions from here? Is it still kind of the same 100, you know, basis points improvement each year, or are we kind of seeing a new higher jumping point? You've talked about 25%, you know, EBIT margins over time. Is that still kind of something to think about as far as long-term target?
Yes, for sure. We put that out there today in terms of the 25%, you know, adjusted EBITDA margin target for our long-term. We continue to feel confident in the underlying profitability of the business, as you can see from not only that gross margin metric, but the contribution margin metric from last year, you know, as well. Yes, we continue to feel confident in that 25% long-term target.
Okay. Gotcha. Just one more here. On the American Home Protect, and then plus RWS now, can you talk to us about kind of what you're envisioning there in the warranty business and how it's progressing and any synergies between the two that are gonna kind of go forward from here?
Yes. We think that the warranty opportunity is significant strategically, you know, for the business. Not only because we meet so many home buyers, you know, early in their home buying process, and it's a natural time to buy a warranty, but also because of the data that we get, you know, from about homes, right? If we know the make, model, serial number of appliances and systems, clearly that gives us opportunity over time to be able to assess risk more effectively. You know, to also be able to price warranties more effectively. I'd also say, though, as I noted, we do think there's an opportunity to be able to bundle warranties with insurance.
Like, we think that the future of how one can protect your home and be able to maintain your home more easily is different than what it is today, where insurance and warranty and then, you know, handymen's type services, maintenance services are just completely bespoke. We think there's opportunities, and I'm really excited about some of the work the team is doing to start bringing those together and making it easier for consumers. Yes, as I mentioned, we're very excited about the growth that's ahead there.
Gotcha. All right. Thank you, guys. Appreciate it.
Thank you.
Next question comes from Dan Kurnos from Benchmark.
Thanks. Just quick housekeeping, I guess maybe for Marty? The $7.5 million impact to HOA, is that all annualized or did most of that flow through in the quarter?
The $7.5 million was for the nine-month period that HOA was part of our group. We acquired them in early April, and so it impacts all three quarters.
Okay, got it. All right, Matt, two questions. One, I mean, look, you kind of laid out the premise that you haven't included anything from data usage, D2C launch, all this other stuff in your forward outlook. I know that you're talking about going to market in the back half of this year to the regulators, and just help us think through order of magnitude of benefit from those kind of initiatives. Does D2C actually contribute meaningfully in 2023? You know, just help us kind of think through that a little bit more.
Yeah. I was gonna say I wouldn't count on much right of those two things in 2022 because of how the timing, what our plans are. Yeah, as we look ahead, I mean, It's a big opportunity, you know, for us, clearly. As we, you know, rebrand some of our properties into Porch, and it gives us the ability to start, you know, opening up new ways to be able to reach consumers. You know, that's obviously a big opportunity. It won't change our core focus of going and selling software to businesses and creating this unique early access to consumer, but clearly that's another lever that we'll have at that point in time. Same with pricing.
You know, as we think about, you know, leveraging the data, you know, as I noted in our priorities for 2022, it is one of our top priorities to start to be able to see that come through, and we're looking forward to demonstrating proof points in a future earnings call and just laying out very definitively how that can help us over time. Again, the way that you recognize revenue for insurance, I wouldn't expect to have a material impact in 2022. As we look ahead, yes, to 2023, yes, certainly that will help us.
Then on RWS, you actually kind of mentioned this a little bit in your response a second ago, and I know I've kind of asked you this off the cuff, but now that, for example, like Zillow has moved to an asset-light model, and you've got something that has a unique product that is sold through real estate agents, how do you think about, like, expanding your partnership opportunities given that you have sort of a unique data set that a lot of other asset-light, you know, verticals similar to Zillow might be interested in?
Yeah. I'll take this one also because, you know, the reality is our business is based on partnerships in some respect, right? We sell software to now 24,000 companies who we then are partnered with and use as a way to be able to meet their consumers and to help. Now to your point in question, yes, there are larger partners, you know, out there where there are very significant, you know, partnership opportunities. We've gone deep into insurance and deep into home warranty and all these integrations across the moving landscape, you know, that clearly is an opportunity for us to plug those experiences into, you know, different partners. We have a lot of proof points, you know, historically of doing that really well. Yeah, some more to come there certainly over time.
Got it. Cool. Thanks, Matt.
Thanks, Dan.
Thank you. The next question is from [Ben Charlen] from [Cantor] .
Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my question. You know, looking at your initial 2022 guidance, this implies $312 million ex-RWS contribution, which would be roughly at the midpoint of your framework for how we should think about the 2022 revenues that you issued on the Q3 guide or kind of framework you laid out. If you've been estimating $7.5 million in HOA claims fee revenue, I assume you're including this into the 2022 guidance framework. My question is, now that you're not including this revenue, and your updated guidance is roughly at the midpoint of your Q3 framework, how should we be thinking about this?
Should we be thinking about you're increasing the prior range by, you know, $10 million or however much you were originally having in there? Thank you.
Yes. I mean, just to be clear, we hadn't actually provided 2022 guidance before today. Yes, clearly, had the historical revenue recognition approach of HOA continued going forward, revenue guidance would have been $10 million higher. Just to make sure that the point that we included in the script was clear, you know, revenue guidance for 2022 is $302.5 million +$10 million from CSE, + $8 million from RWS, which builds up to that $320 million number.
I'm a little bit confused. You said that the $7.5 million impact was spread through the nine months. It wasn't just in the fourth quarter?
That issue impacted our guidance for the entire nine months, and we changed the accounting in the fourth quarter so that the full year is properly stated at $192.4 million of total revenue.
Okay. Thanks so much for your help, guys.
Yeah.
Thanks, Ben.
Thanks. The next question is from Ken Wong from Guggenheim.
Hey, great. Thank you for taking my question. Oh, can you guys hear me okay? I hear an echo.
Yeah.
Hello?
We've got an echo too, Ken.
Okay. Let's see. Give me one second.
Why don't we go-
Ken, maybe we'll go to Mike Grondahl from Northland, and then we'll come back to Ken.
Yeah. Thanks, guys. The average number of companies increased from roughly 11,000 to 24,500, about 13,500. Can you break out between organic and inorganic? You know, that number really didn't slow down much this year, and you've been saying it's gonna slow for a while. How do we think about it for 2022?
Yeah, I can take that. First of all, we don't report out on, you know, organic versus acquisition by quarter. We generally, when we acquire companies, we tell you kind of what the number was then, and then obviously all of our energy is going into accelerating that number. We have continued to see growth across our businesses just because of our focus on, you know, not only selling but also improving our product offerings for our software businesses. You know, we have been pleased with the success thus far, but, you know, we have indicated we don't expect the growth rate to continue at the same rate, and so that is guidance we continue to give.
You know, in this quarter, we have the benefit of Floify, which was $1,500, and that business accelerated. You know, they did better than we expected this quarter. We continue to see growth or will continue to see growth. It's just we expect it at a lower rate, but we're not, you know, guiding towards a specific rate at this time.
Got it. Maybe Matt, the Porch app and some of the demos that you described, could you talk a little bit about the go-to-market strategy for that? Is that gonna be through the moving concierge with the email and the contact? How is the consumer gonna find out about the Porch app?
I'll start, Nicole. I'd love to hear you to layer in as well. It's the same approach today, Mike, that we have for interacting with consumers. You know, we're focused on, you know, meeting consumers in these unique proprietary moments through the companies we provide software to, and that those companies give us this very early access. Nicole's team is focused on integrating both the app and our other digital experiences into that, those software flows with those consumers. For example, somebody gets a home inspection, you know, let's go ahead and provide them additional supplementary information to that inspection by downloading the app, right? That's a real incentive for the consumer to download that app and then to be able to make that rest of that moving, you know, process easier.
It's the same type of approach that we think about with mortgage companies or title companies or others as we go.
It'll be embedded into that experience or that interaction?
Generally, our approach has been—it's been very successful for us, is to be able to embed different experiences for those consumers who are going through our companies, you know, that we partner with. I'll just take the moment to, again, just reinforce, as an example. You know, separate from the app, but embedding insurance into Floify, you know, the teams have been working on really since we had completed the acquisition of Floify. We're getting close to be able to launch that, and it's just such a natural thing to do, right? As a consumer is completing their loan application, loan process, well now insurance is just built in, right? Those are different ways that we use our platform, use the APIs to be able to embed these different experiences, you know, into those software flows.
Yeah, I'd echo that. Our plan is to go to market primarily through the companies that we provide software to. We're live in a closed beta with inspection companies right now. You know, just like Matt talked about embedding insurance into Floify, you know, we make it really easy through the app to get your inspection report and get to the details of your inspection with your My Home area for inspection customers. Just continuing to add more and more value to these customers and then be able to help them with all the services they need as part of their move, so we can build this long-term relationship with those consumers ongoing.
Thank you.
Go back to Ken.
Great. Can you guys hear me okay this time?
Got you, Ken. Yeah, how are you doing?
Okay, fantastic. Doing great. Just a quick question. Really appreciate the long-term EBITDA targets. I think when we think about your business, you guys have been very successful on M&A, and that remains a key part of the strategy. I guess, how should we think about the willingness to prioritize those EBITDA targets relative to a strategy somewhat baked on M&A?
Well, generally, we have acquired companies that are not losing a substantial amount of money or EBITDA. As we layer those companies in, we wouldn't expect it to take us backwards, you know, generally. As we showed today, as we accelerate the growth of those companies, you know, we are able to get them in line with, generally, our margin targets. Our plan is to continue to do what we've done over this last year and change since being a public company, where we're acquiring companies, improving those companies, and still driving to those same long-term margin targets. We don't think that part of our strategy impacts those long-term targets.
Got it. Would that apply to, let's say, more the tuck-in type acquisitions you guys have done? Or just as you think more broadly about just the financial profile of the companies you guys prefer, you probably wouldn't see a step back almost regardless? Thank you.
Yes. Generally, we would not be targeting companies that are gonna take us away from being able to achieve our long-term targets. We're looking for companies both that are competitive advantages, strategic fits, accretive, that we're gonna be able to accelerate and are gonna be aligned with our margin goals.
Got it.
So far we've been successful at that.
That's gonna be tough for Marty, but you guys have been doing well.
Yeah.
Thanks. Bye, guys.
Thanks, Ken.
Thanks. We'll take a quick one from the audience. What are you seeing in terms of impact of the housing market on your business?
We have really not seen a tremendous impact from, you know, the COVID pandemic impact. Yes, there was some during 2020 through about May of 2020, but now we've recovered, and it's, you know, been a relatively stable impact going forward.
I will also just add that we have a natural hedge given the home inspection industry and the dynamics of how the home inspection industry works. Given that's our top of the funnel, that does create a hedge. When the market was booming last year, fewer homeowners as a percentage that were buying homes got a home inspection. As the volume of just general home transactions, home purchases slows, more people are getting their home inspection. The thing I suppose we should stress and note there is, we haven't seen a substantial impact, and our guidance for 2022 takes into account what we're seeing in the macro housing market.
Thanks. One more from the audience. Can you give any thoughts on the street pressure the stock price has seen over the last couple of months?
Sure. I suppose. I was wondering if we would get a question around that? But I will give just my quick views. I view and I think we generally view the last three to four months of stock pressure as noise, short-term noise. I told the team at the beginning when we went public, and I continue to tell them just to ignore the noise. If we build what we expect, the value of this company will take care of itself. I would say that our performance is strong across the business. We believe the results, including the growth and the margins, the 2020 guidance again speaks for itself. Maybe two more points.
I mean, it's quite clear to me that over these last three to four months, we are getting lumped into buckets of companies. You know, companies that have gone public via SPAC, insurance-related companies, to Jason's earlier point, real estate-related companies. The fact of the matter is, across these different group of companies, there have been many, you know, that have not performed and even struggled. We are getting caught in their underperformance, even though our business is a different model, different strategy, diversified revenue streams that are completely different margin performance and profiles, and just that our business is performing. My view is we deliver against our 2020 guidance of $600 million of gross written premium in insurance, and separately, $190 million of vertical software revenue.
It's clear to me that the company valuation, you know, will take care of itself.
Thanks, Zach. The next question from Ryan Tomasello from KBW.
Hey, guys. Thanks for having me on and for taking the questions. Am I coming through okay?
Yep.
Great. I guess, Matt, I was hoping you can discuss the pricing power that you see across the vertical software brands more broadly. I know that you recently pushed through some price increases there on the inspection side, so curious how that has performed relative to expectations, and if you see additional opportunities there near term? As a follow-on to that, in terms of the Pay-At-Close module within the inspection product, can you discuss how that rollout is going across the existing client base and if the guidance for 2022 contemplates a meaningful contribution from that new product?
Take this, Matt. You know, I'll first speak to you know, we generally are gonna evaluate our pricing on a regular basis, and certainly given the market dynamics with inflation, it's a timely topic for us internally. We believe we offer a lot of value. We believe a lot of these companies that we acquire haven't taken a value-based approach to their pricing. We do expect there to be further pricing improvements as we look across our software businesses. You asked specifically about ISN. We did roll out a price increase there and, you know, the team forecasted a certain amount of impact, and it just didn't happen. To me, that was a testament of just how valuable that software is to these businesses.
I mean, it's so deep into what they do that we certainly have some pricing power from that. We're moving on our ability to offer more value to these companies, so we can be a bigger and bigger part of their business, which is only gonna help us to increase our pricing power.
Before you go to the next one, I wanna quickly clarify one thing there.
Yeah.
On pricing. Matthew said they forecast a certain amount of impact. We build in essentially some conservative estimates on what attrition might be, and we didn't see, you know, that happen. It was a very positive move that then creates that much more incentives for companies to also wanna switch to paying in part with consumer access. Two last quick things, then Matthew, go back to pay at close on this pricing. We've also rolled out pricing impact into our title software. That also has gone well. Then lastly, there is pricing on the consumer side also. We've talked about how we have increased pricing along with the market tied to insurance over the course of this last, you know, six to nine months. That also has been part of our strategy.
Just again, out ahead of what Matthew talked about before, with our knowledge of the reinsurance market, you know, we've been out ahead, you know, of those changes with pricing there also.
The short story on PAC, we're very excited about Pay- at- Close. The team is moving forward on that. There have been some key partners of ours who have signed on to be a part of it that we're excited about. We have included a little bit into the plan, but the team has upside to their plan. If that product takes off like we think it can, we could see some nice tailwinds for the business around that for that part of our business.
Great. Then I guess a follow-on to the audience question around the housing sensitivity, and maybe just putting more of a finer point around that. I think, you know, the market probably is continuing to digest the various end market dynamics reports, and I think it could be helpful to, you know, get a sense of how you think the business would react hypothetically if we did kind of get into an environment of weakening housing fundamentals, say, you know, home sales declining 10%-20%, how at a high level that would flow through the business, the various segments? I hear what you're saying around the dynamics around inspections being waived and that being a very new, a big nuance of the pandemic. I guess absent that, how you're thinking through it?
Then more particularly for Floify, you know, if you could say what you're assuming there in the 2022 guidance, and really if that business, you know, has any sensitivity beyond the, I know, 30% refi exclusion that you called out, say to, you know, declining industry headcount as an example.
Yeah, one of the things we liked about Floify, though, is that the way that it's priced is not like, you know, other software companies where it's that might price on a transactional side. They price on a normal SaaS subscription fee. There really isn't exposure with Floify to, you know, refinance volume going up and down, even on the small portion of its business that handles refinancing. That doesn't impact, you know, its revenue, you know, directly. It's focused on segments of the market that are very home purchase, you know, oriented. No, we don't have exposure from a Floify perspective into the changes in the market there. Maybe that wasn't fully understood previously.
I think it's an interesting deep dive in the future to be able to kinda really show, you know, sensitivity to the housing market. Again, one thing that Matthew highlighted before, between insurance at 40%, you know, of our revenue, and the core of our vertical software, you know, being the B2B SaaS fees in the majority, that together represents 70% of our revenue, which is just very consistent, very predictable recurring, you know, revenue. Really it's a small portion, you know, of our revenue that would even have, you know, sensitivity. There's just so much upside in terms of conversion opportunity that we'll just grow through even if there is, you know, a little bit of decline.
I just would wanna stress we've built in assumptions around the housing market, you know, slowing into the 2022 guide based on everything that we have seen. That is built in at this point.
Thanks.
Thanks, Ryan.
Thanks. Next question from John Campbell from Stephens, John?
I think we're having bad audio connection with you. Walter, will you go ahead and mute that and go to the next one?
Yeah. We'll jump to Justin Ages from Berenberg.
Hi. How you guys doing? Thanks for taking the question.
Hey, Justin.
Just a couple quick ones. Can you provide an update for market share of some of the vertical software, services like inspection or title, where you guys stand now?
I can take that. We don't report out on market share numbers on a quarterly basis. You know, what you can see, though, is our number of companies are growing and that, you know, is gonna imply increasing market share. We do periodically do deep dive snapshots, and we aren't committing to doing that, but periodically we will do that. Otherwise, we don't have an update to share at this time.
I suppose we can just reinforce what we have communicated previously, which is, you know, our title software handles more than 30% of all the U.S. home purchases. At the time that we had acquired Floify, it was handling about 1 million loan applications a year in terms of what the volume was. Obviously, we would expect those businesses and share it to grow as we look ahead, but that was the last data point.
All right. That's helpful. Thanks. Can you give us a little more color or help me understand the kind of delta between the gross written premiums growing and the insurance revenue seemingly growing faster than that? Is that kind of the synergies of bringing all these products under one roof?
Are you specifically saying, what was our revenue as a percentage of gross written premium in Q4 versus 2022 guidance?
Yeah. That gets to it.
Yeah. I think the thing to keep in mind is some of the impact of that, how we account for the HOA claim fee would have impacted Q4. There would have been some light seasonality as well that would have been in there. You know, we have been around that 21% this year, and so we are improving it a little bit next year, but I would have you think about that more as a, as a stable, more of a stable number at this point.
All right. Appreciate it. Thanks, guys.
Thanks, Justin.
[And we turn the call over to] you [Yaron] from Wedbush.
Hey, good afternoon, guys. I wanna go back to the app. It looks really interesting, and it feels like an opportunity to kinda connect with the homeowner directly just, you know, so feels like a great way to manage your home on an ongoing basis. Why not push that channel? Is it not cost-effective? If you're not doing that, what are the benefits of going through, you know, through the current channel you're going through? How does that—what does it help improve? Is it helping retention and conversion across the products? Just what are you expecting it to actually achieve, you know, given the kind of investment and effort behind it? Second question, just broadly around M&A. Obviously, done a lot there. It's been a huge contributor for you guys.
Filled a lot of holes. Do you think there's still a lot to fill? Is it more about kind of going deeper in insurance and warranty and where you are? Does the M&A pipeline kind of, you know, narrow or do you keep going, pushing the way you have over the past couple years? Just how has the M&A, like, thoughts around M&A changed over the last year given what you have pulled in into your business? Thanks.
Matt, I can take the first one if you wanna take the second one? On the app, our primary go-to-market is to go access customers through companies, our B2B2 C strategy. We just believe there's so much opportunity to build a long-term relationship with these customers. Adding more value during the move, being able to help them with all the services within the move, and then being able to build this long-term relationship where we continue to help them with their insurance and warranty and services that they need on their home. The app to me is just it. It's a key strategy for us to build this long-term relationship, continue to help with all the services, not only within the move, but also beyond the move.
You know, I could see us going direct to consumer at some point. I just think there's so much opportunity for us to be able to help these consumers through our companies. That's where we will focus our go-to-market efforts to start, and then potentially go direct to consumer in the future.
Yeah. The reason why is just 'cause we have a huge advantage there, right? We have so many of the U.S. home buyers who are the key customers here for us in terms of their purchases, that we may as well start with the lowest hanging fruit, and the least expensive customers, and then continue to open up to more and more. I agree with you know, there's certainly as you look ahead that that will be a clear opportunity for us. Then in terms of M&A, yeah, we don't feel pressure to have to go do, you know, lots of deals and we aren't gonna go reach. Yes, I would expect that we will do other M&A transactions. Our platform is working well. We're bringing in great new talent to the team.
We're capitalized to be able to do deals when the right one presents itself. I think the categories would be, you know, other companies in our existing verticals, you know, software verticals. There might be opportunities to be able to enter into new software, you know, verticals as well that we're not in today that are good fits for our platform. We can execute our strategy. you know, other services for consumers, whether that is to go deeper in insurance or warranty, perhaps layer in new services for consumers over time. Generally, we would be looking across those three areas.
Okay, great. Just a quick follow-up. Did you say, I may have missed it, when you're expecting the app to launch out of beta?
Yeah. We're in a closed beta right now. I would expect we'll be out of the closed beta middle of the year timeframe.
Okay, great. Thanks, guys.
Thanks.
Excellent. That concludes the portion of our call committed to Q&A. Matt, for your last comments?
No, I just appreciate the interest and the questions. Thanks, everybody for the time. We are, as I said, just excited about, you know, where we're positioned and what this next year is going to look like. We're looking forward to seeing you all on the next call coming up. With that.