Thanks for joining us for our next presentation.
I'll say Service Corporation International has joined us here at the conference for many years. I always appreciate it. Back to Tom and Eric joining us and so forth. Aaron Foley is with us today, Senior Vice President with Service Corp. Aaron, I just thought we'd start off, if we could, just maybe framing kind of the outlook. You put a very good first quarter recently. Can you just remind framing the two lines of business and kind of the drivers at this point?
Definitely. Thanks, Larry, and good morning, everyone. Yeah, on the two lines of business, obviously, we've got the funeral and the cemetery segment. They've continued to perform strongly. Obviously, we've gone through the COVID pandemic, which threw some wrenches into the predictability of our businesses. But I think that the funeral perspective, it seems that the volumes have normalized to a strong degree. Averages continue to remain strong. They've been inflationary-type average increases on the funeral side over the past several decades. And we've kind of seen that, have seen that play through even during the higher inflationary periods that we saw back in 2022, 2023. Cemetery side has continued to be strong as well. We, as I know that we'll talk about later, have a dynamic within our pre-need cemetery sales that has large sale dynamics, but a core consumer dynamic as well.
The large sales can be lumpy in nature, but the core business that we term as contracts below $80,000 of spend have remained strong, and over the last two quarters, really, we've seen growth in both the velocity of contracts sold as well as the average of contracts sold, so the trends have been going very strong over the last several quarters.
And you talked about large sales. I mean, what is it about large sales? I think there were up high teens in the quarter within pre-need.
Yeah.
Why all of a sudden the trajectory and growth and kind of focus on the large sales?
As I mentioned, large sales can be very lumpy. And so when you look at the last year quarterly cadence, the first and fourth quarter were our strongest quarters. The second and third were weaker. And so we kind of knew coming into the year where our headwinds and where our tailwinds were going to be. And so the first quarter, we saw kind of a headwind on that large sale. But the second and third, we've seen strength. And I'd say that the fourth, we're expecting some headwinds as well, assuming just kind of a normalized kind of a straight line perspective.
Now, what these large sales are, these are families who are coming in who basically are saying, "Look, they want a private family estate or a private family mausoleum that may take many weeks, months, if not quarters, to materialize through planning and design and ultimately getting a contract in place and signed," and so we've got several going at any given time, and how many actually close during that given quarter can vary, and some people have tried to correlate that with either equity or fixed income markets and how the individual portfolio might be transpiring, but in 2022, when we saw the worst combined equity and fixed income market, that was one of our strongest large sale years that we've ever had. Others tried to correlate it with the real estate market and how well that is performing.
But it's just hard to truly target exactly what's driving it. But those large sales make up about 10%-15% of our total cemetery pre-need sales. And we've got teams out there that are constantly driving and trying to grow this.
It doesn't require any unique infrastructure, though.
No. I mean.
Unique deployment of capital at large sales is just within kind of your organic.
When you think about our maintenance capital, $160 million of that is to the development of cemetery property. And it includes the tiering to create maybe lawn crypt gardens that can be several hundred spaces. It can be community-type mausoleums where many different families, but then a portion of that can as well go to some of these large sale opportunities where you may have a mausoleum that's built just for a family with eight spaces, let's say.
Right. Okay. Just stepping back a bit, and thank you for that. Is COVID obviously created a bolus of and basically it's been a headwind, obviously, the last few years. Is that, I don't say, behind us? Or what's your thoughts today about the COVID? Has it normalized now? Is that in the rearview, fully in the rearview now?
Yeah. I mean, I kind of think that the dynamics are going to constantly be there. Even when you look at death rates today, a decent chunk of people continue to pass from COVID. So I think it's going to be just part of the baseline death rate that's going to occur. Now, the escalation of deaths that we saw during the 2020, 2021, 2022-type periods, those obviously pulled forward deaths from more acutely over the next few years. But there's going to be an impact of that over the next several decades as well because there are 40, 50, 60-year-olds who pass through complications with COVID that might not had COVID not been around. And so you've got those dynamics that kind of go into the blender. You've got the excess deaths dynamics where people during COVID didn't get treated for medical care such as cancer screenings.
There was an increase in suicides, drug overdoses, alcoholism. I think where we stand today, it seems that that has all kind of normalized out. Leading up to COVID, we were in 2018, 2019, kind of a flattish volume trend. We'd been kind of negative as we'd experienced that dearth of birth type period from the Great Depression, but got to that flattish type period, and then obviously, COVID threw a wrench in everything. As we began our 2025 planning, we came out of this expectation after having seen in 2022 a decline of volume of 6%, in 2023, 4%. 2024, we were down 2.5%. We expected 2025 to be about flat to slightly down, and this is probably getting into more numbers than you want.
But what we did was we took our January through December seasonality for 2017, 2018, and 2019 and averaged those and said, "Based on our expectation of that slight decline in 2025, how do we expect the monthly cadence to transpire for 2025?" And for the most part, we've been really close this year. There have been some months we're above, some months that we're below. So seeing all those trends together kind of gives me some heart to say, "I feel like we're kind of at this normalized trend now for volume." And as we look forward and kind of as we've talked about over the last couple of weeks, we haven't given 2026 guidance yet, but volume's likely our expectation is going to be in that flattish type range.
Flattish. It will be flattish, and that kind of is pretty much consistent with what we had pre-COVID.
Yeah. I'd say.
Kind of 50 basis points headwind kind of pre-COVID.
Yeah. You're exactly right. We kind of have that. I'd say that when you think about we put in terms of an earnings growth framework, 8%-12%, 5%-7% of that comes from our base business. And on the funeral side, that really assumes a flattish volume and then low single-digit increase in average, driving basically a low single-digit growth in revenue, fixed cost structure increasing, so maintaining a flat margin percentage, slight increase in margin dollars, but flat margin percentage. On the cemetery side, that's an expectation in that algorithm of a mid-single-digit type growth in pre-need production. The recognition rate's probably around 95%. That's going to drive a low to mid-single-digit growth in the top line. Again, fixed cost growing. So both margin dollars and we would expect margin percentage to increase 50-70 basis points in that algorithm.
So I think broadly, and again, we'll finalize this in February. That's generally the framework that we expect as we look forward to next year.
You're trying to say you're saying mid-single digit is kind of the growth metric for cemetery?
Correct.
Cemetery pre-needs.
That's the only aspect of our business that we can really drive. On the funeral side, most of the earnings and cash flow is driven by death rate. So until we start seeing an impact from the Baby Boomer demographic that is driving volume, which ultimately will drive an increase in our top line, you're really going to see stable margins until then when we start seeing growing margins.
Can you speak to market share? I mean, you're currently growing market share, but it's not necessarily you can't really put a number on it per se.
Yeah. I mean, the way that we look at market share is really looking at it by revenue. And so we're right now about 17%-18% by revenue market share for the total deathcare business that we operate. I'd say 12%-13% on the funeral side, and then about 27%-28% on the cemetery side. And we drive organic growth of that number as well as we can, obviously, through our pre-need sales force on the cemetery side, and then on the funeral side, constantly trying to remain relevant to the consumer, making sure that we're providing the products and services that people are looking for in managing this end-of-life experience and just trying to ensure that we're able to execute to drive that.
Drive that. Okay. Your investment in pre-need, do you ever consider moving that dial in terms of investing more to bump it above your growth rate, above the mid-single digit rate?
Yeah. I think we're constantly trying to figure out what we can do to try to drive that. At the end of the day, we've got about 3,700, 3,800 counselors that are out there. So determining, does it make sense for us to increase that headcount? Would that help drive pre-need production growth? We work with Salesforce, our CRM system, and we work with their modules to make sure that we're driving those leads as well as we can, acting on those leads as well as we can, routing them to the best counselors to be able to drive that. Our marketing team is driving analytics and research to try to make sure that we're targeting the proper consumers who truly would benefit from our products and services.
And then training, just ensuring that the teams have the tools and the training that they need to get in front of the consumer, explain what our value proposition is, and ultimately close that sale. And so we're going to be constantly trying to figure out how can we grow that pre-need, how can we manage costs. And that's kind of the same playbook that we've kind of been following for the last 20-30 years.
30 years. Yeah. Yeah. And analytics, I might as well ask this, but we were talking about it before and it seems to be topical. Certainly, the deployment of AI at any point, is that a cost measure, cost opportunity for you, presumably at a point in time? Or is it still kind of too early to see how this?
I think it's false. I think it's kind of early for a lot of people that are out there. I think we're all excited about it and excited to see what opportunities we might be able to have on it. A few real examples that I have is actually with obituaries. In writing obituaries, funeral directors would sit down with families, get a feel for who the individual was, and maybe take three to four hours to craft a really nice obituary. What that funeral director can now do is, again, sit down with that family, get the information, kind of populate an artificial intelligence platform, generate an obituary in seconds. The thing can be tweaked and really reduces the funeral director's time focused on that, which is great because then they can focus on other aspects of providing service to that consumer.
We do, on the Salesforce side, work with Salesforce, employing different modules that utilize artificial intelligence to help, again, go through routing those leads. You may have a counselor who does much better with direct mail type leads versus another counselor who does a lot better with seminar type leads that we've had lunches and such, and so it can more automatically do that. It can generate emails to say to upper levels of their managers to say, "Look, this counselor's not doing what they need to do to do that," but at the end of the day, I think we're just scratching the surface. For example, in our FP&A type teams, just trying to figure out how can we utilize the data at our fingertips to improve the analytics, improve the fluctuation analysis, and give us better perspectives for forecasting and modeling out what we'd like to do.
And I think there are going to be a lot of use cases that we just need to wrap our heads around and make sure we've got the right people in the room to figure out how to manage through that.
Manage the efficiency of it. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. The cremation mix, I know it's kind of been all over the place a little bit. I know in the past, it had always been, again, looking back at historic trends, it had always kind of been this 100 basis points a year thereabouts headwind. But it seems to have changed recently. Is that fair to say?
Yeah. Really, to your point, for the last 20, 30 years, we've seen this kind of consistent rise in cremation from that 100-150. Today, as we sit, we're probably 57%-58% cremation mix in our core business. Last year, we saw us closer to maybe a 50-70 basis points of shift. And I think we thought that was too early for us to call to say, "Look, we're in this new world, a new paradigm of cremation mix." But as we've kind of transpired through 2025, I think we're kind of shifting that perspective that now that 100-150 is dropping to 50-100 basis points of shift. Where you see that really come through is on the sales average, that low single-digit growth in sales average.
With a lower cremation mix, you're going to see a little bit more beneficial sales average there. And every 1% shift holding all else equal is about a $13 million impact to EBITDA. So you should expect maybe a $6 million kind of headwind.
Each 100 basis points, $13 million.
That's right. That's right.
And that's really in the pricing metric.
Yes. That's exactly right. And where we stand at this 58% or so type cremation mix, when we've looked at other kind of Western cultures where the cremation mix has seemed to stabilize, that's around that 70%-80% type range. And so as we get closer to that, you would expect that that slope should start moderating. But then when you look at a lot of the cities and urban areas that we do operate in, the top 10 or 15, there's a good chunk of those that are already kind of at or near that 70%-80% type range. And so we're expecting less of a pressure from that front going forward.
Okay. You mentioned I'm circling back now, but I had a question in my notes about your very strong adverse margin in the cemetery segment this quarter. And you had mentioned that you could garner maybe 50, 50-plus basis points on the cemetery segment going forward. How are you getting to those margin gains in that segment? What drives that? Is that just more, I don't know, more counselors? Is it more focused on the pre-need side or?
At the end of the day, it's true pre-need, the counselors, the tools, the effectiveness executing there because you really do need top-line growth in both the funeral and cemetery segment because of their fixed cost structures to be able to drive that margin expansion. And as I mentioned, cemetery, we've got a lot more flexibility or ability to drive that because of the pre-need nature of the cemetery business. And so that's really, if you look over the last 15-20 years, we've taken the cemetery margins from close to 17%-18% to where they're at now at 33% type level. On the funeral side, we've really kind of been constant around that 19%-20% type range with the new marketing agreement with Global Atlantic that's driving general agency revenue on the funeral side for funeral pre-need sales.
That's helped get the funeral margins closer to that 21% type level. And really, until we start seeing more growth in that top line on the funeral side, you're going to see us probably around that 21% level. But once we start seeing that volume growth, which we at this point kind of expect toward the latter part of this decade for the Baby Boomer demographic to begin impacting our industry more strongly, I think you're going to see that flattish type volume that I mentioned probably grow to 1%-2%.
And when you add that on top of a low single-digit growth in average, you're going to see that low to mid maybe single-digit growth in the funeral top line, similar to cemetery, that then that 21% should grow as well until the bolus of that demographic kind of comes through the industry, which likely would be toward the latter part of 2030, early 2040.
How is it that that contract translated? If I could ask the mechanics of how that contract translated into.
Are you talking about the marketing agreement?
Yeah.
So these marketing agreements are put in place for about a 10-year type period. And we've been working with TruStage, American Memorial Life for really 30 years. We'd owned them and then sold them about 20-30 years ago. And the latest contract was coming due in June 2024. So we started an RFP process in mid-2023. And if you recall, that was really when interest rates were close to their zenith. And insurance companies are regulatorily required to invest in a bulk of fixed-income type securities. And so going through the RFP process, the economic pie because of that interest scenario and dynamic had increased. And so we were able to negotiate much more favorable economic terms, really, with the incumbent as well as other firms that were out there.
But Global Atlantic, at the end of the day, just put forth the best proposition for us. And so we were able to drive historically close to 26-27% type general agency commission percentage for each insurance contract that we would sell. Fast forward to this new marketing agreement, that's closer to 35-36%. And that's really with no cost. And so we're able to get that completely coming through and hitting the bottom line. That went into effect really in July of 2024. We lapped it in June of 2025. And so now we're kind of at this new base to grow from as we expand our funeral pre-need sales.
Yeah. Okay. That's great. Thank you.
Any questions in the audience? Tim, go ahead.
Thanks. Just one. I'm kind of curious on the cemetery. What drives the decision when you're having the discussion? I'm kind of curious, is it more legacy decisions? You talked about family trust and developing this compound, which it seems to me like, I mean, the cremation shift, I was surprised to hear it's only 50 to 100 basis points or thinking about that going forward. Is it more of a legacy or a religious impact? And sort of is there anything unique to the demographics? Is there a demographic shift as to who the key purchasers are on the cemetery side in terms of demographics, religious, other? Thank you.
Yeah, sure. I mean, I think we're kind of talking about a burial versus cremation sort of dynamic. And you do see a secular trend that has been transpiring for the last several decades. That's part of it. Part of it is America's more transient society. So you may be born and grown up in Florida but ended up moving to Texas or up to New York. And so you have less of a desire to kind of have maybe a single resting spot, if you will. But that being said, there's still a big part of our communities that do still desire burial. A lot of our Hispanic consumers, a lot of our Asian consumers still really appreciate burial. It depends on geography. In the Southeast, you're going to see a lot more burials happening there as well.
And so I think there are a lot of factors that go into play on the cemetery side and what drives the burial. But I think what's potentially misunderstood as well is even though we are shifting to more of a cremation type business or society on the funeral side, that doesn't mean you don't want a memorial service, that people don't want an event to remember the life of that loved one. We're still performing full-service cremations and determining by what that family may want, what type of event. You may have some cremation services that will exceed the cost of a burial service just based on how big of a service they may want. Similar type dynamic is on the cemetery side. Already about 25% of our cemetery sales are to cremation consumers.
We've got what we term cremation niches, which are really glass front boxes that can be opened, put the urns in with pictures and other keepsakes that people can come back to remember. We've got scatter gardens. We've got cremation columbarium as well that people can have a place to memorialize if they would like to come back. And so it's constantly evolving, not rapidly evolving, but it is an evolving type industry. We do on both the funeral and now more recently the cemetery side we've started every five years to do customer segmentation studies to just try to understand what consumers are looking for, what they want, and how that's evolving to make sure we can remain relevant.
Just as a quick follow-up on that.
When you mentioned the family trust, is there really a price sensitivity when you're dealing with family trusts on the large purchase side? It seems to me like with the, I don't know, increasing demographic shifts between haves and have-nots, it seems like, oh, why not have a family thing and leave this legacy behind with the family? Is there much price sensitivity in that demographic?
One, I would say when you think about the demographics, particularly on the cemetery side that we're serving, it is the middle, upper-middle, and upper-income demographics that our cemeteries generally serve. And what you find too is these families are coming in and they're wanting to buy something that is special to them. We custom build in those types of scenarios inventory that is catered exactly to their needs. And so we really put our shoulder behind this 20, 25 years ago. I was in a meeting earlier, and we historically have just sold homogeneous plots. But what we ended up doing was saying, well, up in, let's say, the Northwest, if, let's say, a Bill Gates came into one of our cemeteries, what would you want to offer Bill Gates? And, well, this $10,000, $20,000 lot.
It's like, well, don't you think he'd want something more customized, more special? And we went through and we built a $750,000, $1 million mausoleum, a spec mausoleum, and people laughed and said, no one's going to buy that. It's just going to sit there forever, and within matter of weeks it was sold. And so we've really kind of understood where our cemeteries are located, what the demographics, what people desire, and we'll go through and either build lots to create value to them. But one other thing I'd like to point out is when you think of our 500 cemeteries, they're really in the middle of these mostly urban areas. They can't be replicated. So you've got the scarcity factor, you've got an inflation factor, and then you've got this tiering factor that we've been deploying capital to tier our cemeteries.
That really drives a lot of the pricing that we're seeing on that front. Of course.
Just a quick one. I think there had been some concern that when pricing goes on the internet, it could be your prices might come under pressure. I think that was seen in some other countries potentially. And I think there's an FTC report or some government report that's going to come out that might force that. I think you've kind of begun to transition into putting your pricing online. I forget the percentage of funeral homes that's there, but I think it's above a majority. Can you kind of go into that, maybe when the report is to come out and when that requirement might start?
Sure. So the FTC has about 40 different rules that it really kind of industries that it manages to. And one of those, of course, is the deathcare industry. And they're supposed to review that rule once every 10 years. It was put into place in 1986, and at the end of the day, requires that the General Price List be provided to every consumer. And the latest review began back in really 2018, 2019 kind of timeframe, right before COVID. And at the end of the day, the drive was, to your point, to get pricing to be put online because under the perspectives of some driving that, we're saying that at the end of the day, the funeral business is just a commodity and just get the pricing out there. It kind of misses the weddings, funerals, services can be all across the board.
But as it stands today, the last kind of movement on that was really October 2023. And obviously, with the recent change in the administration, that just seems to put it into a little bit more limbo, and we're just really getting even closer to that next 10-year review type period. And when you step back, this isn't the biggest burning platform that's out there. The latest data that I have is from 2022, and the deathcare industry drove about 1,500 complaints that the FTC received out of the 6 million in total. So I think that there are other larger fish that they've got out there to fry. But as you noted, we do have about 70%-80% of our locations currently that have some form of pricing online.
Our marketing team has really been working to test out different approaches to figure out what's the best way to get our pricing out there. And what we find is getting the pricing out there has had a negligible, really, impact on either the volume or the average. And we've actually seen some positive dynamics of lead generation where people have gone on, seen it, and said, "Hey, we'd like to be reached out to about a potential pre-need plan.
Are you planning to increase that? I think it's been about the same 80% for a year or so.
Yeah. I mean, we're evaluating it. I mean, at the end of the day, I think that if the FTC does come through and say, "Hey, get pricing online everywhere," we're going to be able to do that. I think that some of our competitors may have some technical issues with being able to do that. But I think our perspective is we don't really feel that the federal government should be kind of stipulating how we are marketing to our consumers. And so we may continue down that path, but we're going to just take it methodically and drive the way that we see fit.
I think I'm going to end the point for the credit side. Thank you, Aaron.
Thank you, Mike. Thank you.
Thank you.
I really appreciate it.