Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Green Brick Partners earnings call for the fourth quarter and year ended December 31, 2021. Following today's remarks, we will hold a question-and-answer session. As a reminder, this call is being recorded and will be available for playback. A slideshow supporting today's presentation will accompany today's webcast and is also available on Green Brick Partners' website, www.greenbrickpartners.com. From the homepage, please select reporting and presentations under Investor Relations and then navigate to the presentation named Fourth Quarter 2021 Investor Call Presentation. The company reminds you that during this conference call, it will make various forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Safe Harbor Provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including its financial and operational expectations for 2022 and the future and anticipated impact of COVID-19 on our operations, prospects, and other aspects of our business. Investors are cautioned that such forward-looking statements are based on current expectations and are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results or outcomes to differ materially from those set forth in our forward-looking statements. These risks are set forth in our fourth quarter earnings press release, which was released on Tuesday, March 1, 2022, and the risk factors described in the company's most recent annual and quarterly filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Green Brick Partners undertakes no duty to update any forward-looking statements that are made during this call. In addition, our comments will include non-GAAP financial metrics. The reconciliation of these metrics and the other information required by Regulation G regarding these metrics can be found in the earnings release that Green Brick issued yesterday and the presentation available on the company's website. Now, I would like to turn the conference call over to Green Brick's CEO, Jim Brickman. Mr. Brickman, please go ahead. Thank you, operator. Hi, everyone. Thanks for joining our call today. With me are Rick Costello, our CFO, and Jed Dolson, our COO. Before we jump into this remarkable quarter and record-breaking year, I wanted to draw your attention to our presentation for today. In the interest of maximizing time for questions, we have made some changes to our slide deck. In a moment, I will pass things over to Rick, who will be going over our fourth quarter and full year highlights, as well as providing an overview of our spec-focused strategy. Following Rick's remarks, I will cover key financial metrics, our capital allocation strategy, and an update on our land investments. Finally, before my closing remarks and kicking off our Q&A, Jed will provide insight into our expansion into Austin, market conditions, and demand. I'll now turn it over to Rick. Rick? Thanks, Jim, and thank you all for joining us today to review our 2021 fourth quarter financial results. Please move to slide four, which is related to our highlights for Q4 2021 versus Q4 2020. During the fourth quarter, Green Brick Partners' results set records for any quarter in the company's history for total revenues, residential units revenues, and EPS. Now, here are the highlights. During Q4 2021, we delivered 823 homes, which represented growth of 41% over Q4 2020. Total revenues in Q4 2021 were a record $452 million. That increased 78% from Q4 2020. In also setting a record in residential units revenues that increased 70% year-over-year for the quarter. We combined that 41% unit growth with an increase of 21.3% in our average sales price. Now regarding ASP, we also note that our backlog average sales price was up 25.2% year-over-year. Operating gross margin for Q4 2021 was up 100 basis points over Q4 2020 to 26.2%. We believe, as I'll discuss a little later, that our focus on price over pace will continue to sustain our gross margins at levels higher than our peers. In addition to our 78% increase in total revenues, the company experienced a strong improvement in SG&A leverage, improving 350 basis points from Q4 of 2020, down to 8.8% for Q4 2021. When you combine our unit growth, our ASP growth, and improvement in both gross margins and SG&A leverage, our bottom line Q4 2021 diluted earnings per share of $1.24 was an increase of 114% over Q4 2020, far outpacing our unit growth of 41%. In fact, our EPS for Q4 exceeded EPS for any full year prior to 2020. In Q4, Green Brick Partners was also named to the top 50 of Forbes' 2022 America's Best Small Companies list. Finally, we had a very busy December in the capital markets. We successfully completed an offering of $50 million in our Series A preferred shares. We issued our fourth note purchase agreement in the amount of $100 million at a fixed rate of 3.25% over the 7.7-year average term in a well-received club deal structured by Prudential Private Capital. Our investors again included Prudential, Barings, Hartford, Securian, and Voya. We completed an extension, expansion, and amendment of our unsecured line of credit facility that added $130 million in new commitments, bringing our total commitments to $300 million. The maturity of all the commitments have been extended to December 2024, and the accordion feature was increased to $325 million. We now have a diverse lender group of eight banks with four new lenders being added. Please, move to slide five related to our financial highlights for the full year and year-over-year comparisons. For the year ended December 31, 2021, Green Brick Partners' results set records for any year in the company's history for total revenues, residential units revenues, and EPS, plus lots owned and controlled also represent an all-time record. Here are the highlights. For the full year, we delivered 2,834 homes, which represented growth of 28% for the full year over 2020. Total revenues in 2021 were a record $1.4 billion. That increased 44% from 2020. Total revenue has grown by a compounded annual growth rate of 33% over the past two years and 29% over the past six years. Also setting a record in residential units revenues that increased 41% year-over-year for the full year. We combined the 28% unit growth with an increase of 10.1% in our average sales price for the year. Home building gross margin for the full year 2021 was at 26.4%, up 220 basis points over 2020. In addition to the 44% increase in total revenues for the full year, we significantly improved our SG&A leverage by 180 basis points, ending up at 10.3% for all of 2021. Just like our quarterly results, when you combine our unit growth, our ASP growth, and our improvement in both gross margins and SG&A leverage, our bottom line full year 2021 diluted EPS of $3.72 grew 66% over 2020, far outpacing our unit growth of 28%. Like I said, lots owned and controlled were a record. They virtually doubled, up 98% year-over-year to a total of 28,621 lots. Again, for the year, Green Brick was named in the top 20 of Fortune Magazine's 2021 Fastest Growing Companies list, and we are the number one fastest growing public home builder. Please turn to slide six, where we will discuss metering of sales, our spec focus, and the impacts on our operations. Our full year net home orders were flat, with 2,885 net sales in 2020 and 2,851 net sales in 2021. In Q4 2021, our net sales were down by 44% from Q4 of 2020 as we continued to meter sales. As a result, we increased spec units under construction from a low of 28% of total units under construction in Q1 of this past year to 39% of total units as of the end of the year. This is a success, as holding back homes for sale gives us a better mix of specs versus pre-sold backlog homes. We believe our higher mix of spec homes will lead to more efficient operations, higher gross margins, and less risk of unmatched construction costs. We believe selling some houses two-four months before completion will get a better margin than selling all the houses 7-12 months ahead of completion, as we can capture increased sales prices. Managing our sales pace is a corporate strength. Deciding to meter sales aggressively so we can return to a higher level of spec units under construction has, and we expect will continue to contribute to our superior gross margins and return on capital. Our average sales price of $509,000 for Q4 and $461,000 for the full year were up 21.3% over Q4 2020 and 10.1% year-over-year for the full year. Our ASP of backlog of $588,000 at year-end is up 25.2% year-over-year. As a result of metering sales, we believe that our Q4 absorption per active selling community is not indicative of demand, and we'll talk about demand later in Jim's session. Please recognize that our full year pace of absorption of 8.2 units per quarter per community is up 46% from the levels in 2019 two years ago. With that, I'll now turn it over to Jim. Jim? Okay, thanks, Rick. Please flip to slide seven, where I would like to start by focusing on our return on equity. For the fourth quarter annualized, our net income return on average equity was 31.9% for the full year. Our return on average equity stands at 25.9%. We have had a substantial increase in return on average equity over the last two years due to a sizable increase in net income of 224% over that period. Exceptional market conditions, strategically executed operational initiatives, and our unwavering approach to capital allocation have all been critical components to achieving such strong results. In 2021, we again expanded our entry-level Trophy Signature Homes brand, with Trophy representing 36% of our home closing revenue. This focus has allowed us to create positive SG&A leverage by prioritizing higher absorption trophy communities with simplified design packages and a simplified library of plans. You will also see on this slide that we have been able to capitalize on this growth by expanding gross margins by 220 basis points to 26.4% year-over-year and by 500 basis points over the last two years. As you can see on slide eight, we continued to maintain some of the best margins in the industry, performing well above our peer average of 23.5%. Our home building operations are in strong markets where we can wield pricing power. In an environment where we continue to raise prices, as Rick mentioned, our focus on spec units allows us to sell homes later in the construction process at higher prices, and therefore, to achieve higher margins. On the next slide nine, I would like to address our capital allocation. We continue to exercise a very disciplined approach which includes investing significantly in lot growth, executing the organic growth of our builder subsidiaries, and expanding into new markets. Though there are many noteworthy metrics we can point to as indicators of our success in 2021, I would like to direct your attention to our lot position. In 2021, we increased our lots owned and controlled by 98% year-over-year, far exceeding any of our peers, as we show. This coming year, we intend to spend $285 million on land development with a goal of delivering over 4,700 finished home sites to our subsidiary home builders across 43 communities throughout 2022. In a moment, Jed will discuss our recently announced, excuse me, announced expansion into Austin. On slide 10, we highlight the significance of our robust land pipeline and what it means for our communities going forward. We believe our willingness to invest heavily in our growth of lot inventory and commit to self-developing such a large proportion of our lots is a key factor to our higher gross margins. However, we also understand the importance of maintaining lower financial leverage that is appropriate to match our significant investment in dirt. Based on our strong returns on equity, our lower financial leverage means our results are even more impressive on a risk-adjusted basis. On this map, you will also note the almost 9,000 lots allocated to Trophy Signature Homes are for communities that exceed 800 home sites. One of the main ways we mitigate risk in these larger, longer life communities is by buying land in submarkets, which we believe have long growth term potential at very affordable prices. In the case of these Trophy communities, these lots have an average pay-per-lot price of under $8,000 per lot. Many of these lots also have special development districts such as Municipal Utility Districts or Public Improvement Districts that can fund a sizable proportion of our development costs and thereby reduce our cost of capital and development risk even further. I would like to now turn the call over to Jed Dolson, who will be covering all the Austin market conditions as well as demand. Jed? Thanks, Jim. Let's start with our exciting news about entering Austin as we cover the maps on slides 11 and 12. On February 8, we announced that Green Brick will make its debut into the Austin market through Trophy Signature Homes. We purchased 383 acres of land in Elgin, Texas, 25 miles northeast of downtown Austin, for the development of our first Austin area community named Trinity Ranch. We plan to commence construction in early 2023 and start to see closings as early as Q4 of 2023. The 1,700-unit neighborhood will be developed as a 50/50 joint development with Century Communities, where Trophy will have 850 home sites with two lot width product lines. Per our bullets on the two maps, it's easy to see why we're excited. The community is exceptionally located near the new Tesla and Samsung plants and will be a short commute to many of the city's major employers. The city's low unemployment, educated workforce, and a who's who of major employers have led to a sizable population growth. It's no surprise that it is also one of the lowest levels of resale inventory and is the fifth-largest starts market in the country. Having said that, we realize that one community does not make a division. Stay tuned as we look to add additional land positions in Austin. Shifting gears to slide 13. On the demand side, we continue to see an incredibly strong desire for homeownership in all our markets and across all of our product offerings. As Rick mentioned earlier, although our full year net home orders were flat, we believe this is a result of our proactively metering our sales rather than an indication of decreased buyer demand. We know that interest rates have been on the forefront of everyone's minds, so we wanted to put this into perspective how we anticipate rising interest rates will affect our buyers. Looking back at December and January, our average buyer had a debt-to-income ratio of 34.4%, most commonly referred to as a back-end ratio with a credit score of more than 750. Should rates go up to 5% in 2022, we could see average debt-to-income ratios increase by 2%-4%. Overall, this is still well below the 43% level for back-end ratios that we would try to stay at or under in order not to potentially impact loan approvals. We believe that our buyers' strong credit quality, coupled with the limited resale inventory shown on slide 14, are a recipe for continued demand in 2022 and beyond. Resale inventory levels are at all-time lows across the country, allowing home builders to share a larger share of home sales of the home sales pie. In fact, our resale months of supply was cut in half during 2021, dropping from 1.4 months of supply in January 2021 to 0.7 months of supply in January 2022. As you can see, Austin has only 0.5 months supply of resale inventory. The average price appreciation in our markets is 25% per the Burns Home Value Index versus a national average of 18%. We believe we have more pricing powers because of our preference for high job growth markets coupled with credit-worthy buyers who can afford larger homes and bigger mortgages. We believe this will allow us to continue to raise prices with each new release of lots. Before I turn this back to Jim for some closing remarks, please follow me to slide 15. Our current metrics for evaluating demand have been significantly impacted by supply chain challenges beyond our control, and we believe are not truly indicative of how strong the demand for new homes is. Here, you will see a few case studies we have documented to really illustrate what our boots on the ground teams are seeing. For example, at Echo Park, one of our town home communities in Atlanta, Georgia, our division released four home sites to an interest list of over 2,200 prospective home buyers. To accommodate for this incredible demand, we revised our sales strategy to operate on a bidding system. In Dallas-Fort Worth, our biggest market, we have seen similar stories, with demand far exceeding the number of lots released for sale. In addition to reducing incentives, we have significantly cut back on market spend, marketing spend. For example, in one Texas community of 58 townhomes, we were able to generate an interest list of over 350 people with no digital marketing and using a single sign. In summary, we believe that our well-qualified buyers, coupled with our limited resale inventory, are sufficient to overcome the significant disruptions in supply chain and rising interest rates. Now I will turn it back over to Jim for a few closing remarks. Jim? Okay, thanks, Jed. Please turn briefly to slide 16. As I mentioned earlier, we've accomplished record operating results, industry-leading investments in lot inventory, and return on equity results that have risen almost 120% over two years with a core philosophy of maintaining low debt to total capital. Our financial leverage has consistently been far below the average of midcap and small cap peers, and has been typically one of the lowest and often the absolute lowest leverage metric among this peer group. Our strong results this year are the culmination of meticulous planning and hard work by everyone on our team. Despite our success, we remain focused on maintaining a disciplined approach to investing our capital and enhancing our long-term value of our company for our shareholders and the communities in which we operate. Please visit slide 18. I'd like to close here by highlighting the culture of excellence that we are building. One defined not just by our financial performance, but also by our commitments to environmental, social, and governance behaviors. As such, I am pleased to announce the expansion of our governance committee's role to oversee our efforts going forward in making sustainability a source of value for our business and society. With that, I will now turn the call over to our operator for the Q&A. Operator? Thank you. At this time, we will be conducting a question-and-answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star two if you would like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. One moment please while we poll for questions. Our first question comes from the line of Michael Rehaut with JPMorgan. Please proceed with your questioning. Thanks. Good afternoon, everyone. I guess still good morning in Texas. Thanks for all the information. Congrats on the results. I wanted to focus a little bit on 2022. I know in general, you know, you haven't laid out any guidance in the slides, I believe it's outside of land spend, and the delivery of the 4,700 home sites to your builders. I was hoping to get a little bit of a framework of how to think about closings in ASP for 2022, as well as the direction of the community count throughout the year? Sure. This is Jim. Thanks, Mike. Let me just add a little color. The land spend was really land development spend. That figure we gave earlier did not include land acquisition costs. That was just the development spend part of that. When it gets to the ASP, we are expecting double-digit growth in ASP. In our business, it's gonna be a little bit lumpy depending on some of the product mix as we phase out of some more expensive trophy communities into lower entry-level cost trophy communities. On neighborhood community count growth, we expect double-digit growth. Rick, do you have anything you want to add to that? Yeah, I would say both of the ASP year-over-year should be low double-digit growth and as well as the community count as of the end of 2021 to the end of 2022, the ending community counts should be, again, low double-digit growth. I'd say we typically don't provide guidance, but you know, since there is obvious growth beneath the year-end numbers, we want to provide those reference points. No, that's very helpful. Appreciate that. I guess the second question I had was on the gross margins. Obviously, a lot of success there, and the approach of selling further into the construction process makes a lot of sense. You know, one thing that kind of stands out is that your gross margins have been, you know, kind of in a 26%-27% range for the last three quarters. It dipped down a little bit sequentially. I don't know if that was due to mix. I'd be curious about that, you know, 4Q versus 3Q. Any thoughts on, again, you know, 2022 as it relates to, you know, do you feel like the current level of gross margins are sustainable? Do you think they could even trend higher, given that there has been a clear trend of home price appreciation, more than offsetting cost inflation? It's kind of a two-part question there. One, any comments on Q4 versus Q3? Then just how do you see the sustainability of this current range, going forward? Yeah. This is Jim. I'm gonna take the first part of that question, and Jed Dolson, our COO, is probably gonna shudder at the second part because he's responsible for really helping us maintain our margins in a very difficult operating environment. We are not planning on seeing any reduction in margins at this point because of our lot position and buyer demand. We think that there still could be room for improvement. Jed, why don't you take the rest of that and just kind of explain the challenges of you dealing with meeting the expectations I just set. Yeah. As Jim mentioned, you know, we are trying to mitigate potential surprises in the supply chain from a cost perspective by metering our sales and delaying sales until the later stages of construction. That recipe has worked well for us. Most of the homes we are selling right now had lumber packs, for example, that were, you know, delivered in the late fall, early winter of last year. We feel very good about our position as for 2022, as far as gross margin goes. The new lumber packs are quite expensive, so we are continuing to raise prices and value engineer in an effort to minimize that. These new costs would probably affect us late Q3, early Q4. Jed, aren't you seeing pretty much cycle times not getting any worse? They've kind of stabilized at a what we would like to still improve upon, but they're certainly not going the other direction right now. Yeah, that's correct. We've kind of realized that we live in a new norm now, and you know, it's obviously elongated pre- versus the pre-pandemic cycle times. You know, the cycle times are not getting worse. It's just a matter of the unpredictability of which part and piece is gonna be in short supply that week. Great. Thanks. One last quick one, if I could. You know, I was hoping to get some commentary on, you know, demand trends. I know that you're still metering sales pace, but, you know, have you seen any impact of the, you know, the higher rates in the last, you know, let's say four weeks or so? Sometimes it takes a little bit for a change in rates to filter its way through the marketplace. Any change in either, you know, buyer traffic, or even incentives in the market in general that you've noticed? We have had no increase in incentives. We're I think they're still going the other direction in the builder's favor. It's a tough time actually to be a consumer. We don't really see that shifting at all. Demand is very, very robust, and we don't see it being anything but strong. Typically what you would see in a period of increasing interest rates is folks have to reset what they can shop for. The existing resale inventory usually takes a preponderance of the deals out there, but because so little existing inventory is out there's a lot more of the pie from the builders. With all of us metering sales, there's plenty of time for buyers to adjust and figure out what they can afford, because we're releasing so few lots every period. In that case, it would be healthy to have an inventory adjustment, but we're not seeing one at all. Mike I would just add, Mike, that you know, yes, house prices have gone up, but all, you know, wages have also significantly risen in our markets. You know, in a typical rising interest rate market, we would typically see the buyers looking for smaller square footage homes, you know, and basically trying to keep their payment the same. We are not seeing that at all right now. We're seeing buyers want bigger homes. We are much more successful in selling two-story homes than one-story homes across the country right now. Mike, the other thing is, as you're aware, apartment rents are continuing to escalate very quickly. Apartments are full. You know, those are very strong indicators for Trophy's entry-level business. We, you know, we're just seeing huge demand there. Of course, the in-migration in Dallas, Atlanta, Florida, and our markets is really unprecedented. Great. Thanks so much, guys. Appreciate it. Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Carl Reichardt with BTIG. Please proceed with your question. Thanks, everybody. At first, thanks for the new slide deck, by the way. It looks great. Let's pretend, Jed, that this isn't a new normal. I think we called it a new abnormal in a piece recently. If you look at Trophy Signature's underwriting for absorptions sort of longer term compared to the rest of Green Brick's portfolio of businesses, what do you think normalized absorptions for Trophy Signature are? And then what do you think they are for the rest of the business, if you could combine the bits and pieces from the other markets and different products? I think it varies, Carl. I think it's interesting, we had a meeting yesterday with a top ten home builder that we do a lot of business with. We went over 12 communities that we are joint builders in. The absorptions range from 30 a month to seven a month. I think the demand right now there, the demand is there for 30 a month across the board. The trades are not there for 30 a month. We all have limited trade bases, and we're kind of spreading those across. I think Rick highlighted some of the dramatic differences in Trophy's absorption versus the rest of the companies. I think you will continue to see that expand and get more pronounced in the future. Again, Carl, too, to add on there. Yeah. You wanna go ahead, Jim? Yeah, because I wanna follow up on that because I wanna make sure our investors and shareholders understand that we didn't ever underwrite any community when we bought land based upon 20 or 30 sales a month. We're pretty aware of how our peers underwrite land, and we were always on the most conservative side of that equation. You know, six-eight works for us really well. Demand could be 30, but as Jed said, the labor and supply trades aren't there. We did underwrite enough and underwrote all of these neighborhoods on a much more conservative basis than that. Carl, the other thing that I should have added before about community count is that Trophy communities are bigger, and they are higher absorption. You know, what we have seen traditionally is that the Trophy pace can be 1.5-2 times the rest of our builders. If you take all of 2021 at 8.2 units per quarter per active selling community. You know, maybe if you assume that Trophy is 1.7 times the rest of our communities, you know, somewhere between 1.5 and 2 times, maybe it's six houses a month or, I'm sorry, six houses per quarter for our other brands and, you know, 10-12 houses for Trophy, you know. It really depends on, you know, how we meter it and how expensive things get, etc.. Definitely they're the workhorse. Okay. At the end of the day, Rick, the pace price balance for you would be you probably don't wanna. I mean, you've got supply constraints, but you wouldn't wanna raise prices to the point where that six a quarter for core and 10-12 a quarter for Trophy gets damaged, right? That's kind of the sweet spot, to try to hit that balance, the highest price you can get and hit those absorptions. Is that the right way to think about it as we model? Yeah, maybe Trophy can be higher. You know, it's the- Okay. Got it. Great. When you think about it, if you're doing nine-12 per quarter, that's three-four per month. You know? Okay. I mean, that's clearly below our experience. Like Jim says, we just underwrite conservatively. Okay. Perfect. The last couple of quarters, overall orders have been down, a combination of absorption and community count. As you look at 2022, is there a particular quarter where you feel comfortable, assuming that supply chain, to Jed's point, doesn't change, where you feel that number will inflect positive again on a year-over-year basis? Jed, why don't you take that because we've been studying that all the time with you. Sorry, Carl, could you repeat the second part of that? Yeah. Which quarter in 2022 do you believe that overall orders will be positive year-over-year? Oh, Rick, do you have those pulled for last year? Yes. I know we really started meeting sales the second half of Q2 last year, so Q3 and Q4 for sure, Carl. Okay. Okay. Yeah. You know, we really wanna get to even flow, but we, Yeah. We slowed things down in the second quarter of last year with just over 600 sales. You know, so we could beat that in Q2 because we're going at a greater rate than that in terms of deliveries, starts, and we just wanna wait until we get over 40, maybe 45, maybe higher percent spec. That's gonna be the key in the cycle times. We don't know what the cycle times are gonna do, and so that can change everything. Carl, it will probably be back-end loaded. Yeah. Okay. Fair enough. That I'd assume cycle times will stay the same. Okay, I've used my two questions or more than that, so I will turn it over. Thanks very much, guys. Really appreciate the help. Thanks, Carl. Our next question comes from the line of Alex Rygiel with B. Riley. Please proceed with your question. Thank you very much. The cancel rates stepped up in the fourth quarter. Can you talk about why that was and your outlook as the portfolio shifts more towards spec homes that by default obviously have reduced time to close? Rick? It was a one-quarter aberration. The full year is obviously lower in January, February. In the full two months, the cancel rate is down to under 8%. You know, so it was a function of kicking out some buyers that couldn't qualify. A lot of that comes to a head when you have such a robust Q4 closings as well. You know, some of those folks, they had just changes in their personal lives or their financing or whatever it was. There's nothing that indicates that, that is continuing as you see in our January, February change. In fact, we saw February cancel rate lower than January. We're seeing the market accelerate, not decelerate. That's good to hear. You mentioned earlier closing out some higher priced communities. Can you help us understand sort of the pacing of that? When will that occur in this calendar year? Well, you see a pretty high ASP in our backlog, which is always the case. You always have that higher because you don't get a lot of townhomes in backlog. Trophy is designed not to be a backlog builder either. That's more of a spec builder. We do have quite a few communities that when we originally started Trophy off, we had multiple communities still available in the Frisco sub-market in DFW, which is one of the most dynamic markets in terms of lack of availability, no more dirt available, and just a much higher rate of appreciation. We're gonna close a lot of those houses in Q1, and then start tailing off in Q2 before we settle down. Like I said before, on an overall ASP basis, the full year should be up low double digits. You're gonna see, like Jim said, lumpiness. It's gonna be going up by a good measure in Q1. Just don't get excited about it because it's coming back down as we roll out of those higher price point communities. Does that make sense? Very helpful. It sure does. Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Jay McCanless with Wedbush. Please proceed with your question. Hey, good morning, everyone. My first question, I think, Jim, you said earlier the goal is to get to 45% spec. Is that just a function of the mix from Trophy Signature, or have you guys found out that there's some financial gross margin benefits by getting it to that level and then maybe ramping the sales pace up a little bit? I think it's really across the board. Obviously, Trophy, as it's growing, it's becoming a more important part of our business. Even at our smaller builder like GHO in Florida, I think that they finally determined along with us that they're much better off trying to increase their spec production than their build for sale pre-sold homes. It's really across the board. The only builder that's really that we don't do a lot of pre-selling is in our town home just because we're building homes, you know, and 12 units at a time. Jay, historically, we have been at 40%-50%, depending on the quarter. That number changes every Q4 and goes to more spec at that point because a lot of the pre-sold houses close in Q4. 40%-50% is our history, and we could easily see ourselves being at the high end of that range, if not higher, because those historic numbers were not when Trophy was 35%-40% of our closings and sales. We could see the number go higher. For now, we'll be happy to get it back to those historic ranges. Great. Maybe some comments around the pretty steep decline both year-over-year and sequentially in the community count. I know, and thank you for the guidance on double-digit community growth for fiscal 2022. Do you expect most of that to be back half loaded, or is it gonna roll in as the year progresses? Jed, can you help him on kind of the timing of our community count growth? Yeah. I would just add that, you know, it's, I think you'll really see it pick up the second half of the year. It's gonna stay pretty flat the first half of the year. I would add that, you know, these communities that are coming online are coming on with, you know, 250-300 lots per phase, which is allowing us to get those increased velocities, going forward. One other thing that we found, you know, really interesting over the last couple quarters is, you know, we've made great returns on equity, having almost 29,000 lots on our balance sheet. You know, most of those lots are not producing any current income. We're really set in terms of our lot position going forward, and we've had a number of calls from builders that are short of lots or need lots, and we're considering actually selling off not full neighborhoods, but are bringing other builders in some of our lot positions just because we have such a good lot position. That might be a nice little fig for income this year. Well, that was actually gonna be my other question is, I saw the land sales pick back up this quarter, and I thought last quarter, the company had indicated that revenue number might be coming down. What are you saying, Jim, that that's gonna start to pop back up, and- We've had. You need to start thinking about selling those or modeling for a higher level of land revenue? Well, you know, it's a wild card right now. We've had a number of unsolicited offers that Jed's taking a look at for us and that we're working, that we really didn't anticipate being part of our strategy in 2022. I guess the answer is stay tuned on that, but we're sure considering it. Okay, great. Thanks. Taking my questions. Our next question comes from the line of Matt Dane with Titan Capital Management. Please proceed with your question. Thank you. I want to ask about the starts. I think they ticked down to a lower level, 545- 546 in the fourth quarter here. When are you expecting the starts to start increasing and see some growth there on the starts again? I can take that. Yeah. Hey, Matt. Jed here. Yes, starts did go down in Q4. That was partially a function of our high deliveries in Q4. Just, you know, it's the same kind of message or same story here that, you know, our builders and our trade partners can only handle so much. We had to kind of get. You know, we had a huge delivery in Q4, and we had to get those homes 100% done and transferred over to buyers before we could really start our next batch, which is in Q1. I think when we release our Q1 numbers, you'll be happy with those numbers. Great. Thanks, Jed. Again, as a reminder, if anyone has any questions, you may press star one on your telephone keypad in order to join the question and answer queue. Our next question comes from the line of Alex Marin with Housing Research Center. Please proceed with your question. Yeah, thanks, gentlemen. I wanted to ask about the buyers that you guys are currently seeing. We know, you know, in the last year or two, there's been a significant increase in people who are migrating across state lines. I was wondering if you guys track that or have some general idea of what percentage of your sales are going to those type of buyers. Yeah. Jed can answer part of that. It's harder to track than you think a little bit because many people rent, and they well, they will in-migrate from Texas and try to rent, which is obviously becoming more difficult as apartments are full. But they're renting before they're buying, so they may have a Texas or a Georgia or a Florida address before they buy. But Jed, do you wanna take the rest of the question in terms of what you're seeing in migration? I know it's. Yeah. As Jim mentioned, it's very difficult to look at. We look at, because with our mortgage joint ventures, we have a 60%-70% capture rate, so we're not even getting all the buyer data. But we do look at that with our mortgage joint venture partners, and it's sub-market by sub-market. I can make a generalized statement that in our A location markets, we are seeing a higher percentage of out-of-state buyers, and oftentimes that's over 50%. As we get into our more affordable product, the buyers are more Texas-based buyers. But we still see significant out-of-town buyers. Okay, that's helpful. Along the same lines, I was wondering if you guys track investor purchases or whether you have a specific policy around investors buying houses? Yes, we do. We don't sell very many homes to investors. In our infill communities like Alpharetta, Georgia, which is comparable to Frisco, Texas, we see unbelievable demand for investors, and really, we stay away from them. We've also been approached by the build-for-rent guys to see whether they wanna close out communities or do business with the build-for-rent sector, and we don't do that either. Finally, when you get to our balance sheet, we don't do really land banking or off-balance-sheet optics. Yeah. Okay. Is it you don't choose to sell to investors because the returns are not as good or because you don't want the communities to be full of those types of owners? We don't want the communities to be full, and then, you know, it's harder on the financing side if you're an investor. Obviously, if you're an all cash investor, that's easier. As Jim mentioned, our sales to investors are in the low single digits. Got it. Yeah. We're happy with real retail buyers. We can almost sell a home. I know when you strip out sales commissions and all that, some of these guys are offering you almost the same margin, but we really aren't. That's not part of our strategy at all. Okay. On a separate topic, any guidance you guys can offer on the tax rate for 2022, and also can you comment on why the tax rate was lower this quarter? Rick? We just had a decrease in our state taxes just based on interstate allocation. You know, that all hits at Q4 after you've filed all of your returns for the prior year. You know, it'll probably be higher next year because of how much harder it is to get the energy tax credits on the change. It's gone up per unit from $2,000-$2,500, but it's infinitely harder to get that. It's probably gonna be, you know, closer to 24% for the year. Okay. Thanks. If I could ask one last one. We've got another couple of folks wanting to get on if we can move along, please. Okay, sorry about that. I'll jump off. Thank you. Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Aaron Hecht with JMP Securities. Please proceed with your question. Hey, guys. Land sales up this quarter, but the margin on those sales looked like it was pretty low. Doesn't really align with some of the commentary about the strength and potential earnings that you could see next year? Anything in particular that happened this quarter with those land sales to have a low margin? Yeah. Yeah, I can. Yeah. We did an exchange with another public builder, so technically that's a sale, but it was really an exchange. Okay. It helped us increase our community count and our longevity in a sub-market that we wanted to be in long term. Understood. In terms of capital structure, you did the preferred stock issuance. How did you decide to go with the preferred versus debt or I guess potentially equity, given the strength of your balance sheet, the cost that you got on the debt that you issued, why preferred over more debt? This is Jim. One of the advantages we saw. Well, first of all, we expected interest rates to rise. We called that correctly, and we wanted to lock in very long-term, lower cost of equity. The second thing is that $50 million, we knew we were expanding into some larger, longer term, land positions, and we just thought it was a better asset liability match with this type of equity that lowered our cost of capital and really matched some of these longer life communities that we were investing in. Got it. Appreciate it, guys. Thanks. Thanks, Aaron. Our next question comes from Michael Rehaut with JPMorgan. Please proceed with your question. Hi, thanks. Just had a couple of modeling clarifications. You know, the equity from JVs and the other income, you know, continue to go up in terms of equity in JVs as well as the other income at $10.3 million actually almost doubled from 2020. Should we see a similar increasing trend in 2022 for those line items? Other income is other income. That's always gonna be unpredictable. As you'll see in the footnotes to this 10-K, the JV income is most substantially from our 49.9% investment in Challenger Homes in Colorado Springs and Denver. You know, they're knocking it out of the park, so their business is improving like all of our brands are improving. The second biggest piece is our income from our mortgage joint ventures. That's directly correlated to our top line and our capture rate. If you assume that our top line is going up and our capture rates are gonna remain constant, you would see the JV income going up with our business. Okay. No, that's helpful. Just on the tax rate, you said closer to 24% for the upcoming year for 2022. That would be a tax rate on the adjusted pre-tax income attributable to Green Brick, before the non-controlling interest deduction, correct? Well, it's actually after non-controlling. You have to back it out because we don't pay tax for our partners. You take the pre-tax income, and you subtract out the non-controlling interest income, and that is your leftover pre-tax income related- Right. -to or allocable or attributable to Green Brick. That net number- No, I just- How I look at it. Yeah, I know that's. Maybe I misspoke, but that's what I meant. We're on the same page. Okay, cool. Thanks. Thanks a lot, Rick. Yep. You're on target then. We have reached the end of the question and answer session. This also concludes today's conference, and you may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.