Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
We will now take questions from the telephone lines. (Operator Instructions) Our first question will be from Steve Arthur from RBC Capital Markets. Please go ahead.
Steve Arthur – RBC Capital Markets
First off, I’d just like to elaborate a little bit more on some of the dynamics in the UK market. I understand your comments before and when we look into the forecasts over there now, seem to be numbers 15, 20, 25% decline kind of numbers in expected transaction volumes this year. I guess, is that consistent with what you’re seeing so far and what your outlook is for the year and as importantly would you expect the same kind of mitigating circumstances to lessen the impact for you this year?
Daniel E. Friedmann
Yes, we are seeing data a little bit better in the fourth quarter on our trends, both in the mortgage side and the search side. So there’s no evidence of things going down further at this point. They seem to be either steady or rising. There’s very strong mitigating circumstances on the search market in that there is still a lot of homes that are closing without a HIPS from the past year and therefore ordering a search, there’s of course all the new HIPS searches that are happening and it’s too early to tell, but early indications are that a very significant number of solicitors receiving a HIPS are redoing the search which is not included in our forecast. We saw a fairly robust market almost consistent with last year’s volumes and last year was a record year in the first half despite the drop in the market. On the mortgage side, if you break down our business we get about 10% of our business from what would we would call wholesale banks which basically get mortgage back securities. That business went almost to zero in the fourth quarter and it’s remained there. However the retail banks have continued to grow unabated, there’s no evidence of a slow down at all through the first quarter and into the first half of this year. Our conveyancing porto is growing nicely, our EPC porto is growing nicely and in fact we are planning a number of e-conveyancing related products which is of course the end game for us in the UK, hopefully some of those will come out this year. We’re seeing some good trends at this point in terms of our business.
- To read the full transcript on Seeking Alpha, click here »
