Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
Thank you. (Operator Instructions).
Nicholas DeBenedictis
Hey, no questions?
Operator
We'll take our first question from [Michael Roomberg] with Boenning & Scatter.
Michael Roomberg - Boenning & Scattergood
Good morning, guys. Thanks for taking my call. You did mention a little about delinquency rates and bad debt expense. I am wondering, as we've have gotten into September, October, November, have you seen an uptick in that at all?
I know you talked about getting it to a lower number. But given that unemployment is up and there is lot of uncertainty, has that affected your delinquency rates or bad debt in any meaningful way?
David Smeltzer
Michael, actually it's ironic, but the bigger problem we had was the fact that we had changed over the customer service program late in '07, had to delay bills for a month, and then we decided not to try and collect. So we lost a quarter of our normal collection process, and we saw our bad debt jump, because people were transient in some of our areas, and they leave trying to collect. The biggest was in the Woodhaven, the one we sold. That was our biggest bad debt write-off, but we've seen it come down, even though the economy has worsened.
You're absolutely right on the foreclosure issue, which we've been fortunate our areas have not had as much impact as California, Arizona, or some of the areas where there was speculation, like Southern Florida. The parts of Florida we're in, we're not seeing that as much. I am not saying it's not there, but it's not to the degree of reading at least in the areas we're seeing.
We've become more aggressive now that we have our new computer system. It permits us to have centralized collections versus every state do their own collections and have 13 different policies. If you haven't paid your bill on the 10th day after the bill was mailed, you get a dinging notice and then sent out by computer to the field. They have to address it, which means you could get the money or [shut] the person off within a certain timeframe.
It's no longer an individual decision made by the collection agents sitting in an individual local area, so we have not seen an uptick. In fact, we're going the other way. But I would say, we are doing it based on the fact that we were artificially high in Q1 versus our norm.
- To read the full transcript on Seeking Alpha, click here »
