Question-and-Answer Session
Thank you. [Operator Instructions]. Our first question comes from Darrin Peller with Lehman Brothers. Your line is open. You may ask your question.
Darrin Peller - Lehman Brothers
Thanks, guys. Great job on the expense controls. It seems like it's at least now offsetting all of the revenue pressure, I know investors are waiting for that. And first of all though, on the agency premium side just real quick, the downtrend, 34% year-over-year drop, considerably lower than the direct premiums were down 18%, can you just clarify what exactly is going on there, where we should expect that?
Dennis J. Gilmore - Chief Operating Officer
Sure, this is Dennis. We did have a pretty material drop from quarter-over-quarter, but it's primarily driven by couple of factors here. First we have had a significant drop in our agency remittances from our large California agents and just the market is pretty tough here right now in California. The second issue is we have restructured some of our large national lender-based agents and also counseled a couple of those agents. So those are really the factors that drove that number.
Darrin Peller - Lehman Brothers
All right. Let me looking forward the ratio of agency to direct, I mean is it going to come back a little more closely to historic norms of maybe high 40s, low 50s or percent wise?
Dennis J. Gilmore - Chief Operating Officer
I would anticipate that to happen, but we also continue to monitor our agency business very closely and we are making sure that all of our agents are profitable, meet our profit standards, our business standards, our claims standards, standards etcetera. So we are just watching this business very closely.
Darrin Peller - Lehman Brothers
All right, thanks. And then on the expense cuts, you mentioned another 300 positions were eliminated during April. Where do you believe we stand now with regard to expense, expenses in general and really how much more room is there to cut or do you foresee the needs to cut considerably more and how much do you think that you said 300 positions, I mean what if, I don’t know if you’ve quantified that in your prepared remarks, but if not would you be able to do so?
Dennis J. Gilmore - Chief Operating Officer
We did not quantify, but let me answer the question more broadly. We continue to manage this business just to manage to the overall market. We are not seeing the increase in the summer spring order accounts. Order accounts have trended down a little bit from March. We were averaging March about 9,300 orders a day, we are now down to about 9,300 orders per day in March, we are now down to about 9,000 orders per day in April. So the spring and summer bump is not happening. So, we are going to continue to manage that very, very aggressively. We will continue to manage to our current order flow. The second thing we're seeing in the business too is we've seen some volatility on the average fee happening per title order, and that's driven primarily by increased acceleration of home price depreciations especially on the coast lines. It's also increased conforming loans and less jumbo products, so those factors are driving our average fee down. So all around we are going to just continue to be very aggressive on the expense base to match our EBITDA base.
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