Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator instructions) Your first question comes from Frank Morgan with RBC Capital.
Anton – RBC Capital
Yes, good morning it’s Anton [ph] for Frank. Wanted to discuss the bed growth you saw sequentially and year-over-year. Did you break out how much of that was organic versus acquired?
Joel Gemunder
We don’t – we have never broken that out and I just don’t have those numbers in spite here to give to you. We look at our growth – we don’t really distinguish between organic and acquired growth because acquisitions are part of our business model as they are highly accretive and grow along with the rest of our business. It’s important to note, I think, that we use internally generated cash to do this. And it’s almost a make or buy kind of decision. The returns we get in acquisitions some time exceed that which we can obtain on de novo growth because simply because we get the growth upfront immediate and faster. So, it is a joint model. We have been doing this now for say the 20 years or so that we’ve been, more than 20 years that we have been in the long-term care pharmacy business and that – and it’s part of our model. And we don’t see any need to break that up.
Anton – RBC Capital
Fair enough. Can you talk then about the acquisition environment, anything that’s changed over the past 12 to 18 months?
Joel Gemunder
I think we are finding that the market is stable. I would expect to some of the smaller companies next year as the – some of these issues bite in to increase the number of companies which are willing to consider a sale. This always happens in a period of change. People tend to ride waves of business, but when they come to a fork in the road, many of them decide to call it quits. And so change brings us increased acquisition opportunities.
Anton – RBC Capital
Okay. And can you update us on kind of where you are with regard to pruning the voluntarily foregone contracts and beds?
Joel Gemunder
Well, I think the best way to look at that is to look at what our retention rates are and our losses are now running at 36% better than they were a year – that means we are experiencing 36% fewer losses. I don’t think you ever get to the absolute and of some business we want to walk away from because changes occur in the nature of the – some of those clients. They have new management; they have other issues that affect their attractiveness to us from time to time. so, I don’t think we’ll ever completely get away from that, but I do think those numbers are becoming to decline. If you look at how many homes that we’ve walked away from in the past two years, I think you’ll see that for example in the most recent quarter I think we mentioned 5,500 beds that we waked away from, which is fewer – that number of beds that we’ve walked away from in prior quarters.
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