Dominion Lending Centres achieves 19% mortgage volume growth and strong profitability in Q3 2025, while reaffirming positive revenue and EBITDA growth for the year.

Sam Good afternoon and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Dominion Lending Centres third quarter 2025 results conference call. At this time all participant lines will be in a listen only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer period. To ask a question, press STAR followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, press star one again. Please note that this call is also accessible via webcast and a replay of the webcast will be available on the Corporation's website at www.dlcg.ca. during the call, Management's remarks may contain forward looking information that is based on certain assumptions and therefore subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected. Please refer to our forward looking information disclosure in the MD and A for quarter ending June 30, 2025 which can be found on SEDAR Plus and on the Corporation's website. In addition, during the call the Corporation may refer to specific non IFRS measures, these measures as also defined and the MDA for the quarter ending June 30, 2025. The corporation's MD&A includes reconciliations of non IFRS measures to the most directly comparable IFRS measures. Management believes that these non IFRS measures provide useful information to investors regarding the Corporation's financial condition and results of the operations as they provide additional critical metrics of its performance. These non IFRS measures are not recognized under IFRS, do not have any standardized meaning prescribed under IFRS and may differ from similarly named measures reported by others issuers and accordingly may not be comparable. These measures should not be considered as a substitute for related financial information prepared by IFRS. I would now like to turn the call over to Gary Morris, Chairman and CEO of Dominion Lending Centres. Gary, you may begin.

Good afternoon everyone and thank you for joining us today on the third quarter 2025 earnings conference call. On the call with me today is Jeff Hague, our Chief Financial Officer, Chris Hague, Executive Vice Chair and Co Founder Eddie Cocciuolo, President and James Bell, Executive Vice President and clo. I'm excited to report that the Dominion Lending Centres Group once again generated a solid quarter of growth and profitability as we continue to execute our long term standing growth strategy. Funding Mortgage volume during the third quarter increased 19% to 23.5 billion and on a trailing 12 month basis they reached 80.6 billion. The Canadian mortgage origination market remains strong during the third quarter supported by strength in the renewal and refinance market as well as improved activity levels in the housing market. The renewal market continued to benefit from pandemic era mortgages reaching maturity as well as the recent decline in interest rates. Although the housing market had a slow start to the year, residential sales activity started to improve in March and this improvement continued throughout the third quarter. In addition to the positive market dynamics, we continue to focus on our organic growth strategy including expanding our broker network and increasing adoption of velocity. During the quarter, Velocity adoption reached a record 85%, which is up from 73% in the third quarter of 2024, contributing to a 45% increase in Newton revenue. Given the strength of velocity adoption across our broker network, we are now in a great position to leverage the full functionality of this leading edge platform to help our franchise and broker partners increase market share during the quarter. We continued to expand our highly successful Gold Rush initiative and expect to introduce new productivity tools over the coming years. Productivity and technology were key themes at our national sales conference held in Whistler in September. This year's event brought together more than 700 of our broker and franchise partners along with lenders, suppliers and other industry professionals. It was a fantastic event as we all came together to collaborate on enhancing customer engagement and exploring how AI can drive greater productivity and market growth. Partridge Financial Group, of which we own a 40% equity interest, also had a busy quarter. The company successfully funded its first loan in July and since that time has grown its loan book in line with our initial expectations. We expect Heartwood will reach profitability in 2026 and are excited to be able to take part in its growth as it fills an underserved segment of the Canadian residential mortgage market. In addition to the strength of our revenue, we continue to generate strong profitability while at the same time strengthening our balance sheet. During the quarter, we invested in the growth of our business while returning $3.1 million to shareholders through our dividend and repurchasing 7.6 million of our stock. With the first 3/4 of 2025 now behind us, we reaffirm our outlook for both positive revenue and ebitda growth in 2025. However, I do want to highlight that we are facing some tougher comparison quarters in the fourth quarter of 2025 as well as the first quarter of 2026 due to the strong growth achieved at the end of last year and early in 2025 as we shift our focus towards 2026 and beyond. We remain highly optimistic about our company's long term growth trajectory as we focus on a growing a market share within the $655 billion Canadian mortgage origination market and b expanding our addressable market, c leveraging the full capabilities of Velocity and d pursuing strategic and accretive acquisition opportunities. As always, our priority continues to be delivering strong profitability, maintaining the strength of our balance sheet and creating strong shareholder value. I will now turn it over to Jeff Hague to walk through our third quarter financial results in more detail. Jeff, over to you.

Thanks Gary and good afternoon everyone. For the third quarter of 2025, revenue increased 20% year over year, driven by 19% growth in funded mortgage volumes and an increase in the adoption of velocity to 85%. Revenue from franchise and brokering of mortgages increased 11% while Newton's revenue increased 45%. Beginning in the second quarter, revenue generated from a third party supplier was reclassified from franchise revenue over to Newton's revenue. The third quarter impact was a $0.3 million increase in Newton's revenue and a corresponding $0.3 million decrease in franchise revenue. In addition to the impact from the reclassification, franchise revenue grew at a slower rate than funded mortgage volumes, reflecting the influence of certain revenue components that do not directly correlate with funded mortgage volumes, such as advertising fund revenues. The strength in Newton's revenue was due to the growth in funded mortgage volumes as well as the higher Velocity adoption rate and turning to expenses, direct costs decreased 6% year over year due to the timing of our advertising spend. As a percentage of sales, direct Costs decreased to 9.5% in the third quarter of 2025 from 12.1% in the third quarter of 2024. General and administrative expenses increased 27% or $2 million over the third quarter of 2024. On a percentage of revenue basis, G and A expenses increased to 36.6% from 34.5% in the third quarter of 2024. The increase in G and A cost was largely due to the timing of marketing expenses, including the costs associated with that Whistler 2025 biannual national sales Conference, which took place in September and resulted in approximately $0.7 million in additional costs in the quarter. Adjusted EBITDA grew 16% year over year in the quarter to $14.2 million, and adjusted EBITDA margins remained relatively consistent at 54% in the third quarter of 2025 compared to 55% in the third quarter of 2024. During the quarter, adjusted EBITDA margins benefited from the strength of Newton, though offset by higher operating expenses from the timing of advertising and event spending as well as our investment in Heartwood included in Q3 2025, adjusted EBITDA is a $0.3 million loss from our equity accounted investment in Heartwood for the nine months ending September 30, 2025. The loss from our equity counted investment in Hart was about $1 million. Net income of $9 million increased from $5.3 million in the third quarter of 2024 due to higher revenue and the decrease in finance expense related to the preferred share liability, partly offset by higher operating expenses and a loss on equity accounted investments. Adjusted diluted earnings per common share increased to $0.11 in Q3 2025 from $0.08 last year. Cash flow from operating activities decreased 17% to $9.3 million during the third quarter of 2025 as the increase in income from operations was more than offset by cash used and non cash working capital due to the timing of our payments. For the nine month period ending September 30, 2025, cash flow from operating activities increased by 4% over the same period last year to $27.9 million. The strong cash flow from operations for the nine month period ended September 30, 2025 coupled with the full retention of free cash flow following the conclusion of preferred shareholder allocations resulted in $26.9 million in free cash flow attributable to common shareholders, up from $10.5 million over the same period last year. Our total debt to trailing twelve months adjusted EBITDA ratio for the period ended September 30, 2025 was 0.61 times compared to 0.70 times at the same period last year. I will now pass it back over to Gary for some concluding remarks.

Thanks Jeff. Thanks again for attending our call today. As mentioned previously, the outlook for the DLCG Group of companies remains strong and we continue to execute our long term growth strategy, generate strong profitability and utilize our strong balance sheet to support the company's growth. I want to thank all of you for attending our call today and I also want to thank all of our employees, brokers, franchise partners and lenders for unwavering support. We look forward to continuing our growth journey while at the same time generating strong long term value for all shareholders. That concludes our prepared remarks for today and at this time I'll turn the call over to the operator to open the lines for questions and answers. Operator.

As a reminder to ask a question, simply press star one on your telephone keypad and our first question comes from the line of Gary Ho with de Jordans. Please go ahead.

Thanks. Very solid plus 19% funded mortgage volume growth in the quarter. Several factors that you guys listed in the press release. Growth in broker network, an increase in broker productivity, and also the refi activity. Are you able to kind of parse out for us which of these contributed the most? And on the broker growth in particular, I know you've talked about in the past bulking up your salesforce, Are you seeing tangible benefits on the recruiting side through your various channels?

Hey, Gary, thanks for tuning in today and as always, thanks for the really good questions. It's interesting because as I think through your question, I don't have any answer other than sort of anecdotal answers off the cuff. But I will tell you that it has been a very good year for recruiting. It feels really like we're in a very good spot right now. It feels like we're operating on all cylinders. It feels like the machine is running very, very well. There's no question we have seen a year over year increase on a per broker basis, you know, and that sort of averages right across 9,000 brokers. And that's material, but the recruiting always seems to be sort of the driver that outpaces the rest of our growth. To your question, you know, are we seeing any changes? We've been running our business the same way for, you know, 20 years in January, and we're always looking to improve our effectiveness on our communication, our outreach. The last piece to your question becomes sort of the same store sales over year and as we talked about before our gold rush and you know, helping your agents never have to worry about ever managing, you know, a CRM again and doing that for them, I think is going to continue to pay, you know, dividends going forward. So not a, not an answer with a rifle where I can give you the specific numbers between the three, but all of them have made a meaningful contribution to this last quarter.

Okay, thanks. Thanks for that. And then my second question, I want to move on to Heartwood. How is that ramp up going on right now? And what's the current loan book size? If you can disclose, and I think geographically you've mentioned BC being next up on the list. And also maybe just remind us, at what scale or timeframe should you expect hardwood to be breakeven? Should it be kind of first half of next year or back half? Any color would be great.

Yeah, thank you for the question on Heartwood. And you know, I'm going to be mindful and careful, as I always try to be, in not necessarily disclosing too much information to the public, you know, in advance. I don't think that as a Shareholder. It bodes really well just from the competitive, you know, nature of giving, you know, sensitive information out. I would tell you this, that Heartwood is doing extremely well. We're super happy with the rollout in Ontario. Our volume is, you know, ramping each month. We are currently licensed in British Columbia. In the last quarter we got that done. So we're licensed. We are, you know, managing our risk profile. The requirements and the regulators a little bit different in BC than it is in Ontario. We are hiring staff and we do plan on ingesting loan applications in British Columbia in early in the new year, in January or February. In terms of your question around breaking even our profitability, I think our plan that we originally put out talks to us about being profitable somewhere around the third quarter of 2026. And I would think we are definitely on track for that. We feel really good about Heartwood. The feedback from the broker market in general has been really good. And we think we have some advantages in terms of cost of funding when we look towards the competitive landscape primarily around Mortgage Investment Corp. So we're encouraged by Harwood. We like it, we're happy. We've seen some really positive things from Heartwood. Our average credit bureau and what we call Beacon score is higher than we had anticipated. Our loan to value is exactly I think where we had anticipated. We're doing more first mortgages than seconds. But we are cautiously optimistic as we finish out this year and enter into 2026.

Okay, that's great, Charlie. Thanks for sharing that. And then my next question, I did see in your subsequent event note that the company bought the remaining 30% of BFG that you don't already own. I know you don' want to disclose any of your secret sauces, but you know, what was the kind of how accretive was was this in terms of multiples that you purchased that ad and maybe on a related note, any conversations you've had with other brokerages that you could transact over the next 12 to 24 months?

Yeah, we originally bought BFG. We bought 70% of that business. We hadn't anticipated buying the other 30% this soon, but there were some things that came up that provided opportunities. Because it was so close to the first transaction, we bought the 70%. We used the same multiple. And I think when we bought bfg, I think the multiple that we used at that time was somewhere around five. So that was in line with the original first tranche of that transaction that continues to be doing well. We have a new president in there and he is Focusing on recruiting and getting to know his team. Feedback on. On that has been good. And I'm sorry, Gary, the second part of your question was what?

Yeah. Are you having any other conversations with other.

Yeah, I mean, listen, I think you guys know how we, you know, how we operate. We're always having conversations. I mean, you know, that is the nature of our business. There's a lot of different things that we think are accretive that we're having ongoing conversations with. And, you know, they will continue to, you know, sort of develop, you know, throughout the remainder of this year and through 2026. So, yeah, the short answer, not to bore you, is that we're constantly having conversations. You know, as I said to you, it just, you know, for whatever this is worth, guys, take it as you will. It just feels to us that we're in a really good spot right now. It feels to us that we are, you know, operating very efficiently. It feels like the, the feedback from the market itself, in just terms of our group and how hard we are to compete with is paying dividends. It feels like we're getting lots of opportunities at lots of tables.

Okay, great. Maybe I can just squeeze one more numbers question in maybe for Jeff. Just on that reported EBITDA 14.2 million, I think you've called out 0.7 million for the sales conference expense and then another 0.3 million for. For hardware losses. Any other one time that's missing?

No, you pointed them out. There's always one time items. Right, but those are the two most notable that we had this quarter and we don't see anything similar happening in Q4.

Yeah, we had a little bit of severance. Gary, just to dovetail on Jeff's comments, we had a little bit of HR expense items. We had some severance in there, you know, bringing out, buying somebody out recently, but I think largely captured in that Q3 EBITDA.

Okay, great. Okay, those are my questions. Thank you.

Thanks, Gary. Appreciate all the support over at Desiredown.

Thanks.

When your next question comes from the line of Buriti Manjal with Catacore Genuity, please go ahead. Hi. Thank you for taking my question and congrats on an excellent quarter. My first question is around lead generation and conversion rates. Given the interest rate corrections and softer home sales environment, have you observed any noticeable trends in this quarter and going forward, are you seeing any geographical divergence, for example, say, between Western Canada and Ontario, Quebec?

Yeah, a couple really good questions. Thank you to the Canaccord team. Overall, it's interesting, you know, There's a.

Lot more product, you know, on the market right now. So the urgency that sometimes you see, you know, happen when you start to see interest rate decreases is a little bit muted. I do expect that we'll start to see a higher percentage of conversion rates as we get through the balance of this year. I mean, November and December is typically, you know, a little slower anyway. It starts to slow down. We start to see a rebound, obviously, you know, sort of in Q1 or towards the end of Q1. So I haven't seen anything that, you know, is meaningful that stands out. I mean, there is some, you know, differences provincially. Vancouver and Toronto have, you know, a higher level of inventory. You know, there's some reduced investor activity, especially in the, you know, more expensive detached housing. But I think, you know, overall we're not surprised with the numbers that we're seeing. We are cautiously optimistic that Q4 is going to be a, you know, like the rest of the year is going to be a good quarter. And I think if you look at sort of the feedback from the market and if you look at, you know, authorities like, like Korea, they are anticipating 2026 to be, you know, up about seven and a half, 7.7% in sales activity and, you know, moderately up in price activity next year to somewhere around 3%. So we're just head down doing what. We do, focusing on the referral market and. Sorry, the referral market, the renewal market. And, you know, I think we're on track and exactly where we expected it would be.

Okay, thanks, that's very helpful. Another quick one for me is around capital allocation. Do you intend to renew the share buyback program in December? And more broadly, are you thinking of how do you think about balancing returning capital to shareholders versus reinvesting in the business?

Yeah, we don't have to sort of redo the ncib. We keep an open NCIB all year. I think a lot of, you know, we bought back, you know, somewhere around 850,000 shares in the last quarter, a little bit more, just under a million shares in the calendar year in 2025. You know, if we think that we have free cash flow and we don't have a better use of that capital, then we would look at those share buybacks. When we look at capital allocation, I think we have been fairly consistent in the way we think about it. Number one is always in growth. You know, what are the opportunities that are in front of us that, you know, add on funded mortgage volume which drives, you know, all of our revenue buckets? You know, that can be on continued focus on recruiting and retention. That can be on acquisitions, buying, you know, competitors. You know, we're always open for business in terms of looking at things that might make sense and that are accretive. You know, next we would look at cash dividends. You know, we try to, you know, we'll try to maintain and even grow a modest dividend back to our shareholders. We think they're very deservant. And then lastly would be the share buybacks. That's sort of the order of priority that we, you know, think about capital allocation.

Okay, thank you. That's very helpful. Thank you for taking my questions.

Yeah, I appreciate your time. Thank you for asking. Thank you.

Our next question comes from the line of Jeff Benwick with Cormart Securities. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon, everyone. So, Gary, just wanted to start off on Newton. You mentioned earlier the investment in AI functionality. There were some good sessions there at your conference on that. Can you just update us on, on. The status of rolling out that capability? What kind of spend is there and sort of the timing of rolling that out and getting it adopted by your brokers?

Yeah, thanks, Jeff. Great to hear from you and thanks for making the effort and coming out to the conference. Listen, we believe that AI is going to continue to be a very important part of our business. We try to be in front of any of these new initiatives. We've already begun something called AI Essentials. We are training 9000 number brokers how to get started with AI. From the very, very simplest forms of AI into some of the more advanced features. We have made a mandatory AI integration in all departments by April of next year with all of our head office staff. We said to them that using AI for efficiencies within our organization and our team having the ability to understand and feel comfortable with AI is going to be important. So we have a very clear focus with our head office staff. We are teaching AI essentials to our 9,000 brokers. And then more importantly, Velocity, we've been first to market with AI integration. So right now, inside of our Velocity submission platform, that is a platform that we use to send and receive every mortgage transaction documentation. We use it for all of our AML requirements, we use it for our payroll and compliance. Obviously most of you know what, what we use it for and what it is for has already integrated chat, GPT and Gemini. So you can use it in your daily transactions. Now you can use it for your deal notes, you can use it for searching, you can use it for packaging. You know, the lender packages and host of other items. So it's, you know, something that we're not going to be behind on. We're going to. We're going to try to lead on. You know, I think our mandate from head office has been anything that helps us become more efficient, more effective, do a better job communicating, making ourselves look more professional. We have to make sure that we, as leaders of the organization, you know, eat our own cooking and walk that talk.

That's great. That's great color. Thanks. And then it's obviously becoming an exceptionally valuable component of your business. How do you think about building onto it now? Is it maximizing? Obviously, it's maximizing by your team, but what about opening up some of those capabilities to third parties? Maybe even just plugging through into the back end of Newton? I know you've had some relationships sort of providing some service there, but just opportunities to leverage Newton into some new areas for Revi.

Yeah, it's an excellent comment, Jeff. Sure. Some of you. I remember earlier this year I said that by the end of this year we want to stand up a sales team to, you know, do outreach to competitors and large teams offering on the Newton platform. In other words, you know, operating Newton as a Switzerland or standalone and not only exclusive to the DLCG group. We've done a fairly good job. I don't know what the final number is, but it's somewhere around 11 or 12% of our velocity origination comes outside of our group already. I will tell you that Velocity continues to be the gold standard. It does so much more than any other competitor's platform. It has done a remarkable job on the regulatory piece of it, the aml. So we have begun that. I'm always cognizant of when we say something, we try to deliver on it. We are having outbound calls right now. We are talking to other teams, we are interviewing people. We are standing up a sales team so that we can continue to reach out to just mortgage brokers who are good mortgage brokers who may not want to make the move over to a DLCG company for whatever reason, for previous relationships. But we expect a lot of them will be open to looking at the software they use to run their business. And when ours is best in class, we expect that we'll win some of that business. So we do see a opportunity for much more growth outside of the dlcg. And it is something that we prioritize. We think it's very important.

Okay, great. And then maybe just one with respect to the market activity, you've spoken to the renewal wave that just continues to. To be a big part of the market here. Certainly recognize that you're up against some. Very tough comps through Q4 and Q1 into next year versus that prior year there. But sounds like the renewal wave here. Is kind of cresting or peaking through. That period as well. So I guess there should be some balance. I guess maybe put it in that. Context where you have a bit of a tailwind as well to help you out.

Yeah, we hope so. I mean, listen, the very peak, the. Top of the crest on the renewal market actually is in the first half of 2026. So obviously it started after Covid. We saw that escalate because due to the higher rates we had a lot of short term mortgages, 1, 2, 3 year mortgages, which were different than the typical 5 year fix that we had for so many years. So that is peaking at the first half of this year. So we're going to have some tail at our, some wind at our tail. There's no question. I mean, we are historically coming into a little bit softer time of the year. Just as I said earlier, November, December typically is a little bit muted. People are home for Christmas, they don't want to move at that time, you know, and that normally starts to see a bit of a rebound, you know, late Q1. So, you know, we think that peak of the market in terms of renewals is going to help us offset the slowing, you know, some of the slowing in the market. But you know, we're always, I mean. I say to my team, you know, listen, let's just put our head down. Let's really focus on execution. Let's find ways to bring more value to our people. Let's do a better job with, you know, Gold Rush to, you know, help our brokers stay in touch with their past customers more frequently, more consistently and the rest should take care of itself. It's the same thing, Jeff, that, you know, when we've spoken in the past that I always tell you we will be good operators. You know, we, we do, obviously a strong housing market is better for us. There's absolutely no question. But I think we've proven, you know. Even this year right where, you know, I think if you look back right now you would say, you know, it was a softer economic cycle than I think what, you know, you know, what was anticipated this year. And I think that we've proven that, you know, regardless of the market, we still run a very, very good organization.

Fantastic. Thanks for that color. That's All I had. Yeah.

Thanks very much, Jeff. Great hearing from you again.

With no further questions in queue, I will now hand the call back to Gary Morris for closing remarks. I apologize, we do have one further question. Sure, Jim. Byron.

Sorry I was a couple minutes late joining, but just wanted to clarify. Maybe with Jeff, just on the. You mentioned the advertising marketing costs. I just want to clarify exactly what. You'Re referring to in terms of the. Direct cost versus some of it flowing.

Down to the GNA line. Maybe you can just clarify that for me. Yeah, sure. We typically have two different major types of marketing or advertising spend. As I believe most people probably know. Dlc, the standalone brand, maintains a specific advertising fund and costs associated with the advertising fund or costs paid out of that fund are considered a direct cost just because there's a certain proportion, they kind of move in lockstep with revenue. On the other hand, our typical more, less brand building spend, let's say including the likes of industry events and also of course for the other brands outside of dlc, those would hit general and admin costs as opposed to direct costs.

Okay, that's helpful. So the direct cost this quarter were abnormally low or is that, is that.

The way we should think about that? Yeah, the costs associated with the ad fund were a little lower than usual this quarter. This is the nature of sort of brand building advertising spend. It does tend to ebb and flow. It is a bit opportunistic in terms of when we think a good time to spend on say TV or digital advertising rears up. And you know, to a certain degree we had our sort of sites focused on our sales conference in September, which, you know, might have diverted a bit of attention away from that. But I know we're going to have probably a bigger spend on advertising in this, in the fourth quarter, but yeah, it was a little slower this quarter than historically.

Okay, that's great. Thanks, Val.

And I will now hand the call back over to Gary Morris for closing remarks.

Excellent. Thanks very much, operator. Listen to all of our investors out there. Thank you. We appreciate the good questions and we appreciate that support. You know, as I said to you many times before and just reiterated a few minutes ago, you know, we're not running the business quarter to quarter. I don't look at it honestly, it doesn't, you know, I don't give a whole bunch of horsepower to it. I think our horsepower that, you know, we give to, you know, to our business is, is year over year and it's making good decisions, making accretive acquisitions, spending our time on, you know the items that give us the highest return and that is recruiting. You asked me about capital allocation. You know growth is acquisitions are always our number one target. So appreciate the patience. I promise that we'll continue to be good stewards of the business, make good sound decisions when it comes to G and A and how we think about the business going forward. Lastly, to all of our franchise partners, all of our team leads, all of our mortgage brokers, all of our partners and suppliers, you continue to make this industry fun for us. I promise you the best is yet to come and thank you for all the hard work and contributions that each of our agents and owners and partners make every day to continue to help us build this business. With that, have a great evening everyone.

Thank you again for joining us today. This does conclude today's conference call. You may now disconnect.

Thank you. . It was Sam.