Pure Cycle Corp  (NASDAQ: PCYO) Q2 2020 Earnings Call Transcript

Pure Cycle Corp  (NASDAQ: PCYO) Q2 2020 earnings call dated Apr. 07, 2020

Corporate Participants:

Mark Harding — President, Chief Financial Officer and Director

Analysts:

Elliot Knight — Knight Advisors — Analyst

Bill Miller — JM Hartwell — Analyst

Bill Cunningham — Analyst

Presentation:

Operator

Greetings and welcome to the Pure Cycle Corporation 2020 Second Quarter and Six Month Financial Conference.

[Operator Instructions]

It is now my pleasure to introduce you to your speaker, Mark Harding. Thank you, Mr. Harding, you may begin.

Mark Harding — President, Chief Financial Officer and Director

Thank you. And I’d like to welcome you all to our second quarter call. Some housekeeping measures. We do have a slide deck for this. So if you want to log in to our website, it should be on the front landing page. It’ll just say Second Quarter Presentation. If you don’t see it there, then you can surf over to the Investors section and there’ll be a link there as well. So that will allow you to follow along with the presentation and the prepared remarks. And I’m going to beg forgiveness for those of you who are new to the company, probably just jump into sort of the quarter-end, without giving kind of the overview typical overview of the company. We’ve got some excellent resources on our website if you’re new to the company and want to get a little bit more color about sort of how we do things and how we got to where we are. There’s a couple of podcasts on there that will give you that presentation.

But with that, let me go ahead and start the call here. And the first thing I need to do is while I said I was going to go through the presentation quickly, I got to get through at least the second slide, which is to get the lawyers out of the room, saying that this is our safe harbor statement, then really these are forward leading statements not intended to be policy or direction or guidance to our investors.

So with that I’m going to scroll you guys down to Slide 6 and really start by giving you all an update into our land development segment and give you kind of an update of the activity that we’ve had. As you all know, we’ve got a very large master-planned community located in the I-70 corridor here in the Denver metropolitan area. We even embarked on our first phase of that which includes a little over 500 lots. We have three national homebuilders that are under contract for all of our homes or all our lots on that. We have Richmond America, Taylor Morrison and KB, and all three of them are very active in building homes out there. We have, of the 506 lots, I think we’ve delivered about 380 of the 506 lots. So there is really just two more take-downs. I think Richmond has taken down all of their lots. Taylor Morrison has one more takedown requirement, one more takedown of lots which will be about 49 lots.

And then I think KB has another 50 lots and they’re going to be plus or minus, maybe a little bit more than 50 lots. I think they’ve got maybe two more takedown schedules. The real nice thing about our project here is all three of our builders have accelerated their take-downs from their original contract schedules, mostly due to really the success that this project has had. We’ve had a great entry into the market, mostly because of our price point. Our price point is an entry level price point. Our home start in sort of the kind of the 340, 350 range. As sad as that may sound, that’s a starter home in the Denver market, but we have a real mix of homeowners out there. We have had our first sort of shareholder — homeowner community meeting and got a chance to meet with a number of those folks.

We have about 70, a little more than 70 people occupying houses out there and the first Community Meeting was a huge success. I think we had more than 42 homes, represented families from 42 homes represented. I will throw shout out there to KB who gave us one of their model homes for the meeting place there and they gave us some things to snack on there, so I’ll give them a shout out, thank them for that. But the project is going great. In addition to the actual occupied homes, we probably got I’d say 120 homes, 130 homes under construction. So I’d say we’re right close to 200 homes, either built or under construction.

We’ve got, I’m going to — let me pull that back, about 180 building permits issued, so can’t get started on a home until you have actually got a building permit. We have paid tap fee. So in addition to selling lots, as many of you know, we — our water utility and we keep track of that metric as well. We’ve got about 217 water and wastewater taps purchased from our homebuilders and then how this is likely to roll out for the rest of this first phase, we’ll deliver the remaining 127 lots through calendar year-end. So there is, of those three or four more closings, those are staggered throughout the rest of the year. So you’ll see announcements as we get those closed, I’ll likely send out a press release for each of those announcements to let everybody know how those are progressing through.

Move to the next slide, Slide 7, that will kind of give you both a visual as well as a numerical representation of the progress since Q1. So you can see we are having a tremendous start and then we’re really just getting into the building season. So we’ve got a number of new homes, I’d say 70 residents as we were describing. And I think home builders are averaging about six homes per month per builder. So that absorption has been very exciting over the winter. We’ll see how that continues to progress in this new environment that we’re in and we’ll talk a little bit more about that later in the presentation. Move to Slide 8. Slide 8 will really kind of give you a view of the rest of the project, it’s about 935 acres in total.

So this first 155 acres is really just the first entry into that. And as you can see, I want to highlight, really the next residential component of that. The next phase incorporates 480 acres and there is much more than just the residential component. We have a large commercial component, which is going to be up along the interstate, so we have about a half a mile of frontage along the interstate and we have our own interchange that’s existing right at the exit to the property. But we’re going to focus in on kind of the next residential component of that and we have a very broad product mix in our next residential component.

If you flip to the next page, that’ll kind of give you kind of a land plan layout and really the mix is going to be more than we have kind of, in our first phase, we just had two product mix, a 45 foot and a 50 foot lot. Those are pretty homogeneous that did allow the builders to be able to take a wide variety of homes on those sites, but it was still a pretty typical stand-alone detached single-family house.

In the next phase, we will have a little bit more density on the per acre on that, we’ll have some smaller lots, 32 foot single family, 45s and 50s like the first phase. We’ll have some paired product out there, which means we’ll have some duplexes and then some townhome product where we’ll have clusters. And so it [Indecipherable] does speak to a much larger customer base, a much more diversified product offering among the number of builders that we’re looking at.

We’ll likely phase this in and so this will be our second phase, but we’ll probably have four micro phases here as you can kind of see, we set that up, where you can see each phase is somewhere in the 230 lot to 260 lot deliveries and so it allows us to be able to manage our construction costs, so we don’t get too far out over our fees and we want to make sure that builders are absorbing and paying for all those full cost of developing those lots before we move on to the next increment. I think we did a very good job of efficiently delivering the first 500 lots in our first phase.

And so we don’t want to stray too far away from that model, because I think that was very good, not only for our builders, so that they didn’t have to inventory too much as well as the company, so we didn’t have to inventory too much in terms of the development costs. So we can do a lot of those land, like the earthwork, maybe we carve that up into two phases. But we can carve up the utilities and the roads, curves and gutters into four phases so that we’re much more real-time and delivering those. So that’s I know, important to our shareholders, because they want to make sure that we’re using our capital wisely. We’re not putting too much into a work in progress or WIP on that without having our builders kind of there with us payment progresses.

I think our contracts are going to look very similar in the second phase as they looked in the first phase where we’re going to get maybe a third, a third, a third delivery schedule where we’ll get paid a portion of the lot cost, finished lot cost as we plat the property and then a progress payment as we deliver wet utilities and then a final progress payment as we deliver the final finished lots. Pricing is probably going to be a little bit stronger. I would like to be able to disclose that pricing to you.

I think we know or have a pretty good idea about that, but until we get our contracts finalized with each of our builders, I’m going to keep that in our pocket and we’ll look forward to giving you that guidance as that becomes available to us.

Let’s move on to Page 10. So Page 10 as you know, we also supply water and wastewater services and one of the biggest activities that we have in the water segment is supplying water to the oil and gas industry. When the oil and gas industry existed, they seem to have taken a hiatus this year just mostly due to the price of oil. We did have some repositioning of the assets in the field.

So our largest operator Conoco Phillips had sold their position in this field to a group called — a private company called Crestone Peak Resources. You can Google them and find out a little bit more about them, but they’re almost exclusively owned by Canadian Pension Fund.

So they operate a little bit differently than maybe a public E&P company. They really do have a long-term focus, I have been very impressed with their management and their leadership. In point of this transition, how they’ve handled the transition, the communication channels that we have with them about how they look to take a look at the field and then also, what’s going on in the current market with oil in the mid-20s now, which is a significant improvement than it was maybe six or seven days ago. But looking at oil in the low-20s, it certainly puts a lot of pressure on E&P companies’ ability to really invest into a field right now.

And so I think most of their activity is on hold for 2020 in terms of new exploration. One of the things that they did have as a carryover from Conoco Phillips is they have 13 wells that Conoco had drilled and completed on the drilling side but they hadn’t fracked those wells. So if you look at some of the low hanging fruit and they look at this as to say, based on we’ll make sort of a month to month assessment based on the price of oil as to how we want to pick up and the timing of completing those wells, so that they can get those in production and really a very modest investment to bring on production or at least complete those wells and hold those leases by production.

So there is a little bit of opportunity for us to have some activity on that, but I don’t have a lot of guidance on that, because they don’t have a lot of guidance just yet. Moving to the next slide, Slide 11, let me give you some of the financial metrics. Our water assets, so our assets are going up, continue to go up from year-end of last year, as well as do our cash and investments. So you always want to own companies that have increasing assets as well as increasing cash position, that usually means that they’re making money. And this is one of those areas where we find ourselves in a very unique position where we’re very strong and very highly appreciating asset base and a very strong and not making very much money but a lot of liquidity within the company. I’m sorry, let me take that, that could be misinterpreted.

We are making a lot of money. Our cash is not making a lot of money right now. Let me roll to the next slide, Slide 12. That gives you kind of the metrics on the P&L. Operating revenues, that’s a six-month number, $14 million over what was last year, so we’re a little bit ahead of where we were this time last year and then growth in income from continuing operations on the share basis, $0.25 a share. And then profitability, if you take a look at the net income after tax, we are, we have used up all our tax credits. So now I end up having to send some of those dollars to help support that $2 trillion benefit package that Washington has sent out, but we are now happy to be reporting a very good margin after-tax profit.

Page 13 will give you kind of a breakdown on where that money is coming from. So if you look at the land development segment, a little over $10.8 million on lot sales, the tap fee revenue about $2.8 million.

So we’re getting a good monetization of the equity value that we have in our water system. What has fallen off is obviously fracking water revenue. So very nominal revenue for this fiscal year in the fracking revenue. We really haven’t had a single frac in this fiscal year. That revenue that you see there that $57,000 is sort of incidental water that would be going to a pad site for any construction activity in the pad site water compaction or a number of things like that.

And then, we also have some oil and gas minerals and what you see is kind of a substantial tick up in our oil and gas royalties and that was because Conoco had drilled and completed another four well pad site on some of our land. And if you remember, we have two sections where we carry forward net mineral interest on that. This is in the smaller portion of that. We have 1/8 pooling in where these four wells are and then in the other pooling interest we have 3/8th of that. So this is even in the smaller well pooling. So it gives you kind of an impact on the fact that this is a very oil-rich field. But for the price of oil being in the 20s, would be being developed on a pretty aggressive basis.

And so there will be cycles in that. This too will end in terms of the pricing war that we have currently in the oil sector and we will continue to be able to monetize that in terms of our mineral estate as well as the opportunity to share our water assets and sell water for fracking revenue.

Next slide, balance sheet impact. So, that gives you kind of a period over period balance sheet impact and then on the Slide 15 sort of the P&L. One of the non-GAAP measures there that I think is good to keep track of is our sort of our EBITDA, our non-GAAP EBITDA there. So you got $8.7 million for the six months ending. So when you look at sort of trending on, how is the company doing with its assets, your investment into these assets over those many years is really starting to really benefit our shareholders and really provide value to that.

So with that, I do want to spend a little bit of time talking about sort of our unique, the world that we’re in sort of today and talk about some of our response to the virus impacts. Water and wastewater are essential services. So we’re one of those exempt industries and our employees are exempt. So our day-to-day operations are pretty much, pretty normal. I would say our field crews are pretty, I’d say standard. We have the typical folks that are going to be in and out of flu season. We are very particular about, if somebody is sick we want them to stay home, we give them the company as an employee-centric company, we have very generous PTO policy.

So we want to make sure that one, they take care of their health but then they also make sure that we take care of all of our co-worker’s health as well. But that said, we do have to be on site, we do have to make sure that water keeps flowing and wastewater keeps being processed. Our office personnel, probably 80-20 mix where we have 80% of the people still commuting to the office. We try to stick to our offices and maintain our distances from each other, just to have best practices and make sure that we have continued healthy professionals here. But we do have some folks that have the type of job responsibility where they can commute from home and they do a very efficient job and are very productive of being able to do that, some of our engineers and accounting staff can do some of that stuff remotely.

Our builders continue to complete the houses that they have under contract. They have said that their walk-throughs, the on-site traffic is down substantially and that’s really primarily because Colorado like I think most states in the US are on sort of a stay-at-home period where other than essential activities they are sort of discouraging that essential activity.

That said, the construction industry itself is classified as essential. So while they may not have a lot of construction, they do have a lot of contracts and a lot of homes that are in the pipeline and there continues to be a lot of activity on-site. So those homes that had started construction or that they have contracts for, they continue to start new starts, they continue to complete those homes because they have specific delivery timelines on that and we have to support that. So our field crews are out there setting meters, making sure that we have inspections on water and sewer lines and all that activity.

What else? I think I did mention the oil and gas activity, that has been deferred for 2020. But again, there are 13 wells that are sort of that low-hanging fruit and we’ll see how our new partner looks to capitalize on being able to invest in those new activities — I’m sorry, those existing wells to frac those and bring those things on to market.

If you take a look at our Phase II, we are in conversation with as many as seven different builders. We don’t think we have room for all seven builders. But we have — we’ve sort of put it in front of seven national homebuilders and all seven want to be in the project and we’re trying to balance out each individual builder with what their product specialties are.

So some builders specialize on paired products, some builders have townhome products, some builders have alley load product and some builders don’t. And so we want to figure out and really find a market segmentation for each of the builders to be able to get them to have some value proposition of doing what they do well, segment out the different types of players that we have on the site and really looking to finalize those agreements within the next 90 days.

Our opportunity would be to be able to be under construction and be in the ground sometime late this year, I would say, I keep saying, September, October, but because of where we’re at with our current market conditions, I’m looking for maybe November, December timeframe.

So we’ll see how this continues on. But still being in a position where we can deliver lots for, sometime in 2021 timeframe and then they can start constructing on some of their model homes and then be really opportunistic by selling some of what their product is.

So some of the builders that we have in our first phase have a strong interest in being in our second phase as well as some new builders. So looking at how that traffic is going to go through the winter of ’21 as well, so they can continue to build through the seasons on that.

So with that, what I’d like to do is turn it back over to the moderator, maybe open it up to some questions. I know you all probably have a lot of questions about how we are handling all of the activity and sort of what this current market conditions might impact on the company. So with that, I’ll turn it back over.

Questions and Answers:

Operator

[Operator Instructions]

Our first question comes from Elliot Knight of Knight Advisors. Sir, you may now ask your question.

Elliot Knight — Knight Advisors — Analyst

Hi, Mark.

Mark Harding — President, Chief Financial Officer and Director

Elliot, how are you?

Elliot Knight — Knight Advisors — Analyst

I am well. Thank you very much. You haven’t said anything on the call about the commercial. You’ve got 160 acres that you highlight there. Could you tell us what your plans are there and what the timetable, what timetable do you anticipate? Thank you.

Mark Harding — President, Chief Financial Officer and Director

Great question. So while I’m very excited about the residential component of that and that’s kind of where a lot of my attention has been occupied, just solidifying those contracts with the builders, you’re right, we have a very large commercial component to this property and commercial usually lags residential development.

I would say we’ve gotten it — significantly more interest this year than last year on our commercial piece but not really to the point where we have found the right opportunity yet. A lot of the interest, I would say, 70% of the calls and the serious calls on it have been people that want to put it under contract and then they want to market to somebody who is actually going to develop.

And we have the flexibility to be able to go from our position to a direct user rather than having an intermediary in there, not that we’re going to be building it or not that we think that we offer significant value independent of somebody that would say I want to buy five acres and then I want to bring a deal to Walmart or to Kroger. Certainly those are the opportunity to do that and if they have that type of structure, that’s where we are interested.

We look at commercial where it has opportunities for both retail and commercial. So you’ll have a lot of employment base, it will have a lot of product offerings where you can get, you’ll have the typical Walmart’s targets, big-box stores, Home Depots, the fast casuals on the restaurant side, sort of a mixed-use of really all different types of retail and commercial uses out there.

And so we’re looking at kind of the right model and each time we kind of configure our land plan, we’re looking at some of the demographics that we have on that and what those demographics can bring to the type of retail or commercial player that’s there. But I would say that still, if I scale this on saying on a one to 10, where I’ve got people building 10 would be, I’ve got people building commercial installations out there and one being somebody made a call to us on it, I’d say we’re at the three, four range on that. So I think we’re still pretty early on that.

I would expect that to pick up probably in the next 18 months as we get closer to the 500 homes that are under, that are occupied and we get a lot more traffic out at Sky Ranch where they can kind of monitor rooftops and census counts out there for getting a lifetime or getting a fitness center out there, getting a bulk store out there.

So we look at it as we like to hold that a little bit longer than maybe most developers would, so that we are participating more in the end value of that, not necessarily building the value on it but participating more on the end value by just being patient with it.

Elliot Knight — Knight Advisors — Analyst

So we’re there now. How far do they have to drive to a supermarket, to a Home Depot, to a theater?

Mark Harding — President, Chief Financial Officer and Director

So it will be, it’s almost triangulated and it’s almost about 10 miles in three different directions, going to be 10 miles to the west, I’ll call it eight miles to the west, 10 miles to the south and 11 miles to the east, to find those types of installations. So we are very well located on that. And really, there’s not much opportunity on land other than ours because they don’t have the interchange that would give you that accessibility and that kind of the transportation network to the site itself.

Elliot Knight — Knight Advisors — Analyst

Which makes our commercial all the more attractive.

Mark Harding — President, Chief Financial Officer and Director

It does. And then, it has a several things. I mean one you do benefit a lot in the value of commercial real estate and we also benefit from the value of a commercial water user out of that. So we see value not only in the land, we see value in taps, we see value in selling water, but then there is a tremendous value here in Colorado for reimbursables. And I know I’ve talked about that in the past, but when you take a look at how Colorado is incentivized, our commercial real estate generates four times the equivalent AV that a residential AV has.

And so it does allow us to really capitalize on our full reimbursables and we did do a bond offering that I talked about that at our last call, which really encompassed about 35% of the reimbursables that we accrued for the first phase but that was valuing all of that residential. So when you look at it, we will have — we should have surplus revenue when you add in the commercial component. So that will become a very important component for us to help realize and help monetize some of those accrued reimbursables.

Elliot Knight — Knight Advisors — Analyst

Thank you.

Mark Harding — President, Chief Financial Officer and Director

You bet. Stay safe

Operator

Thank you. [Operator Instructions]

Our next question comes from Bill Miller with JM Hartwell. Sir, you may proceed with your question.

Bill Miller — JM Hartwell — Analyst

Mark, hi. Things sound as they’re going really well. If you looked out three years let’s say, I want to know how, what percentage of your revenue at that time. will be recurring and not be tap sales or land sales or whatever but what percentage will be recurring at that point?

Mark Harding — President, Chief Financial Officer and Director

So what I would say is that really drills down into kind of the water connections, the monthly month-over-month, year-over-year connections that we have into the system. Today, we stand somewhere around pretty close to 500 water connections and then I think maybe a 180 sewer connections. And the reason we’ve got a disconnect between the water and the sewer connections is we have a lot of irrigation connection. So we have more water that doesn’t create sewer than water that is in a house creating sewer. Those will catch up as we get more of the single-family residents.

But we’ll still have more water connections than we’ll have sewer connections. But within three years, I think we’re built out on at least the first phase of the 500. So, adding, that would probably add another 400 connections, so well more than, I would say, just in the first phase of Sky Ranch will more than double the size and the connections that we have there. We continue to do well on our acquisition down at Wild Pointe. So that continues to build out.

So, year-over-year, I think we’re up almost 70% from when we bought that in terms of the number of connections that are adding. We’re getting close to build-out on the residential component of that, there is still a little bit of tattle [Phonetic] left in that on the commercial side. So that will continue to build out, will add more connections.

So, if that gives you kind of an indication, we could be in the 1,000 to 1,200 range on that, and then continuing to grow. And what we we’ll likely see Bill, and I know we’ve talked about this, but we will likely see, we’ll have multiple phases going on at Sky Ranch and then as other properties that we don’t necessarily own, but that we extend our utilities to continue to add and grow into the system, that really builds into sort of the capacity of our water portfolio.

And so we want to have multiple projects going on at the same time that add capacity to our system in that. And so that’s where you’re going to see, if you look at our capacity of our portfolio serving 60,000 connections and we’re serving 500 today, we will have a bell curve on that well, where that will continue to grow slower on the front end, then you get up to some very high numbers for a number of years and then it will trail-off as we get to some of the build out scenarios on our portfolio. But to get out 60,000 connections, that’s still probably 30 years out, but I think we still look very good in the short run.

Bill Miller — JM Hartwell — Analyst

Are there any other easy pickings on the acquisition front?

Mark Harding — President, Chief Financial Officer and Director

I was hoping somebody would ask me what am I going to do with all our cash.

Bill Miller — JM Hartwell — Analyst

Well, that’s the point, isn’t it?

Mark Harding — President, Chief Financial Officer and Director

It is, honestly, and I know we’ve talked about this in the past in terms of our philosophical view of how we manage our cash and if I’m at $3.5 million a year in my overhead and I’ve got $25 million, $30 million of cash, that’s a little bit long on the cash side to be sitting on the balance sheet. It’s a high quality problem, and I’m not going to make any money investing that in T-Bills.

Right now, I’ve got to give money up than invest that in T-Bill on the short stuff. So we are looking to be opportunistic here, we’re looking for acquisitions that may have otherwise not been available to us or at a pricing that might be a little bit more advantageous, much like when we acquired Sky Ranch. I’m looking for land interest that don’t have water to them where we can pick that land interest up.

I’m looking for water systems that are going to be stressed in this market condition and may need somebody to come in and help, make some improvements to them to have the liquidity to make some improvements in them. So the acquisition costs are going to be a little bit more favorable for us. And opportunities where we can extend infrastructure to areas that give us more connections and more customers.

So I know that’s been my mantra that we’ve got our nets out there, but this is an opportunity where when you get this kind of stress into the system that those usually present good opportunities. And so we’ll take a look at those, we still want to be disciplined about our metrics and take a look at — whether I get excited about it or not, I think my Board’s very disciplined and very acclimated to throttling back some of my enthusiasm at times, but they’re also looking for opportunities to maybe risk on with some of that stuff and be opportunistic with this current condition, we’ll see.

Bill Miller — JM Hartwell — Analyst

If there was ever a time to be aggressive about the whole thing, aren’t we approaching that at the moment?

Mark Harding — President, Chief Financial Officer and Director

I tend to indicate, I tend to agree with you on that. I think the proof will be in the pudding to see what happens and how this in this current market condition impacts businesses, property owners, entrepreneurs. the whole nine yards are going to, it’s going to have a very significant trickle down effect.

And you just got to know that the liquidity will get a premium today and so us having a very healthy balance sheet, we have a very solid liquid balance sheet that we can, we can pounce on deals and solve other people’s problems and some — it’s not necessarily a win-lose relationship because current market conditions are what they are.

I would say that when we acquired Sky Ranch, we were in a very similar situation and having the access that we had then and having sort of a longer time horizon to be able to make sure that we can get those assets and not impact the shareholder value and really use those assets to create more shareholder value by adding water to it and increasing the value that way and then adding infrastructure on the utility side where we acquired some utilities in the past as well. All of those are great opportunities for us.

Bill Miller — JM Hartwell — Analyst

Well you know your record is superb not only with the Sky Ranch, but with the acreage you brought down on the Arkansas River. So I hope the Board isn’t being a throttle on your constraint, on your activity now. Now is the time when you should have somebody devoted to looking at these things. If not you, do you have somebody else whose assignment is to go out and scout for these opportunities.

Mark Harding — President, Chief Financial Officer and Director

Well, Bill, you just gave me another softball there. So that gives me an opportunity to introduce Kevin McNeil who is — we welcome back to the company. He was our controller about a decade ago, but he’s going to be our new CFO. And that’s exactly his charges is to get out there and start combing the landscape and see what opportunities are going to be available to us and put some metrics to it and see if we can generate some action there.

So it’s exactly a great time for Kevin to come back to us on that. A lot of activity and there is going to be plenty of deals that — that we can come through. So, while — I think I still have a little bit of game and I appreciate your kind words there, I might give you my wife’s phone numbers so that you can give me a slug. But we are are taking it very seriously and we are staffing up to be able to be aggressive on that.

Bill Miller — JM Hartwell — Analyst

Great. I’m glad to hear that because you’ll get paid ultimately for recurring revenues.

Mark Harding — President, Chief Financial Officer and Director

You are very astute on that and never failed to point that out for me.

Bill Miller — JM Hartwell — Analyst

Well, pointing out the obvious is a skill I have.

Mark Harding — President, Chief Financial Officer and Director

Well, thanks for kicking in and stay healthy.

Bill Miller — JM Hartwell — Analyst

You too, Mark. Great job.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from Bill Cunningham. Sir, you may proceed.

Bill Cunningham — Analyst

Hi, Mark. I had a question on what’s going on with the actual contracts being signed. My most recent article on Seeking Alpha talked about you know what, Richmond American is reporting. It’s great that they report in real-time what’s happening with contract signings and I’ve been monitoring carefully recently because I expected to see potentially cancellations because that’s what I’ve seeing all along, but their website is you’ll see something reported as sold because the contract has been signed, and then it goes out because of assuming maybe the purchaser doesn’t qualify or something else goes on so there’s a lot of changing there.

So I was — I’ve been looking at the site the last couple of weeks and expecting to see cancellations with everything going on in the market. And instead there has been zero cancellations and there’s actually been a number of new contracts signed in the past week. So I’m kind of curious as to what your general spin is, not just with Pure Cycle and Sky Ranch, but what you’re seeing with the market overall and housing and how some of this may want to look at the real estate market in general the next few months or a couple of years.

Mark Harding — President, Chief Financial Officer and Director

Great question. One that it’s probably, I can only give you anecdotal comments on. But if I referenced anything, and this will be kind of a first hand experience. Kevin coming back, he moved back — he relocated back from — from Austin, Texas and we typically don’t like to welcome Texans in here, but at least they have the right voting pattern. But anyway, he come back and — and he really wanted to buy a house in Sky Ranch.

And so, as he was moving back, he went out and met with all three builders and said, “Hey, listen. I want to buy a house.” And they say, “Great. We’re 9 months out.” He said, “But I need a house in March”. And they said, “Well, good luck. You can’t get one.” And not only did he find that experience here, but in kind of the surrounding area. And so, one of the things that we know is that there is strong demand at Sky Ranch. There’s strong demand in the I-70 corridor. And so, you look at where we’re at, we’re in the right location and I think we’re in the right price point in that.

And so, I firmly believe that we will continue to see that same pace of contracts. I know that their traffic is going to be down just because everybody is staying at home, but I know a bunch of people are sitting around the kitchen table talking about, “You know what? This house is too small.” The kids are home and everybody’s sitting around. They are climbing the walls going, I want something else. And so, I think you’re going to find some pent-up demand and some people are going to — I think our Governor extended it to another couple of weeks, but even outside that, they still have showing. They are still out there on site. They still have showing. They still have people that have a need and I really believe you’re going to see a rush of people coming out, putting the stuff under contract and then everybody is going to be beating me up saying why didn’t you get the second project online sooner.

So, I think it’s going to be a high quality problem for us. We want to be very reacting to it. We want to be able to invest some of that liquidity position we have into some acquisition opportunities as well as be able to invest into some of our next phase lots. I try and time those contracts. So we play on the house’s money and then we take our equity in the back end, but I think that structure will still serve us well and give us some strong rope to go out there and lasso some of these deals.

Bill Cunningham — Analyst

Yeah, it was truly surprising to see no cancellations and new contracts being signed the last few weeks. Totally separate question. I also noticed you’ve still got some revenue coming in from your oil and gas activities. And although the whole fracking industry, it’s a unprofitable industry at this point, every dollar of revenue basically you get in is just income. You’re not dealing with costs against it. So, although revenue was down, you’re generating a certain amount of income from it. It’s never going to generate a loss for you. And I think that’s [Speech Overlap].

Mark Harding — President, Chief Financial Officer and Director

It’s very important distinction. And there is — it’s all variable cost to us, right. So, I don’t have a lot of fixed costs that are outside that. So, I can dial that up, I can dial that down, and you’re right. If I’m not getting any revenue in, I’m not incurring the cost attributable to that. So, that is a very attractive segment for us.

Bill Cunningham — Analyst

Great. Thank you, Mark.

Mark Harding — President, Chief Financial Officer and Director

Thanks for your questions. Stay healthy.

Operator

Thank you. Mr. Harding, it looks like we have no further questions at this time. Would you like to make any closing remarks?

Mark Harding — President, Chief Financial Officer and Director

I would. Thanks. So again, I want to thank all of you for your continued loyalty and your continued support. We’re very proud of being in this position and really it’s — it’s really a discipline of you guys having patience, the company having patience, the Board sticking to it’s metrics, management sticking to their metrics and being able to right size the company and — and grow the company and acquire valuable assets. We will continue to do that.

We’re very thankful having our liquidity in our highly appreciating assets in times like these, and we will continue to try and make good decisions on your behalf. And what will be the foreshadow anything coming up, I’m assuming that we return to a bit more normal. I’d like to have another Investor Day for you all to come out again over the summer when you can see a ton of things going on, much more activity on the site.

So, as we get a little bit closer into that, maybe over in the July time-frame, I’ll send out a little save the date, and we can welcome you all that have been following the company. If you haven’t had a chance to come out and those of you who are new to the company, have a chance to kick the tires because there’s nothing quite like seeing it and getting your arms around it for a real tangible view of what we do.

So, thank you and with that I’ll sign off and I look forward to see — if anybody who had a question that couldn’t get through, that had a technical challenge, don’t hesitate to give me holler. Thanks.

Operator

[Operator Closing Remarks]