Howard Hughes Holdings Inc. 2026 Q2 Earnings Call

Good morning, and welcome to the Howard Hughes Holdings second quarter 2026 earnings call. With me today are William Ackman, Executive Chairman, Ryan Israel, Chief Investment Officer, David O'Reilly, Chief Executive Officer, Carlos Olea, Chief Financial Officer, and Marc Grandisson, Vantage Executive Chair and Howard Hughes Holdings Director. Before we begin, I would like to direct you to our website, howardhughes.com, where you can download both our second quarter earnings press release and our supplemental package. The earnings release and supplemental package include reconciliations of non-GAAP financial measures that will be discussed today in relation to their most directly comparable GAAP financial measures. Certain statements made today that are not in the present tense or that discuss the company's expectations are forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Federal Securities Laws.

Although the company believes that the expectations reflected in such forward-looking statements are based upon reasonable assumptions, we can give no assurance that these expectations will be achieved. Please see the forward-looking statement disclaimer in our second quarter earnings press release and the risk factors in our SEC filings for factors that could cause material differences between forward-looking statements and actual results. We are not under any duty to update forward-looking statements unless required by law. I will now turn the call over to our Executive Chairman, William Ackman.

Thank you, Joe. Before we talk about the quarter, I thought in light of the significance of events over the last few months for the company, I just want to give a little background on how we got here. In May of last year, Pershing Square acquired $900 million of stock at Howard Hughes at $100 a share, increasing our ownership to 47% of the company. I became Executive Chair. Ryan became Chief Investment Officer of the company, and we said, look, our goal is to turn Howard Hughes, a kind of pure-play real estate company, into a diversified holding company. Our business plan was to acquire an insurance operation, to find a platform that we believed that we could build into a highly profitable and very successful company and one where Pershing Square's investment capability could add material value.

Within about six months or so, we identified and most recently closed the transaction to acquire Vantage Group Holdings. We purchased the company at a fair price. It was not a bargain purchase. It was a platform that had been built over the previous five years, led by two very successful private equity firms. We had an opportunity to acquire it, and it fit very well with our kind of long-term ambitions. Our initial thoughts on going into the insurance business were really driven by what Warren Buffett and what Berkshire Hathaway has achieved over a very long period of time. As part of that thinking, we reached out to a guy named Marc Grandisson, who we had met maybe two and a half or almost three years ago, and someone we greatly admired in the insurance business.

We thought when we were trying to make a decision whether to acquire a company or to build one from scratch, we looked to Marc for advice. Marc was sort of on the beach. He wasn't sure whether he was prepared to go back into the business. He gave us excellent advice, but we went sort of our own way in acquiring Vantage. Since the acquisition, Marc has furthered in his retirement, and we got him to join the board of Howard Hughes. It was very clear from the first day he joined the board meeting his passion for the industry. It's been a cultivation, or a seduction, if you have a better word, to try to get Marc a little bit more involved.

We had a stroke of luck, which is that David Gansberg, who was kind of a co-president of Arch, someone who was in line for the potential CEO role at the company, was actually let go by Arch. He did not win the battle for CEO, but he was a favored choice of Marc, and that created really an opportunity for us. Where Marc was not prepared to come in and be CEO of an insurance company with effectively his right-hand guy stepping in as CEO, he was prepared to take a more significant role in the company. With that, we announced Marc became Executive Chair of the company. David has a non-compete until June or I guess early June of about 10 months from today. We now had really our dream team in the insurance industry.

That's not to diminish in any way Greg Hendrick or anyone in the Vantage operation. If you look at the 25-year history of Arch, where from 2001, Marc an important younger member of the team and to all the value and learnings over that period of time to his becoming CEO and building one of the best records in the insurance industry. If you look at Pershing Square over time, our most successful investments have been finding a great business and then finding the best person in the world to run that company. When we've combined those two things, whether it was at Chipotle or at Canadian Pacific or other businesses, that's really when the magic happens. We couldn't resist the opportunity to recruit David and to get Marc in place at the company.

It's a very material announcement. The other thing that I have experienced over time, when you get someone who's run a large enterprise, or for example, someone who's managed a large investment portfolio, and then you've given them a much smaller operation, the magic they can achieve from that kind of base level is really remarkable. I think the same thing really applies here. We have a senior leadership team with enormous horsepower, stepping into a very small, very young operation, and we're very excited about what can be achieved. The market does not yet understand the significance of this announcement. The other important fact is now that we have, if you will, the dream team in place, we need to do everything we can to inject more and more capital into Vantage so it can exploit the opportunity created by the team that we've built.

Vantage benefits by beginning with a highly diversified kind of portfolio of lines of business. You'll see that expand. Marc will find other areas of opportunity expansion for the company that will allow us to deploy capital in a market which is patchy in terms of opportunity, but that's really in Marc's expertise. I have to say that we're incredibly excited about Marc and David. We're excited about the synergies created to combining with the Vantage team and what's been built over the last five years, but still at a very early stage. That's what kind of gives me an opportunity to segue to real estate. As kind of proven by this quarter, this is a time where rates have risen very significantly.

You read all kinds of stuff about the housing market here and there, and quarter after quarter, it continues to be enormous demand for real estate in our communities. The reason for this is in part political. I'm fortunately living in a city where the city is not run in a particularly pro-business fashion. Taxes are high and going higher. Whereas in Texas, in Las Vegas, kind of our core MPC markets, these are state cities and communities where safe people like to live and very conducive to business, and kind of quality of life. I think that is a great competitive advantage for us. We believe that our real estate assets are phenomenal assets.

In light of the fact we're no longer a pure-play real estate company, we can take a much harder look at the portfolio and say, which are assets that are kind of strategic and critical for the long term, think land holdings, kind of core MPC assets. Which are assets where there's a better owner who are prepared to buy the asset at a very full price. The team has begun to prune the portfolio and generate cash, freeing up liquidity that can be reinvested in real estate. The nature of our real estate business is that it's effectively, in large part, self-liquidating. You've seen significant condominium closings during the quarter, significant lot sales. Over time, we will sell all of our residential lots. We will sell all of our condominium assets. We will sell all of our non-core real estate assets.

Beyond that, we're going to look at historically, we sort of owned and financed 100% of everything ourselves. We're going to look at joint venture structures. We're going to look at ways to bring in capital. The Howard Hughes platform, number one, we have a phenomenal team. They've done an incredible job building out these communities. A lot of skills honed over time in real estate development. Unlike a typical developer who's got to find a piece of land, we have decades of value. That being said, we have very high-cost capital, certainly as the market assigns it to us. We're not a REIT. We're kind of an unusual company. Bringing in third-party capital where we're a really attractive platform, and much lower cost capital will enable us to earn much higher returns on our real estate assets and also free up additional significant capital.

What you should expect to see over the next several years is the inherent self-liquidating nature of condos and lot sales, but also an acceleration in the monetization of what you think of as more stabilized type assets and maybe more partnership type opportunities for the company. Maybe even we'll raise a pool of capital that management can deploy in these assets on behalf of pension funds or other investors who love to own the kind of assets that Howard Hughes owns.