Yahoo Finance Starwood Property Trust, Inc. (NYSE:STWD) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript
Starwood Property Trust, Inc. (NYSE:STWD) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript May 8, 2024
Starwood Property Trust, Inc. isn’t one of the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds at the end of the third quarter (see the details here).
Operator: Greetings. Welcome to Starwood Property Trust's First Quarter 2024 Earnings Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A brief question-and-answer session will follow the formal presentation. [Operator Instructions] Please note this conference is being recorded. At this time, I'll hand the conference over to Zach Tanenbaum, Head of Investor Relations. Zach, you may now begin.
Zach Tanenbaum: Thank you, Operator. Good morning and welcome to the Starwood Property Trust earnings call. This morning the company released its financial results for the quarter ended March 31, 2024, filed its Form 10-Q with the Securities and Exchange Commission and posted its earnings supplement to its website. These documents are available on the Investor Relations section of the company's website at www.starwoodpropertytrust.com. Before the call begins, I would like to remind everyone that certain statements made in the course of this call are not based on historical information and may constitute forward-looking statements. These statements are based on management's current expectations and beliefs and are subject to a number of trends and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those described in the forward-looking statements.
I refer you to the company's filings made with the SEC for a more detailed discussion of the risks and factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied in any forward-looking statements made today. The company undertakes no duty to update any forward-looking statements that may be made during the course of this call. Additionally, certain non-GAAP financial measures will be discussed on this conference call. A presentation of this information is not intended to be considered in isolation or as a substitute for the financial information presented in accordance with GAAP. Reconciliations of these non-GAAP financial measures to the most comparable measures prepared in accordance with GAAP can be accessed through our filings with the SEC at www.sec.gov.
Joining me on the call today are Barry Sternlicht, the company's Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; Jeff DiModica, the Company's President; and Rina Paniry, the Company's Chief Financial Officer. With that, I'm now going to turn the call over to Rina.
Rina Paniry: Thank you, Zach, and good morning, everyone. We reported a strong quarter with distributable earnings or DE of $191.6 million or $0.59 per share. Our results were highlighted by contributions across all of our businesses with outsized performance in property from the sale of our master lease portfolio and in commercial lending from prepayment fees, which was partially offset by underperformance in our CMBS book. In all, DE includes an $0.08 net gain from these items. They also contributed to higher GAAP net income, which was $154 million or $0.48 per share. Undepreciated book value ended the quarter at $20.69 with GAAP book value at $19.85. Beginning my segment discussion this morning is commercial and residential lending, which contributed DE of $205 million to the quarter or $0.63 per share.
In commercial lending, repayments of $909 million outpaced fundings of $128 million on preexisting loan commitments. Our portfolio of predominantly senior secured first mortgage loans ended the quarter with a funded balance of $15.1 billion and a weighted average risk rating of $2.9 billion. Jeff will cover our risk rating changes in greater detail. Turning to CECL. We had no new specific reserves in the quarter and no new loan or REO impairment. Our general CECL reserve increased by $35 million to a balance of $342 million of which 70% relates to office. This increase was driven by our selecting the most pessimistic economic outlook of seven scenarios available to us in our third-party model for our office loan. Together with our previously taken REO impairments of $172 million these reserves represent 3.4% of our lending and REO portfolios and translate to $1.64 per share of book value.
Next, I will discuss our residential lending business. Our on balance sheet loan portfolio ended the quarter at $2.5 billion, including $880 million of agency loans. We had $45 million of par repayments during the quarter and recorded a $2 million net negative mark-to-market adjustment for GAAP purposes. This mark includes a $38 million negative mark on our loans, offset by a $36 million positive mark on our hedges, which provided $25 million of cash during the quarter. In our $435 million retained RMBS portfolio, a change in market call price assumptions contributed to a $7 million negative mark in the quarter. Next, I will discuss our Property segment, which contributed $59 million of DE or $0.18 per share to the quarter. During the quarter we sold our master lease portfolio for $387 million.
The transaction resulted a net proceeds of $188 million by net DE gain of $37 million and a net GAAP gain of $91 million. Because the sale was completed in late February, our Q1 results include two months of income or $0.01 of DE to fund these assets. Our Florida affordable housing fund generated $40 million on DE in the quarter. Subsequent to quarter end, HUD released the new maximum rent levels, which were set 7.9% higher than last year. Certain properties were in geographies where the rent increases were capped by HUD, which resulted in 3.8% of incremental rent growth being deferred to next year. This would be in addition to any increase determined by the HUD formula in 2025. And finally, in our medical office portfolio, subsequent to quarter end, we refinanced the $600 million of outstanding debt on these assets, which was scheduled to mature in November.
We entered into new CMBS debt of $450 million and a mezzanine loan of $40 million both with a five-year term at a blended coupon of SOFR plus 252 basis points. Turning to investing and servicing. This segment produced breakeven results in the quarter with the positive contributions from our conduit and special servicing businesses offset by a negative contribution in CMBS. In our conduit Starwood Mortgage Capital, we completed four securitizations totaling $212 million at profits consistent with historic levels. In our special servicer, LNR, our active servicing portfolio increased from $6.6 billion to $7.2 billion primarily due to $1.1 billion of transfers in, more than half of which were office or contained in office component. Our named servicing portfolio ended the quarter at $96.1 billion driven by $3.7 billion in maturities, offset by new assignments of $1.1 billion.
Finally, in our CMBS portfolio, as is typical for the first quarter, we receive annual financial statement reporting on the assets underlying our bond holding. One securitization in particular had three non-performing assets out of the remaining 73 in the pool. Due to lower than anticipated NOI and a lower than anticipated appraisal for these assets, we recorded a $17 million DE impairment on the bond. Concluding my business segment discussion is our infrastructure lending segment, which contributed DE of $20 million or $0.06 per share to the quarter. We committed to $120 million of new loans, of which we funded $96 million dollars and an additional $42 million on pre-existing loan commitments. Repayments totaled $210 million bringing the portfolio to a balance of $2.5 billion at quarter end.
Subsequent to quarter end, we completed our third infrastructure CLO for $400 million at a weighted average coupon of SOFR plus 2.18%, which Jeff will discuss. And finally, this morning, I will address our liquidity and capitalization. We continue to have ample credit capacity across our business lines, ending the quarter with $9.7 billion of availability under our existing financing lines and unencumbered assets of $4.6 billion. Our adjusted debt to undepreciated equity ratio ended the quarter at 2.3x, a decrease from 2.5x last quarter. In addition to low leverage, our current liquidity position has increased to a record $1.5 billion. This does not include liquidity that could be generated through sales of assets in our property segment or debt capacity that we have via the unsecured and term loan B markets.
With that, I'll turn the call over to Jeff.
Jeff DiModica : Thanks, Rina, and good morning, everyone. We accessed the debt capital markets in the quarter, issuing $600 million of senior unsecured sustainability notes, leaving us with record liquidity today. This issuance was the first in our industry in over two years and it was 7x oversubscribed with orders from 156 institutional investors, both records for our company. Record demand allowed us to tighten pricing by 75 basis points and after swapping this fixed rate issuance to floating, we borrowed at a repo equivalent of SOFR plus 312 basis points in line with pricing we achieved throughout our history despite today's high rate and spread environment. After paying down bank warehouse lines, this issuance was leverage neutral allowing us to maintain just 2.3 turns of leverage, a two-year low for our company and it will not affect our dividend paying ability.
Creating excess liquidity in a leverage neutral fashion will allow us to again ramp up our investment pace at the appropriate time. Market transaction volumes are picking up and our pipeline of actionable deals is as strong today as it has been in over two years. As for the macro environment, commercial real estate continues to face headwinds created by higher interest rates that have driven cap rates higher, thus causing the reserve increases you are seeing in our sector for the last year. Partially offsetting that three quarters of our CRE loans have interest rate caps in place and 85% of our portfolio has embedded interest rate protection. Rates rose in the quarter since we last spoke and have now begun falling again. After last week's weaker than expected employment number and the Fed's decision to slow the pace of quantitative tapering from $60 billion per month to $25 billion per month, which in turn will reduce treasury bond issuance by $420 billion per year.
At the same time, we are seeing tailwinds in increased transaction volume and credit spread tightening, which will help our borrowers as they seek accretive refinancing alternatives. Recent issue BBB minus CMBS credit spreads, which are a good proxy for mezzanine CRE lending has tightened by over 300 basis points in the last six months and are back to second half of 2022 levels today. Spread tightening has allowed us to issue unsecured notes, refinance our MOB portfolio in the CMBS market and issue our third energy infrastructure CLO all inside market expectations at much tighter spread. We built a low leverage diversified business to withstand choppy conditions like these and to be in position to go on offense when they create outsized opportunities, which as I said, we expect to do in the coming quarters.
With regards to our commercial lending credits, like most banks, we use a third-party model called macroeconomic advisors in computing our general CECL reserve, which we again increased in the quarter. Our equity market cap of $6 billion is nearly 2x the second largest participant in our sector, but since we have seven other businesses, we do not have the largest CRE loan book in our sector. We run a very low leverage business model and only 11% of our assets are on loans on U.S. offices. The asset class most disrupted since COVID, due to work from home, higher rates and the tightening of real estate credit conditions. That is half of what our holdings were before COVID began and a fraction of our peer set average. Despite that, we have reduced book value with the largest general CECL reserve in our sector by dollar value and the second highest by percentage, giving us cushion for potential losses that could come on assets we have not taken a specific reserve for.
Our sponsors continue to support their assets in math and after receiving $1.3 billion of new sponsor equity commitments in in 2023, we have already received an additional $483 million in 2024. Looking at our property types, our largest property type multifamily, which is 21% of our company's assets has an average remaining term of 2.7 years and continues to experience year-over-year rent growth with same-store rents up 3.4% in 2023. The sponsors for 60 of our 72 multifamily loans have committed fresh equity to their assets including all of our four and five rated loans and we don't foresee any issues getting paid off on the 12 that have not had to inject additional equity to date. I just mentioned office loans, our second largest property type, which comprise 11% of our company's assets.
87% of these are Class A and 77% of them do not mature until 2025 or beyond. Our third largest property type hotels is 8% of our assets today and this portfolio has an average in place debt yield of over 11%. As we have been saying since the beginning of COVID, we do not foresee refinancing issues with these hotel assets. As for risk rating changes in the quarter, while our four rated bucket increased with three new additions, the dollar value of our five rated bucket was lower this quarter following the upgrade of a $252 million office loan in Houston. This Houston asset has seen incremental leasing activity including the anchor tenant taking more space and extending lease term to 2036 and is sufficiently capitalized with runway to complete important CapEx projects and secure accretive new leasing.
We downgraded two smaller loans to five in the quarter, an $82 million mezzanine loan on an office building in Los Angeles where the borrower has remained current and we are working to extend term allowing time to complete accretive leasing and a $52 million multifamily loan in Nashville that is in payment default and we expect to foreclose on. We will decide in the coming quarters whether to maximize value by holding and stabilizing this asset as we have in the past or sell it at or near our basis depending on the short-term direction of cap rates. We also downgraded three loans in the quarter from a three to a four risk rating. The first two are office, a $99 million loan in Atlanta and a $92 million loan outside Minneapolis. We are working to close preferred equity investments on both that will carry the assets for two years, giving our borrowers time to find accretive leasing that would create escape velocity should rates continue lower and markets continue to repair.
The final downgrade to four is a $45 million multifamily loan in Phoenix that is in payment default. This asset has been poorly managed allowing occupancy to drop into the 70%s. Should we take the asset back, our manager Starwood Capital Group is one of the nation's largest owners of multifamily assets and we hope bringing in new management and our expertise will allow us to bring this asset back to market occupancy of 90%, after which we will decide whether to hold or sell the asset. In our property segment, Rina mentioned our affordable housing and medical office portfolio and that we sold our master lease portfolio in the quarter. We originally purchased the 23 asset master lease portfolio in 2017 for $556 million. We sold 7 of the 23 assets in 2018 for $235 million and a DE gain of $23 million.
This quarter we sold the 16 remaining assets for $387 million and a DE gain of $37 million. We successfully doubled our equity investment on this sale over seven years producing an IRR of 15.7% for shareholders. These assets had 25-year leases at origination and the lease term had fallen to 18 years. Our plan was to sell these with more than 10 years of lease term remaining and given retail sales have slowed since their early COVID increase, we thought this was an opportune time to take our gains and further reduce our company's leverage, while looking our company's leverage while looking for opportunities to reinvest elsewhere. In energy infrastructure lending, Rina mentioned we completed our third CLO. We now have 56% of our debt in this segment on term non-recourse, non-mark-to-market financing, which further implies our company's cash position.
This business continues to benefit from lower lending competition and higher energy driven by AI and EDs. That significant portion of our holdings are on loans that have actively quoted trading markets and prices on those loans are up almost 4 points in the last 12 months alone. LTVs in these assets continue to fall due to increased asset profitability and structural deleveraging over the life of these loans. In the quarter, we committed to $120 million of new loans at an IRR approximately 20% and our post 2018 acquisition portfolio now makes up over 90% of our portfolio with expected levered returns in the high teens. We expect continue to take advantage of these tailwinds by making outsized investments in this highly return accretive segment going forward.
With that, I will turn the call to Barry.
Barry Sternlicht : Thanks, Jeff. I want to thanks, Rina and Zach, and good morning, everyone on the webcast, so dialing in remotely onto the team's call. I'm out at the Milton Conference. I will say that the everyone's mind is where are we in the cycle, are we bottoming? I think it's going to get better, when will they get better? And I think it's pretty clear that most every property type things are okay at the property level. And so it's really a question of how you finance yourself. This is a balance sheet crisis in United States, not a property level crisis. Most of the asset classes, while there are some decelerating rents in multifamily. Most everyone is sophisticated in real estate knows that the supply of new apartments is going to fall precipitously as soon as this wave completes more or less middle of '25.
And then rents should reaccelerate. So you are seeing buyers come out of the woods, particularly since the credit markets, the CMBS markets are wide open, even diversified portfolios are getting done in the CMBS market spreads are in. So the markets are repairing themselves. And even the tone of the banks, at least the large banks is getting slightly better as they grasp, but to get their arms around what they have and who's going to do what with what. It is remarkable how many sponsors are coming in and working to fix their capital stacks, buying caps, trying to push their loans into coverage ratios. I think there's a lot of dry powder on the sidelines. And there you've recently seen Blackstone's large take private of a multifamily two of them, in fact, one in Canada, one in the U.S. There are transactions taking place in the private sector and we're kind of, it's definitely the yellow flag.
We're doing we're doing this caution rate, you're out, you're going around the track, you peek your head into the pit and do I have to come in and then repair the car and go back out on the track. We are in an enviable position, I think, both with our footprint, both here in Europe where, there's more activity but also with liquidity, being going into this with this much dry powder gives us the opportunity to restructure, modify, take back and basically do the thing that will maximize value for our shareholders. We are unique in our sector that we've always been in equity REIT and we've always owned, 17,000 affordable housing units that are continue to be the gift that keeps on giving with significant rent growth and, assuredly, rent growth next year because we couldn't take all the rent growth as we pointed out this year.
So affordable housing is the one sector of real estate you can actually count on being full and for rental growth for the foreseeable future, which is material to us and will help us. And the other thing that you probably don't know is there has been significant margin relief in our cost structures, particularly for insurance, and we expect our insurance to be down year-over-year. As we budget the year, we do not expect that. We thought it would be up as it has been most every year. But that should help increase margins and improve or support the value and the gains that we already have in our affordable housing book. I do like continue to like, we talk about every quarter for 10, 11 years, the multiple cylinders, we continue to look at other cylinders that would offer new business lines for us and maybe not quite as correlated to the large loan real estate book.
The Energy Infrastructure Lending Group is just such a thing with a 20% target returns on the paper. We've invested, we will go deeper there and accelerate that investing. We also are looking at other things. We've always looked at other things and with the general stress, I don't call it stress on other companies in our sector and more companies that are probably will have some issues. I mean, I think we will find some opportunities to be creative on the capital market side and continue to look at different things both here and abroad, that will grow our enterprise and with the goal, of course, to achieve ultimately investment grade, which makes its perpetual flywheel of capital in our industry. And given the pullback of the banks, we would like to figure out that we should be the dominant player in this space, much as some of the private credit guys have done that in the corporate space.
So it's the largest player, that's our job to execute there. I think our smaller loan business, the recent hires in our Star solutions business are just beginning to take root, but we hope they become small oaks instead of saplings in our portfolio and continue to contribute to higher ROE for our shareholders and very dependable income stream to support our dividend. It is such an unusual thing with rates this high sitting on this couch is not nearly as punitive as it used to be. We just pay off our lines and then we can accord them out as we need to borrow again. So we're paying off lines that are written off of SOFR, which is 5.3 and spreads that are at least 200 something over. So you're talking about the paying off 7%, 8%. Debt is not a bad outcome for the short order.
It's not that dilutive. What is dilutive is the non-accruing REO assets we have in our balance sheet, but we're blessed to be able to support our dividend without having them accruing even though they are recovering and we will continue to work through the portfolio and bring that capital back into an earnings position as soon as prudent. The only other thing I'd say is, I do think the Fed has a -- of the wrong toolkit for this economy and the faster they realize that the better off certainly the banking system and the real estate complex will be. It's not working. I mean, interest rates at this level have not slowed job growth in many industries. It's not slowing down the tech innovations, the new announcements by Meta, Facebook, NVIDIA, Amazon, Microsoft in construction of data centers, the nearly $100 billion defense bill, which will power military manufacturing of weapons and armaments in the United States as a simulate as United States as a simulative bill.
Obviously, you see the administration laying out the money now for the CHIPS Act and $5 billion here, $8 billion there, $30 billion there, it's adding up. We are turning on the infrastructure bill. So the government is not getting any construction job losses, which you'd normally see with a 500 basis point increase in rates. One of the first things you can kill is construction. On the other hand, half the almost 45% of the economic of the workforce today is in healthcare, education and government. And you can point out that those three industries have added 3.1 million jobs since he started raising rates in May of '22. So back, close the door, it's not working for health care. Nobody doesn't get sick because it's raised interest rates 50 basis points nor does anyone not go to the hospital, not call their doctor.
The other big problem we had inflation is driven partly by energy prices and food prices and both of those have retreated. It’s not going to affect car insurance with interest rates. So it's kind of a tool that is the collateral damage of which has been the banking system, the regional banks and throwing into disarray the valuations of commercial assets all over the country and I'd say all over the globe because many people had to follow us. And that is not just an academic thing because the cities and municipalities are dependent on the real estate taxes from these commercial assets to run their schools and police and waste management and all the other services they provide their communities. So, if you keep taxing and keep decreasing the NOI of your buildings, you decrease the property values and you can keep taxing, but the values keep going down.
And pretty soon you're in a spiral far worse than a 2.7% versus a 2% inflation rate. You have asset deflation, which has unbelievably bad implications across the country. So maybe the Fed will get ahead of direction and do something, I think he'd like to. But I don't think people should think that in this economy, the way it's configured with tech leading and productivity leading from the tech sector that without causing a serious recession or hard landing, he can get the job losses he wants to free up the labor force. So, I would say, we also would like, we'll take advantage of the data center area and probably wait into some lending opportunities. We're with the private firm, we're the fourth largest data center player in the country. So we are quite active on the build side.
So that we have 50 people now doing data centers that would -- will -- could be a very interesting place for us to continue our new vertical to lend against. And one of the issues there is those loans are big and they require a lot of capital, which is good news, bad news. But there are opportunities for lenders to achieve very nice returns in that sector, and it's very good credit. So that would be something that we'll look forward to doing in the future. With that, again, I want to thank the team and this is hand to hand combat. This is like hands on the steering real time. It's not a time to be out and twiddling your thumbs. It is the teams are working with borrowers and working on our entire investment portfolio try and maximize returns and for the shareholders.
So we are feeling pretty good in a tough world, but I think we're very confident in our ability to weather the storm emerges, I think the leader in our sector. So thanks, everyone. We'll take questions.
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