Arbor Realty Trust Inc (ABR) 2025 Q4 法說會逐字稿

Good morning ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the fourth-quarter 2025 Arbor Realty Trust earnings conference call (Operator Instructions) Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. (Operator Instructions)

I would now like to turn the call over to your speaker today, Paul Elenio, Chief Financial Officer. Please go ahead.

Okay, thank you, Angel, and good morning everyone, and welcome to the quarterly earnings call for Arbor Realty Trust. This morning, we'll discuss the results for the quarter and the year ended December 31, 2025. With me on the call today is Ivan Kaufman, our President and Chief Executive Officer.

Before we begin, I need to inform you that statements made in this earnings call may be deemed forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties, including information about possible or assumed future results of our business, financial condition, liquidity, results of operations, plans, and objectives. These statements are based on our beliefs, assumptions, and expectations of our future performance, taking into account the information currently available to us. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from Arbor’s expectations in these forward-looking statements are detailed in our SEC reports. Listeners are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements which speak only as of today. Arbor undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise these forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances after today or the occurrence of unanticipated events.

I now turn the call over to Arbor’s President and CEO, Ivan Kaufman.

Thank you, Paul, and thanks to everyone for joining us on today's call. Today, we will focus on how we closed out 2025 as well as our outlook for 2026, especially in the first half of the year.

As we discussed in the past, we believe we are at the bottom of the cycle and are working very hard to accelerate the resolution of our non-performing and sub-performing loans into performing assets to improve our rate of income for the future. This is a top priority for us as these loans are having a tremendous drag on our earnings. In fact, as Paul will lay out in more detail, we estimate, as we resolve these loans, we will add back as much as $100 million of income per annual run rate or about $0.48 a share. This is an important point, and we believe we have a clear path to resolving the majority of these loans over the next few quarters, which will put us in a position to start to build back up our run rate of interest income.

Additionally, we also have a very active originations business with several diverse platforms that will continue to contribute to rolling out income streams and increase our future earnings. We ended the year with approximately $570 million of delinquencies and around $500 million of REO assets for total nonperforming assets of roughly $1.1 billion. These numbers are down by over $130 million from the last quarter or an 11% reduction. This is strong progress in one quarter, and again, our goal is to continue to accelerate the resolution of our non-interest earning assets and redeploy the capital into performing loans and grow our run rate of income.

In fact, we have a line of sight in roughly $100 million to $150 million of delinquencies that we expect to resolve by the end of March and another $100 million to $150 million we believe will resolve in the next 90 days. We’re also very optimistic we can reduce our REO assets to around $250 million-$300 million by the end of 2026, even after adding an additional $100 million to $200 million of REO assets along the way, mostly all of which are already reflected in the $570 million of delinquent loans reported by year-end. This estimated pace of resolutions will go a long way towards significantly reducing the drag on earnings and increasing our run rate of income for the future.

We continue to focus heavily on legacy assets which currently sit around $5 billion. $570 million of these loans are delinquent that we are actively working through, and $1.5 billion is performing in accordance with the original terms. The other $3 billion have been modified to pay and accrue structures. On roughly half of these loans, we are currently accruing the full rate of interest. On the other half, we are being more conservative and only recording the pay rate of interest.

We generated around $2 billion of runoff in 2025 in our balance sheet loan book, approximately $1.5 billion of which is related to legacy book. Given these and given where rates are today, we believe we will experience similar runoff in 2026, which will continue to reduce our legacy book down to a much smaller number by yearend. Certainly, if rates come down even further, we could accelerate the runoff process as well as further reduce the legacy book. We are closely monitoring the performance of these assets, and while we believe we will experience some additional delinquencies as we work through the bottom of the cycle, we are seeing steady progress on the bulk of this portfolio, which we believe indicates that the worst is behind us.

One of the ways we are resolving our legacy book is by resetting the interest rates for current loans to today’s market spreads, which puts these loans in a position to positively cover debt service from property operations without a shortfall. This, combined with having the right guarantees and requiring the borrowers commit significant additional capital to support their deals, gives us comfort about how these loans will perform going forward. This strategy does temporarily affect our earnings, and we are resetting these loans to lower rates. Howerver, this will result in improved terms from our line lenders and greatly limit the potential risk for future losses, which is very important and will allow us to preserve our book value.

As Paul will discuss in more detail, we produced distributable earnings of $0.22 a share in the fourth quarter. As stated earlier, our earnings are being greatly affected by the significant drag from our non-interest earning assets, which is something we are working very hard to chip away with over the next several quarters, and we continue to make progress in resolving our legacy issues and grow our new business volumes. It is very important to highlight that despite the significant drag we are currently experiencing, which we still produced strong earnings of over $200 million last year and have managed through this very long, elevated rate environment without a material decline in book value, unlike the rest of our peers who have experienced significant book value deterioration.

Despite these accomplishments, we are trading at significant discount to book value. We believe our stock is substantially undervalued, especially in light of our extremely valuable agency business and diverse and growing business platforms compared to most of our peers who have monoline businesses. One of the opportunities available to us right now is to liquidate non-performing assets and use a portion of those proceeds to buy back stock at a significant discount to book value.

This is a tremendous trade for us, as it allows us to actually grow our book value and generate mid-teens returns on our investment. We have approximately $120 million left in our buyback plan and in the fourth quarter entered into a 10b5-1 plan that allows us to purchase stock in a blackout period. We purchased roughly $20 million of stock in the last few months under this program at an average price of $7.40 or 64% of book value. We will continue to evaluate this strategy, and in the future, it’s highly accretive to both earnings and book value at these levels.

Turning now to the production numbers of 2025 in our different business lines. We had a very active, strong fourth quarter in our agency platform with $1.6 billion origination volume, which puts us at $5 billion for the year. This is a 13.5% increase from our 2024 production numbers in what was a very challenging rate environment for the majority of the year. We’re extremely pleased with these results and believe this is a real testament to the value of our franchise and the resiliency of our originations network with a loyal borrower base that we’ve cultivated over many years. We have a large pipeline, which, combined with the current rate environment and the fact that the agencies have increased their caps by 20% for 2026, gives us confidence in our ability to produce very strong volume numbers again in 2026.

As we talked about in the past, our servicing portfolio, which is now over $36 billion and grew another 8% in 2025, generates a very predictable and growing annuity of over $128 million a year of income. This annuity, combined with the earnings on our escrow balance, generates around $200 million a year in annual cash earnings. This is addition to the strong gain on sale margins we generate from our origination platform. It is extremely important to emphasize that our agency business generates approximately 50% of our net revenues, the vast majority of which occurs before we even turn the lights on every day.

In the balance sheet lending business, we originated $340 million of volume in the fourth quarter, closing out 2025 at $1.2 billion of production. This business continues to be incredibly competitive and with consistent concessions being given on credit and structure, this is not something we will sacrifice to win a deal, and as a result, we’re being very highly selective and are focusing our attention on larger deals with higher quality sponsors. This will likely result in origination similar to volume of 2026 to approximately $1 billion to $1.5 billion, which we can easily scale up if the landscape becomes more constructive throughout the year. The bridge lending business is a very important part of our overall strategy as it generates strong levered returns on our capital in the short term, while continuing to build up a pipeline of future agency deals. And with the significant efficiencies we continue to see in the securitization market and with our line lenders, we’re able to produce strong returns on our capital despite the competitive landscape.

We continue to do an excellent job in growing our single-family rental business. We originated approximately $500 million and $80 million in new business in the fourth quarter and $1.6 billion in 2025. We also had a very strong pipeline, giving us confidence that we will be able to produce approximately $1.5 billion to $2 billion in volume again in 2026. This is a great business as it offers returns on our capital through construction, bridge, and permanent lending opportunities and generates strong levered returns in the short term while providing significant long-term benefits by further diversifying our income streams.

And again, with the enhanced efficiencies we’re seeing in the securitization market and in our bank lines, we’re generating mid to high returns on our capital, which will contribute to increased future earnings, especially as we continue to scale up this business. Over the last several months, we’ve received a lot of questions from investors how the president’s potential ban on institutional single-family home purchase would affect our SFR business. First of all, we are not entirely sure what, if anything, transpires, and that is just the political noise ahead of the midterm elections. Clearly, this is a serious housing shortage in the country, and we applaud any effort to address this very important issue. We want to make it clear that we do not traffic in scattered site, single-family businesses like Invitation Homes.

We focus on build-to-rent business, which we believe is actually being excluded from this proposed ban. These are 200 to 300 homes and communities that are built by experienced developers and are commercial properties more akin to multifamily. Therefore, we believe we will not be affected by any efforts to ban large institutions from buying and aggregating single-family homes and that this build-to-rent business will continue to be a very attractive solution when dealing with supply issues in the market.

In the construction lending business, we are having great success in growing out this platform with a real influx of new opportunities that we’re seeing due to larger loans on high-quality assets with very experienced developers. We closed out the year with around $500 million of production and also have a very large pipeline, giving us confidence that we can meaningfully grow this platform and produce between $750 million and $1 billion in production in 2026.

And so between our agency business, bridge lending business, SFR, and construction platform, plus our mezz and PE businesses, we originated $8.5 billion in volume in 2025 in a very difficult environment for the majority of the year. Again, we are confident in our ability to produce consistent volumes in 2026 and potentially even some room for growth, depending on how the market conditions evolve over the balance of the year.

In summary, we had a very active and productive year with many notable accomplishments. Clearly, the outlook for the interest rate environment has improved from where it was at this time last year, and we are feeling more optimistic as a result. We believe this will allow us to continue to grow our origination volume and generate strong returns on our capital from the significant improvements in efficiency as we continue to create on the right side of our balance sheet. We’ve also done a great job on preserving our book value, even in the face of unprecedented elevated rate environment and reductions in property values where we have experienced over the last several years. We believe we have ring-fenced the majority of our delinquencies and have a clear path to resolving these assets over the next few quarters, which again, will allow us to significantly reduce the drag on earnings and grow our future run rate of income.

I will now turn the call over to Paul and take you through the financial results.

Hey, thank you, Ivan. In the fourth quarter, we produced distributable earnings of $46.3 million or $0.22 per share, excluding one-time realized losses of $12.4 million from the resolution of certain delinquent and REO assets that were previously reserved for and $7.3 million of income we generated through reduced tax expense in the fourth quarter from the sale of the Homeward asset. On our last quarter’s earnings call, we guided to $15 million to $20 million in realized losses for Q4 depending on how quickly we could liquidate certain assets. We had $12.4 million in the fourth quarter and have liquidated two other assets in January for approximately $10 million in losses for the first quarter of 2026, all of which had been previously reserved for.

On our last call, we discussed how our decision to accelerate the resolution process of certain loans resulted in a temporary increase in our delinquencies. We guided that this would reduce our fourth-quarter earnings by approximately $0.05 to $0.06 a share. This combined with a few new delinquencies as well as some reduced rates on modified loans resulted in an additional $0.02 of drag for Q4, which was in line with our expectations. And although we expect to have some new delinquencies as we work through the bottom of the cycle, we are working very hard to continue to resolve more delinquencies than new ones that come on. This process takes time and could temporarily affect our earnings. However, we are making meaningful progress and have a clear line of sight to resolving the bulk of these assets over the next few quarters, which will increase our run rate of income for the future.

As disclosed in our press release, we have roughly $600 million of delinquencies and $500 million of REO assets on our books at December 31, 2025. Currently, these assets are not producing income and some of the REO assets are actually generating negative NOI as we work through the process of stabilizing these assets and improving occupancy. We estimate that these assets are creating a temporary drag of between $80 million to $100 million annually or roughly $0.40 to $0.48 a share, which translates into $0.10 to $0.12 a quarter of additional income that we are optimistic we will be able to create as we resolve the vast majority of these assets over the next several quarters.

With respect to accrued interest on modified loans, in the fourth quarter, we reversed approximately $4 million of previously accrued interest on new delinquencies during the quarter, which, as we discussed earlier, is reflective of where we are in the cycle. This adjustment, combined with $7 million in back interest collected on a loan payoff in the fourth quarter, has resulted in total accrued interest on modified loans remaining relatively flat quarter-over-quarter even after accruing an additional $10 million in interest on modified loans that are performing in accordance with their terms. In the fourth quarter, we reported an additional $20.5 million of impairment on our REO book to properly mark these assets to where we think we can effectuate a sale as we look to dispose of certain of these assets quickly and create interest-earning assets for the future. This puts our reserves at roughly $75 million life to date on our REO book.

As Ivan mentioned, we’re expecting to take back roughly another $100 million to $200 million of assets as we work through the bottom of the cycle, $50 million to $75 million of which will likely happen by the end of the first quarter. Most of these assets are already reflected in the $600 million of delinquencies we reported at year-end, and we’re working very diligently to dispose of these assets quickly, which we believe will put our REO book at between $250 million and $300 million by the end of 2026. We also booked another $3 million specific reserves on a new delinquency in the fourth quarter, which was offset by a $9 million recovery of a previous reserve on the Homewood asset that we sold in the fourth quarter.

We expect to book similar level of reserves and impairments over the next few quarters, which is consistent with our strategy of accelerating the resolution of our problem loans as we look to mark certain loans that we are marketing for disposition to where we think we can execute a sale.

In our agency business, we had another outstanding quarter with $1.6 billion originations and $1.5 billion in loan sales, which generated $21 million in gain on sale income in the fourth quarter. The margin on this business was 1.36%, which is up from the prior quarter due to some large off-market portfolio deals we were able to capture in the third quarter, which contained lower margins and smaller servicing fees.

We also recorded $20 million of mortgage servicing rights income related to $1.6 billion of committed loans in the fourth quarter, representing an average MSR rate of around 1.24%. Our fee-based servicing portfolio grew 8% in 2025 to approximately $36.2 billion at December 31 on very strong 2025 originations. This portfolio has a weighted average servicing fee of 35.6 basis points and an estimated remaining life of six years and will continue to generate a predictable annuity of income going forward of around $120 million gross annually.

In our balance sheet lending operation, our investment portfolio grew to $12.1 billion at December 31 from originations outpacing runoff for the fourth straight quarter. Our all-in yield on this portfolio was 7.08% at December 31, compared to 7.27% at September 30, mainly due to a decline in SOFR. The average balance in our core investments was $11.84 billion this quarter compared to $11.76 billion last quarter from growth in our portfolio. The average yield in these assets increased to 7.38% from 6.95% last quarter, mainly due to the significant non-recurring adjustments we booked in the third quarter, including reversing $18 million of accrued interest, which was partially offset by a decline in SOFR in the fourth quarter.

Total debt on our core assets was approximately $10.5 billion at December 31. The all-in cost of debt was approximately 6.45% at December 31, versus 6.72% at September 30, mainly due to a reduction in SOFR, which was offset slightly by the new unsecured debt we issued in December. The average balance on our debt facilities was approximately $10.1 billion for the fourth quarter, compared to $10 billion in the third quarter, mainly due to funding our fourth quarter growth. The average cost of funds in our debt facility was 6.66% in the fourth quarter, compared to 6.88% for the third quarter, excluding interest expense from levering our REO book, the debt balance of which is separately stated on our balance sheet and therefore not included in our total debt on core assets. This decrease is mostly due to a reduction in SOFR. Our overall spot net interest spreads were up slightly to 0.63% at December 31, compared to 0.55% at September 30.

So in summary, we had a productive year and have made considerable progress and have a clear line of sight to resolving the vast majority of our delinquencies over the next few quarters, which, when completed, will significantly reduce the drag on our earnings. This, combined with the growth in our origination platforms, will go a long way towards allowing us to grow our run rate of income in the future.

That completes our prepared remarks for this morning, and I’ll now turn it back to the operator to take any questions you may have at this time. Angela?

(Operator Instructions)

Chris Muller, Citizens Capital Markets.

Congrats on a really solid quarter here. So I guess, on the GSE business, your guys’ full-year originations in 2025 were about $5 billion, but the FHFA increased caps pretty substantially, as Ivan mentioned in his prepared remarks. So I guess, how are you guys thinking about 2026 GSE originations relative to that $5 billion number?

I think that a lot will be dependent on interest rates and also the GSE’s increase in the cap. They also have a parallel match on affordability. So you have to be able to originate at least overall certain affordability percentages to be able to get to that cap. I think we’re feeling fairly comfortable. Our pipeline is fairly strong, and I think targeting similar levels that we had last year, if these levels remain in this space, would be something that we feel comfortable with.

Got it, and then I guess looking at the servicing portfolio, fees have compressed a little bit there. Do you expect that dynamic to continue into 2026, or are servicing fees starting to bottom out? And can you just talk about what's driving that compression?

Sure. Hey, Chris, it’s Paul. So a couple things. There’s two components that are driving the compression in the servicing fees. One, obviously, where rates have gone over the last two years, there’s a lot more five- and seven-year product being done in the agencies versus traditionally, what was 10-year, 9.5-year yield maintenance product. So it’s a little bit shorter on the curve, and therefore, the servicing fees are changing over that period of time.

Secondly, during the COVID era, servicing fees were very, very high from the agencies. They’ve cut them back pretty substantially to more in the range of 40 to 45, 40 to 50 basis points on Fannie. But I think it’s just a matter of we’ve got some higher servicing fee loans back from the pre-COVID days running off, and then the new products coming on, shorter part of the curve, and it’s also coming on at the more normalized servicing fees.

We’ve run a model. We think this starts to bottom out towards the end of the year and then kind of levels off. So I think it compresses a little bit for the balance of the year as you flush out some of those higher servicing fee loans that are older, and you’re putting on the product that’s more in today’s market. But I think by the end of the year, we’ll start to see that level off, and then you don’t have that compression anymore.

Got it, that is very helpful. Thanks for taking the questions and congrats again on a great quarter.

Gabriele Poggi, Raymond James.

Can I ask a little bit about just your -- you talked about the SFR book. You obviously made a lot of loans in the fourth quarter. Who knows what happens out of DC? Have you seen any credit issues in your Build-to-Rent borrowers, and if so, any geographic color, or is everything just been ho-hum and pretty good on that front? And I got a follow-up to that.

I mean, I'll give you the overall view. Our SFR book is really outstanding as it is probably the best performing book we have, and the loans generally have institutional backup behind the sponsors, they are not syndicated loans, and they are usually lower leverage. Paul, I do not know if you have any stats in terms of performance, but from my knowledge, this book is performing exceptionally well.

Yeah, I do have some stats, and as Ivan said, it has been an exceptional book for us. Obviously, the levered returns are real high, Gabe, on that book. And we have done a nice job of putting together the first-of-its-kind securitization on the Build-to-Rent business earlier in the year so we have been at the cutting edge of how to lever these things appropriately and get strong returns, and the returns are mid-teens on this business. As I look at the book, there is not a single delinquent loan or a loan on our watchlist in this type of product, and so this product has been spotless from a credit perspective, and like we said, it's a great business that we are able to scale.

A quick follow-up just on the delinquent/REO book, is there any kind of geographic color that you can provide where you may be seeing more pockets of weakness? I mean, I know the Sun Belt has gone through a lot, but is there any state, city, MSA, et cetera, that is weaker or stronger than another? Any color there would be helpful.

Yeah, I would say that there are certain markets that are soft, like Houston, and that’s a factor of the history of Houston being boom and bust, but more significantly, by it being very adversely affected by the issues with immigration. That got hit on both sides. First, under the prior administration, you had a significant number of immigration centers next to a lot of properties, took over the properties, damaged those properties severely.

And then under the current administration, you’re seeing a lot of ICE raids in those areas. You’re seeing that in areas of Texas, Houston primarily, San Antonio a little bit, and even in Dallas, which is shocking. So you’re seeing properties that were 90% occupied, next day, they’re back down to 65% or 70%. We’re also seeing a little bit of that in the Atlanta area, too, in certain pockets of Florida. But those would be the markets that have the, you know, significant softness.

(Operator Instructions)

Jade Rahmani, KBW.

Thinking about credit, you mentioned you expect another tough couple of quarters, but the worst generally seems to be behind the company. At the same time, in this year-to-date economy, multifamily fundamentals have been pretty weak, looking at new lease growth, and then the economy sending a lot of mixed signals with weak trends on the hiring side, and the K-shaped recovery with the low end of the consumer suffering. So are you seeing any additional headwinds year-to-date? How have the trends been so far in 2026?

So we’ve seen tremendous headwinds over the last last couple of years due to higher interest rates and the stress on borrowers and due to the softness in the economy and bad credit and just poor operations. We think we’re at the bottom. We’re seeing a firming up of economic occupancy. We’re seeing the property stabilize.

And in our case, what we’ve made a decision is, anytime we’re not pleased with an operator, or they don’t have enough capital, we’re stepping in, and we’re seeing good results with our efforts. We’re also seeing liquidity return to the market, and when we do market a distressed asset, and when we get it back, we’re seeing multiple bids, and we’re seeing pretty good price discovery.

So we think we are in a bottom. We’re being very aggressive, and we’re pleased with the results once we get our hands on these properties.

In terms of the current earnings level, you mentioned there is $0.48 in untaxed earnings trapped inside these NPLs, yet earnings remain below the dividends. Could you give any thoughts as to all that, and the dividend was maintained but that was for the fourth quarter of 2025. What are your thoughts around the likelihood of the dividends being maintained in 2026?

I'll let Paul answer most of that, but our goal is to facilitate the resolution of the drag on earnings, and the quicker we do that the quicker we will have line of sight, and every day and every month matters. What used to take us 90 days to resolve a loan with a little bit of a drag, it's taking more like 120 days. So I think it's about 90 days to get on-site with the property, and then the marketing process takes us around 90 days.

We're marking our book, and we took additional marks because we are trying to mark it to a level where we think we can get rid of these assets quickly. So the whole concept is how quickly we can get to that resolution and how fast we can take drags and start having returns.

Paul, you want to give some comment?

Sure. Jade, Ivan’s correct. We look just to level set. We look at the dividend, and the Board looks at the dividend from a more long-term perspective. So obviously we have purposely accelerated the resolution of these delinquencies to put them behind us and get our run rate back up. That’s temporarily certainly hit our earnings, and I laid out in my commentary it’s about $80 million to $100 million.

It will all determine how long it takes us to get that resolved. We have clear line of sight right now. We did resolve $350 million of loans, of delinquent loans and REO loans in Q4. We put on another $270 million, which was the wave, the one more wave we said we were going to have in the fourth quarter.

We think the lion’s share of this is behind us, and now our job is to continue to resolve those assets at a quick pace. If we can resolve them very quickly, the run rate will get up quicker. If it takes a little longer, it takes a little longer. But again, we look at it more long term.

A couple other things I’ll mention is, yeah, we put up $0.22 today. The good news is we’ve seen our net interest income level off here, so we’ve gotten good net interest income for Q4. I’m kind of projecting that to probably stay in that range for Q1, then hopefully it starts to run up in Q2, 3, and 4 when we start resolving a lot of these loans.

The first quarter could be our low watermark, though, as we’ve mentioned in the past. The agency business is very seasonal. We did do a pretty large number of volume in Q4 of $1.6 billion. The first quarter is normally much lighter. If you go back and look at last year’s numbers, we did $600 million in Q1. I think we’ll do $750 million to $800 million in Q1 this year, and then run back up. So we’ll see a couple of penny drag from the gain on sale number being lower in Q1 just because of seasonality, but nothing to do with further delinquencies. We think we’ve ring-fenced everything, and we think that we’ve got a clear path to resolution.

So again, we look at it long term. We expect to be able to resolve these things quickly. If we’re right, our numbers will get up quicker. If it takes a little longer, it’ll take a little longer, and we’ll evaluate it. But again, it’s too early for us to say that we’re not going to be able to earn that back in a reasonable period of time.

Fair enough.

At this time, there are no further questions in queue. I will now turn the meeting back to Ivan Kaufman for any closing remarks.

Well, thank you everybody for your time today. It has been a bouncy road a little bit, and we do feel that we've ring-fenced our issues and have a clear line of sight to how to resolve those issues and get back to getting rid of the negative drag on earnings. It's just a matter of what the timing is. We are aggressive, and we'll look to facilitate that, and once again thank you, and everybody have a great weekend.

Thank you. This brings us to the end of today's meeting. We appreciate your time and participation. You may now disconnect.