Starwood Property Trust Inc (STWD) 2024 Q4 法說會逐字稿

Greetings, and welcome to Starwood Properties Trust fourth quarter 2024 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question-and-answer session will follow the formal presentation. (Operator Instructions) As a reminder, this conference is being recorded.

At this time, I'd like to hand the conference call over to Zach Tanenbaum, Head of Investor Relations. Zach, you may begin.

Thank you, operator. Good morning, and welcome to Starwood Property Trust Earnings Call. This morning, we filed our 10-K and issued a press release with a presentation of our results, which are both available on our website and have been filed with the SEC.

Before the call begins, I would like to remind everyone that certain statements made in the course of this call are forward-looking statements. which do not guarantee future events or performance. Please refer to our 10-K and press release for cautionary factors related to these statements.

Additionally, certain non-GAAP financial measures will be discussed on this call. A reconciliation of these non-GAAP financial measures to the most comparable measures prepared in accordance with GAAP, please refer to our press release filed this morning. 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

Thank you, Zach, and good morning, everyone. Today, we reported Distributable Earnings or DE of $167 million or $0.48 per share for the quarter and $675 million or $2.02 per share for the year. Across businesses, we committed $1.6 billion towards new investments this quarter and $5.1 billion for the full-year, with 67% of our annual investing in businesses other than commercial lending. As a testament to our diverse business model, commercial real estate lending now comprises just 54% of our asset base.

I will begin my segment discussion with Commercial and Residential Lending, which contributed DE of $193 million to the quarter or $0.55 per share. In commercial lending, we originated $477 million of loans, which brings our full-year originations to $1.7 billion. Repayments totaled $1 billion in the quarter and $3.6 billion in the year. Our $13.7 billion loan portfolio ended the year with a weighted average risk rating of 3.0 consistent with the prior quarter.

In the quarter, we foreclosed on 3 previously 5 rated loans totaling $190 million, all of which were multifamily, two in Texas and one in Phoenix. We obtained third-party appraisals for all three assets with one indicating a value below our basis. We took a $15 million specific CECL reserve against the $46 million loan prior to foreclosure. In total, the three assets had $61 million of lost sponsor equity.

As we work to resolve our existing REO assets, we sold our previously mentioned Portland multifamily asset at our basis of $61 million. In addition, subsequent to quarter end, we received $39 million in repayment of a non-accrual loan secured by a hospitality asset in California that was destroyed in the 2020 wildfires. The insurance proceeds were $1 million in excess of our DE basis.

And finally, we are under contract to sell an REO multifamily asset in Texas at our DE basis. Our CECL reserve increased by $36 million in the quarter to a balance of $482 million, together with our previously taken REO impairments of $198 million, these reserves represent 4.6% of our lending and REO portfolios and translate to $2.02 per share of book value. which is already reflected in today's undepreciated book value of $19.94.

Next, I will turn to residential lending, where our on-balance sheet loan portfolio ended the year at $2.4 billion. The loans in this portfolio continue to repay at par with $56 million of repayments in the quarter and $256 million for the year. Our retained RMBS portfolio ended the quarter at $421 million, with a slight decrease from last quarter driven by repayments and offset by a positive mark-to-market.

In our Property segment, we recognized $14 million of DE or $0.04 per share in the quarter, driven by our Florida affordable multifamily portfolio. For GAAP purposes, we recorded an unrealized fair value increase related to this portfolio of $60 million in the quarter, net of non-controlling interests.

The value was determined by an independent appraisal which we are required to obtain annually. NOI for this portfolio increased 9% this year. We expect rents to increase again in 2025 once HUD releases its maximum rent levels in a couple of months.

As a reminder, there was a 3.8% holdback from last year that we expect to implement in 2025. Turning to investing and servicing, which we often call REIT, this segment contributed DE of $49 million or $0.14 per share to the quarter. Our conduit Starwood Mortgage Capital was the largest nonbank CMBS loan contributor in 2024.

During the quarter, we completed five securitizations totaling $595 million at profit margins that were at or above historic levels. This brings our year-to-date total to 17 securitization for approximately $1.6 billion, the highest level since 2016.

In our special servicer, our named servicing portfolio regained position as the largest named servicer in the US ending the year at $110 billion, the highest level in a decade. This was driven by $5 billion of new servicing assignments in the quarter and $24 billion during the year.

Our active servicing portfolio ended the year at $9.2 billion, with $1.5 billion of new transfers, nearly 60% of which were office. In our CMBS portfolio, we purchased a $49 million B piece. And in the segment's property portfolio, we acquired $14 million of property investments.

Concluding my business segment discussion is our Infrastructure Lending segment, which contributed DE of $22 million or $0.06 per share to the quarter. Our strong investing pace continued this quarter with $532 million of new loan commitments, bringing our total for the year to $1.4 billion, its highest annual level to date with this performing loan book ending the year at $2.6 billion.

And finally, this morning, I will address our liquidity and capitalization. During the quarter, we executed $2.3 billion in debt transactions, which Jeff will talk more about. We repaid our $400 million December unsecured at maturity and early repaid half or $250 million of our March 2025 high yield maturity. After repaying the remaining $250 million next month, we will have no other 2025 maturities and our next corporate debt maturity is not until July 2026.

Our liquidity position remains strong at $1.8 billion. This does not include liquidity that could be generated through sales of assets in our Property segment, direct leveraging of our $4.9 billion of unencumbered assets, or issuing high yield or term loan B backed by these unencumbered assets. We continue to have significant credit capacity across our business lines with $10.5 billion of availability under our existing financing lines and unencumbered assets of $4.9 billion. Our leverage continues to remain low with an adjusted debt to undepreciated equity ratio of just 2.1 times, its lowest level in over four years.

With that, I will turn the call over to Jeff.

Thanks, Rina. We ended 2024 with a flurry of capital markets transactions, where we extended the average term on our corporate debt from 2.2 to 3.5 years. Repriced, upsized and extended $1.4 billion in term loans, extended and upsized our corporate revolver and issued high yield unsecured debt, all of the tightest floating rate spreads in our company's history. We raised almost $800 million in incremental proceeds in this process, leaving us with significant investable firepower as we enter 2025.

We have seen significant spread compression across our investment cylinders in CRE, the MBS, DIF and residential loan and financing spreads and in CRE cap rates, where spread tightening has offset most of the rate rise since the election.

Liquidity has returned to all of these markets for both new transactions and the refinancing of the record loan originations volume from late 2020 through early 2022, giving us a strong loan pipeline as we have seen in three years.

Banks continue to earn significantly higher ROEs lending to nonbank lenders like us in making their own direct whole loans to borrowers. They've also reduced the lending spreads to us in line with the spread compression I just spoke about, allowing us to compete at tighter spreads across our platform on higher quality, low leverage loans at today's lower basis, which we believe will create outside opportunities for us in 2025.

We've already closed $1.5 billion of loans in the first quarter, and our business plan for 2025 is to write the most loans we have in any year since our inception other than 2021, which was a record year for lenders across the board. Our unique diversified business model has a cycle low debt-to-equity ratio of 2.1 times today, leaving us significant room to invest our near-record cash levels while still maintaining our low leverage business model. investing an incremental $1 billion of equity will offset the drag created by our REO and non-accrual balances today and given we can borrow today at record low spreads, allowing us to more than absorb tighter lending spreads.

Our approximately 350 employees at Starwood Property Trust, in addition to the employees of our manager, Starwood Capital Group, are working towards this goal of significantly increasing our investing pace across cylinders.

Although we have a lot of work to do, we believe we will be able to start exiting legacy non-accrual and REO assets at a faster pace. We presented our Board with our 2025 plan this quarter. And in that, we have a plan to reduce this portfolio, which has caused a significant drag on earnings by half in 2025 than by half again in 2026 as we look to exit our difficult legacy positions by 2027.

While we have earned our dividend in these difficult years, we're with the hardest hit by the Fed's unprecedented interest rate increases, freeing up this trapped equity while simultaneously taking advantage of tighter spreads to grow our investment portfolio will allow us to increase earnings in the coming years while holding on to the vast majority of our over $1.5 billion in unique harvestable gains in our owned real estate portfolio.

We had $3.6 billion in repayments in CRE. And with near record liquidity and access to capital, we have looked at resolutions differently than most of our peers and focused on the highest NPV to shareholders after factoring in the workout timetable and cost of capital of exiting loans today, versus improving performance and waiting for a better exit window.

We work with our manager, Starwood Capital with over $110 billion under management across nearly all CRE asset classes to find the most accretive business plan for difficult assets. If you'll recall, back in '21 and '22, we made $93 million for shareholders after foreclosing, holding and repositioning our first defaulted loans, two former Winn Dixie industrial assets.

This quarter, we sold our Portland REO multi at our basis.Looking to Q1 of '25, we will sell an REO multi in Texas at our basis, and we already were repaid on a hotel in Napa that burned down at $1 million above our basis.

All of these were as we expected and signaled. We are beginning interior demolition on a $115 million office building we foreclosed on in D.C. and are converting it into a beautiful multifamily, which you will see on the cover of our supplemental. Rather than sell this asset in a depressed DC office market, our underwriting has us returning a gain to shareholders upon completion.

We have resolved or modified 25 assets totaling $2.8 billion to date with 12 modifications and 12 assets we have taken into REO to reposition or sell as we did in the previous example. With markets repairing, we expect the pace of resolutions to pick up going forward, as I mentioned previously.

Rina mentioned our significant liquidity, and I will add that we are through the vast majority of our projected deleveraging. Our 4 and 5 rated loans, which were optimally levered with $794 million of repo and $901 million of CLO debt today have only $144 million and $620 million of debt, respectively, down 81% and 31% on the same asset base. Having paid down 81% of our repo borrowings already on these 4s and 5s, we are left with only $144 million of repo debt subject to any potential margin costs remaining on these assets.

As a result, we have significantly more clarity into our future liquidity than we have had at any point in this higher rate cycle, which gives us comfort, but now is the time to go fully on offense with our incremental liquidity and access to significantly more liquidity, as Rina just mentioned.

We will also use tighter spreads to continue to increase our unsecured corporate debt as a percentage of our overall debt. And we'll use proceeds to continue to pay down secured asset-level debt, which we believe will put us in discussions with our rating agencies to upgrade our corporate debt ratings.

Thereby further reducing our cost of capital and making our planned growth even more accretive to shareholders in keeping us on our stated path of getting to investment grade.

In commercial real estate lending, although we foreclosed on 3 multifamily loans, our 4 and 5 rated loans were down this quarter. We have said in the past that late-cycle multifamily loans will be the hardest hit by stubbornly high forward SOFR. As undercapitalized borrowers will struggle to buy new caps and extend loans.

While more work for our asset managers, our manager is one of the largest owners of multifamily in the country with 106,000 units, and we expect as we have done in the past, that we will quickly improve performance and be able to exit these assets at or near our basis as we have done multiple times recently or choose to hold them as accretive long-term invest.

As I mentioned, financing costs continue to improve, and our pipeline is as big as it's been in years. We plan to add to our personnel again this year to take advantage of what we see as one of the best new lending environments we've seen.

In infrastructure lending, CLO and borrowing spreads continue to move down, offsetting tighter lending spreads and after making $1.4 billion in accretive investments in 2024, we expect to grow at a much faster pace in 2025 given tailwinds in the energy sector and the much discussed need for incremental power in our country. We're off to a strong start with $229 million closed and $763 million in the process of closing.

All our blended ROE in excess of what we can earn in our core CRE lending business. We hope and expect this business will continue to grow and become a bigger part of our asset base going forward.

In our Real Estate Investing and Servicing Division, as Rina mentioned, we are now named special servicer on $110 billion of CMBS loans, our most since 2015 and the most in the growing CMBS market.

In a slow CRE lending year, REIS was a strong contributor to earnings in both special servicing and our CMBS conduit SMC, a highlighting once again the benefit of our multi-cylinder platform and the positive carry credit hedge embedded in our business as our servicer will again make more money as the workouts of loans made in a lower interest rate environment continue to come through in the coming years.

With that, I'll turn the call to Barry.

Thank you. Thanks, Zach. Thanks, Rina and thanks, Jeff. This is going to be one more of the interesting calls that I've hosted in 10 years. I think we kind of talk about the macros and probably the windshield has never been Merck here.

Nobody really knows the effect of tariffs or if they're going to go in or they'll be targeted or broad. But there's one short-term conclusion, which is definitely is inflationary. There's only three places the price increases can go. They can go to the manufacturers, they can go to the consumer. They can be split between the two of them.

And take steel tariffs, for example, the American producers will raise prices something less than the 25% increase in foreign imports.

So I think we'll have to wait and see, and I think I was joking internally for the last nine months. 99 out of 100 economists would have thought with our deficits, the 10-year was going 4.5% to 5% to 5.5%. And Jeff, you go on like Jimmy Diamond have both in fairly public about significant increases in the 10-year, we said this morning with a tenure like 428 and a huge rally showing the inherent weakness in the US economy.

What you're seeing in the US economy is that 10% of the population is spending half the money and the bottom half is not participating because the explosion that has led to a commitment of close to $300 billion from seven companies, levered is $1 trillion. It is the same thing as the infrastructure bill is getting spent much faster.

That's the exceptionalism of the US economy. It's not anything else certainly out of fixed public education school system. So we have a sort of a distorted economy. And you're seeing the consumer sentiment fall because of the uncertainty coming out of the White House, we'll see if it's tactical or not and what -- but every day, of course, we have new news feeds, and we have to readjust our thesis.

What it means for real estate, though is interesting. I mean we're sort of we're sitting in a good place. I mean, construction has come down. You've heard it from our peers. Multifamily starts down 60%, 70%. Industrial starts down 70%. Buying real estate today with today's interest rates are usually volume way below replacement cost. We've talked about.

That means, by the way, that rents have to rise in order to justify new construction in many cases. So it's bullish for loans we have in place and bullish for existing assets. And with Canadian tariffs, for example, you'll see imports of wood lumber will be more expensive, creating shortages of housing additional shortages of housing, if steel prices rise, additional shortages of everything else in real estate because construction costs are going up. It's it leads to future inflation.

If we have a continued shortage of multifamily rents will rise, looking at some numbers in Denver the other day, going from 17,000 homes completed in the quarter to 3,000.

And you can see the patterns rents go up double digit. Those factor into CPI, and they're one-third of CPI, and you'll see that probably in late '26, '27. So we're kind of caught -- we want low rates, great to refinance our debt, great for the real estate complex, great for LTVs, great for cap rates.

And then we also don't mind high rates because we can lend at higher spreads, and we make more money on the new book. So it's a little bit of a tug-of-war between both ends of the spectrum. We don't mind higher high rates.

Although one of the reasons that we're so busy and our peers are talking about going back on offense, is that rates are stable, people expect and probably in the last months, the SOFR curve has actually changed again, and we still -- we're looking at so for less than four again.

I mean, just wait a week and it'll change again. But really depends on what this economy does. And nobody really knows. We really don't know today. It's soft. Two weeks ago, it was a runaway freight train. So the markets are confused, companies are confused.

And it leads to a problem, of course, for the average company, not Amazon or Microsoft or matter Google for the average company on what their capital spending should look like. And also when we applaud the concept of building manufacturing back in the United States, it's 13 of 160 million jobs today.

And we have a 4-point something percent unemployment rate. Hard to imagine how you can instantly produce manufacturing jobs in the manufacturing sector that doesn't have worked of course, add that with the deportation. Congress approved build, I guess, the last couple of days, it includes significant funds to support millions of people that will put pressure on wages again.

And of course, many of these people work in construction. So that also increases construction costs. So you'll see a lack of a rebound in construction. And these are the jobs that these people have taken, whether it's an Uber driver or construction job, landscaping job, agriculture job those are the jobs that many of these people have taken. So the good news is the markets are clearly bottomed. Now that's barring a runaway move in the 10-year.

But right now, it doesn't look like it's the case, though, obviously, Trump's policies, I think, by general consensus will increase the deficit especially if the Senate blocks, the spending cuts that the House has put in.

I want to talk about us now because I think the company is really in fantastic shape, probably has been in years. And even with our non-accrual loans, look at the balance sheet, 2.1 turns of leverage. It's down from almost a turn. We can easily borrow money, as Jeff said, and increase our leverage and increase our earnings power and we're going to, we're going to be aggressive on our lending book.

To take some things we didn't talk about. Our construction book was 24% of our loan book today, it's down to 3%. And forward fundings under those loans were 34% of our real estate book. Obviously, lending book today, it's 8%.

So we don't have any really -- and when you look at our -- how we've de-levered on our repo and there's a mentioned by Rina, the future funding required -- could be required on any margin calls that de minimis in the concept of the firm. So the company is really in a rock solid foundation with $1.8 billion of liquidity and may be better than we've ever been in that context.

And I think it's really exciting to see our businesses like the conduit to 17 securitizations, 17, that's more than one a month. That means we're just a manufacturing facility. We take in paper, we package it up, put it up, put a boat tie on it and sell it. We had a record year, and that continues actually into the new year, which is I'm pleased to see.

And then L&R now is, again, the largest servicer of the nation. That should bode well for future earnings from that subsidiary. Both of those businesses you know, are unique to us in the mortgage area and have enabled us to be the only mortgage REIT not to cut a dividend in the last 11 years, I guess, it's been the multifamily, every time we would foreclose, I kind of throw a little party, the lending group shows a little fit. Because I'd like to own these assets because we land 65% of cost typically.

And by definition, we're below replacement cost. And we all know that the multifamily markets will stabilize as the new supply is absorbed. It won't happen this year. there's still too much supply coming in this year, but it will fall off a cliff in 26, and you can see buyers positioning themselves probably multifamily cap rates are in 75 basis points already and probably we'll go further as the future growth becomes more apparent to more people, and you want to get in as late as you can, but not delay but just to pay up for the future growth in rents.

We also -- because LNR is so big, we will have, as we've always had a front row seat to the restructuring. It's a proprietary deal pipeline for us. It's unique to us and allows us to work with borrowers and offer them solutions to their borrowing issues, whether it's preferred or seniors or equity, we can play in that all those bases.

I think we'll wind up picking up our residential lending business again, which is a vertical that's been closed for quite some time. We'll be looking at that, looking at HPA and deciding soon with how much capital to deploy here.

SIF, our energy business, I mean really want to grow it dramatically it's been to get that keeps on giving, so good that the loans are being paid off pretty fast. And while rates are high, as everyone mentions, and all our peers have mentioned spreads have come in dramatically, they've crashed overall borrowing costs are probably pretty much where they are. And the CMBS markets are wide open. They had one of the biggest days in the history two weeks ago. and you can refinance pretty much anything in the CMBS market.

And you will, including office, by the way, the markets -- the market has accepted large refinancings of large office buildings, which are much harder to do in the private market. And that's good for us because all of us, including us have some exposure to the office markets. I want to say that with all these businesses growing, and I'll mention two other things we're doing. One, we've done our first massive data center loan.

We're going to make two more that we have in our book and our pipeline. This will be a big business for us. It's an infrastructure sleeve, I was asking, Jeff, we should called infrastructure or commercial real estate lending.

Are there unique loans, as you know, you're making a loan usually to a credit -- the best credits in the world, AAA credits. There are 15-year leases in place with bumps. And you're usually financing something like a 910 debt yield.

So these are great loans and the market is becoming very competitive, but we're finding ourselves as able to create the returns we need for our vehicle, making those loans too. So you'll see hopefully that business grow and grow and grow.

And of course, I think as we grow and add more diversity to the portfolio, and we've made it through this 500 basis point hurricane that the fed through to us the more we can actually convince the rating agencies to give us that investment-grade rating.

And we're a couple notches away, but we are the highest credit in the REIT world. And hopefully, that will translate into being ultimately like better loans at lower spreads and financing tighter than our peers and become a very powerful machine.

One other business that we've kind of put on hold is coming back into possibilities today is buying equity real estate. And I think it's one of the best investments Starwood Capital ever made was the 17,000, 15,000 homes, affordable housing units that are in as you know, we have nearly a $2 billion gain. We have no net equity invested today. and we could take that off at any time.

But it's a gift that keeps on giving with 8% trailing rent growth and 8% forecast for this year. There's no better place to have your investor your capital. Of course, you're always full. And I think Jeff has talked in the past about the built-in rent growth as these assets come off, they are affordable restrictions and then we negotiate moving them closer to market.

So we think we're really comfortable with that portfolio, and that would lead us to enter other businesses again, like triple net lease and other areas.

So we are looking on expanding our equity book. And again, we can do $3 billion to $4 billion of investments without issuing equity. We can do this just by increasing the leverage on the company at more normal levels, I'd say we're under leveraged today.

But we don't really have a need to borrow at the moment. But if the pipeline gets really big, we will be levering ourselves to probably a more normal level for us and not have one of the lowest leverage, it might be the lowest leverage ratio in the REIT universe. So I'm really pleased the team is intact. They're working hard. We're excited to be able to open going offense again as we have been for quarters, but this is full on open we're open.

We're actually losing deals again, which is not fun. Even office construction loans, we've lost a few, which is kind of funny and the spreads are good, but it is competitive. There are a lot of players today that want to put out private credit and real estate is one of those sleeves are history has been doing large deals. And because of our scale, we get that phone call.

And one of these data center deals, the mezz is $0.5 billion. There's not a lot of people you can call for that. So and we could take that whole thing down. So we're very -- we're pleased. I mean, I'm happy with where we are.

The good news also as we do resolve these non-accrual loans, which are way too big. And inevitably, we'll run into other problems in the portfolio all that money comes back and can go back into the earnings and there's available firepower, if you will.

And we're pretty excited about that possibility, and you can do the math yourself and figure out the earnings power. The goal of this is to not call us a real estate REITs. We want to be thought of as a finance company and in a REIT form, which is the most passionate. It's the most tax-efficient way to pay out our earnings. But we're a company.

Clearly, we're a company with multiple business lines, and we'll continue to add business lines. We have looked at buying some dust lenders, Jeff participating whether we should talk about it. We weren't competitive on one that's being sold now.

But there are other businesses that we're looking at to add to the portfolio and grow the other lines of business.

So with that, I think I'll stop and thank the operator. Pass it to the operator. Thank you.

(Operator Instructions)

Steven Laws from Raymond James.

Hi, good morning. A few topics I want to head on with Woodstar, first on the expense side, cost of renter operations a little higher in Q4. It looks like that's been the case the last couple of years. So is that seasonal and how do we think about that moving forward, and then on the interest expense, what's the remaining term on the debt there and how do you think about, what that's going to cost when you look to to refinance that?

Yes. Thanks, Steven, and I appreciate it. We have 2.5 years remaining debt there, and we will be opportunistic. We'll go early if the market gives us an opportunity, as we always have. If you look at the way we've treated our unsecured debt where we've gone were only a number of times we're going to do the same here when the market gives the window, but 2.5 years is plenty of runway.

And expenses were really up because of the hurricanes. There was some maintenance that needed to be done, and that is not run rate, but we expect that that will come back to run rate. And as Barry said, with 8% rent growth and probably another 8% coming next year with moderating expenses. I think we feel pretty good

This year, '25.

This year, '25. Yes.

Great. And then just as I think about the fair value mark, we typically have seen that take place in the second quarter around those annual rent increases. How do I get my hands around what drove that valuation gain this quarter. And how do I think about forecasting that as we move forward?

Yes. Thanks, Steven. I know it's probably difficult to look at the quarter where the 10-year went up in the fourth quarter. I'll note that it's down 27 basis points since year-end. In the second -- first, second and third quarter, we use desktop underwriting. In the fourth quarter every year, we get an appraisal.

The appraisal is a discounted cash flow method it backs into a 443 cap, which our portfolio premium from the appraisal would be equivalent of a 4.6% cap I have a list of the last 20 trades in this sector in Florida in our markets.

And the last 20 of them for significant size have a 4.6% blended cap. As Barry said, cap rates have come down and they are coming down and we're seeing tightening, and I would expect they will continue to come down.

Certainly, as we look at our desktop mark for next quarter, so being higher than the last 20 trades, which date back to '23 and have some of the higher cap rate assumptions in them based on the market being weaker than we feel like we're very much in the middle of the range. But the most important thing here is this is an appraisal. This is a discounted cash flow method, looking at assumptions over time.

I'll say on top of that, they look at the rent growth for this year, and we only effectively get half of that because it's only for six months. If you take all of that it's all of that, just the 3.8% that's been held back is worth about 19 basis points in comp.

So if I ask -- if I do six months, it's equivalent of 10 basis points. So the 4 million asset level cap that is effectively used in the appraisal is almost 4.78%. So we're 18 basis points above the average over the last 18 months, which should have gone down. So while it was tighter than where we were on a desktop basis, we feel really comfortable that it is where the market is today at worst.

Rick Shane with JPMorgan.

Hey guys. Thanks for taking my question this morning. Look, one of the anomalies in the market is that you guys are one of the opportunities, I should say, in the market, is that you guys are trading at a significant premium to virtually all of your peers and that creates an interesting arbitrage in terms of acquisition. When we normally raise this question, company's response is, hey, why do we want to buy anybody else's problems.

But the reality is that given our experience in terms of special servicing, it is analysis that you guys can do really thoughtfully and probably a lot of loans you've looked at in the past. Does it make sense to scale the business at this point by inorganic opportunities as well as the organic opportunities.

We're agnostic. I mean, any business plan that needs to return capital is accretive, we'll look at. I want to say we don't really have any peers. And we pay a whopping dividend and given the diversity of our business model and its historic ability to cover its dividend from whatever is 12 years or something, 13 years. I can't even keep track 2009. 14 years? 15 years?

So I mean, I think we should be trading at a dividend yield or 7.5%, not the 9.5% reflects broken companies basically that are completely busted or have cut their dividend. There's some of them are not continuing to cover their dividend. So yes, I mean, you could say that it's booked but then you have to believe us on our books. And maybe that is what it is. But the ability to pay a dividend that's too large given the risk inherent in the dividend.

I think that pushes us beyond book. And I think I think if we -- that's why I say we're a company not a REIT. And I know we're a REIT, but it is, if you look at it as a company with an efficient tax structure to pay out then we could and should trade away to a dividend yield that reflects the risk of our business model.

And I think we have -- we're in a really good position and perhaps we should look at other vehicles, which we have considered spinning out businesses and things which will not trade at the discount we do as a book, when we bought our SIP portfolio, our business, the GE Energy Lending business, we inherited, I think it's like a $2.5 billion book of loans. And we paid a lot we were moaning and growing that we've paid a lot.

And as that book paid off inevitably, it pretty much did, we replaced it with a book 3 times as good. I mean the higher spreads, better credits, much better financing, CLO financing, that's going to happen to our real estate book. You're going to wind up getting a bigger and bigger 2.0 book and less and less of a 1.0 book.

And like I guess as we trade where we trade because of when we made these loans. And otherwise, why would you have a 9.5% dividend yield? So I think we're way down with all the respect by the analyst community that just focuses on multiple to book.

And we ask you to look at the diversity of our business. The lending business is half of our business 54% of our assets. I mean there's no peer to that. You don't have anyone that comes close to that interline they don't look like us.

And yet you talk about them as the same as us, and we're totally different. And we have 300 employees in the release, like there's no one else has 300 employees in their REIT. So we are a company in a REIT form, and we're trying to build a diversified credit business.

I mean, Rick, I'd add to that and say our undepreciated book value was 1994. We were below that on Monday, right? And today, we're a little bit above that. we've averaged close to 1.2 times because of our diversified business model because we have businesses like Starwood Mortgage Capital and LNR that makes fee-based revenue, we should trade at a significant premium to our peers.

Some of the parts. We had one of the analysts that covers us in some of our peers last week put us on -- it made us to sell. I think it's our only sell and has wanted to buy and wanted to hold. And we were told in that note that we have the best management team and the best business model, but we trade too close to book value. I think that's a ridiculous statement.

We traded at 1.2. We have businesses that will perform on an ROE basis. We also have the ability to grow our book value. Woodstar is going to go up. Rents are going to go up. And if you look at forward book value, forward book value is going to be higher.

We have $700 million in reserves, about 5% of our book by taking the REO reserves that we've taken in asset-specific reserves and our general CECL reserve we could certainly undershoot that but that is our conservative number, right?

So why should we trade at or below book with these very accretive businesses with the ability to grow book value internally and with the fact that our Woodstar portfolio, which is a gift that keeps giving is going to keep going up in value for the next handful of years.

At a minimum, and as Barry just said, more likely rent increases across the board never mind just in this. So I think we're completely mispriced. If we were back at 1.2 would be $4 or $5 higher, but that's not management's job. That's for people on this call. But to determine, but we're going to grow the business significantly this year and try to improve it to earnings.

Guys, look, I appreciate your passion on this issue, and I'm not saying it's unfounded, but sort of going back to the original question, regardless of what your absolute multiple is, is at a significant premium to these other companies, call them peers, don't call them peers. Does it, in fact, take -- make sense to take advantage of that potential arbitrage at whatever level and acquire additional assets?

We'd love to acquire other companies at a discount, but they don't seem to want to do that. So we're going to grow as fast as we can. The fact is 10% of our assets are on US office. US office is still difficult. Our peers have significantly higher exposure to US office. So I would say I'd look into why they trade where they do rather than why we trade where we do. But we should be at a premium.

Jade Rahmani with KBW.

Thank you very much. Life science has been an area of significant challenge due to oversupply. And also the basis. Many of these projects that are spec are being looked at as conversions to office, because that's the cheapest option. The only problem is the rents are much lower per square foot in office. So could you just discuss the one life science downgrade you experienced and what the outlook is there?

Yes. Thanks, Jade. We've never really leaned in on life science. We saw all the conversion deals. We ended up doing one loan is under $100 million. It was in Boston in a great location in the Seaport. We still like our basis versus today's now lower rates.

If we can sign a lease somewhere near $90 a foot, which we believe the market is 92, we are out of that loan, but we need to find that lease. Life science is having a difficult run, as you said, because of supply. I've always joked that we don't need 3x as much lab space if we're not graduating 3x the scientists.

Going forward, I think it's more difficult than that. I think AI, if you look at a certain gene or something that you want to take on in the life sciences world, AI is going to take 20 possible conclusions and knock it down to or some smaller number.

And so I think the need for lab space is going to continue to go down. Fortunately, we probably have the least amount of life science exposure of any of our peers. We did that one get through, but we've had a similar reaction to yours that the basis is high. It's difficult to convert back to office.

And if you do, you're not going to return the equity and you may not return a loan balance, but these are difficult problems. And I think the market is going to become more aware that it's a more difficult sector than everybody thought it was a handful of years ago when we converted anything that didn't work as office, hoping to get higher rents. Thanks, Jade.

Yes. And then on new initiatives, GSE multifamily, I know it's a business that you've been interested in historically and maybe your uncertain about what the new administration does as to privatization and what the implications are there. Meantime, the existing assets generate really good servicing fees. So is there potentially a move in that direction without making a huge bet for a joint venture that you might be interested in?

Jade, you're a little distorted for us on the call. Did you say GSE multifamily? What are GSE multis?

Multifamily of (inaudible)

(inaudible) yes, we'd love to get one. You got one for us, Jade?

It's hard. There are certainly people that have reasons that they want to buy them brokers et cetera. We've tried now 3 times to buy one, Jade. You have to sort of buy one into, if the cap is $140 billion caps today, its Jenny and Freddie, but if we go through this privatization sort of what happens there, some people could argue -- would argue that although you're going to pay about 12 to 13 basis points more in a securitization for GPs that you will actually see them able to increase volume because that $140 billion has really been driven by mission, low-income housing type of green housing type of mandates.

So it would open it up for the GSE lenders. If we do that at a slightly higher cost, which is probably competitive with CMBS, but not as much inside of CMBS as it is today and certainly inside of where bridge vendors are. But it's a bridge lender, we're doing transitional assets, and these are not transitional properties.

These are properties with high cash flows that they are assuming are near the top of cash flows, which is why they're locking in 10-year debt. So we really like the business. getting licenses has been -- is difficult, adding brokers who you have to pay multiyear guarantees to go to a golf club and smooth, and we like being in the office 60 hours a week.

It's hard to justify having people that you're going to pay an awful lot of money for and not know for sure where the market is going. It's a balustrade if rates go down for us if we started one, but not having the legacy servicing portfolio if we started one de novo certainly makes it a little bit difficult if rates go up.

So we wrestle with these things. We've been competitive bidding on them. You asked about JV. Some of our peers have entered JVs. There's not a tremendous amount of volume that has come out of those JVs.

We've looked at them and ultimately, every time look, we end up getting somebody else's underwriting. And we don't like their underwriting as much as we like our own underwriting.

And so if they think we're getting in at 75 LTV, when we look at what they've done, we think they're getting it at 85 LTV and those JVs sort of sticky with something that I think is not psycho-agnostic that can actually underperform the book that we would put on our own in an unhealthy market.

So it's been a hard thing for us. We would love to grow. We have a lot of other places to grow that our peers don't, right? Our energy infrastructure business is great.

Barry said we want to start getting back into resi that we want to potentially start adding property again. And we're going to have a great year in CRE lending. So we have plenty of places to put money out. We struggle with this one, we'd love to own one the cost of entry is high and we will continue to look at every one of them that come. And we'll continue to look at JVs, but they have to be on our credit terms, not in someone else's credit box.

Doug Harter with UBS.

Thanks. Hi, you talked about expanding owned -- getting back into buying properties. Do you think that would come with selling down some of the existing or would that just be in deploying some of the excess liquidity that you have today?

Yes. If we started buying properties, would we use our excess liquidity? Or would we look to sell down any of our existing properties?

Sorry, his mic wasn't on. First, we use our excess liquidity that's the most accretive way to an issue unsecured to do so if we didn't -- obviously, we have $1 billion of cash and other availability. So it's not for the foreseeable future.

But yes, we would not need to sell anything to buy something. I don't think. We do look at, as Jeff mentioned, that office building of 1210 in D.C., I've toured it myself. I mean it's a really good resi conversion. So -- and we've decided we want to do it or have outside to it. We've made a lot of money in the RO business historically.

So where we think the investments are sound. We've taken some serious hits on an office building in Houston that didn't -- we got blocked by a tenant that wouldn't leave. We had a pretty nifty deal crafted for that building.

But then would leave and we had to sell it as an off building that's unfortunate the user showed up. So it's pretty good, but it's not anywhere near the loan balance. But again, this money went out and you look at our balance sheet is where we stand today. We have a liquidity. I think we have an adequate CECL reserve, and we have quite a large amount of capacity, both liquid and then levering.

So we have billions of things we can do before we have to bother stuff. If the markets show up, if there are great opportunities when people approach us to buy something and tracker, just sell it, of course, we thought we also have Blackstone Mortgage Trust announced they're getting into net lease.

We're really happy they are. We love all of our peers to be diversified. It would be great for the sector to see more stable earnings across the board. That's something we've looked at. And if you look at the REITs on the triple-net side, like AN or whatever, they're cap rate, I think, on their more recent acquisitions.

I think that is something we could make work accretively and would actually have positive financing leverage and get you or something like that. I'm a little afraid 56% of the triple-net business is industrial and a lot of the rest is gas stations and bank branches and whatever.

And when you have a great credit, you have to pay up for the credit. And I think if that brings it below a 6.25% cap rate or so it's very difficult for us to justify versus our elevated dividend today. If we get our dividend down, I'd love to do those high credit deals.

I'm not sure we're ready to wait into lower credit deals to sort of chase mid-7s cap rates today. I think the market on the things we like are 100 basis points or so tight, but we have a group that Starwood Capital group that has been looking and will continue to look and continue to show up opportunities, but that's an obvious place where we could potentially add some more exposure there going forward.

Great. Thank you.

Don Fandetti with Wells Fargo.

Can you talk about the Washington, D.C. office and multifamily market? I mean more people coming to work, but potentially fewer people kind of how you're thinking about that area?

Well, we have one building, I think, in Virginia and two in D.C., which includes the 1201.

Yes, that would have been true.

Yes. So it's not good. We don't know what's going to happen there. I mean, even last night or this morning, I heard that they were firing 65% of the EPA, and they changed the lower expenses by 60%. And not necessarily fire that many people. You have two countervailing forces return to work, which is really good, and people will show up in D.C., it will be good for retail at grade, the coffee shops, the and maps and the tenants at the base of our buildings we'll have a field day. But we don't know yet really the outcome. It's not good for the D.C. office market. I don't know how you could say it would be. We do have some pretty good tenancy and duration of tenants in our properties.

So we're 84% leased on our biggest loan in D.C. and in our other loan in D.C. just had another re-up. So those two aren't terrible. Our Virginia asset, we signed two leases this quarter, but I think it's only 64% leased. So that's probably more difficult, but it's a much smaller loan at $120 million. But our two larger DCs, we certainly are hoping that the government isn't completely shuttered for new leases because that market is certainly very dependent on GSA leases. And you just haven't seen them sign in the last years. So we need to get back to work, and it's great to see people coming back to work and being forced to work and that could give some breeds to the market. But we're watching it like you are.

If I had to guess, sort of interesting. I mean my guess is you'll have these layoffs. They'll hit different sectors of the government differently. Many of these people being laid off or being laid up in government owned buildings and government they may come back on the market. I don't know. And then my guess is you'll be rehiring to fill the -- as they had to do with air traffic control people. And I'm not sure American knows that park ranges are getting laid off. National parks will have no one in them this summer. I think most people, including me, are super in favor of cutting government waste and bringing accountability to the federal government.

It's actually the 50 million people employed by government only $3 million are federal it's really the municipality states where the bureaucracy continues to be an impediment to construction development, and you shouldn't have to get take 18 months to get a permit. And that we'll see how that work shakes out of any of this trickles out of federal government into the regional local municipalities and states because it is I mean it is ridiculous. How long it takes to get a permit. Of course, that's all built into the system. But if you want to fix the housing crisis, you can't ask people to wait 18 months to get your permits and then the building departments are lethal.

So it will change slowly. So some of them it's really good. We went in one direction with going in the other direction now. And -- but I firmly believe capital is in these guardrails. So it cannot be left to its own. It will be CapEx as we did in '07, '08. So we'll see how this lays out.

And we gave you a sense that we only have, I think, $144 million of margin call eligible credit mark eligible repo on our lending book the two assets in D.C. and the one in Virginia, I don't think have any going to confirm that now, but I think we don't have -- we've paid off completely on one of them, and I don't think we have any repo debt left on any of the three. So if it gets worse, it's not going to cause. It's not going to be a liquidity problem. It's going to be figuring out our exit time line, which may be longer.

Got it. Thanks.

We've reached the end of the question-and-answer session. I'd now like to turn the call back over to Barry Sternlicht for closing comments.

Thanks everyone for joining us today, and good luck in this fascinating environment we're in, and we wish you well, and we'll see you next quarter. Thanks.