Ivan Kaufman
Analyst · JMP Securities. Please go ahead
Thank you, Paul, and thanks to everyone for joining us on today's call. We're very excited today to discuss the significant success we had in closing out what was an exceptional 2021 as well as our plans and outlook for 2022, which we are confident will be another outstanding year. As you can see from this morning's press release, we had another record quarter and 2021's results reflect one of our best years as a public company. It is very important to continue to emphasize the value of having multiple products with diverse income streams, which has allowed us to consistently grow our earnings and dividends in all cycles while maintaining a very low dividend payout ratio. We strategically built an annuity-based business model, creating multiple income streams from a single investment. As a result, not only do we generate strong risk adjusted returns on our capital, which positively affect our current earnings, more importantly we are also building a much higher quality future earnings and dividend growth story by ensuring that our assets will provide us with multiple other products in the future. And this is one of the major differentiators of our business platform, which is why we strongly believe we should consistently trade at a substantial premium and much lower dividend yield than anyone in our peer group. In fact, with the recent pullback in the market, we are now trading at a dividend yield of approximately 8.8%, which is actually higher than the yield of our peer group for the first time in several years. This is despite the significant advantages of our business model and a long track record of consistent dividend increases compared to our peers, most of which have been unable to grow their dividends. We strongly – we feel strongly that our current stock price in no way reflects the true value of our franchise presenting investors with an unparalleled buying opportunity. As described in this morning's press release, our record fourth quarter results combined with a very positive outlook on the long-term growth of our platform has allowed us to once again increase our dividend to $0.37 a share. This is our seventh consecutive quarterly dividend increase and our tenth consecutive year with consistent dividend growth, putting us in a very elite class of companies all while continuing to maintain the lowest dividend payout ratio in the industry. We built a premium operating platform that is focused on the right asset classes and a very stable liability structures. We have a thriving balance sheet, GSE agency, private-label, single family rental as well as an industry leader securitization platform that allowed us to produce a long track record of exceptional performance with consistent earnings and dividend growth. As a result, we've been the top performing REIT in our space for five consecutive years now in all the major performance metrics including earnings and dividend growth, ROE and total shareholder return. And again, we are very well positioned to succeed in every market cycle, which gives us great confidence and our ability to continue to have tremendous success going forward. Before we discuss the details of our quarterly results, I want to highlight some of our more notable 2021 accomplishments, which include generating substantial growth in our earnings allowing us to increase our dividend 4x or 12% to an annual run rate of $1.48 a share delivering total shareholder return of 39% in 2021 and 221% cumulatively for the last five years with an annualized return of 26% achieving industry leading ROEs of 90% for each of the last two years producing record originations of $16 billion, a 76% increase over last year, originating $10 billion of new balance sheet business increasing our portfolio 122% in 2021 to $12.2 billion, producing private-label originations of $1.4 billion, a 276% increase over the last year, growing our servicing portfolio to $27 billion, a 10% increase from 2020 and a 34% increase over the last three years, closing four non-recourse CLO securitizations totaling $5.2 billion and two private-label securitizations for $1 billion through our industry-leading securitization platform and raising $1.7 billion of accretive capital to fund our balance sheet growth and increase our market cap to over $3 billion. Turning now to our fourth quarter performance, as Paul will discuss in more detail, our quarterly financial results were once again remarkable. We produced distributable earnings of $0.62 per share, which is well in excess of our current dividend representing a payout ratio of around 60% for the fourth quarter and 70% for the full year 2021. In our balance sheet lending business, we have another outstanding quarter producing record volumes of $4.3 billion. We're a top balance sheet lender in the industry and are seeing tremendous growth in efficiencies as we continue to scale our platform. As a result, we grew our balance sheet book 122% in 2021 to $12.2 billion on record originations of $9.7 billion and we have a very large pipeline, which gives us great confidence in our ability to continue to meaningfully grow our loan book in 2022. And again, these balance sheet loans create significant value for our platform as they are not only accretive to our current earnings and dividends, but also allows us to build a pipeline for two to three years of new GSE agency and private label loans that produce additional long dated income streams, ensuring the long-term growth of our platform and creating high quality earnings and dividends for the future. We have consistently been a leader in the CLO securitization market as finance our high quality balance sheet portfolio with the appropriate liability structures continues to be one of our key business strategies. We are very successful in continuing to access the CLO securitization market in 2021, including closing our largest CLO to date totaling $2.1 billion in the fourth quarter, as well as closing another $2 billion CLO just last week. The utilization of these vehicles has contributed greatly to our success by allowing us to appropriately match fund our assets with non-recourse non market-to-market long dated debt and generate attractive lever returns on our capital. We continue to experience strong growth in our GSE agency and private label business programs as well. We originated approximately $1.6 billion in agency loans in the fourth quarter and $1.9 billion, including our private label business, equally as important, we have a robust pipeline giving us confidence our ability to continue to produce consistent agency volume in 2022. Our GSE agency platform continues to offer premium value as it requires limited capital and generates significant long dated predictable income streams that produces significant annual cash flow. Additionally, our $27 billion GSE agency service and portfolio, which has grown 10% in the last year is mostly prepayment protected and generates approximately $121 million a year and growing and reoccurring cash flow, which is up 8% from a $112 million annually last year. This is in addition to the strong gain on sale margins we continue to generate from our originations platform, which combined with new and increasing servicing revenues will continue to contribute greatly to our earnings and dividends. And earlier this week, we were pleased to have closed our fourth private label securitization totaling $490 million, which continues to demonstrate the strength and diversity of our versatile lending platform and tremendous securitization expertise. We also had a great year in our single-family rental platform. We produced approximately $900 million of volume in 2021, including approximately $400 million in the fourth quarter. Additionally, we currently have over $1 billion of additional deals in our pipeline, making us optimistic about the growth opportunities in this segment of our business going forward. We are a leader in the build-to-rent space, which provides us with the opportunity to originate construction bridge and permanent loans on the same transactions. And again, similar to our balance sheet business, this platform provides us yet with a path to future transactions that will produce additional long dated income streams. In reflecting on 2021, we had an exceptional year and clearly outperformed our peer group. We are the best performing REIT, five years in a row delivering a 26% annualized return over the same time period. We are also well positioned for continued success in 2022 to our unique multi-tiered annuity based operating platform that provides us with a future annuity of high quality long dated income trend making us confident in our ability to continue to grow our earnings and dividends and significantly outperform our peers. I will now turn the call over to Paul to take you through the financial results.