Mike Mazzei
Chief Executive Officer
Thank you, Matt, and welcome – welcome to our coverage universe. Look forward to working with you. So the vision is – the vision can be a long answer. Let me start by kind of giving you a summary of where we are right now. So where we are, is in terms of earnings we're going to like the trough part of the earnings point in our growth. Why we a trough? We're trough because we have peak liquidity, right? We've had more cash than we've ever had, and we're working it down. We're starting to originate loans. We've originated $1 billion and so that is going to pull us out of the trough as well. The internalization has done, Frank, mentioned the economics of that in terms of adding to earnings. And then we mentioned that we are starting a process for what will be our second CLO probably sometime in the early third quarter. And we've now identified assets and I spoke about this in my remarks, these underperforming assets or non-earning assets that we're going to be focusing on largely due to COVID impacted assets. So that's where we are in terms of right now and why we feel like we're on the trough of earnings and coming out. In terms of the vision, I hate to disappoint you it’s kind of simple. We just – we want to transition this balance sheet and this company to becoming a pear and what we consider the best-in-class commercial mortgage REIT in our set. Now, I'm not going to tell you what I think the best-in-class, or don't want to insult anybody by leaving them out. We want to evolve this balance sheet into more of a pure play, commercial mortgage balance sheet with predictable earnings and predictable credit going forward. This management team has signed on for trying to accomplish this in 2021 fully and this is our eight month goal. How we do it as we're going to – wit the things involved we have to obviously grow our earnings. We have to improve our ROA and this is really also largely entails the rotation of the asset base and continuing to rotate the asset base as we've been doing mostly into first mortgage bridge loans. So now how – that's kind of a what? We want to be best among the best-in-class, pure play commercial mortgage REIT and the how we get there. And we alluded to some of this in the prepared remarks, we continue to deploy cash into first mortgages and now selective mezz and expand the property types that we're looking at. We've done $1 billion so far, and we continue to evolve the balance sheet into a pure play commercial mortgage. I think 90% of what we've done out of the 30-plus loans has been multifamily acquisition loans, average loan size around $30-ish million. We mentioned again, we want to execute on our second CLO to maneuver into non-request financing that will probably also boost earnings a few cents. We looked to tee that up now for the – as I said mid-summer and hopefully get another one done. Maybe late Q4 were very, very early in Q1. And then the balance of that is really what I would call really the game changer for CLNC in 2021. And the game changer is turning the current non-earning assets around. And we can do that in a, in a couple of ways. One, we could simply get assets off the bench and on the field and producing revenue again, and financed again, and Fairmont, San Jose is a great example of that. It's an asset where the borrowers and bankruptcy the loans are non-accrual, we're pulling it off of its financings. And so if we could turn that asset into an earning asset again and get it financed, that means a lot. And we're looking to do that and we're working closely with that borrower. And another way is just simply repatriating capital on a non-earning assets by monetizing them in some way. And then we invest in those – the monetization of those assets into new loans. An example of that would be for instance Century Plaza. They're in the process of trying to sell the hotel at Century Plaza right now and the condo towers are being completed. And if that hotel is successfully sold, it'll pay down the debt substantially. And then that we may unlock value for us and the ability to monetize. So this last step of dealing with the non-earning, it really counts as a full game one, you're turning assets into earning assets, or are you turning cash into new assets? And also with result is on the cash balance side, it gives you more visibility into the cash that you need, or I should say that you don't need to defend these assets any long. And then once you're able to understand what cash you no longer need to sit on, you then unlock that cash and you invest it. And so we're no longer sitting on too much idle cash, and it gives us the confidence to get down to more of an operating level of cash. And so I'll close with what's the math – the basic math around that we want to operate the company, say with two, three CLOs outstanding, a couple of several billion dollars. We probably need – call it a bucket a quarter of cash, $125 million of cash plus our undrawn revolver. Right now we're sitting on about $330 million in cash and so if you get that down and what you got $200 million cash to spend, as soon as you know that we're spending part of it now, and we'll spend the rest of it. When we know that we've got these assets protected. And then you got something like Century Plaza, which is $97 million in market value. And let's say, you can unbridle that because good things happen at the asset over the course of the summer. And then you've got Fairmont, San Jose which in and of itself is $180 million, that's going on encumbered. And if you can get that earning again and then maybe finance it at 50% advance rate and produce another $90 million in liquidity, you're looking at $200 million plus $100 million plus $90 million, you're looking at close to $400 million and liquidity. And you put a 10.5 on that, and it’s or 11 it's like $0.35, $0.40. And so to summarize and I'm sorry for being longwinded, we want to transition the balance sheet; we are doing that in to a pure play. We want to be best-in-class among what we are is in our pure peer set. We – this is the roadmap, how to get there? We're doing most of it now. We just need to turn these non-earning assets and monetize them, we will get them earning again and lock the last portion of our earnings.