Michael Nierenberg
Analyst · Barclays. Your line is open
Thanks, Mandy. Good morning everyone and thanks for joining our second quarter earnings call. For the quarter, I think we had a terrific quarter and we continue to do all we can to deliver consistent earnings, while maintaining and hopefully growing our dividend overtime. And despite all the volatility that we saw in the market and the uncertainty following Brexit, again we’re very proud of our results. For the quarter we saw global [indiscernible] following Brexit and yields in all fixed income assets headed lower. We saw spreads on mortgage assets tightened as fixed income investors search for yield. Just to give a sense on some yields. On a year-over-year comparison, in June of 2015 the 10-Year Treasury rate was 2.35%. One year later, at the end of June in 2016, it was 1.47%. So obviously, we saw a very big rally in the treasury market. The 30-Year Mortgage rate, for comparison at the end of June in 2015 was 4.02% and at the end of Q2 in 2016 was 3.48%, so again a very big rally in mortgage rates. For us our core investment strategy performed very well despite the challenging markets. During the quarter, we invested $233 million of capital with most of that targeting the Non-Agency mortgage market. We bought Non-Agency mortgage securities in which we own the associated call rights. For the quarter, our Non-Agency business did extremely well. We had an unrealized gain of approximately $68 million, which increased our book value by $0.30 per share. Our advance business continues to perform like we thought it would. Advance balance continue come down as delinquencies trend lower. For the year advance balances are lower by 13% since January 1. In our MSR segment, despite seeing the lowest mortgage rates we’ve seen since May of 2013, our portfolio outperformed the market as we own very seasoned and more credit impaired MSRs in the broader market. Our recapture agreements with our servicing partners also provide insurance for our portfolio. On the consumer front, our consumer loan portfolio has been terrific, outperforming underwriting as charge-offs and delinquencies are much lower than our initial underwriting. To give you a sense, when we initially purchased the consumer portfolio in May of 2013, charge-offs were approximately 12%, today they’re between 5% and 6%. So overall, that portfolio has performed extremely well. So now I’m going to refer to the supplement which has been posted online and after that we’ll open up for some questions. Currently, New Residential trades at approximately 13% - I’m on page 2. On page 2, our dividend yield is approximately 13%; our market capital is $3.2 billion. As I’ve been pretty well for weeks [ph], set out on a mission to become licensed to own MSRs in all states. We’re currently licensed in 49 states, we’re also licensed to own Fannie Mae MSRs, we also have approvals from FHA to FHA MSRs. Our Excess MSR portfolio is $371 billion and we own associated call rights on a Non-Agency mortgage market of approximately $175 billion. Our GAAP income for the quarter was $68.7 million or $0.30 per diluted share. Our core earnings were $119.6 million or $0.52 per diluted share. We paid a quarterly dividend of $0.46 per common share. On page 4, New Residential Today, if you take a look to the right side of the page, our excess MSR portfolio net of financing is currently $1.358 billion or including financing is about $1.65 billion. Our servicer advance portfolio is $205 million, our residential securities and where we own the associated call rights is approximately $792 million. Our consumer loan portfolio and residential loan portfolio is $311 million. We have cash at the end of Q2 of $234 million. For the quarter in our Non-Agency business, we executed clean-up call rights on 12 seasoned Non-Agency deals totaling $291 million. We then completed our seventh Non-Agency securitization totaling $306 in May. As I pointed out earlier we increased our Non-Agency RMBS position growing our net equity from $374 million dollars at the end of the year to $715 million as of the end of Q2. And then the valuation of our Non-Agency securities increased by $68 million during the quarter from mark-to-market gains and again that increased our book value by $0.30 per share. On the excess MSR front, as I pointed out earlier, we are now eligible own to MSRs in 49 states. That is up from 46 states in Q1 and we are also licensed. We have Fannie Mae approvals to own MSRs as well as FHA approvals to own MSRs. We expect to be licensed in the other state, most likely over the course of the next 30 days and I am looking to discuss that a little bit later. On our portfolio, we have been very vocal about our investment strategy of owning legacy credit impaired seasoned mortgages, so as a result when you look at our next CPRs on the quarter, our net CPR increased by 1.8% compared to an average industry average of 4.8%. We also in the quarter secured two new financing facilities, one for $300 million and one for $225 million. And on the servicer advance front as I pointed out earlier our service or advance balances were down 13% year to date. We started the year at $7.6 billion. We are now at $6.6 billion as of the end of Q2. Also our advance to UPB ratio declined from 3.4% in Q4 of 15 to 3.2% at the end of Q2. And then we continue to do all we can to improve our advance rates, lower our cost to funds and increase financing capacity around our servicer advance business. I’m now going to take you through our portfolio update, which I’ll begin with on page seven. On our excess MSRs, what sets us apart from the rest? Our total portfolio is $371 billion and a couple of things I would like to point out to you on this page. If you take a look, our portfolio is seasoned now. Our weighted average seasoning is 115 months or a little bit more than 10-year seasoned on our portfolio. Our current LTV is 83%, our current FICO is 662 and our delinquency ratio is 14%. As you take a look to the right side of the page, our average loan size is smaller than the industry average. We have a 155,000 average loan size versus 197. Then if you look at the other metrics on the right FICO as I pointed out 662 versus 731 and again our LTV is 83 versus 78. All of these things explain why our speeds are going too much slower than the industry average. As you take a look at page eight, I pointed out earlier; the mortgage rate at the end of June was 3.48% versus 4.02%. If you take a look at year-over-year, our net CPR is almost identical, it’s roughly 13%. So again the nature of our portfolio being very seasoned, credit impaired typically higher LTV is going to protect us during periods of time when the treasury market rallies like we have seen and mortgage rates rally like we’ve seen. The other thing to note is again, on almost all of our MSRs we have, recaptured provisions in place with our different servicers. On page nine, our servicer advance portfolio; that will continue to come down over time as these loans continue to season and the delinquency profile of the portfolio cleans up. Pointed out earlier $6.6 billion is our total advanced portfolio versus $7.6 at the end of the year. Total equity is $204 million; you may ask, why did that go up in the quarter? What we did is we had excess liquidity in our portfolio, so we paid down some of our advanced financing and as a result that increased the amount of equity that we had in our advance business. Life-to-date IRR of 25% and we believe that should continue to perform extremely well again as delinquencies come down and portfolio continue to season further. One page 10, this is our typical illustration where we talk about how our deal collapse opportunity works and what the associated P&L is as a result of this. Again it is an illustrative transaction, $565 million we purchased underlying bonds at a discount. We then execute the call rights, where we buy the collateral and the associated advances at par. We then sell or re-securitize the performing loans at a premium and then we retain the distress loans and modify or liquidate those over time. Typically our P&L has been something around 2 points on each transaction we have done, while saying that there is no guarantee what that will be going forward, but we are very optimistic on that business. On page 11, again this is our slide where we talk about what the pipeline looks like, what are some of the key drivers and how we are going to accelerate our call pipeline. Currently we own call rights on approximately 175 billion UPB of the Non-Agency mortgage market that is a very, very significant amount of the legacy Non-Agency mortgage market. Over the course of the past two years, we’ve seen delinquencies decline by about 4% from 22% to 18%. We do expect this to continue over time, that will help us accelerate timelines and improve our ability to call Non-Agency deals, not necessarily one by one in a quarter, but hopefully do some significant size. Currently our callable pipeline is about $30 billion and again overtime we will do all we can to try to figure out a way to accelerate that. As I pointed out on earlier earnings calls, I do believe this is going to be not NRZ specific, but it is going to be a broader industry effort to be able to do that and we look forward to working with our partners in the industry to accelerate those timelines and clean up the legacy Non-Agency mortgage market. On page 12, we talk about our consumer loan portfolio, just some highlights. In April of 2013, we invested $241 million to purchase 30% interest in a $3.9 billion UPB consumer loan portfolio, to date we haven’t got a back a little bit over $515 million on that investment. If you recall back in March of 2016, we increased our position in that SpringCastle JV from 30% to 54% by investing roughly another $55 million to capital there. The life-to-date IRR is 90% obviously, we would like to find more of those for you guys, but there are few and far between and as I pointed out earlier charge-offs are running much lower than our initial underwriting. Currently at the end of June, they were 5.2%. If you look at acquisition I pointed out earlier they were 12%. So overall we are very excited about that portfolio and we believe we should see continued excellent performance from that business and portfolio. One page 13, we discussed our funding platform. We will continue to do all we can to increase liquidity in and around our business. We currently have over 21 different financing counter parties. We have facilities from Repo facilities and bank facilities to variable funding notes around our advance business and we also have term debt where we issue term securities. During the quarter I pointed out, we did two financing facilities around excess MSRs, one is for $300 million on Non-Agency MSRs and the other is for $225 million around agency MSRs. I do want to point out on the $300 million facility I think we’ve drawn about roughly $100 million of liquidity on that facility, so we still have plenty of liquidity left in that facility as well as in our business. Page 14, we discuss where we are from a state perspective. I think this is pretty clear, there is one remaining state that we expect to get approval from that is California. We hope to obtain that approval over the course of the next 30 days. We are currently licensed by Fannie Mae and FHA. We are working with Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae. There is a real thesis of what we are doing here is, we want to one, maintain flexibility in our business; two, protect our interest in every MSR that we own and three, have the ability to acquire MSRs and diversify our servicing partners over time. One page 15, we talk about the second half of ‘16. As you take a look, one of the things that we are extremely vigilant in doing, every day we come in and we try to make sure, we do all we can to maintain and grow our dividends in our business. As you take a look over the past four quarters, we continue to pay $0.46. We’ll do what we can to continue to do that over time. The core business is going to remain the same. We will be licensed, we believe in all 50 states shortly. We are going to try to increase our Non-Agency call rates execution and accelerate those time lines. As I point out, I do think it is a bigger effort and just NRZ at this point. The MSR pipeline is extremely robust and significant, more so now than we have seen and over the course of the past couple of years there’s been a lot of chattering and there has been a lot of - some of our non-bank servicers who have announced strategic decisions to actually sell MSRs. We are in the middle of lot of different things and hopefully we could execute on the MSR pipelines. We are going to diversify and increase our funding vehicles and our funding partners and then we will continue to explore, what I would call opportunistic investments in the market place. So with that will turn it back to the Operator and open it up for questions.