Michael Nierenberg
Analyst · KBW. Your line is open
Thanks, Mandy. Good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining our earnings call. I was getting ready for this earnings call, I was looking back to our Q4 earnings call and the comments and we did that call in February and quite frankly from February to where we are today, there's really not a lot of that has changed despite some of the deal political and the things that have occurred in the world. For the quarter we had a really good quarter. The business performed very well, quite frankly like it should. Our portfolio performance was excellent and our investment thesis continues to create terrific value for our shareholders, where we are and based on our view of the current interest rate environment I feel like we’re in great shape. Activity levels overall during Q1 were fairly muted as the investment opportunities, quite frankly are just not that abundant. As I mentioned on our prior earnings call, the abundance of capital continues to create an environment where most asset classes are fully priced and do not offer a ton of great value for shareholders. Our $540 billion MSR portfolio and $140 billion call right portfolio make us a very, very unique company. Quite frankly, you can’t can replicate this company. As we move forward we continue to have plenty of liquidity and access to the capital markets, should we have something that we need to be investing in we will do so. As we move to the supplement, we tried to simplify our business a little bit and we put some glossary of terms in there, so as I walk through the supplement, I hope that this makes it a little bit more self-explanatory. I’ll now refer to the supplement, which has been posted online and I’m now going to begin on Page 2. Currently NRZ we are obviously a mortgage REIT and we have a market cap of $5.7 billion. As you look to the right side of the page, there’s a little bit of a highlight reel from ’17, but our ’17 numbers we had 24% return on activity, our total return was 26% and again I still want to highlight the two large asset classes that we have, one is the $540 billion MSR portfolio and then our call right portfolio of $140 billion. The other thing I want to point out, our book value, which we reported at the end of Q4 at $15.26 is now $16.85. So again, very good performance. On page three for the quarter, our GAAP net income number $604 million or $1.81 per diluted share. Our core earnings $195 million or $0.58 per diluted share and our dividend $160 million or $0.50 per diluted share. So again, very good performance and as I pointed out earlier, the portfolio continues to perform like we think it should and in this kind of interest of environment. On page four, couple of things to point out here, one is we are a leading capital provider to the U.S. mortgage industry. If you think about the amount of one home-owners that we touched due to servicing business, two, the counterparties that we have in this servicing business, I believe we play a very important role in the U.S. housing market. The asset classes again and try to simplify our business, mortgage servicing rights with advances non-agency mortgage securities that we purchased where we have the associated call rights and we make opportunistic investments. As you could see on this page, we try to define the different terms that we use when we speak about our business. On the right side of the page from an opportunistic standpoint, in November we announced the acquisition of Shellpoint Partners, that is a full-scale mortgage origination and servicing business and I think we’re going to have a lot of optionality in that business continues to perform well and I’ll talk to that in a little bit. On page five, again a little bit more of a highlight reel. The most important thing I want to continue to point out, different type of company, setup extremely well for the current interest rate environment, growth in book value, stable core earnings and then we try to take our capital and be as opportunistic in nature as possible and then the bottom part of the page you could see 2015 the HLSS was a transformational deal for our Company, 2016 we became fully licensed we’re about to acquire MSRs independently from our different servicing partners, 2017 we made some large bulk acquisitions from a number of different counterparties including Citi Mortgage. 2017 we joined a four-member consortium with Jefferies, Third Point and Soros and agreed to buy consumer loans as well as get equity in the company of about 6% to 7% and then in 2017 we acquired Shellpoint. On page six, Shellpoint today. Shellpoint is again a full-scale mortgage servicer and an originator and it's got an ancillary business with title and an appraisal business. On the mortgage servicing side, Shellpoint today services a little over $50 billion in mortgages of which 35 plus billion are third-party servicing. As we look forward Shellpoint will continue to focus on its third-party business, it will not become for example the size of a nation store, we think it's very important for Shellpoint to maintain its independence and focus on its third-party business which is been very fruitful for both the third-party as well as for Shellpoint. On the origination side, last year Shellpoint did $6 billion, we expect that to do something between $8 billion and $10 billion this year and turn the business into a profitable business and then its rated by S&P, Moody’s and Fitch and fully approved by Fannie Freddie and once the acquisition closes between NRZ and Shellpoint we expect to be fully licensed by Ginnie as well. Page 7 is just really on how we see the market and this page on the bunch of Fed speak. We think Fed is going to go at least another two times maybe as many three times this year. What does that mean for us. If you flip to page 8, I can talk in each after class, what that means to use a shareholder and how we think about our business. MSRs is one of the few fixed income assets that were actually increasing value as rate rise. So, when you look at the quarter, we had some large gap numbers that we can talk to in a little bit. Some of that’s due to MSRs, some of that due to some of the conversions from excess MSRs to full MSRs. But in general, in a higher interest rate environment having $540 billion portfolio off MSRs, should do extremely well for our shareholders. Servicer advances as you look to and we will talk to each bucket shortly. As you look to the servicer advance portfolio, the amount of equity, we have in that business today is a 146 million. The team at NRZ has done a fantastic job financing that asset in the capital markets along with our bank partners. So, it’s really a less important part of our business today. And when you think about it as home owners continue to clean-up and delinquencies continue to trend lower the amount of servicer advances outstanding will likely decrease. On a non-agency securities and call rights 94% of our business are floating rate. So as the Fed rates is raised, we’re going to achieve higher net interest income. And on the other portions of our business that had fixed rate components to the underlying assets, we used interest rate hedges to hedge out that interest rate risk. On a loan and consumer loan business. On the loan side, most of our loans are a higher coupon, very short duration assets, for example 5.5% or 6% coupons. So even in the current interest rate environment where you have Fed funds around one and three quarters. So, you have LIBOR 190, the amount of net interest income on that portfolio continues to be extremely high and then where we have situations where our fixed rate assets have lower coupon, we have interest rate hedges on our balance sheet to protect us against higher rates. Overall, we think, we’re in a great position for the current interest rate environment. Now, if you click to page 10, I’ll just take you through the different asset classes, the amount of equity we currently have in our business. And then I’ll wrap up on page 11 and then open it up for questions. On MSRs, which are both excess info, our net investment amount is $3 billion, our growth investment amount is a little bit over $5 billion. Servicer advances I just pointed out, our net investment is $146 million. When you look at our residential securities and call rights we have approximately $1.5 billion of net equity there, which has been pretty consistent with where we’ve been in prior quarters. On a residential loan portfolio, you’ll see our net equity of $725 million, while that’s up a little bit, the recent that’s up a little bit is because we paid down a little bit of our debt there with some of our excess cash on our balance sheet and then our consumer loan portfolio, you’ll see is a $112 million. Finally, our cash amount at the end of Q1 was $233 million. Now on page 11 talking about Q1 and then some of the recent activity levels we had. In general, we were, I think our investment activities as I pointed out earlier were fairly muted, there wasn’t a lot to do in the markets that we thought would add a lot of value to our shareholders. We did acquire $38 billion of MSRs during the quarter and then we've also agreed in principle to acquire up to another $30 billion subsequent to the end of Q1. In January we paid Ocwen, a restructuring fee of $280 million to obtain the remaining rights to the MSRs on our legacy non-agency portfolio at Ocwen services that totals [$87 million] and then we also priced two fixed rate MSR notes in January and February, totaling $930 million at a weighted average cost of funds of 3.6%. I think this is very important to note, as you think about the size of our MSR portfolio, one of the things that we've been very, very focused on is converting our floating rate financing to fixed rate financing, if you recall going back to 2016 and 2017, we did that in our servicing advanced portfolio and as the MSR markets continued to mature we're seeing a much more receptive investor base to be able to issue debt backed by our MSRs so that we think that’s a very good transfer for our business and going forward. We executed 32 seasons, non-agent clean-up cost and 32 season, non-agency deals that was about $500 million during the quarter. We completed the $700 million securitization in January and during the quarter, we purchased a little under $700 million on non-agency RMBS, bringing our net equity again to give or take $1.5 billion. Our Servicer Advance business, totaled about $4 billion as I pointed out in prior earnings calls, at their peak I think it was a little over $8 billion, really that’s just indicative of, one, the seasoning of the portfolio, two, is as the homeowner continues to heal and three is, delinquent loans continue to work their way through the pipeline. On the consumer side, it’s really just executing on our current portfolio prosper, the amount of equity that we have invested in that business is fairly low, we expect lifetime IRRs to be about 20%. The SpringCastle deal is a legacy deal again 90% IRR and that continues to perform extremely well, and then our loan portfolios continue to perform well and for the most part our loan portfolios will grow over time and contract over time as it relates to our call activities. We did buy a pool of loans from Fannie Mae in subsequent to the end of Q1 there was about $686 million. And then finally we raised $482 million of equity in January to help fund some of our different acquisitions as well as have a little bit more cash on the balance sheet and based on what we felt were going to be choppy market. Rather than go through the entire portfolio review, I’m going to turn it back to the operator and open it up for questions. Operator?