Michael Nierenberg
Analyst · Bose George with KBW
Thanks, Alan. Good morning, everyone and thanks for joining our call this morning. For the quarter -- the company had a great quarter, similar to prior quarters where our portfolios performed extremely well and this is pretty consistent with our market views and our investment thesis. Investment activity for the quarter picked up a bit with capital deployment focused on more MSR acquisitions and more acquisition of non-agency mortgage securities where we own call rights. We have grown our MSR investments and the growth in our bond portfolio this quarter around legacy non-agency RMBS will help us with our call strategy. On our call strategy, our execution has been very good. Our current callable population, based on factor, meaning, the cleanup call is approximately $46 billion. To the extent that we can reduce delinquencies and advances fall further, we would expect our activity levels to increase and be able to call more of this $46 billion, which is currently callable. Another possible way to increase activity would be a broader industry solution, which we are currently working on as well. On the investing environment, we remain very cautious. However, we believe the current market volatility we’re seeing today should create some opportunities in the near term. We continue to believe rates will head higher and our portfolio should perform extremely well for our shareholders. We closed on Shellpoint in early July and the management team at Shellpoint has been doing a great job. Their third party business continues to grow, as they onboard more loans from their existing clients and over the course of the past six months, they've added approximately another 10 new clients. The servicing business at Shellpoint has grown from 50 billion at the end of 2017 and we project the -- at the end of 2018 to have a servicing portfolio of $100 billion. Before we move on to the supplement, which has been posted online, I'd like to mention that our capital and our access to liquidity puts us in a position to continue with our investment strategy, while taking advantage of any opportunities we see. Now, let's look to the supplement. I'm going to begin on page 2. This is our page, which gives just an overview of New Residential. Focusing on the right side of the page, our MSR portfolio today is $541 billion. Our dividend yield based on where our stock trades is approximately 11%. On the year, we've acquired 95 billion of new MSRs. Our call rights continues to be in and around $130 billion. For the year, our book value has increased by 13%. Year-over-year, our total return is up 8%. Now, these numbers are as of 09/30. In our MSR business, we continue to issue fixed rate term notes, so a lot more of our financing around our MSR book is more term in nature, rather than short-term financing. On page 3, our results. Our GAAP net income for the quarter was $185 million or $0.54 per diluted share. Core earnings of $215 million or $0.63 per diluted share and we continue to pay a dividend of $0.50 per common share. Page 4. What we try to do here is just simplify our company, 541 billion UPB of MSRs. Servicing advances, 130 billion of calls, residential securities and loans and then we have our opportunistic investment section and I'll talk through these, as we go into our portfolio reviews. So for Q3, when you think about our investment amounts, on mortgage servicing rights, as of the end of 09/30, we have a net equity investment of $2.9 billion. That is lower than 06/30, not because we acquired less, but we simply have increased our advance rates a little bit on the asset class. On our residential securities and call rates, we currently have $2 billion of net equity in securities. On our loan book, 500 million in net equity. Our consumer loan portfolio continues to be stable at about $120 million and we have cash on our balance sheet as of the end of 09/30 of $330 million. When you look back to the beginning of time, since 2013 when our book value was $10, we closed the quarter at $16.87. And what we wanted to just illustrate here is that we continue to do anything and all we can to continue to generate good returns for our shareholders, while maintaining our dividend of $0.50. The next two slides are really just to discuss -- to point out a little bit about interest rate. Interest rates and expectations from whether it be different economists or the Fed, we put in a quote from John Ryding, the general view and I think we continue to agree with that view unless our President changes this is that interest rates will continue to climb, the way that our portfolios are set up with our mortgage servicing rights, high coupon mortgages on our loan book and our call rights, we think our portfolio should continue to do exceedingly well in an operating environment. Page 8, we just wanted to highlight a couple of things. One is, at current mortgage rates, only 5% of the entire mortgage universe is refinanceable. During October, the 30-year mortgage rate increased to 4.9%, that is the highest level we've seen since 2011. Our prepayment speeds on our own portfolio continue to decline and we believe will slow further as we go through the rest of the year. What does that mean? Slowdown in CPR is better for our portfolios, better for our mortgage servicing rights and overall should continue to generate good returns for shareholders. Page 9. Again, what does all this mean for our company? The economy remains strong, rates are expected to rise, housing is fairly stable, although, we’re starting to see some signs of weakness and we think increased market volatility will continue to -- should create some good opportunities for investment. And then what we lay out here on the rest of the page, MSRs, obviously rising rates are good for the value of the MSR, will continue to provide more cash flow for our company. Servicer advances will continue to decline. Keep in mind, our servicer advances declined further, our call population becomes more callable. Our non-agency securities on our legacy portfolio, 96% of our legacy non-agency securities portfolio is floating rate. What that means is higher interest rates will continue to lead to higher net income. On assets, where we have fixed rate exposure, we've put additional hedges on to manage our overall interest rate exposure for the company and then on our loan book, when we acquire new loans, we try to acquire again higher coupon loans and then anywhere where we have a fixed rate exposure, we have interest rate hedges to manage our overall exposure. Now, I’ll just flip through our portfolio updates and then we’ll open up the line for questions. Page 11 is our MSR portfolio. Again, year-to-date, we've acquired 95 billion from 10 different counterparties, including 43 billion in the third quarter. Keep in mind, the lag time on this or the lead time on this is a little bit longer. So typically, the way it works is we'll get into discussion with the seller today and the likelihood of that closing or the timing of that closing would likely be in the first quarter of 2019 for example. We do believe that we're going to see more MSRs come to market, as interest rates continue to rise, mortgage bankers need to raise capital, so we think the way that we're currently set up, it should be a great opportunity for our company. On page 12, I mentioned earlier in my remarks, our MSR activity or financing around our MSR business has been very robust through 2018. We've issued 2.1 billion of fixed rate notes and we intend to issue some more deals, probably through either towards the end of this year or early in the first quarter. Our goal ultimately is to have term financing on our entire MSR portfolio. Page 13 talks about our non-agency securities and our call rights. Again, $130 billion of call rights. Our execution around our calls has been very, very good. We expect that to continue. Keep in mind we have a lot of high coupon collateral. The other thing is, we're starting to see loan prices, particularly on non-performing loans and re-performing loans, they continue to trade extremely well with prices on non-performing loans currently in the low-90s and re-performing loans in the upper-90s. Now, just to frame that for you, if you roll back the clock a few years ago, non-performing loan pricing was probably in the, I would guess, somewhere in the low-70s. So, you've seen a dramatic increase in loan pricing. Again, this should help our overall call strategy as well. Page 14. Just a little bit of an overview on our call rights. 130 billion of call rights today, 46 billion, if delinquencies were low and advances were lower could be called today. Delinquencies have declined over the past two years from 20% to 16% and during the quarter, we issued a $658 million non-agency loan securitization and subsequent to quarter end, we get our first non-QM securitization of 300 million with collateral originated by Shellpoint. Page 15, 1.7 billion in net equity in our legacy bond portfolio, it’s up from 1.4 billion in the prior year. We continue to acquire legacy non-agency securities that will help with our calls business and during the quarter, we also acquired some AAA senior fixed rate securities and we put the appropriate interest rate hedges on to protect us, as we believe rates are going to increase. Servicer advances, a smaller and smaller part of our business, I’d like to go back to when we first got in the servicing advance business, we had approximately $8 billion of servicer advances that we’d financed. Today, that number's down to 3.7 billion. What does that mean? It's really a cleanup of the legacy portfolios, one, to the homeowners healthier, two, and we expect those percentages to continue to decline. The 3.7 billion is financed with 3.2 billion of debt and all of that debt is currently fixed rate at this point with a 3.2% interest rate and an 87 LTV. On our loan portfolio, currently, $2.8 billion at 500 million of equity. Just to break that out. If you look to the bottom part of the page, we have an NPL book of $699 million. Most of our loans are acquired through our call strategy. Based on where loan prices are currently in the marketplace, we’re very rarely acquiring loans off the options. What I would say also is I think we've seen approximately 60 billion of loans come to market this year and we expect the calendar for the rest of the fourth quarter to be fairly robust. On our consumer loan portfolio, in the SpringCastle investment, we just like to point out the returns on this, almost 90% IRR. I say this pretty much every call, we'd love to do more of these. We can't really find them to the extent that we can, obviously, we’ll try to do that. Page 19 is just our Prosper investment. Just to get you up to speed on that. We agreed along with a consortium of Soros, third point and Jefferies to acquire up to 5 billion of consumer loans in exchange for warrants and 35% of the company. The warrants should fully fund in February of 2019. To date, we've acquired 3.25 billion of loans and what we do is we then issue securitizations along with our partners. Returns have been something in the 15% to 20% range. So overall returns have been very good. And just to wrap up, before we turn it over to questions. Overall, I think the way that we're positioned is extremely well. We love our MSR assets. MSRs are one of the few fixed income assets that will continue to rise in value, as rates go up. We have key hedges in place to protect us on our fixed rate exposure or some of our funding exposure. With a $26 trillion housing market, we believe with increased market volatility, we’ll see more and more opportunities come our way. We continue to work on additional MSR purchases and overall liquidity and capital, we’re in a very good place. So with that, I'll turn it back to the operator and then we could take some questions.