Lawrence Mendelsohn
Analyst · B. Riley FBR
Thank you, operator. Thank you, everybody, for joining us on our first quarter investor call. To start off, I'd like everybody to look at Page two where we have our safe harbor disclosure and forward-looking statements. And with that, we'll get into the presentation. I apologize a little bit for my voice. I'm fighting off a little of bit cold that seems to be going around Portland right now. Overall, we had a very, very successful net asset value and intrinsic value-building quarter in pretty much most facets of our business and investment side. We bought loans at good prices and very good prices with collateral values. We added approximately $400 million in co-investment joint ventures with accredited institutional partners. We closed two joint venture securitizations with good prearranged executions both in cost of funds and advanced rates. And the joint ventures, you have to keep in mind, have significantly more effect than just the income generation. Our servicer and our manager each get fees from those joint ventures, and we own a significant percentage of our servicer and our manager and their value increases materially as these joint ventures aggregate. Just kind of a business overview from off top. We're very, very, very focused on expanding our investor, our seller base, our loan seller base. Over 90% of our transactions continue to be in privately negotiated purchases. We've made 273 transactions since 2014. We had 12 just in the first quarter of 2019. Our loan sourcing network is very, very important to our ability to acquire the types of loans we want at the prices we want. Our sellers are typically banks, originators and funds who also invest in loans. We use our manager's proprietary analytics to price each pool asset by asset by asset. We frequently get the ability to go loan by loan with sellers and determine what subset we want to purchase. We analyze a large amount of data to do this in order to determine target loan characteristics and to develop pattern recognition algorithms for both pricing and to drive the servicing of loans. Third parties as well as some of our JV partners rely on our manager's analytics as a service. We own 20% of the equity of our manager at a 0 cost. As a result, it doesn't show on our balance sheet. We adjust individual loan prices to accumulate clusters. We have purchased in the first quarter some very small pools. We also, in joint ventures, purchased very large pools. We aggregate much lower cost bases than our competitors, and our affiliated servicers then service these loans asset by asset, borrower by borrower. And the servicer's performance really has created brand value for the servicer and tremendous amount of NAV, which we'll look at later when we see the migration patterns of our loans. And the servicer's performance has led institutional investors to us for loan purchase joint ventures and third-party servicing. In Q1, we increased our JVs by approximately $400 million and between Q4 of 2018 and Q1 by $1 billion. This materially increased the servicer's value. We own 20% of the servicer including warrants. We invested in the servicer about a year ago, in the first quarter of 2018. And since then, our servicer's portfolio has increased by 50%. We use moderate non-mark-to-market leverage. Average leverage for Q4 was 3.3x and asset base leverage was 3.0x, pretty much unchanged from Q4 -- Q1 2019 was pretty much unchanged from Q4. We'll see more of this when we look at some of the comparison tables later on in the presentation. Now a little more quarter focus, Q1 2019. We purchased about $28 million, $29 million of loans separate from JVs at a purchase price of about 61% of property value. Almost $18 million of those were small-balance commercial loans generally in urban areas, particularly in Southern California, Houston and Dallas, Texas. We formed -- we also formed joint ventures that acquired almost $400 million in mortgage loans with underlying collateral value of $670 million. We retained $64 million of the varying classes in the related securities that we do in structuring, and we closed the quarter with $183 million of investments in these joint ventures. These JVs we closed in -- that we closed in first quarter of 2019, all $400 million closed in the last 2 business days of March. So those were the 28th and 29th of March. As a result, they were on our balance sheet for an average of 2.5 days. So we received very little income from them in Q1, but we're glad we closed them and the income from them will show up in Q2. We acquired one multifamily property for $2.3 million. That's in Atlanta, Georgia. We're very excited about that one. Interest income, $29.5 million, net of $3 million $0.3 million [ph] in servicing fee expense. I talked about that a little bit in Q4, but I wanted to bring it up one more time. Interest income from our portion of the JVs shows up in income from securities, not loans. Also, servicing fees for securities are paid out of the securities waterfall. So our interest income from securities is net, not gross of servicing fees unlike loans. As a result, as our JVs grow, it causes interest income to be lower by the amount of the servicing fees from our joint ventures. In Q1 2019, this difference is about 80 basis points on average invested amount in securities. Another place you can see the JV effect on interest income is if you look at the servicing fees line item on Page 13 of this presentation, you'll see that servicing fees actually declined for the quarter about $50,000, and that's because they don't show up in the securities. They show up as effectively less interest income in the securities. So that's a little bit of a distortion, but it's created because of the specific JV structure of securities that we do with our accredited institutional partners. Basic earnings of $0.39; net income, $0.39. There are few items I want to mention that were small offsets to net income. We've discussed before REO impairment was about $500,000 or about $0.025. We mentioned on previous quarterly calls REO impairment happens first under GAAP and the gains happened second. Also, any foreclosure that is -- results in a third-party sale of the property rather than becoming an REO is accounted for as a loan payoff and not an REO sale and doesn't offset any REO impairment in our income statement. In our portfolio, third-party sales happen approximately 50% of the time. So 50% of the actual REOs that get sold don't get sold as REO. They get sold through loan payoff effectively at a foreclosure sale. Second, we had an increase in professional fees of approximately $280,000. Approximately $250,000 of this was a onetime accrual for SOX testing as this is our first year of no longer being an emerging growth company under SOX rules. So this charge for the SOX testing -- upfront SOX testing and the opinion is about $250,000, about $0.015 a share. We had another $0.01 of other onetime charges related to specific loans in older, small remaining pools. Since we don't mark loans to market, a small decrease in a few loans becomes a GAAP charge and isn't offset by an increase in market value of our larger loan portfolio. We'll talk about the market value of our loan portfolio when we get to the migration table later on. So with the $0.05 of noise, we walk back to approximately $0.44 a share. With the -- including the $0.05 of noise, $0.39 a share. Taxable income, $0.11. This is an unusual number. There's a couple of reasons for it why it was lower. First, we had fewer foreclosures. Foreclosures generate taxable income at the time a foreclosure becomes an REO, equal to the gross value of the REO, property minus tax basis in the loan. We had more REO sales than new REO created through foreclosures. REO sales typically generate tax losses since the foreclosure that creates the REO causes taxable income based on gross REO value before all expenses related to the REO. The sale of the REO, you have expenses that typically you recognize when you sell the property and it generates a tax loss. So if you have more sales than new REO, you generally have net tax loss. Three, fewer prepayments in Q1 partially because of the timing here, partially government shutdown, partially some volatility in rates in late Q4 and early Q1. However, we have started to see a pickup in prepayment in later March due to the February rate rally. There's usually about a 45- to 60-day delay of the prepayment from rate rallies, and we're definitely seeing in both April and May so far that more loans are paying off than in Q1. And number four, more loans are paying every single month. We'll again see this in the migration chart. But for paying loans, GAAP income is -- from our purchase price discount is determined by the expected life of the loan, while taxable income is determined based on installments to contractual maturity. Since contractual maturity is typically much longer than expected life, for paying loans, taxable income is usually lower than GAAP income. Prepayment accelerates taxable income, so there's an automatic catch up. And loan sales would also accelerate taxable income, and that's something we'll talk about a little bit on this call as well. We collected $63.2 million of cash. This is approximately 17% annual rate based on our investments in loans and securities. It shows how many loans are paying, but it also shows that prepayment is down a little because in Q4 2018, this number was about 18.5% versus 17%. 17% is still an enormous number, but it represents the difference in prepayment between Q4 and Q1. Average cash for the quarter was $55 million. Quarter-end cash was $41.5 million. On Page 5, our portfolio overview, the composition is not much different. The RPLs remain 97% of our portfolio and NPLs, 3% of our portfolio. REO is principally held for sale. It turns into cash over relatively short periods of time. REO increased marginally from Q4 of '18 to Q1 of '19, but not from foreclosure or from fewer REO sales. Instead, we purchased a commercial property. As our property portfolio grows, we'll see an increase in total REO, but not REO held for sale. We'll also see an increase in noninterest income. On Page 6, you can see kind of the relative ratios of where we buy things. We continue to buy lower LTV loans with overall RPL purchase price of approximately 62% of property value and approximately 86% of UPB. The price to property value does not include home price appreciation, if any, since acquisition. You can see that our price to property value has been pretty steady, all along the way. We're very focused on always playing defense and always having kind of a base expectation of return, and we stick to our knitting in that regard. Purchased NPLs had been declining in absolute dollars invested. For our NPL portfolio, purchase price to property value is approximately [56%]. As you might imagine, higher LTV NPLs become REO sooner and lower LTV NPLs become REO later, if at all, as lower LTV NPLs are much more likely to become paying loans or just payoff. You can see at 3/31/2019, at the end of the quarter, our purchase price to property value is about 55%, and that's been a pretty consistent number for a long time. Again, that doesn't include any home price appreciation in the underlying properties since our acquisition time. On Page 8, we have a couple of changes to our portfolio concentration. California, however, continues to represent the largest segment of our loan portfolio. It increased pretty significantly at the end of the year. Right at the end of December, we bought a pool of loans in a joint venture structure that was 89% California, about $240 million. Our share of it was 20%, and it's the largest segment of the portfolio both for residential RPLs and for small-balance commercial mortgage loans. Our California assets are primarily Los Angeles, Orange and San Diego counties. We're seeing consistent payment and performance patterns in these markets particularly in urban centers. We also have seen consistent prepayment especially for certain borrower characteristic subsets in those markets. The California percentage of our portfolio increased in Q4 of '18 and it also increased in Q1 of 2019. You'll see in Dallas and Houston markets, they now have purple in them, not just target markets, but we now have property management. We've added to our Houston and Dallas investments as well as our infrastructure in those cities. One thing we are seeing in certain markets, particularly in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Illinois, is an effect of the new tax law. We've seen a compacting of higher and middle range home prices were higher end have come down materially more than middle and upper middle, and we were seeing a much smaller difference between middle range home prices in those markets and higher end prices in those markets as well. Portfolio migration. This is one of the things that we are extremely, extremely focused on. It's the real basis for NAV creation here, the way we buy the loans, the way we think about the loans, we want to buy the analytics we do and the way we drive the servicing of these loans based on analytics. If you look at our portfolio right now, $1.25 billion of it is 12 of 12 consecutive payments or better, and that's an increase of $110 million versus December 31, 2018. When we bought these loans, only $150 million of them where 12 for 12. For the loans that we buy based on analytics and the way we -- our servicer services and manages these loans, our data suggests that once a loan becomes 7 of 7 consecutive payments, there is about a 93% chance for the loans that we buy that they will become 12 of 12 consecutive payments. At acquisition, less than 10% of our loans were 12 of 12 or better. Now the overwhelming majority of our loans are 12 of 12 or better. The intrinsic value of loans has increased materially on average since acquisition. Some of you may see some of the home loan markets where loans have traded once they're 12 of 12 clean pay, rating agency eligible and it's night and day versus our average purchase price in the mid-80s of these loans. So it's a significant NAV creator. Number two, in addition to increasing cash flow and NAV of our balance sheet, the significant outperformance of these loans also over time lowers asset base cost of funds and increases the senior securitized bond advance rates. We've clearly seen this in our JV structures where we get 75% and 80% senior advance rate where market standard is more like 65% senior advance rate. In first quarter of 2019, we did not issue any non-JV securitizations, but we are working on a couple of them currently. Structured credit markets are materially better than they were in first quarter as well as in fourth quarter of last year. And we will -- we expect that 1 or 2 securitizations that we do in the second quarter will materially lower cost of bonds on the related financing for those loans. On Page 10, subsequent events. We've already closed since March 31 about $14 million at a $88 price, 57.8% of property value. We have another, about $30 million under contract, 3 of which are properties: 1 in Dallas, 1 in Baltimore, 1 in Raleigh, and about $22 million of which are re-performing loans. You can see the purchase price on the RPL is 84% and the price/collateral value, 56%, which is over and over and over as our network of sellers and the analytics we do that it allows us to be able to do this. We've had a pretty busy Q1 so far. There's a lot of things that we'll be looking to offload some assets before June 30, and it's still pretty early in Q2. But it's important to see the pattern of we just keep buying loans at approximately the same prices with the similar composition and collateral value percentage. Our Board announced -- declared a dividend, $0.32, payable on May 31, 2019 to shareholders of record on the 17th. You may think about that relative to $0.11 of taxable income from our Board's perspective given the underlying NAV of our assets. They're pretty confident that the taxable income number versus the dividend will be -- the dividend will be maintained as is. So the -- with that, we'll go to Page 11, financial metrics. And this is -- there's 2 slides. The first one is where I'll focus, which is excluding the consolidation of a couple of our joint ventures. We have 2 of our joint ventures which we are still required to consolidate. We own more than 20% of those joint ventures, which make it a little confusing, but there's a couple of topics I want to mention. Average loan yield, you'll see, is 8.7% versus 8.5% in Q4. Yield on loans is net of any impairment. So in Q4, we had more impairment than in Q1, but we still had some impairment. You'll see in Q3 we had almost no impairment, so the yield is higher. So our yields on our loans have been relatively constant. Impairment's the only deviation in any of the quarters for the most part. If you look at average yield on debt securities, that 7.3%, remember that is net of the servicing fee of approximately 80 basis points. Debt securities is how our interests in our JVs are presented for GAAP accounting. As our JVs increase, which they have materially in Q4 and Q1, the GAAP reporting of that servicing, unlike loan interest income, distorts the average asset yield lower and the related ratios to that. So the average total asset yield of 8.5% is also distorted a little bit lower because of the 7.3%, which is net of about 80 basis points of servicing relative to the cost. If you look at our average debt cost, it's really the difference is two things. One is rounding between a number just over 5.1 and a number just under 5.2. Number two is we put on some 6-month repurchase agreements on a non-mark-to-market basis in the fourth quarter to deflect any movements in volatility that we saw in late fourth quarter and first quarter. We put them on six-month agreements. six-month LIBOR was higher than it is now. And when those roll, which they are in April and May, repo funding will come down by about 20, 25 basis points on those related repos. If you look at our ending leverage and our average leverage, they're pretty consistent ending leverage. It's the same as it was at the end of the year, 3.6 times including convertible -- our convertible debt and our asset-backed debt. The convertible debt's unchanged versus year-end. The asset-backed debt is 3.2 versus 3.3. With so many loans paying every single month, as we saw on the migration chart, we're comfortable with a little more asset base leverage, although in Q1, total leverage didn't increase and our asset base leverage was basically the same as well. But we do have capacity and room and comfort given our portfolio performance of increasing asset base leverage a bit more. With that, the last two pages are our quarter end financial statements, and I'm happy to take any questions anybody might have.