Lawrence Mendelsohn
Analyst · B. Riley FBR. Please go ahead
Thank you very much. Thank you, everybody, for joining us on our third quarter investor call. Before we get started, I want to point everybody to Page 2 of the Safe Harbor disclosure and discussion of forward-looking statements. And with that, we get started on Page 3. In general, Q3 was another good quarter. We bought loans from multiple sources primarily in joint venture structures which closed in very late September. We continued to improve the rates and terms of our asset-based financing including closing our second rated long-term securitized bond structure. The market value of our assets continues to increase and we'll see that when we look at loan performance migration later on this call. And as a result, intrinsic net asset value grew in Q3 and it continues to grow more so in Q4. I want to give a little, kind of high-level business overview before we get into the quarter results on the next page. It’s very important to understand where we get loans from. You can see from some of the data that our cost bases in loans and the types of loans we buy is different than others and our sourcing network is very important to our ability to acquire these loans at the prices we want and the kinds of loans we want. Our sellers, our banks originators and funds and the yield curve environment in the last few months has increased supply into our markets as well. Our manager – it’s very important to understand the analytic approach. We have 11 people in the analytics group so that analyses large amounts of data to determine the target loan characteristics for the loans and also to develop pattern recognition algorithms for choosing what kinds of loans we want, what characteristics they should have, how to price them and also to drive the servicing platform. Third-parties in our joint venture partners rely on our managers’ analytics and oversight as a service now. We own 20% of our manager, and we have a zero cost basis so as a result our book value does not reflect any value in the manager as we carried it at a zero basis. Similarly, our affiliated servicers services our loans asset-by-asset and borrower-by-borrower. The servicers’ performance has created significant net asset value increases to the loans we own and it's helped bring institutional investors to us as loan purchase partners. We own 20% of our servicer as well, including warrants. Since our investment in servicer, its servicing portfolio has more than doubled during the 18 months we've been invested. We use moderate mark-to-market leverage. Average level including corporate leverage for the third quarter was three times and asset-based leverage was 2.7 times. This was approximately 6% lower than the second quarter and 10% lower than first quarter 2019. On Page 4, we'll have a good discussion about the quarter itself. We acquired $241 million in UPB through joint ventures. Unfortunately, they closed in the last week of September. So we only received four days of interest from these investments. So, timing does matter in that regard, but $241 million in joint venture investment in loans $43 million our share in the joint ventures. We acquired three multi-family rental properties for $16 million in two single tenant triple net lease commercial properties for another $1.5 million. The two multi-family properties are in – two of the multi-family properties are in Dallas. One more is in Baltimore and the two triple net lease properties are in Boston. Net interest income in Q3 2019 increased approximately $700,000 versus Q3 of 2019, primarily driven by a $1.1 million decrease in interest expense and that was partially offset by a decrease in loan interest income. You may remember that we sold loans in the second quarter of 2019 and we didn't materially reinvest the proceeds until late September, as we just discussed at the end of September and those purchases were primarily investments through joint ventures. As a result, we had less interest earning assets on our balance sheet in Q3 than we did in Q2 and therefore less loan interest income. If we had purchased asset earlier in the quarter, net interest income would have increased by a materially larger amount. Another item to keep in mind is that, interest income from our portion of joint ventures shows up as income from securities and not loans. Also since servicing fees for our securities are paid out of the securities that waterfall itself, our interest income for securities is net of servicing fees unlike interest from loans which is gross of servicing fees. As a result, as our JVs grow, interest income will grow slower than if we directly purchase loans by the amount of the servicing fees and the servicing fee expense will decrease by the corresponding offset. In Q3 2019, most of our investments were made through joint ventures. However, since these closed in late September, they had little revenue benefit. Our overall cost of funds decreased by approximately 20 basis points during the third quarter due to issuance of our rated securitization, Ajax Mortgage Loan Trust 2019-D, as well as well as from lower interest rates on our repurchase lines of credit. The advance rate on 2019-D for AAA through A rated securities was 81% at UPB with a weighted average coupon of 3.01% Our amortized cost in the underlying assets was only 87% at UPB. So, as a result, we effectively received 81 – 87s leverage at 3.01% fixed rate match funded non-recourse. Our amortized – as a result, we’ll get more leverage through the securitization of these loans and our cost of funds versus repurchase facilities for loans declines by approximately 120 basis points. Also as LIBOR has decreased materially, the cost of our repurchase lines of credit had decreased commensurately, as well. Subsequent to September 30, 2019, we’ve put in place an additional repurchase line of credit for our joint venture securities. That is approximately 65 basis points cheaper and we expect our interest cost related to financing joint venture securities to decline as we rotate securities to that facility. Net income attributable to common stockholders was $7.7 million or $0.39 per share. We've already discussed the impact of having less interest earning assets on our balance sheet, and as a result of selling loans in the second quarter and not reinvesting it to late in September 2019. So, a timing difference of receiving proceeds and putting them back to work. Additionally, the loan sale from second quarter of 2019 triggered a $490,000 incentive fee payable under our management agreement due to the increase in book value that was triggered by the payment of the dividend in September. The one-time fee is two-and-a-half cents a share or $490,000. If we had reinvested the proceeds in the beginning of the quarter and had no incentive fee, or if we had effectively not having sold loans, our per share income for the third quarter would have been about $0.45. We continue to have significant cash flow from our loans in our joint venture portfolio, as our loans consider – continue to have very robust payment performance and we’ll see more about that in a few slides. And the other thing is, with the decline in rates, prepayment has increased materially, as well. Our average daily cash balance for the quarter was $56 million and continue to have approximately the same amount of cash on balance sheet because of loan cash flow. We continue to be primarily RPO or re-performing loan-driven. Our loan portfolio at quarter end September, we were 97% re-performing loans. If you look at property value, you will see it increased quarter-over-quarter in our REO and rental portfolio. The REO and rental did not increased because of an increase in REO, it increased because of an increase in rental assets. We purchased urban multi-family properties in Dallas and Baltimore and triple net lease properties in Boston. As our property portfolio grows a bit, we’ll see an increase in non-interest income. REO held-for-sale which results from foreclosures continues to decline. On Page 6, you can see that we continue to buy lower LTV loans with our overall re-performing loan purchase price of approximately 61.8% of property value and 87% of UPB. In our NPL portfolio, while purchased NPLs have been declining in absolute dollars invested, our NPL portfolio purchased sites to property value is 54.5%. As you might expect, higher loan-to-value NPLs become REO sooner, and lower LTV NPLs become REO later if at ever as lower LTV NPLs are much more likely to become paying loans. Our markets keep going. A couple of things to point out, we’ve added to our Dallas and Houston investments as well as our local infrastructure in those markets. Number two, we are seeing that the new tax law is having material effects on higher-end property values in four states more than others, New York, Connecticut, Jew Jersey and Illinois. We are definitely seeing a decrease in value differences between the higher end and middle property deciles. So we are seeing a compacting of the higher end towards the middle. So there is less difference between what I’ll call, docile six versus docile eight or nine than they are used to be. California continues to represent the largest segment of our loan portfolio both in residential RPLs as well as in small balance commercial loans. Our California assets are primarily Los Angeles, Orange and San Diego counties. We are seeing consistent payment and performance patterns in these markets, particularly in the urban centers. We've also seen consistent prepayment patterns, especially for certain borrow characteristics subsets and also prepayment related to tax laws in different states. One thing I do want to point out, given the current events, we have not seen any impact on our California loan portfolio from the current wildfires. Portfolio migration, this is kind of the most important part to me, is the improved performance of loans once own them and our servicer start servicing them. A lot of that is driven by the analytics of what loans we think will do better and a lot of it's driven by the way our servicer performs and the analytics used by the servicer that our manager produces for it. Right now, we have – or at quarter end, we had $1.04 billion of loans that were 12 of 12 the payments are better. Only $269 million of these or 12 of 12 were better when we bought them. For the loans that we buy based on our analytics and the way our servicer services the loans, our data suggests that one of our loans gets to be 7 of 7 payments. There is a 93% chance that it’s going to be 12 of 12. The intrinsic value of their loans as you might imagine increases materially when we buy them if you kind of look at less than four payments of $500 million and those all become or overwhelmingly will become 12 of 12 to 24 to 24. The value increases materially on average over our ownership time. In current markets, and as evidenced by Fannie Mae, loan sales today, as well as loan sales over the past few months, clean pay 12-month or better loans with LTVs under about 90 trade to yields around 3.50% to 3.60%. When you think about our loans with an $87 price and an average – weighted average coupon is up 4.5%, you can imagine there is a significant amount of built-in value in the migration – due to the migration of our portfolio. The other thing that this performance does is, in addition to increasing cash flow and NAV materially, the significant cash flow velocity from these loans also lowers our asset-based financing costs and it increases the securitized bond senior class advance rates as well. As you can see from our securitization 2019-D that we did in Q3, triple A, double A and single A is 81 divided by 87 or over 90% of our cost in terms of single A or better advanced rate clearly shows this. Additionally, we are working on another rate of securitization currently for Q4. Subsequent events, we had a very busy, late Q3 and it’s continued into Q4. We continue to buy lower LTV loans as purchase price to collateral values in the 50s and 60s percent. We expect the bulk of these identified transactions to close in early December. We also continue to grow our urban center small balance commercial properties and triple net lease properties and as well. Our Board – most recent Board Meeting declared a $0.32 dividend to be paid on November 26 to common stockholders of record of November 16. If we turn to the Metric Slide, there is a couple of things I want to point out on Page 11. As I mentioned before, yield on debt securities is net of servicing of approximately 75 basis points. So, and on – relative to underlying cost basis. Debt securities is how the interest in JVs are presented under GAAP. As our JVs increase, which we expect them to, the GAAP reporting net of servicing unlike loan interest income distorts average asset yields lower and related ratios by the amount of that servicing fee. So, it’s important to keep that in mind when you see some small changes in yield, much of it is related to the combination of what goes to joint ventures that is net of servicing fees and what goes to loans that is gross of servicing fees. We continue to expect the asset level debt cost to decrease even more, both through securitization and the repurchase lines of credit. You can see it came down from 4.7 to 4.5 and we would expect that number to come down as well in Q4. Our leverage ratio, with so many loans performing, we are comfortable with a little more asset-based leverage. However, the loans are paying so much, our leverage actually is – has declined rather than increased from the cash flow from that leverage. On Page 13 and 14, our most recent income statement and balance sheets. Those are also in our press release. And with that, I am happy to take any questions anybody may have.