Barry Sternlicht
Analyst · Raymond James. Please proceed with your question
Thanks, Zach, Rina and Jeff. Good morning everyone. While we joined the day after the Fed did their 10th increase in a row. I think I’ve been pretty clear what I think of this. It is bordering on idiotic. The biggest victims of this are the regional banks, which every quarter point is a $50 billion loss in their books. Last we checked, a point is $200 billion, and they’re going to have two choices. They’re going to take 100 banks back and have to sell their loans as they’re doing in assets, as they’re doing in Signature and Silicon Valley Bank, and it doesn’t look like they did because they supported the First Republic acquisition. And you’ll have RTC2. Clearly, the government will have to step in and save all these banks who really are a victim of the Fed zone stupidity, frankly. I mean you had a situation where the government set the rules. They said, you buy treasuries with all these deposits that are floating – flooding your banks because of the stimulus we’ve put in, buy treasuries have advantaged tax capital regulations and you don’t have the market to market. And it’s kind of like if you had a hurricane or told everyone, you’d never experienced a hurricane. So why would you buy a hurricane insurance? Now I think what the management’s missed is the pace at which the deposits could disappear obviously helped by social media today. But realistically, you have a really nearly insolvent regional banking system based on the rules that were set up by a government that has 30,000 people to monitor the banks. That’s between the FDIC, the OCC and the Federal Reserve itself, but we are filled with PhDs running models that make no sense. There’s no question that credit will decline that’s already the highest credit in history. And you see the markets vote on this with the steepest yield curve inversion in the history of this country. So despite the fact that some people call for credibility, besides the regional banks and obviously, real assets, the other victim is the federal government itself. The only benefit to them is they are going to have to spend more on interest expense and their deficit will grow because the value of assets drop capital gains or income and other receipts drop. So the deficit widens. I continue to worry that he hits the point of no return where people realize that a $3 trillion interest expense is significantly higher than the $480 billion it ran in ‘21, which is 5% on $32 trillion only hit it in one direction. So I’m done with my speech about that because I really understand that our view is we need to navigate between now and then. Then is when the yield curve says at the end of this year will be 80 basis points lighter on LIBOR. But let’s forget about that, let’s say, a year from now or even 1.5 years from now. And clearly, the economy should slow given what’s going on in the – with interest rates, decline in manufacturing. The service sector remains strong. There is no doubt. The travel will remain strong. We will see how long this can continue. But it does defy most logic. And obviously, employment is solid, and that is what’s keeping the economy alive, but the Fed seems adding in to increase unemployment and so you see this inverted yield curve, more or less suggesting that we’re going to go into not a shallow recession as Powell said yesterday, but something more severe. Let’s talk about the real estate markets because, again, we were not the reason for this recession or this crisis. This was all the government too much money, too few goods, then a lot of goods and now dwindling money, prices went up. They are now coming down. Oil is $68 a barrel. The only person who seems to not know inflation is going down is Chairman Powell and his merry band of Fed governors. So in the real estate markets, you have like three or four superb segments that are really behaving quite well. Anything in single-family and multifamily is doing fine. Industrial remains fine. Hotels are record high. Occupancies and rates, you saw Marriott’s earnings this week. Hilton reported earlier in the week. Business travel remains good. Leisure travel remains good. The only – real data centers are good. Life sciences are good. The only issue is office. Office is a story. It’s a very – it is a tale of countries anywhere but the United States. Office is full. We have a large exposure to Germany in the office market. Not only are our buildings remaining full, but rents are actually rising across Germany, 5% to 7% in places like Berlin, Hamburg, Munich. In the U.S., you have a tale of city by city. You have the bluish states, the Chicago, the West Coast, New York, really experiencing maybe 2 days a week in some cases. I was recently with one of the state pension plans in California, and there are 2 days a week. They own the building they are in. It’s sort of a shame but that is what’s happened in the U.S. It is unique to the U.S. And then in the office market, you have a bifurcation. The good buildings are full. They are holding their rents and is actually hard to get into. We recently even tried to renegotiate a lease in San Francisco of our own Starwood Capital Group lease. The landlord insisted on a 10-year deal. We wanted a 5-year deal. We sell it on a 7-year deal. My team wanted to be in that building. I wanted them to be in a big building that they’d be happy in. So you can see that it is a city-by-city, market-by-market underwriting exercise and you are throwing – or the markets are throwing and in the federal government is throwing the baby out with the bath water. The federal government make no mistake is leaning across all the banks, big and small, and saying reduce your exposure to the Office segment. I don’t know what they think is going to happen to a $3 trillion asset class but it will take down the banks. When you look at the regional mix, we’re marking their securities to market and seeing that they are virtually insolvent. Those are their treasuries, which are money good. We haven’t really even touched their CRE books. And obviously, they are 4x is dependent on CRE lending as are the major banks or 28% of their assets, and it’s a $1.9 trillion of loans. So it is a serious situation that I hope will improve as the Fed realizes what it’s doing. Our friends in the industry talk to the Fed, but they are seeking credibility. So I guess they are taking credibility as destroying the U.S. economy. Anyway, in this morass, you want to lend to get good assets that have bad balance sheets. And they weren’t bad per se when we started, but they become stretched when interest rates go from 0 to 5%. And so those are the assets that actually as an equity player. Starwood is an equity player. We have $120 billion of assets. We don’t want to take them back, but we have made money taking back assets every time we have done it in our 12-year history. And as an equity player, whether it’s the conversion of our museum building in Los Angeles or the new building we got from a major sponsor in Washington, D.C., we’re confident we will recover, if not every dollar then most every dollar across the board. And if we have more money, we might actually take on the development ourselves. We actually – those of you who have been with us for a long time, we started Starwood Financial, that’s today called iStar Financial, and they survived their 2007-2008 crisis, took back tons of assets and started to build real value for their shareholders. We will make more money as an equity REIT than we will have a debt REIT, but we don’t expect to be there. But we would be delighted – take our multifamily book, which is 33% of our loan book, not including the $2 billion of multifamily own on balance sheet, which are affordable housing that remains solid. And I would expect the rent increase to be above 8%, 9% that we will see this month from the federal government for those assets in the asset class. But going back to that multifamily book, the debt yield stabilized on that book is a 7 1. I would be delighted if we would take every single asset back. I don’t think that will happen, but that would make it the cheapest REIT in the United States, including all the fallen angels at that cap rate. So we would be very happy to see on our balance sheet. We don’t think we will see maybe one asset in that portfolio in a city that was hit by the George Floyd fallout crisis. It’s not coming to us yet. It’s just leasing slower than we anticipated. So we do think the economy is going to slow, and our job is really to manage through the cycle, keep our liquidity high. Obviously, our stock is an intoxicating value at these levels. But caution is the right word for us as we play defense and decide when again, we will go on offense. We are, again, somewhat excited by this. You should see that – note that we are loan-to-values. We’re 60% to 65%. So again, when we get assets back, we’re getting them back at an attractive basis that allows us to do things the prior borrower couldn’t. Perfect example, as Jeff mentioned, was that building in D.C., which works as a residential conversion because we funded $0.60 of the cost. It wouldn’t work as an office conversion. So it’s under LOI. We will see if we can get rid of it. And you should know also that we believe we can make our earnings with no new investments. That is a benefit of having floating rate debt. Having said that, between non-accrual and REO assets, if we could put that capital to work, which we intend to do over the coming months or, let’s say, 6 months, we could earn an incremental $0.30 to $0.40 a share. That’s between earning a 12, which would be easy today on the new capital and also not having to spend the money. We do carrying those assets until we can put them back – or sell them and put them back in the market. So I also want to highlight what Jeff said that our lending book really did mirror the strategy of our equity book, which is we have very little – no exposure to San Francisco and de minimis exposure to Manhattan, which are two very difficult markets right now. These states are running massive budget deficits. And the only way they can cover them is to continue to increase taxes, which, of course, create this negative cycle for both cities where they can’t support their social infrastructure. So in summary, I think we feel confident we will navigate through the cycle. It is choppy. The headlines are bad. We do expect there will be losses here and there, but we also expect that we will begin to offset them over time. We do have this unique business model and I’m sitting in Eleonore’s offices in Miami today. We have 300 people that are foaming at the mouth ready for the what the market assumes will be a massive onslaught of defaults and restructurings required in the commercial real estate industry. So they act as an enormous hedge for us, and it’s different – makes us different than then the other business in the sector. We have the owned real estate assets, which are material. The lending business is only 60% of our earnings today. So we have many other cylinders that will hopefully function even better and offsetting the softness in the lending portfolio that we are well positioned for what we think we’re going to see over the next 12 months. So with that, I want to thank our team, which remains dedicated and focused on navigating through this crisis. This is a Fed-induced crisis. The beginning of – the government did all of this. The government did all the stimulus package. The government created the inflation by throwing money at everyone. Some of it went offshore apparently. And then the government decided that inflation were not to be transient and then increase interest rates the fastest pace in history, and it isn’t the level of rates at the pace at which we got there. And then the set of rules for the banks that made in hindsight very little sense. And HCM would be a lovely thing for us to have. We don’t have it really. And as you see, because we are not a bank, we hedged our RMBS exposure. We – our interest expense – our hedges covered 100% of our losses in that book and we have no real exposure to rates. So we behaved as probably the regional banks should have behaved, but we’re told by the government they didn’t have to do. So you can blame management or you can blame the Fed but I only hold the management responsible for not understanding how fast deposits could leave, but $42 billion in a single day. That also was a world record. That was a swan. And now, of course, with ETFs, the regional banks are facing serious issues that the government is going to have to cover. Not every bank has the franchise of First Republic. And many of these banks won’t have residual value. And it is a criminal to put all these people out of business. These people that work at these banks, it is not right and it should all be on the Fed. It’s their fault. So they did this and they don’t need to be a blast for killing inflation at what cost. You can’t manage the employment rate United States with 25-point interest rating increase. So with that, which is kind of an aggressive line of part, but you know how I feel. Inflation will fall as soon as the rent index, they are delayed. Rent index gets included in the CPI. We should be in the 2s by the fourth quarter. I think it’s a shame. There is no point to doing what they are doing, and I don’t know who they are trying to get credit with, but it’s just not the right thing to do for this country at this time. So with that, and my diatribe is over, we’re going to take questions. Thank you all.