Christopher Poulton
Analyst · Piper Sandler.
I thought I was a ray of sunshine but -- what I tell you guys is, hey listen, every once in a while, we reluctantly agree to give some people some money. But I think that's served us well, and it's continuing to serve us well because we could have plowed into some things over the last year thinking time is right for us. I think we've had a good origination year so far. I think well, what we're seeing is, especially on the bank side, bankers aren't that creative generally to begin with. They're not the most creative people to begin with, I think. And when things look like they might be disruptive, they just go home, right? So as far as I can tell, once Memorial Day hit pretty much every large bank in the country just went home and they'll come back after Labor Day and see if they feel like doing something. So we're seeing opportunities over the summer and through the second, third quarter, where people are just saying, "Hey, listen, I got this project, I want to move it forward or I'm buying these things and don't want to do that, and we're going to have to get that done over here." And some of the people I normally go to for higher leverage and lower costs aren't going to be there for us right now. And would you look at it? And we do, right? I just think we always do what we do, which is we look at a deal and we find about what we think about it. We find 4 or 5 ways out of it. And then we say, "All right, I'd probably do it like here. And sometimes that's disappointing to folks. And sometimes they say, I can make that math work. We're finding more people now saying, I think I can make that math work because that might be my best option. But it's taken a little while though. I would say the last couple of months, it's been borrowers readjusting their expectations because they're saying, well, I used to get 70% at L plus 2 75%. And they say, "Well, you should go do that. That's a good deal. It sounds like a pretty good deal. I do that if I were you. And they said, "Well, yes, I don't have that right now. Okay. Well, we can talk about what we would do. And by the way, what we would do is what we've always done, be in the 50s on leverage. And we're going to be over, and we're happy to keep talking to you about that. And so I think our product is useful to people right now. And so we'll continue to be there. And that's why I think we get the phone calls because people know we'll be there. And if we say we're going to do it, we'll close, which is important today because things are a little disrupted.