Good day and welcome to iStar Financial’s First Quarter 2015 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, today’s conference is being recorded. At this time for opening remarks and introductions, I’d like to turn the conference over to Mr. Jason Fooks, Vice President of Investor Relations and Marketing. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, John, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today to review iStar Financial’s first quarter 2015 earnings report. With me today are Jay Sugarman, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; and David DiStaso, our Chief Financial Officer. This morning’s call is being webcast on our website at istarfinancial.com in the Investor Relations section. There will be a replay of the call beginning at 12:30 PM Eastern time today. Dial-in for the replay is 1-800-475-6701 with a confirmation code of 358123. Before I turn the call over to Jay, I’d like to remind everyone that statements in this earnings call which are not historical facts will be forward looking. iStar Financial’s actual results may differ materially from these forward-looking statements and the risk factors that could cause these differences are detailed in our SEC reports. In addition, as stated more fully in our SEC reports, iStar disclaims any intent or obligation to update these forward-looking statements except as expressly required by law. Now, I’d like to turn the call over to iStar's Chairman and CEO, Jay Sugarman. Jay?

Thanks, Jason, and thanks to all of you for joining us this morning. Our first quarter was something of a table setter for us as we move closer to laying out our vision for the future. We are continued on a number of projects that should be strong contributors to profitability in the coming 24 months and our investment activity remain focused on themes we have touched on over the past several quarter. We solidified our liability structure with a new $250 million revolver and creatively monetized several assets to create a sizable liquidity position. Our goal now is to build on this progress and present a comprehensive overview of the company early in June during the NAREIT meetings in New York. With respect to our major business lines, we saw profitably continue in the real estate finance, net lease and operating portfolio segments at levels consistent with past quarters, while land remained a sizable negative despite growing revenues in several projects. Investments continue to be in the $200 million per quarter range, while the forward commitment book has enabled us to remain selective in choosing where to deploy capital. And while overall adjusted income was positive this quarter, we expect future quarters to benefit from increased lending volumes and increased profitability being driven by several of the land development projects. And we will have more detail on these to share at our June meeting. So with that quick summary, let me turn it over to Dave to review the numbers. Dave?

Thanks, Jay, and good morning, everyone. Let me begin by discussing our financial results for the first quarter of 2015, before moving on to investments activity and the performance of our business segments. Finally, I’ll finish up with an update on recent capital markets activity. For the quarter, our adjusted income allocable to common shareholders increased to $9 million or $0.10 per diluted common share from a loss of $6 million or a loss of $0.07 per diluted common share for the same quarter last year. The year-over-year improvement included a $7 million increase in interest income due to growth in our performing loan portfolio and an increase in the average yield of our loans. In addition, sales of real estate, primarily condominiums and earnings from equity method investments, contributed an additional $10 million of adjusted income this quarter. This was partially offset by $4 million less in operating lease and other income as we contributed several net lease properties into our net lease joint venture and sold certain other properties over the past year. Our net income allocable to common shareholders for the quarter was a loss of $23 million, compared to a loss of $27 million for the same period last year. In addition to the explanations for the year-over-year improvement just discussed, net income included a $4 million general provision for loan losses, largely attributable to the origination of new lending investments, which increased general reserves. Let me now turn to investment activity in our real estate and loan portfolios. During the quarter, we committed to $274 million of new investments, of which we funded $163 million. In addition, we funded $62 million associated with prior financing commitments and ongoing development, resulting in $225 million of total investment fundings during the quarter. We generated $207 million of…

Okay. Thanks, Dave. I think we’ll now just go ahead and open it up for questions. Operator?

[Operator Instructions] We got Jade Rahmani with KBW. Please go ahead.

Good morning and thanks for taking my questions. I was wondering if you could provide your view of the state of the current commercial real estate market. What you could characterize overall fundamentals as continuing to improve and on the other hand, do you believe there is too much capital chasing real estate. Could you identify any pockets of frothiness and also how do you expect to differentiate iStar to compete in this environment and maintain underwriting standards?

Hi, Jade. I think we touched on this in past calls. We do think the market is fairly competitive. It’s a strong yielding asset in a world where yield is very rare right now. So we are seeing lots of new entrants into the market. There has been a pretty strong tailwind. Certainly we’ve been playing that theme and the largest gateway city markets. We do believe there are some fairly significant technological changes taking place that are impacting real estate. We’ve been looking to play that theme a little bit. We’ll go into a lot more about I think in our June meeting. We will give you a comprehensive overview of how we see the world. I would say that, this is a big market. There are always pockets to play in. I think part of our skill set has been to try to find those pockets and again you will hear us talk a lot more about that in June.

Okay. And just on the lending side specifically, what types of loans are you focused on writing. We’ve seen in the media a couple of very large construction loans on mixed use developments. Is that the core focus? Large loans, construction weighted or are you also planning to other areas?

We are not constrained to any particular area I would say. We’ve talked in the past again about larger deals seem to have less competition, require more specialized sophisticated skill set, that fits up nicely with us and we are also looking that we think demographically you’re going to be driven over the next couple of years and we think we might be able to get an early entry point into some interesting businesses. So we are going where we think the best risk award returns are and right now large gateway city stuff whether its construction or not, we are looking for a high quality real estate that we can be in a safe place from a capital side.

Okay. With the focus on transitional properties amongst real estate investors, is there an opportunity for iStar to accelerate the sales and dispositions of it, unstabilized commercial operating property portfolio or do you think that continuing to stabilize assets, lease them up yourselves, put in whatever CapEx is necessary and then sell one-off is more likely the strategy.

Where we think we have – our capability is to do that, we are not going to give anybody a discount for their skill set. We will do it ourselves and then sell it to the stabilized market which is as you point out very deep and lots of capital flowing. Where we don’t have that particular skill set, we will try to JV with somebody or we will sell our rights. Obviously in Detroit, we thought we sold to a buyer who had a very significant presence on the ground, certainly had relationships and leasing capabilities that might have been better than ours and we were able to structure pretty clever dealer, both sides got with one. I think a lot of value was created in a short period of time some of which will accrue for them but some of which will accrue for us as well.

On that asset in particular, could you consider selling your ground lease interest to someone with a lower cost of capital?

The game is not done yet and we had to get the deal structures and completed, and now we have a number of options to look at how to monetize what we think is a pretty rare and exceptional ground lease that does inflation index and certainly in a 100% leased building probably the nicest building in that market should add substantial value.

On the net lease side and I apologize for asking so many questions, I don’t know if there are other people in the queue, but please do let me know. But on the net lease side, I was wondering if you could comment on your plans for that business. Whether you expect to grow it on a net basis and also the JV I think you indicated the asset base, but whether you expect to grow that or just get to the $500 million target.

Net lease has been a core business for us for almost 20 years now. So it will come in cycles. There will be moments where we will push and lean on that business harder. Right now, it’s pretty competitive. We are sticking to the things where we think we have competitive advantage but those are typically again where we bring in more sophisticated skill set there and they tend not to be cookie cutter deals, so they have longer lead times to get done. So we continue to have a pipeline of things we think are quite interesting. They just take a bit of time to just stayed and get to the finish line.

Okay. And turning to the land side, can you just characterize homebuilder appetite regarding potential joint ventures or bulk acquisitions. I think that we’ve seen some modest pullback in terms of the types of land deals they are willing to do at this stage in the cycle.

Yes, it’s an interesting market. It feel strong and then it feels next quarter less strong and then it feel strong again. I think it’s very idiosyncratic depending on market and depending on what supplies and demand the homebuilder community sees in those individual markets. We think where we have good land and scarce markets, we have not seen any pullback where you’ve seen markets with homebuilders have loaded upon lot and they certainly have taken a pause to digest what they bought, but we are pretty confident if you put the right product out there, there is a number of people show up on our doorsteps. So we are not concerned that there is any diminishing interest over the long term.

Okay. And lastly I was wondering if you could comment on the convertible perpetual preferred and what do you expect to happen with those securities. When you might anticipate more converting?

We assume those investors are sophisticated. They will maximize the value of the embedded option which means I don’t think there are no rush, but certainly we expect share price performance to put them in the money and when they do need to make that decision, we will fully expect be in a position where that will convert but we can’t say it today what they are thinking.

Okay. Thank you very much for taking the questions. Look forward to the June investor presentation.

Thanks, Jade.

And Mr. Fooks, we have no further questions in queue.

Great. Thanks, Jon, and thanks to everyone for joining us this morning. If you should have any additional questions on today’s earnings release, please feel free to contact me directly. Jon, would you please give the conference call replay instructions once again. Thanks.

Certainly. And ladies and gentlemen, this replay will start at 12:30 PM Eastern Time today. The dial in numbers for the replay is 1-800-475-6701 with the access code of 358123. That does conclude your conference for today. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.