Greetings and welcome to the Starwood Property Trust Third Quarter 2024 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are on a listen-only mode. A question-and-answer session will follow the formal presentation. [Operator Instructions] Please note this conference is being recorded. At this time, I'd like to turn the conference over to your host, Zach Tanenbaum, Head of Investor Relations. Zach, you may begin.

Thank you, operator. Good morning and welcome to Starwood Property Trust earnings call. This morning, the company released its financial results for the quarter ended September 30, 2024, filed its form 10-Q with the Securities and Exchange Commission and posted its earnings supplements to its website. These documents are available in the Investor Relations section of the company's website at www.starwoodpropertytrust.com. Before the call begins, I would like to remind everyone that certain statements made in the course of this call are not based on historical information and may constitute forward-looking statements. These statements are based on management's current expectation and beliefs and are subject to a number of trends and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those described in the forward-looking statements. I refer you to the company's filings made with the SEC for a more detailed discussion of the risks and factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied any forward-looking statements made today. The company undertakes no duty to update any forward-looking statements that may be made during the course of this call. Additionally, certain non-GAAP financial measures will be discussed on this conference call. Our presentation of this information is not intended to be considered in isolation or as a substitute for the financial information presented in accordance with GAAP. Reconciliations of these non-GAAP financial measures to the most comparable measures prepared in accordance with GAAP can be accessed through our filings with the SEC at www.sec.gov. Joining me on the call today are Barry Sternlicht, the company's Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Jeff DiModica, the company's President, and Rena Paniry, the company's Chief Financial Officer. With that, I'm now going to turn the call over to Rena.

Thank you, Zach, and good morning, everyone. This quarter, we reported distributable earnings, or DE, of $159 million, or $0.48 per share. GAAP net income was $76 million, or $0.23 per share. The difference was driven by a higher CECL reserve, which I will discuss shortly. Across businesses, we committed $2.1 billion towards new investments this quarter, with 60% of our investing in businesses other than commercial lending, which now makes up just 56% of our assets. I will begin this morning with commercial and residential lending, which contributed DE of $190 million to the quarter, or $0.57 per share. In commercial lending, we originated $848 million of loans, of which we funded $635 million and an additional $134 million on pre-existing loan commitments. Repayments for the quarter totaled $1.1 billion, nearly twice that of last quarter, bringing year-to-date repayments to $2.6 billion. Our $14.6 billion loan book ended the quarter with a weighted average risk rating of 3.0, consistent with prior quarter. Most of our borrowers continue to support their assets, investing over $2 billion of fresh equity since the beginning of last year. On the topic of CECL, our reserve increased by $65 million to a balance of $445 million, of which 71% relates to office. Together with our previously taken REO impairments of $183 million, these reserves represent 4.1% of our lending and REO portfolios and translate to $1.86 per share of book value. Jeff will discuss our risk rating changes with you in greater detail. Next, I will turn to residential lending, where our on-balance sheet loan portfolio ended the quarter at $2.5 billion. Prepayment speeds decreased slightly while spreads tightened, leading to $58 million of repayments and a $22 million net positive mark-to-market for GAAP purposes. This mark includes a $97 million positive mark on…

Thanks, Rina. I've been a little under the weather, so I'll apologize in advance for my voice. Fifteen years after starting STWD, we're the most diverse mortgage REIT with a market cap larger than our four largest peers combined. We have deployed over $100 billion in that time, and shareholders have received a 10.5% total return since our inception and $7.7 billion in dividends, a dividend which we have never cut. This includes the spinoff of what became Starwood Waypoint Homes, which ultimately merged into Invitation Homes. While we are proud of our diversification and scale, management and our board, who collectively own almost $400 million of our stock, are most proud of our consistency, as we have also earned a similar total return in the last 12 months and the 12 months before that, 24 of the most difficult months for commercial real estate. We invested over $2 billion in the quarter, more than half of which came from outside our CRE lending business. We have invested every quarter since inception. Our loan pipeline is the strongest it has been in two years, and we expect our pace of commitments to continue to increase. With record amounts of cash in money market funds and investors reaching for yield early in a rate cut cycle, we have seen significant spread tightening across our markets. Although longer rates have been more sticky, the yield curve continues to normalize, and we have seen SOFR forward curve move lower as the market prices in more Fed cuts, likely as early as Thursday and again in December. This combination has brought liquidity and optimism back to the CRE markets for the first time since the Fed began raising rates and will help repair value in our industry's weaker legacy assets. Banks are pulling back…

Thank you, Zach, thank you Rina and thank you Jeff and thank you for joining us for this call. I'll first start with some comments on the market in general. The Category 5 hurricane that's been hanging over the commercial real estate market in the United States is finally clearing and we had our first rate reduction and hopefully we'll get another one tomorrow. I think you can expect rates to continue to fall as inflation falls and inflation is falling primarily because of the delayed impact of the rent component of CPI which as you know is a third of CPI and as rents are basically almost flat now across the United States and the government's readings are still too high. I also think the consumer will be taking a breather. Wage growth is slowing, it has record credit card debt and we have one of the lowest savings rates we've ever had at 2.7% but the consumer is employed and he is happy to borrow money but as I think the economy does slow and then you have the impact of course of the election uncertainty. Whoever wins it's not so much whoever wins it's what they said and what their actual policies would be, and I think that will also create some hesitation by both the consumer and companies to take forward their capital spending in the face of radically different policies that may or may not be enacted by the respective congresses. I think U.S. growth though has been unique, it's been exceptional but it's really exceptional to the U.S. partly for some of the wrong reasons like our massive fiscal spending which is again going forward regardless of Jerome Powell's interest rate policy. We will spend trillions of dollars on infrastructure, CHIPS Act, the Inflation…

Thank you. At this time we'll be conducting a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions]. Our first question comes from Stephen Laws with Raymond James. Please proceed with your question.

Congrats on a solid quarter and nice to see the acceleration and origination activity. Jeff kind of along those lines you know high liquidity, low leverage, accelerating originations. You know I know you do watch leverage because you're pursuing an investment grade rating. But can you talk about the investment capacity as you deploy that and kind of what kind of incremental earnings you know do you think that can generate as you shift more to office?

Yes. Thank you, Stephen. Excuse me, I may cough a little bit. I apologize I'm pretty under the weather. So in terms of investment capacity and the ability to sort of grow earnings here. It depends on a few things. Obviously our ability to move assets out of non-approval or REO would create earnings capacity in the easiest form in the form of growing through equity and debt in some combination and you've seen us this year issue equity once and debt twice. If we did continue to issue equity and debt to grow, I sort of think of it as at a 2.1 in terms of leverage it's for every dollar of equity that you that you issued you could issue 2.1 dollars of debt. Your debt costs you somewhere around 6%. We issued a 6% sixth year, six to five and a half year note in September and your equity costs you in the nines or somewhere around that. So you end up with a blended with 2.1 versus one somewhere around a 7% cost of new capital. Our historic ROE has been 12% to 13% and if we could put that 7% money back out at 12% you make 500 basis points. So for every billion dollars that you're able to do in a combination of equity and debt if that's how you choose to grow and maintain that leverage at 2.1, you would add $50 million to distributable earnings on a zero loss basis if you earned a 12 and paid an effective cost of 7. So if you did 2 billion you'd earn $100 million. We've told you that we have a little over a billion dollars on non-accrual today, so our goal is to earn $100 million incremental to offset that or start bringing down these non-accruals and REOs. We're working hard to do that but hopefully that gives you some scale of what we think the power of growing the businesses. We are full steam ahead on trying to grow. We have the most significant pipeline that we've had since I think the fourth quarter of '21 or maybe in the first quarter of '22 as I look at our actionable pipeline list. There is less competition from banks. There is more competition from debt funds. It feels like we have a pretty good runway right now in energy infrastructure to continue to grow. We really like that sector as well and we'll continue to look in a lot of different places. We did our first Freddie B piece this quarter so we're looking there. We're looking at CMBS B pieces but our goal is to grow and growing our way out of the drag of the non-accrual et cetera to make sure that we can continue to earn our core $0.48 is the main goal of the of the management team today.

Thanks. And a quick follow-up around the unsecured debt. You know as you look to increase the mix of unsecured debt on the balance sheet. Can you talk about any impact that may have on earnings or how much kind of higher cost secured debt are you going to be able to pay off without kind of a material shift in your cost of funds?

Yes. So it's interesting everybody here knows I think at this point that we have these accordion repo lines. It is the benefit that we pick up in having bank repo lines. The negative that we give up we've talked about in the past. We give up a little bit of recourse. We give up the ability for the bank to credit markup and we give up across all the assets. In return we get the lowest rate we can borrow at unsecured debt and we get the ability to accordion these lines. So when a dollar of cash comes into our system instead of earning a money market rate of 4% or whatever that is, we've been over this before but we will pay down the most expensive outstanding accordion repo line and the most expensive lines are SOFR plus 300, 325, some even at 350. So today you'd earn 8%, 8.5% on cash if you only had one dollar of cash. When we sit on a billion eight of cash like we are today we paid down the 350s. We paid down the 325s, the 300s, et cetera. So we're probably paying something down more in line with 240 over 245 over today and the more cash we have the less we're effectively getting paid on our cash. So when I look at our last high yield deal which we swapped to SOFR plus 270, that 270 to me on a repo equivalent is 260 because our bonds are semi-bond and our repos are monthly. So we pick up another 10 basis points there. So if we can continue to borrow at 260 over which the market's a little wider than that today we opportunistically tapped it at the height of the high yield index in September but…

Our next question comes from Jade Rahmani with KBW. Please proceed with your question.

Seems like a positive story is building around the commercial real estate recovery prospects. The one damper on that is the treasury market and I know you all have been sensitive in your comments around long-term treasuries and how that creates risk for refis. What are your views on how that might change the positive trajectory we're currently seeing?

Yes, Jade. It's a great question. Barry would certainly take this one normally. The 10-year is obviously up today. The curve is normalizing and steepening. The thought that there'll be more government expenditures and potentially creating inflation and growth is not great for the 10-year and that will have an impact on cap rates. I will say that it's not all negative. If I look over a longer period of time over the last two years, I've been really focused on where's SOFR in 2026. SOFR in 2026 is somewhere in the 375 area today after this big move. It was 350 just a couple of days ago. That is in the middle of the range of where we've been for the last couple of years. On this call last year, at Halloween of last year, SOFR in 26 was 460. So it's significantly better than where we were, but it's not as good as the 285 or so that we were at five or six months ago where we expected the Fed to be more aggressively cutting. I would say that our portfolio from a credit perspective, we certainly want lower SOFR. That will benefit us more than lower cap rates driven by the 10-year. So this move and this steepening of the curve doesn't hurt our portfolio as much. But should we normalize somewhere around here? I think you will see cap rates potentially be slightly higher, obviously, with what's happened in the 10-year. And you will see our ability to look at our entirety of our multi-books, et cetera, that might have a five and a half or six debt yield that we thought a week ago were easy to refine, might be a little bit more difficult to refine. But we think there's enough capital out…

Thank you very much. In the opening comments, you talked about the mix of new investment weighted toward non-CRE originations. Could you provide any additional color? Is that a ratio you expect to maintain? Is it a goal to reduce the CRE percentage, or is that just a snapshot of a moment in time?

It's a moment in time, Jay. We did just under a billion in CRE lending. We had a very strong quarter. In our CMBS originations business, we did the Freddie B piece, which we talked about. We bought some CMBS and we were pretty aggressive again on the energy infrastructure side, which we think is a great business today. I think you were probably 53% or 54% to 46% or 47% this quarter. I would expect that our core business, which is CRE lending, becomes 70% or so as I look at quarters going out. And we certainly think we have a pipeline that would be in line with that.

Our next question comes from Doug Harter with UBS. Please proceed with your question.

As you guys think about executing the pipeline, should we think about that growth being funded by leverage normalizing or continuing to raise equity?

Yes. Listen, we raised equity this year. If we wanted to stay within the normal band for our company, we're at 2.14x leverage today, near the lowest we've ever been. Part of that is that we are sitting on more cash. When that gets invested, I would expect we're more in the mid-twos. I think we have a great story to tell with the rating agencies as we stay below 2.8 or so. We're pretty low. We have a lot of room to add more debt capacity. We haven't raised as much debt as would stay in line with the 2.1 or certainly not the 2.5. We have room to issue not insignificant amounts more debt. We have $4.6 billion of unencumbered assets. We have room on our term loan to issue another billion dollars of incremental debt. My gut is, depending on where markets are at any given time and where things are, that we have significant capacity to issue more debt before we go to another part of our capital structure. We have room. If we get this money spent, we're in spread stay here. I would expect that we continue to do what we said we want to do, which is increase the amount of unsecured debt on our balance sheet as a percentage of total debt to try to get to a ratings upgrade in the not-too-distant future. That would lean us towards that direction.

I appreciate that, Jeff. Rina, on Woodstar, it seemed like the discount rate went up in the quarter despite rates going down. I'm just wondering if you could give us an update there.

Sure. Doug, our process for Woodstar valuation is to do an internal valuation in the interim quarters, and then we get an appraisal every year end, which is required by our partnership agreement for the JV. What we do each quarter is, we look at comparable sales that occurred not only in the quarter, but also over the previous 12 months. The comp set really just had a wide range of cap rates that got executed. The average ended up at the 4.6 that you see disclosed in our 10-Q as far as cap rate goes, so that's really what drove that. No way to really know where the third-party appraiser is going to come in at year end, but I know last year the cap rate that we used ended up being really close to where the appraisers came in. Not sure about year-end valuation just yet, but that's how we approach the process.

Doug, we have a list of the last 25 or so that have traded similar to ours in our markets, over half a billion dollars in the last year and change, and that comes up with the same number that's in the queue, and that's the number that we're using. I know people will look at where rates are at any given time. They certainly were lower at the end of last quarter than today, but we base it on where the market is.

Just a further point on that, we discussed it, I believe, at year-end last year that there is a 25-basis point portfolio premium in there, so if you look at it on a per-asset basis, your cap rate is really 25 basis points above what you see in the queue.

Our next question comes from Rick Shane with JPMorgan. Please proceed with your question.

Look, as you work through the challenges in the portfolio, there basically are three paths. One is modification and extension of loans. Two is to sell the loans. Third is to foreclose and take the property. As you work through that process, what is the decision tree, and how much is that impacted by property type, geography? What are the criteria that help us understand how you're going to remedy the portfolio?

Yes, that's a really good question, Rick. Thanks. At the end of the day, I think there are certain financial institutions who want to do what might look best for their financials as they report them, and that's going to force them to either be a seller or a holder, and oftentimes a seller. There are certain less liquid companies that would look like us that might have to be a seller because they don't have the capital to put into the assets to optimize the assets. They may not have the private equity sponsor that we have that has history of running today over $100 billion of equity assets to get to the point of creating enough value to where you want to take it to market, and then to really wait until you have a decision that this is the optimal time to take it to market as opposed to it's the optimal time for my financials for me to make a decision. I think we always look at things and say, how can we best protect shareholder value by finding the right time and what we think we can do in terms of improving an asset and timing an exit? So having great liquidity and having access to tremendous liquidity really allows us to sit back and make the right decisions that we think are in the best interest of the shareholders and management in the board of $400 million of stock. So it's our retirement as well, and we want to look at this as what's the best way to get back every dollar that we think that as opposed to forcing ourselves into a long-term sale, into a sale that takes a loss today or sign up for a longer-term modification that effectively takes a loss over time because you're giving up something in order to have a modification in earnings over the coming years. So we weigh those all against each other. We weigh where they are in the market, and we try to make a decision based on that. But we get to make a decision with clear eyes and a full heart that we want to be in an asset for a long period of time and we think there's value there or else we would move on.

Did you just tell us that you can't lose, Jeff?

I can't lose. You're a Friday Night Lights guy. I love it.

Yes. I got your reference. Anyway, thank you for the answers, guys.

Our next question comes from Harsh Hemnani with Green Street. Please proceed with your question.

Maybe I think you touched on this a little bit, but given the feeling in the commercial real estate market, the improvement in fundamentals, how are you sort of looking at balancing the near term in terms of capital allocation given the relative value between perhaps infrastructure loans and commercial real estate lending? And then how does that maybe contrast with your longer-term strategic view where maybe you want commercial real estate loans to be less than 60% of the book overall?

Yes. Listen, it's a really good question. I think we're happy that they're less than 60% in the last couple of years and we're 56% today as commercial real estate values have certainly come off of their peak. That doesn't mean that that's where we want it to be. I think if we felt like relative value was leaning significantly towards commercial real estate, we'd be happy doing 100% of our new business in commercial real estate. Balance has been good for us. We appreciate Green Street picking us up and covering us. We've pivoted this business over the last 15 years. Every couple of years we've sort of leaned a different direction. In 2015 and '16, we didn't like where lending values were going. We thought that spreads were getting too tight, and we thought it was a better time to be a buyer than a seller and we basically stopped writing loans and we acquired this $4 billion or so of a property pipeline. We've had stretches where we've been more significant on the resi side. Certainly over the last couple of years with uncertainty in the commercial real estate side and less volume on the commercial real estate side, we've been fortunate that that's been met with an incredibly good investing environment for our energy infrastructure business. It's midstream assets which include pipelines and power plants, sort of 50% or so each. The LTV on that book I think is down to 51.5%, the lowest it's been. The term loans that are quoted in the secondary market average significantly above par today. That's never been the case. We've been earning mid to high teens on that book as we've leaned in and really grown that in the last couple of years. We're earning that because our liability…

Got it. That's really helpful color. Maybe if I can ask on the conduit side, I think as you mentioned in the prepared remarks, originations are strong, margins are healthy. Maybe given what's happened with rates early in this quarter, how's that trending into the end of the year and maybe your outlook for next year?

Yes. Listen, the SASB market is still the bigger market. That's not really where we play. Within the conduit market, we tend to write $8 million to $15 million smaller loans that the banks don't want that maybe have a little bit more room in it if you're willing to do the work. We hedge 100% of the interest rates and we only hedge about 30% of the credit spread. That's historically what we've always done. In quarters where credit spreads continue to tighten, as they have in the last couple of quarters and you've seen AAAs across the board do really well, we tend to make outsized returns in that business and we'll pull back a little bit when credit spreads get into the tights. We're going to have close to a record year this year. What I'm seeing right now for the near term still looks really good for the fourth quarter, but if AAA spreads are into all-time tights, you're not going to see us layer in a larger risk position if we think that there's an equal opportunity for spreads to go higher than tighter because that's going to define the difference between us making a little and a lot or risking not making any. I think there's only been one quarter in our history where we didn't make money in that business. We're patient there. We play in smaller loans. We have a niche business. The guys who do it for us have an unbelievable risk appetite. We've got every loan I think we've ever made since we bought this business into a conduit deal. We know what BP buyers want because we're a BP buyer, because we're a big servicer. We tend to originate smartly, never get hung on loans, and it's a profitable, steady business for us. I don't think with this rate move that you should expect a significantly bigger conduit year next year than this year, even though you will have more rolls of the old 10-year loans. You're now looking at the 2014 and 2015 and 2016, which were pretty good origination years. Those will roll, and if the same borrowers decide to go back into conduit, there will be more of a pipeline, but they'll have different opportunities. To be honest, if this interest rate curve continues to normalize and steepen, you could see some of them go floating at some point if the curve continues to steepen up. We'll see where that comes from, but right now, we're going to stick to our knitting and run a fairly conservative book that is accretive every quarter.

We have reached the end of the question-and-answer session. I'd now like to turn the call back over to management for closing comments.

I'm sorry, again, that Barry was unable to be on for the Q&A, but we really appreciate your time and look forward to updating you again next quarter. Thank you, everyone.

This concludes today's conference. You may disconnect your lines at this time, and we thank you for your participation.