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spk04: Good day, and welcome to the AAMC Investor Call. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Donya Sawyer. Please go ahead.
spk01: Good morning, everyone, and welcome to AAMC's Q1 2023 Annual Earnings Conference Call. I'm Donya Sawyer, the new Chief Operating Officer of Lending Operations at AAMC. Before we begin, I would like to remind everyone that certain statements made during this conference call may constitute forward-looking statements covered by the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements are not historical in nature. As described under risk factors in our annual report on Form 10-K, forward-looking statements are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties that could cause the company's actual results to differ from its beliefs, expectations, estimates, and projections. Consequently, you should not rely on these forward-looking statements as predictions of future events. Statements made during this conference call are made as of today's date, and the company undertakes no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise. As previously mentioned, today's call is being recorded, and a link to this webcast will be posted to our website later today. With that, joining me for today's call is our Chief Executive Officer, Jason Kopchak. Jason will provide an update on our first quarter 2023 activity, review additional corporate developments, and present an overview of our outlook for the year ahead. We will then open the line for questions. Lastly, materials for this call can be found in our investor presentation, which was issued earlier this morning. Related information can also be found on the stockholders' page of our website at www.altasourceamc.com. And now, I'll turn it over to Jason.
spk06: Thank you, Donya. It has been but seven short weeks since we last spoke. However, a lot was accomplished in that time. As a reminder, we are a capital light originator of private credit products. In our business model, for every dollar of capital that we deploy, we can originate $10 of assets to sell. Once we achieve normalized operations, we turn our loans on average weekly with a net margin of 150 basis points. This means that we expect to earn $7.50 for every dollar of capital deployed at the beginning of the year. On slide A, assuming $20 million in weekly production, the original $2 million of capital required would grow to $17.5 million at the end of the year. Therefore, as we grow faster, we would expect to generate more XX cash. Given the progress that we have made in building our loan production facility and pipeline, we have let the closed loan portfolio runoff to position our capital to be available for wholesale and the direct-to-borrower originations, which reduce interest income for the quarter. Even still, first quarter earnings improved by $1.1 million, reducing the first quarter loss to $3 million on revenue of $2.1 million. Our product mix includes both short-duration, one- to two-year-term, high-yielding fixed-income assets with a gross weighted average coupon of 9.5% to 12%. secured by one to four family residential or multi-family residential properties going through value improvements, also known as residential transitional loans or RTLs, as well as long-duration interest-only secured by income-producing residential properties, also known as DSCR loans. Unlike our peers, we do not use loan securitizations or banks as an exit for our loans. Instead, we establish individual criteria or a buy box to sell loans to institutions with permanent capital such as insurance companies, endowments, and pension funds. Our investors do not have the infrastructure to originate, yet potentially have over a trillion dollars allocated to alternative fixed income assets. I have 15 years of experience in unique relationships with these institutions. As a reminder, once we have secured our takeout investor, we then go to originate these assets, these loans, via our three channels, direct-to-borrower, wholesale, and broker channel. Turning to our accomplishments. In Q1, we hired Diane Sawyer as COO of both Allgent Lending, direct to borrower platform, and Alternative Lending Group, our wholesale lending platform. She has made an immediate impact with the build out of our loan production operations across all origination channels and manages relationships with institutional buyers. We added three additional takeout investors, two of which have insurance money. We are in talks with several additional takeout investors. In 2022, we were primarily a buyer of closed residential transitional loans, but as of mid-January of 2023, as planned, we turned on our direct-to-borrower origination channel, and in late March, we did a soft rollout of our wholesale platform. As a reminder, there is materially more revenue and profits to be earned from originating a loan versus purchasing a closed loan. Furthermore, if the customer experience is good, these borrowers often finance multiple projects each year. In the fixed income market, there's significantly more demand for self-originated paper. Turning to our Q2 2023 goals in operating metric standards. To go live with our wholesale platform. Another goal of ours is to go live with our direct-to-broker channel. For the RTLs, our expected gross revenue per loan is in excess of 350 basis points. For term and DSCR loans, our expected gross revenue per loan is in excess of 250 basis points. Once stabilized, our cost to process a loan is expected to be $160 per file. This represents a significant competitive advantage due to having our loan production principally conducted in Bangalore, India. Our expected average loan size for RTLs is approximately 500K. Our expected average loan size for DSCR loans is approximately 300K. As we are still in the process of setting up our loan production lines, there is no guarantee that all loans in our current pipeline will close. However, as of May 10th, our pipeline consists of the following. Direct-to-borrower origination pipeline is approximately 75 million. The wholesale channel has a committed volume of 45 million. On slide B, the $62 million pipeline from a direct-to-borrow channel represents net submissions of $38 million over the past seven weeks, with a net of $11 million of closings. The $45 million pipeline from the wholesale channel represents a net submission of $37 million over the past seven weeks, net of $7 million of loan closings. We plan on rolling out our broker direct channel this week. For the past seven weeks, our net submissions averaged 10.7 million per week and have grown substantially over the period. We expect continued growth in all three channels. By the way of example, on slide C, in the wholesale channel, we presently have five clients. Client one had net submissions of 29.5 million and has been active since March 1st. We have 100% participation of their sales force, which has four loan offers. Client two has net submissions of 15 million, has been active since March 9th. We have approximately 2% participation of their sales force, which is approximately 250 loan officers. Client three has net submissions of a half million dollars, has been active since April 27th, and we have approximately 5% of their sales force, which is 11 loan officers. Client four, we go live with them this week, has approximately 600 loan officers. Client five, we will go live the week of June 1st has approximately 2,000 loan officers. In summary, we're experiencing strong demand for our products from both the perspective of the borrowers and our takeout investors. Hence, we are perfecting, we are focused on perfecting and scaling our operations. I'm excited by the team's accomplishments since I joined as CEO last July. I'm looking forward to ramping our performance through the year. With that, I'll turn the call back to the operator for questions.
spk04: Thank you. If you would like to ask a question over the phone, please signal by pressing star 1 on your telephone keypad. If you are using a speaker phone, please make sure that your mute function is turned off to allow your signal to reach our equipment. Again, you may press star 1 to ask a question. We'll pause for just a moment to allow everyone an opportunity to signal.
spk02: Once again, before we go to questions, that's star 1 if you would like to signal, star 1 to join the queue. We'll take our first question from Jeff Moore, private investor. Please go ahead.
spk05: Hey, thanks for taking my questions, guys. On slide B, you say over the past seven weeks, net submissions have grown an average of 10.7 million per week and accelerated over the period. Can you talk to the more recent weeks in that period about what have those averaged per week?
spk06: I don't have it broken out in front of me. We can circle back with that information. Yeah, we don't have that information in front of me. So I'd like to circle back with you on that one, Jeff.
spk05: Okay. But, I mean, at the end of the day, like, you know, over the past, say, two months, you know, you've had submissions of 10.7 a week, so-called at, like, 45, 50 million a month, which will put you on a run rate for kind of the targets you put out at the start of the year. And you haven't even really rolled out a lot of the broker wholesales yet.
spk06: Exactly. So I think, to your point, Jeff, which was interesting, is if you look at our direct-to-borrower platform, what we've seen is, Over the last seven weeks, our pipeline is more than doubled on the direct-to-borrower. And that's the channel we rolled out in mid-January. We did a soft rollout on wholesale. And the goal with that is that you roll out a channel, you're going to come across issues. And right away, I think the first two weeks we had 15 million in submissions. Now we're up at 45 million. And we really are just scratching the surface. the volume is picking up dramatically in the last three weeks. We feel good about it, but we are focused on operations. We're focused on the process with our partners. So that way we give them a smooth experience because anybody can go live, but it's all about having a good customer experience and a good execution. And that's what we're, we're focused on perfecting that part of it.
spk05: Okay. So on the execution front, like on average, how long does it take to close one of these loans? And again, what are some of the challenges and the successes that you guys have had in kind of rolling this out operationally?
spk06: So typically a loan on average, I said the average loan takes about 40, about 30 days. Okay. These, these are nuanced loans. Um, what we find is with our new construction, the borrowers are typically a little more experienced and they close a little quicker and the, and the fix and flip a little bit less experience take a little longer. So, um, what, what we found is exactly that is, is, The more experienced borrowers have packages that come in quicker and tighter. What have we learned? We learned that there's a lot of demand, even as rates are dramatically up over the year before. We're not concerned about the amount of demand coming in the door. What we're trying to do is make sure that we have a tight process that we can close efficiently and deliver a saleable loan. So what experience have we had in the last 30 days? I think our packages are a lot tighter today than they were 30 days ago. The sellability of our loans are tighter. I've been on the trading desk for years, and trust me, you'll see operations that have really sloppy closed packages. We don't want that. We want the loan, the borrower coming in. We want it closing in 30 days, and we want to be able to sell it within three to five days. So the amount of time that we're today at closing a loan is probably half of what it was two months ago. And our sellability has gone up dramatically, meaning the quality of the packages we put together are much improved over the last 60 days.
spk05: Okay, so you're going to be turning your capital every three days, every three to five days is what it sounds like, right?
spk06: That's the goal. The goal and the ideal role when we get to normalized operations, we're turning the capital every three to five days. Okay, if we run the system right, again, Donna, we brought Donna in for a reason. She's very experienced. She's very disciplined. And the goal is the turnover. We close a loan and we sell it and we get reimbursed within three to five days. So that's, that's our target. We feel comfortable. It can be done. But with that being said, that is part of the process we're building out right now.
spk05: Well, it's impressive. So good luck on that. Also, I was happy to see you'll repurchase. It's like just under 20,000 shares of stock. What, um, Are those repurchases, do you think you're going to continue them? How do you feel about those right now?
spk06: The thought was we're there, we can do it. We still feel the stock is undervalued. Part of what we do is we have the ability to police the stock. Number two is if we feel that we don't have a strict amount that we have to put out and that we plan on buying, but we are opportunity to be looking at the stock. So we still feel it's undervalued, but frankly, right now we're conserving our capital for our originations because turning our capital 50 times a year is more valuable than buying stock.
spk05: Okay. Got you. Well, thanks for answering my questions. I'll hop back in if I have anything else. Thanks. Thanks, Jeff.
spk04: As a reminder, if you would like to join the queue to ask a question over the phone, you may press star 1 on your telephone keypad now. Again, that's star 1 if you'd like to ask a question over the phone.
spk06: So there's a question that came in. It says, can you talk about the impact of the regional bank issues? I think it's a great question. So I want to come right out and say, look, our bank partners have been fantastic. They've been great partners. They're very experienced banks. banks in the real estate and mortgage space. They've come to us actually about increasing our line and doing more business. From that standpoint, it's very comforting. The bank issues, I think at the end of the day, the regional bank sector is overall holding up pretty well. How has it affected us? We know what bank partners are good partners, so it's actually strengthened. We had great relationships with our banks. We had the ability to increase lines so that's shown that they would pick the right partners so I think for us has been great it has caused some of our some of our peers has caused them problems because some of the weaker banks have falling out and they're and they pulled back from real estate so frankly the regional bank issues it's actually been a win for us because we again we like we've aligned ourselves with the right banks who understand and comfortable with the real estate space and worry space and their and their balance sheets strong and And then some of our peers have been aligned with probably some of the softer regional banks, and it's caused them some headaches. So I feel, you know, for us, it's been a win-win for us.
spk03: Any other questions?
spk04: As a reminder, if you would like to ask a question over the phone, you may press star 1 on your telephone keypad now. It appears there are no further questions at this time. I'll turn the conference back over for any additional or closing remarks.
spk06: Well, I appreciate everybody's time. We look forward to the year ahead, and have a great week. Thank you.
spk04: This concludes today's call. Thank you again for your participation. You may now disconnect, and have a great day.
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