New York Mortgage Trust, Inc.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the New York Mortgage Trust First Quarter 2021 Results Conference Call. During today's presentation, all parties will be in a listen-only mode. Following the presentation, the conference will be open for questions. If you have a question, please press the star followed by the one on your touchtone phone. If you would like to withdraw your question, please press the pound key. If you are using speaker equipment, we do ask that you please lift the handset before making your selection. This conference is being recorded on Friday, May 7, 2021. A press release and supplemental financial presentation with New York Mortgage Trust's first quarter 2021 results was released yesterday. Both the press release and supplemental financial presentation are available on the company's website at www.nymtrust.com. Additionally, we are hosting a live webcast of today's call, which you can access in the events and presentation section of the company's website. At this time, management would like for me to inform you that certain statements made during the conference call, which are not historical, may be deemed forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Although New York Mortgage Trust believes the expectations reflected in any forward-looking statements are based on reasonable assumptions, it can give no assurance that its expectations will be attained. Factors and risks that could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations are detailed in yesterday's press release and from time to time in the company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Now, at this time, I would like to introduce Steve Mumma, Chairman and CEO. Steve, please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for being on the call. Jason Serrano, our president, will be speaking to our investment portfolio strategy today, and Christine Naria, our CFO, will be speaking more TCL about our first quarter results. We will all be speaking to our supplemental financial presentation that was released yesterday after the market closed and is available on our website. We will allow questions following the conclusion of our presentation. The company completed another successful quarter, delivering an economic return of 2.1%, with $0.11 gap earnings per share and $0.12 comprehensive earnings per share. Our book value remained unchanged at $4.71. Our portfolio debt margin expanded by 12 basis points to 2.42%, but more importantly, our portfolio net interest income increased by $4.4 million from the previous quarter, or 17%. We expect to see continued improvement in both our net interest margin and net interest income in future periods as we transition out of our lower-yielding QSIP securities and focus increasingly on loans in both our single-family and multifamily strategies. On the balance sheet side, we have continued to focus on expanding our access to longer-term, non-mark-to-market financing arrangements. As a testament to the strengthening of our balance sheet in recent quarters, we were pleased to close on our first rated unsecured bond deal in April, a $100 million, 5.75% five-year financing. It serves as an additional non-market-to-market financing option for the company as we continue to build out our credit portfolio. Now going to the presentation, I will start on slide six. Our investment portfolio totaled $3.2 billion unchanged from the previous quarter. Our market capitalization was $2.2 million, an 18% increase from December 31st. Our capital is currently allocated 75% to single family and 24% to multifamily strategies. Our portfolio growth continues to be focused on loan investments as we believe that we can generate better risk-adjusting returns for more stable funding. Going over to slide seven, we'll go through some key developments, some of which I spoke to in the opening comments. We declared a 10-cent common stock dividend representing an 8.9% yield on our stock price as of March 31st, and we had a total rate of return on our common stock of almost 24% for the period. We purchased $347 million in residential loans and closed on a $10 million multifamily joint venture investment, our first since 2015. We continue to opportunistically sell our QCIP portfolios, selling $112 million during the period. On our financing efforts during the period, we funded $160 million of business purpose loans on a non-mark-to-market line. And in April, as I said before, we closed on our first rated unsecured bond offering of $100 million. giving us yet another option to fund our credit portfolios, specifically our multifamily investment opportunities. Both financings continue to produce mark-to-market pressure back to the company. On slide 9, we cover key portfolio metrics on a quarter-over-quarter comparison. Our net interest margin for the quarter was 2.42%, an increase of 12 basis points from the previous quarter. Our portfolio weighted average yield was largely unchanged at 6.03%. However, our funding costs improved by 14 basis points, mostly attributable to the payoff for non-agency securitization that we completed back in June of 2020. Going forward, we expect to continue to improve in our asset yields as we start to see the full impact of recent loan investments that closed late in this quarter. We expect to close at least one financing securitization in the second quarter and plan several others by the end of the year. Our recourse portfolio leverage remains low at 0.2%, at 0.2 times as of March 31st, as we continue to focus on ways to decrease our exposure to market-to-market call risk back to the company. Now, Christine Nario, our CFO, will go through the financial results in more detail. Christine?

Thank you, Steve. Good morning, everyone, and thank you again for being on the call. In discussing the financial results for the quarter, I will be using some of the information from the quarterly comparative financial information section included in slides 23 to 30 of the supplemental presentation. Slide 10 summarizes our activity in the first quarter. We acquired residential loans for 347 million, closed in a multifamily joint venture investment of 10 million, and purchased 6 million of investment securities. We sold non-agency RMBS and CMBS for proceeds, totaling 112 million. We also had total repayments of approximately 184 million primarily from our residential loans. Most of these residential loans were purchased at a discount, and the early payoff off the loans resulted in additional income of approximately $3.3 million, which is included in realized gain. We also had three multifamily loans that redeemed, which generated $0.6 million of redemption premium income. We had net income of $42 million and comprehensive income of $45 million, attributable to our common stockholders. Our book value ended at 471, unchanged from the fourth quarter. Slide 11 details our financial results. We had net interest income of $30.3 million, an increase of $4.4 million from the previous quarter. Our interest income increased by $4.1 million, primarily due to increased investment in higher-yielding business-purpose loans. Also, interest expense decreased by $300,000, which can be attributed to the repayment of debt associated with our non-agency RMBS re-securitization that had a higher funding cost in the first quarter. We had non-interest income of $39.7 million, mostly from net unrealized gains of $26.2 million due to improved pricing across the majority of our asset classes, particularly our residential loans and investment in consolidated SLSD. We also generated $7.1 million of net realized gains from sales of investment securities and residential loan prepayment activity. In addition, our multifamily preferred equity investments accounted for as equity, and our equity investments in entities that invest in residential properties and loans contributed $3.4 million of income during the quarter. We had total G&A expenses of $11.4 million an increase of approximately $1.8 million from the previous quarter. The increase can be attributed to stock-based compensation expense related to 2021 annual equity awards, an increase in incentive expense related to improved performance in 2021. We would expect our G&A expense ratio to be approximately 2% of the company stockholders' equity going forward. We had operating expenses of $7.8 million during the quarter, which included $4.8 million related to our portfolio investments, which increased primarily due to growth of the business purpose loan portfolio and $2.9 million of operating expenses related to two multifamily apartment properties that we consolidate in accordance with GAAP. As I mentioned earlier, included in our results for the quarter is the net income activity related to multifamily apartment properties that we consolidate in our financial statements in accordance with GAAP. These properties generated operating income of $1.5 million and incurred interest expense and operating expenses of $0.3 million and $2.9 million, respectively. After reflecting the share in the losses of the non-controlling interest of $1.4 million, in total, These multifamily apartment properties incurred a net loss of 0.3 million for the quarter. It should be noted that the net loss in these properties includes depreciation and amortization related to the real estate. The graph on slide 11 illustrates the change in our book value from December 31, 2019. Our book value remained flat at 471 during the quarter, but increased 21% from the end of March 2020. Our stock price has also recovered significantly increasing our price-to-book ratio to 95% from 40% at the end of March 2020. We continue to focus on growing and strengthening our balance sheet by investing in our core strategies of single-family and multifamily investments, and prudent liability management by placing greater emphasis on procuring longer-term and or more committed financing arrangements, such as securitizations and non-mark-to-market financings. Jason will now go over the market and strategy update. Jason?