Bridge Investment Group Holdings Inc.

Greetings. Welcome to the Bridge Investment Group's first quarter 2022 earnings call and webcast. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. Please note, this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to your host, Bonnie Rosen, head of shareholder relations. You may begin.

Good morning, everyone. We appreciate you joining us for the Bridge Investment Group First Quarter 2022 Financial Results Conference Call. Our prepared remarks will include comments from our Executive Chairman, Robert Morse, Chief Executive Officer, Jonathan Slager, and Chief Accounting Officer, Katie Elsnab. We will hold a Q&A session following the prepared remarks where we will have Dean Alera, Vice Chairman and Head of our Client Solutions Group, join. As a quick housekeeping item, please note the new format of our supplemental earnings presentation, which is designed to complement our prepared remarks and provide our shareholders and constituencies with comprehensive data and full transparency. As always, we welcome feedback on our materials and hope you find the new layout helpful. During the call today, we will discuss certain non-GAAP financial metrics. The reconciliation of the non-GAAP metrics are provided in the appendix of our supplemental slides. The supplemental materials are accessible on our IR website at ir.bridgeig.com. These slides can be found under the presentations portion of the site along with the first quarter earnings call event link. They are also available live during the webcast. It is now my pleasure to turn the call over to Bob.

Thank you, Bonnie. We're excited to announce another solid quarter for Bridge. Momentum through year end 2021 continued. And in 1Q 2022, Bridge again produced strong growth across each of our key metrics. First quarter of 2022 was the best first quarter in our history. Distributable earnings per share more than doubled year over year to $0.28 a share, driven by a healthy combination of management and performance fee revenues across a broad and growing set of fund strategies. Fee-related earnings to the operating company more than tripled year to $45.4 million year-over-year, and fee earning AUM now stands at $14.7 billion, which is up 43% year-over-year. These results continue the track record of strong and consistent growth bridges delivered for many years. As of the end of first quarter, our fee-related earnings and AUM have grown at respective compound annual growth rates of 43% and 40% over the past five years. Jonathan and Katie will give more detail in a moment, but my key takeaway from our first quarter is that Bridge continues to execute and scale our differentiated fundraising and investment approach, focused on some of the most attractive sectors within real estate that aggregate to a large and growing total addressable market. Macroeconomic and geopolitical events are dominating headlines and impacting markets worldwide. in the context of increased public market volatility, higher interest rates, and the broad-based expectation that rates will continue to rise as the Fed raises the Fed funds rate and sells investment holdings instead of purchasing additional securities on a monthly basis, we continue to believe that the U.S. remains an attractive market in which to invest, and in fact, in our view, is the preeminent investment destination globally. Strong relative economic growth healthy consumer and corporate balance sheets, high household formation, low unemployment and high wage growth are just some of the positive characteristics that define the US economy. Fiscal and monetary stimulus supported strong growth during the COVID pandemic, but also exacerbated supply side challenges and contributed in part to the elevated levels of inflation across sectors today. Of course, we are acutely aware of the inflationary pressures buffeting the US economy currently and the impact of inflation on our investment verticals, especially as we develop new assets and repair and rehabilitate the value-add assets that we typically invest in. We have navigated well through supply chain issues and cost pressure in the past and hope we can continue to do so looking forward. Centralized procurement and careful planning have served our projects well. In addition, higher rates have affected projected returns for new investments, and we've adjusted our acquisition and development pro formas appropriately. We believe that the tailwinds across our verticals, high household formation, strong rent growth, strong consumer balance sheets in residential, the continuing and dire need for added infrastructure investment in logistics, and the ever-present hunt for yield in the fixed income sector counterbalance many of the macro headwinds. To date, we have not observed a significant change in the underlying fundamentals for our core real estate investment sectors in the U.S. and observed tailwinds across most, if not all, of our specialized strategies. While the macro and geopolitical stresses will likely continue, our investment strategies have historically remained resilient in a wide range of market outcomes. Bridge recently published our comprehensive 2022 Real Estate Market Outlook co-authored by Jack Robinson, managing director of research, and our various sector heads. Our views of the current investment environment are summarized by the following observations. First, the U.S. remains the preeminent investment destination. In our areas of focus, capital inflows in the U.S. real estate climbed to a record in 2021 of nearly $250 billion, and early returns in 2022 suggest a continuation of these trends. Second, housing is critically undersupplied, particularly for the underserved middle class and workforce cohorts of the U.S., and will remain undersupplied for years to come. Third, the U.S. has a dire, ongoing, and substantial need for infrastructure to facilitate the continuing growth of e-commerce and onshoring. Fourth, notwithstanding recent and expected increases in interest rates, there's a global hunt for sustainable yields which is increasingly satisfied via alternative credit vehicles, like those in our debt strategies, AMBS, and net lease income strategies. With the 10-year treasury approximating 3%, the opportunity to achieve resilient, sustainable, double-digit yields without a huge amount of financial engineering and backed by solid real estate collateral is very attractive. This ability to provide yield in combination with commercial real estate as an inflation hedge position Bridge well in the current environment. Since our founding, Bridge is focused on fundraising and investment in markets and properties underpinned by long-tailed secular demand drivers like the ones I just described. We have purpose-built Bridge as a specialized investment manager forward integrated into property management to capture alpha at the asset level as we optimize the value-add assets we acquire or develop. Our nationwide teams, which now total 1,980 people, provide us with local nuance and knowledge, which allows us to identify and intimately understand our target markets and assets. More than many, we acquire assets one at a time, are selective in what we buy, develop bespoke individual renovation and rehabilitation plans for each asset, and aggregate at scale. We don't have to pay a portfolio premium to efficiently deploy over $4.6 billion per year, as we did in 2021, and therefore can deliver best-in-class performance. Our outperformance is a key driver to fundraising success, resulting in $1.1 billion of inflows during the quarter, which is typically the slowest quarter of the calendar year. In 1Q 2021, for example, we raised $175 million. 74% of our investors are repeat investors and 58% of our investors invest across multiple strategies. Additionally, each quarter we add new investors, both institutional and in retail, as our relationships with wire houses and local, regional, and national registered investment advisors expand. We added nine new institutional investors in 1Q 2022 and have continued to expand our relationships with global wire houses RIAs and other wealth managers. In 1Q 2022, 54% of new funds raised were institutional in nature. Lastly, we have just begun to scratch the surface of our opportunity to raise international capital with continued momentum from our recent fundraising team expansion in Europe and Asia. 45% of capital raised in the quarter came from international clients. In my experience, a full calendar for investor meetings is a good sign in our business. And thus far in 2022, we are busier than we ever have been across the investor universe and across our real estate verticals. Next week, for example, our expanded fundraising team will be actively engaged in meetings in the U.S., Europe, Asia, and elsewhere. With that, let me turn the call over to Jonathan to further detail our results and strategy. Jonathan?