Granite Point Mortgage Trust Inc.

Good morning. My name is Diego, and I will be your conference facilitator. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to Granite Point Mortgage Trust's fourth quarter and full year, 2024, financial results conference call. All participants will be on a listen-only mode. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session, period. Please note, today's call is being recorded. I would now like to turn the call over to Chris Petta, with Investor Relations for Granite Point.

Thank you. And good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining our call to discuss Granite Point's fourth quarter and full year 2024 financial results. With me on the call this morning are Jack Taylor, our President and Chief Executive Officer, Stephen Alpart, our Chief Investment Officer and Co-Head of Originations, Blake Johnson, our Chief Financial Officer, Peter Murau, our Chief Development Officer and Co-Head of Originations, and Steve Plust, our Chief Operating Officer. After my introductory comments, Jack will provide a brief recap of market conditions and review our current business activities. Steve and Alpark will discuss our portfolio, and Blake will highlight key items from our financial results and capitalization. Press release and earnings supplemental associated with today's call were filed yesterday with the SEC and are available in the investor relations section of our website. We expect to file our Form 10-K in the coming weeks. I would like to remind you that remarks made by management during this call and the supporting slides may include forward-looking statements, which are uncertain and outside of the company's control. Forward-looking statements reflect our views regarding future events and are subject to uncertainties and could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations. We see our filings with the SEC for a discussion of some of the risks that could affect results. We do not undertake any obligation to update any forward-looking statements. We also refer to certain non-GAAP measures on this call. This information is not intended to be considered in isolation or as a substitute for the financial information presented in accordance with GAAP. A reconciliation of these non-GAAP financial measures to most comparable GAAP measures can be found in our earnings release and slides, which are available on our website. I'll now turn the call over to Jack.

Thank you, Chris, and good morning, everyone. We would like to welcome you and thank you for joining us for GranitePoint's fourth quarter full year 2024 earnings call. Before discussing our results, I'd like to take a moment to remember our board member, Reed Sanders, who passed away last month. Reed served as a member of our board of directors since our company's inception. He was a trusted advisor to GranitePoint and a superb man. We and our board will miss him greatly. Now, Turning to our business activities, 2024 marked a year of substantial progress for Granite Point in resolving non-performing loans and collaboratively working with our borrowers to facilitate repayments. Both were driven by our proactive approach to asset and balance sheet management against a backdrop that continued to be challenging for the commercial real estate industry, with more volatility and eventually somewhat less optimistic outlook for rates going into 2025. The Federal Reserve rate cuts, while less than anticipated, did help improve liquidity in the commercial real estate market in the second half of the year. And there is a growing consensus that real estate prices for most sectors and markets have already bottomed out, contributing to a more positive sentiment in the market. Liquidity has reemerged in certain sectors, most significantly for the SASB, Conduit, and more recently, the commercial real estate CLO markets. Meanwhile, liquidity in the floating rate transitional middle market sector, though improving, remains less robust, particularly as regional and community banks, who had remained largely on the sidelines, are just now starting to reemerge. We expect these banks to remain less active in direct lending compared to prior cycles, which will present attractive longer-term opportunities for non-bank lenders to grow their market share over time. In 2024, we successfully resolved nine loans, totaling about $344 million in principal balance at or near our carrying value, and realized about $415 million of loan repayments, paydowns, and amortization, with much of this activity culminating during the third and fourth quarters. So far in 2025, we resolved two more office loans, totaling about $97 million, for a total of $441 million of resolutions since the beginning of 2024. We have successfully executed on a variety of resolution strategies, each fitted to the particular situation. We are pursuing resolutions over remaining five-rated loans, most of which are in various stages of their respective processes. We anticipate several of these transactions will be finalized through the first half of this year, though we expect some others to require longer timeframes. Our portfolio management approach continues to emphasize a balance between timing, potential profitability, book value impact, liquidity, and other factors, with the goal of optimizing the economic outcomes for our company and various stakeholders over the long term. To that point, we have opportunistically deployed capital into our own securities. During 2024, we repurchased about 2.4 million of our common shares, 1.2 million of those purchased in the fourth quarter, reflecting our strong belief that our stock continues to be significantly undervalued. We currently have about 4.8 million shares remaining under our existing authorization, and we intend to remain opportunistic with respect to any future buyback activity. Overall market sentiment has improved over the past few quarters, despite the disappointment resulting from the Fed pivots and rates trending higher. As the market enters 2025 with a more positive, though still tempered outlook, We believe liquidity and transaction volume will continue to improve over the course of the year in the commercial real estate market, with improving fundamentals for most property types across many markets. With the progress we have made in 2024 and so far in 2025, our current volume of non-performing loan resolutions should continue to meaningfully exceed any potential future credit events. With these ongoing resolutions, our run rate profitability should improve over time, as we pay down expensive debt and create more earning assets. We anticipate that, with further portfolio turnover through loan resolutions and repayments, we will be positioned to return to new originations in the latter part of the year and regrow our portfolio, while improving our run rate profitability, driving attractive total shareholder returns. I would now like to turn the call over to Steve Halpert to discuss our portfolio activities in more detail.