Granite Point Mortgage Trust Inc.

Good morning. My name is Paul, and I will be your conference facilitator. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to Granite Point Mortgage Trust's first quarter 2025 financial results conference call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer 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 points first quarter 2025 financial results to be on the call this morning with jack taylor our president chief executive officer steve alpart our chief investment officer and co-head of originations blake johnson our chief financial officer peter morale chief development officer and co-head of originations and ethan leibowitz our chief operating officer after my introductory comments Jack will provide a brief recap of market conditions and review our current business activities. Steve Alpert will discuss our portfolio, and Blake will highlight key items from our financial results and capitalization. The press release, financial tables, 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, along with our Form 10-Q. 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. Please see our SEC filings for 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 the 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 Granite Point's first quarter 2025 earnings call. Before discussing our first quarter results, I'd like to take a moment to briefly discuss our recent Chief Operating Officer transition from Stephen Plust to Ethan Leibowitz, which was successfully completed on May 1st. As was previously announced, this transition was initiated as Steve expressed a desire to narrow and concentrate the scope of his business responsibilities going forward. He has been in the industry for over 40 years, and I am proud to say that we have worked together for over 30 of those years. At the same time, we are also very excited to have Ethan as our newly appointed Chief Operating Officer. Ethan has been with the team since before Granite Point's inception, and I have worked with him for almost 20 years. Ethan brings broad industry expertise, real estate acumen, and exceptional leadership capabilities. I am confident that his deep understanding of our business and extensive history with our team makes Ethan the perfect fit to advance our initiatives and drive shareholder returns as our Chief Operating Officer. Now turning to the market, the beginning of 2025 showed continued improving sentiment for commercial real estate with credit spreads tightening, enhanced liquidity, and greater transaction volume. However, in the past month, following the tariff announcements, there has been renewed uncertainty about the path of interest rates and heightened concern about the possibility of a recession and the possible effects of both on commercial real estate. While this has introduced some caution amongst commercial real estate market participants, it is too soon to tell how long this uncertainty will last and what the long-term impact of the tariffs will be. Fortunately, commercial real estate is better positioned today as the activities over the past few years have resulted in a lower reset basis across most property types and markets. Commercial real estate also compares favorably to other asset classes and industries, as it represents a hard asset with intrinsic value and is a more defensive asset class during a period of uncertainty. Despite the market turbulence, we have made significant progress on our goals and objectives. During the first quarter of 2025, we resolved two of the risk-rated five loans. both office properties, totaling about $97 million. Additionally, in the last week, we resolved two more risk-rated five loans. We resolved the mixed-use asset located in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. And we are pleased to share that the imminent resolution we wrote about in our press release yesterday with respect to the hotel asset located in Minneapolis did in fact close late yesterday. Steve Alpert will discuss both in greater detail shortly. All of these resolutions have decreased our risk-rated five loan count from seven at year end to three remaining today, as we have continued to make substantial progress on reducing our non-accrual loans. While the improvement in liquidity in commercial real estate is now facing some headwinds, the commercial real estate debt markets are open and functioning with significant liquidity for the floating rate bridge and transitional market sectors from both direct and warehouse lenders. As previously noted, we extended all three of our repurchase facilities for approximately one year. We also continue to work with our borrowers and have seen steady loan repayments at par, including in the office loan sector. Year-to-date, we realized about $107 million of loan repayments, paydowns, and amortization. As we manage both sides of the balance sheet, we continue to navigate this period of high uncertainty and market volatility by maintaining higher liquidity, extending debt maturities, and engaging in other value-enhancing activities. To that point, we have also opportunistically deployed capital into our own securities. During the first quarter, we repurchased about 900,000 of our common shares. It is our view that the current market price does not reflect the value of the business nor the progress we have made to date, including the pace of our loan resolutions and our ongoing pace of repayments. despite recent headwinds. We currently have about 3.9 million shares remaining under our existing authorization, and we intend to remain opportunistic with respect to any future buyback activity. We anticipate that with the continued resolutions and repayments, we will further pay down our remaining expensive debt and will be positioned to return to new originations in the latter part of the year, all of which will improve our run rate profitability and earnings over time. I would now like to turn the call over to Steve Halpert to discuss our portfolio activities in more detail.