Lument Finance Trust, Inc.

Good morning, and thank you for joining the Lumen Finance Trust first quarter 2021 earnings call. Today's call is being recorded and will be made available via webcast on the company's website. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your touchdown phone. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. I would now like to turn the call over to Charles Duddy with Investor Relations at Lumen Investment Management. Please go ahead.

Thank you, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining our call to discuss Lumen Finance Trust's first quarter 2021 financial results. With me on the call today are James Flynn, CEO, Michael Larson, President, James Briggs, CFO, and Priscilla Torres, Head of Real Estate Investment Strategies. On Monday, we filed our 10Q with the SEC and issued a press release which provided details on our first quarter results. We also provided a supplemental earnings presentation, which can be found on our website. Before handing the call over to Jim, I would like to remind everyone that certain statements made during the course of this call are not based on historical information and may constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. When used in this conference, words such as outlook, Evaluate, indicate, believes, will, anticipates, expects, intends, and other similar expressions are intended to identify forward-looking statements. Such forward-looking statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in the forward-looking statement. These risks and uncertainties are discussed in the company's reports filed with the SEC, including its reports on Form 8K, 10Q, and 10K. and in particular, the risk factor section of our Form 10-K. Additionally, many of these risks and uncertainties are currently amplified by and will continue to be amplified by or may in the future be amplified by the COVID-19 pandemic. It is not possible to predict or identify all such risks. Listeners are cautioned not to place under reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date hereof. The company undertakes no obligation to update any of these forward-looking statements. Furthermore, certain non-GAAP financial measures will be discussed on this conference call. A presentation of this information is not intended to be considered in isolation, nor as a substitute to the financial information presented in accordance with GAAP. Reconciliation of these non-GAAP financial measures to the most comparable measures prepared in accordance with GAAP can be accessed through our filings with the SEC at sec.gov. I will now turn the call over to James Flynn. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Charlie. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the Lumen Finance Trust earnings call for the first quarter of 2021. We appreciate you joining today. To begin, I'd like to provide an update on the recent positive developments for the company. As previously announced via press release, I'm pleased to note that on May 5th, we successfully closed an underwritten public offering of 2.4 million shares of 7 and 7.8 Series A cumulative redeemable preferred stock at the public offering price of $25 per share. We received approximately 58 million of net proceeds from the offering after deducting the underwriting discount, but before estimated offering expenses. The Series A preferred stock has been authorized for listing on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol LFTPRA. And trading of the Series A preferred stock commenced yesterday, May 10th. Simultaneous with the preferred offering, we amended our term loan, which will provide an incremental $7.5 million that we expect to be funded this quarter. Together, these transactions will produce $65 million of net capital that we will look to deploy over the coming months. I believe this transaction was a great execution for LFT and is consistent with our stated goal of growing our capital base to create additional scale, which we believe will benefit all shareholders. The positive investor interest in our preferred offering reflects strongly upon what LFT has been able to accomplish during a challenging year. The offering provided us the opportunity to tell our story to a broad institutional audience, exhibit the breadth and expertise of the entire Lumen platform, and highlight the credit quality and performance of LFT's investment portfolio. In the coming months, we hope to continue discussions with investors and educate market participants about LFT and the opportunity we believe we offer investors. As we have mentioned on previous calls, although LFT is relatively small in our space, our manager and the larger Lumen platform is not. Our manager is one of the nation's largest capital providers in the multifamily and seniors housing space, with over $16 billion in total transaction volume during calendar year 2020. Our manager services a $47 billion portfolio and has over 550 employees and 25 offices nationwide. The scale of this platform benefits the investors of LFT and provides great support in the execution of our investment strategy. Our strategy is to continue to invest primarily in floating rate bridge loans with a focus on middle market multifamily opportunities. Although we have seen increased competition for these investments, The strength of the Lumen platform and our focus in multifamily in particular continues to provide us with compelling investment opportunities. In fact, we have seen our investment pipeline increase dramatically over the last several months. We intend to use the net proceeds of our recent preferred offering and increased term loan to make additional investments in these types of opportunities. As we continue to grow, we will also identify other investment opportunities and commercial real estate debt to invest a portion of our capital, such as preferred equity, mezzanine loans, and other high-yield theory debt instruments. Before turning the call over to Jim and Mike, I would also like to briefly touch on our portfolio and our financing sources. Our focus in multifamily bridge lending and the strength of our credit and asset management platform continues to prove itself in the performance of our portfolio. As of March 31st, Our portfolio was 100% performing with no loan impairments, no loan defaults, and no loans subject to forbearance. Furthermore, we have not needed to grant a single forbearance, nor have we experienced a single loan default during the COVID era. I believe this is a testament to both our rigorous credit standards as well as our proactive asset management efforts. With regards to our financing sources, we do not currently utilize repurchase or warehouse facilities, and therefore, we are not subject to margin calls on any of our assets from repo warehouse lenders. Our primary source of financing are two match-term non-mark-to-market CRE CLOs as well as a corporate term loan. I'd like to note that our utilization of non-mark-to-market financing proved valuable during the last year's disruption and we continue to see this as an attractive way to finance our investment portfolio. When this management team took over as manager of LFT in January of 2018, we were clear on our goal of deploying our capital into commercial real estate debt investments with a focus in multifamily in order to provide stable book value and earnings that support a market return to our shareholders. We also indicated our desire then to grow LFT to a larger scale, which we felt would prove valuable to our shareholders. With these recent preferred offering and term loan increase, we're continuing to make progress toward that goal, and I'm excited about our continued growth as we focus on executing our business plan. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Jim Briggs, who will provide details on our financial results.