Walker & Dunlop, Inc

I have with me this morning our chairman and CEO, Willie Walker, and our CFO, Greg Borkowski. This call is being webcast live on our website, and a recording will be available later today. Both our earnings press release and website provide details on accessing the archived webcast. This morning, we posted our earnings release and presentation to the investor relations section of our website, www.walkerdunlop.com. These slides serve as a reference point for some of what Willie and Greg will touch on during the call. Please also note that we will reference the non-GAAP financial metrics, adjusted EBITDA, and adjusted core EPS during the course of this call. Please refer to the appendix of the earnings presentation for a reconciliation of these non-GAAP financial metrics. Investors are urged to carefully read the forward-looking statements language in our earnings release. Statements made on this call which are not historical facts may be deemed forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements describe our current expectations and actual results may differ materially. Walker & Dunlop is under no obligation to update or alter our forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise, and we expressly disclaim any obligation to do so. More detailed information about risk factors can be found in our annual and quarterly reports filed with the SEC. I'll now turn the call over to Willie.

Thank you, Kelsey, and good morning, everyone. We ended 2024 with strength, closing $13.4 billion of total transaction volume, up 45% year-over-year, generating diluted earnings per share of $1.32, up 42% from Q4 2023. Agency loan originations totaled $4.9 billion on the quarter, pushing revenues from mortgage servicing rights up 62% from Q4 2023. Q4 adjusted EBITDA was $95 million, up 8% year-over-year, and adjusted core EPS was $1.34, down 6% from last year. The strong finish to the year helped us close the significant gap to our annual financial targets after an exceedingly slow start to the year, bringing full-year diluted EPS to $3.19, flat from 2023, adjusted core EPS to $4.97, up 6%, and adjusted EBITDA to a record level of $329 million, up 9% from 2023. Given the challenging macroeconomic backdrop and typically challenging competitive landscape, these results are a testament to the talent, teamwork, and tenacity of the Walker & Dunlop team. As shown on slide four, Q4 total transaction volume included $3.2 billion of Fannie Mae lending. up 91% from Q4-23, and a very welcome surge in lending activity from our largest financial partner. Walker & Dunlop once again finished the year as Fannie Mae's largest DUS partner, an honor we have now won for the past six consecutive years. We grew our Freddie Mac loan originations in the quarter by 19% to $1.6 billion and finished the year originating $5.2 billion of loans with Freddie Mac, making us their fourth largest OptiGo lending partner in 2024. The GSEs continue to play an extremely important role in the multifamily financing market, and Walker & Dunlop's team, focus, and partnerships with the GSEs have allowed us to remain at the top of the league tables for the past decade. We will continue to invest in these businesses by hiring and retaining the very best bankers in our industry, improving the processes and systems we use to underwrite and fund loans, and continuing to integrate all of the products and service offerings Walker Nelop has built to bring one-stop shopping to our clients across the country. We closed $3.5 billion of property sales transactions in Q4, up 20% year-over-year, and a very strong finish to the year, given that rates moved up 90 basis points after the Fed's rate cut announcement in September. Our team did a spectacular job holding deals together as rates and client expectations shifted throughout the quarter. For the full year, our property sales team sold $9.8 billion of multifamily properties across the United States, up 11% from 2023, and a great accomplishment on the year after only selling $2.7 billion of properties in the first half of the year. We held our team together throughout the downturn to be able to capture deal flow when markets returned, and our investment sales team's efforts in the back half of 2024 were fantastic and set us up very well for 2025. and beyond. We began 2024 with the Federal Reserve foreshadowing multiple rate cuts at the short end of the curve that would likely bring down the cost of borrowing and commercial real estate significantly. Yet the rate cuts didn't materialize in the first half of the year, and when they did, the long bond surged. Yet throughout the year, the W&D team remained focused at our clients' needs and grew total transaction volume from $6.4 billion in Q1 to $8.4 billion in Q2, to $11.6 billion in Q3, to $13.4 billion in Q4. We love this consistent quarter-by-quarter growth in transaction volumes as the market began to transact again after the rate increase shocks of 2022 and 2023. We ended the year with average production per banker broker of $172 million, up $35 million per banker broker from 2023 yet still $12 million less than the $184 million average banker broker production prior to the pandemic in 2019. Given the strength of the W&D brand, expanded service offering, and investments in people, brand, and technology we have made since 2019, this metric should continue marching upward as the macro fundamentals to commercial real estate improve and transaction volumes grow. As a point of reference, Coming out of the pandemic when transaction activity was at its peak, our average total transaction volume per bank or broker was $311 million. Walker & Delknop operates in an enormous industry with an extremely large total addressable market and it is up to us, our team, to grow transaction volumes, revenues, and earnings in 2025 and beyond. Our technology-enabled appraisal and small balance lending businesses did extremely well in Q4 and throughout 2024, apprised more than doubled quarterly revenues from $2.4 million in Q1 to $4.9 million in Q4, for total 2024 revenues of $13.3 million, up 43% year-over-year. We achieved significant efficiencies with regard to data processing and appraisal turn times throughout the year and are poised for strong growth in this business in 2025. Similarly, our small-balance lending business grew total revenues by 20% in 2024 and ended the year as the number four small-balance GSE lender in the country. Both APPRISE and SBL were startup businesses only a few years ago and have both established the people, processes, and technology to scale dramatically in the coming years. And as they do, we will migrate the data, processes, and technology from these businesses to our scaled capital markets, servicing, and asset management businesses. Before I turn the call over to Greg to run through our quarterly and annual financial results, I want to focus for a moment on the challenges we have faced over the past two years and the steps we are taking to move forward from here. Walker & Dunlop's credit track record is one of the very best in the commercial real estate industry. When I joined Walker & Dunlop, we honestly couldn't afford to take credit losses. And as we have scaled the company over the past two decades, we have maintained an impeccable credit culture. which has included thorough training, investments in and implementation of new systems, and a generally conservative approach to credit risk. Yet during the pandemic, due to changes in workflows, and post-pandemic, due to the sheer volume of business, we made mistakes that have caused us to buy back several loans from the GSEs. We take these buybacks extremely seriously and have implemented new process controls and technology to protect against them happening again. We have also decided to create a new special asset management group led by seasoned Walker & D'Alempe executive Aaron Perlis to work out these loans and recover as much value as we possibly can over the coming years. I will now turn the call over to Greg to talk through our financial results in more detail before I return to discuss our outlook for 2025 and beyond.

Greg? Thank you, Willie, and good morning, everyone.