Ares Commercial Real Estate Corporation (NYSE:ACRE) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Jade Rahmani: Thank you.

Bryan Donohoe: Thanks, Jade.

Operator: Our next question comes from Stephen Laws with Raymond James. Please proceed with your question.

Stephen Laws: Hi. Good morning. I think it was mentioned in the prepared remarks by Tae-Sik, no new downgrades, I think three to four. I just wanted to confirm that. And also at a higher level, when you think about your portfolio and the 1 to 3 rated loans, how comfortable are you in those ratings that the concerning stress points during the past and you’re not concerned about kind of more negative rating migration? Kind of what percentage of those three do you still think have, maybe a material stress point in the next six months to 12 months that you’re really focused on? Kind of any color on that would be great.

Tae-Sik Yoon: Sure. Good morning, Stephen. Thanks for the question. I’ll start and would love to have Bryan add to my comments. So correct, we do not have any negative migration from loans that were rated 1, 2 or 3 from second quarter to third quarter. We did mention the negative migration for one loan from 4 to a 5. In terms of outlook, I mean, I’ll just start very briefly and really turn it over to Bryan. I think, again, we are assessing our loans very carefully each quarter. Obviously, the future forecast is taking into account, but with the volatile markets that we’re all in today, it’s hard to set an exact macroeconomic environment in which we would be assessing the loans. But I would tell you that we take into account what we do know and we do this every quarter. Bryan, did you want to add to that?

Bryan Donohoe: Yeah. I’ll just kind of echo that, but I think it is clearly a good bit of uncertainty out there. We’re spending the vast majority of our time on the asset management side of the business in dialogue with sponsors and really taking in all the outside factors in real time that we’re all collectively sharing. So when we see rate movements one way or the other, clearly, that impacts values. And to some of the earlier discussions, some of that stability will be seen as a positive for the commercial real estate industry. But we remain cognizant of risks in terms of supply dynamics in certain markets and really the impact of rates still being felt on the income statement and balance sheet of a lot of the borrower community. So I’d say risk aware and focused on each individual asset situation and resolving it as best we can throughout the next few quarters.

Stephen Laws: Great. Appreciate the color. Thank you.

Operator: [Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from Rick Shane with JPMorgan. Please proceed with your question.

Richard Shane: Thanks everybody. Good morning. Hey. I do want to say I appreciate the transparency, both in terms of highlighting or quantifying the potential loss in the fourth quarter and also being clear about what the specific reserves are against individual 5 graded loans. It’s very helpful and it creates a much greater degree of transparency for analysts and investors, so thank you for that. I wanted to talk a little bit about the REO. And there were a couple of comments that this is an investment that is now unlevered. There’s potential liquidity that can be unlocked there. What — I guess there are really three courses that you can — three paths here. You can continue to run this unlevered. And it sounds like the cash flow is roughly comparable to the yield, but that’s somewhat inefficient.

You could go out and lever this, own the property, that’s not really your core business. And I’m curious in this environment where banks prefer to be lenders to lenders rather than be lenders on first lien, whether you would actually wind up going to a peer company in order to get that leverage. Or third, why not really kind of do what you guys do, sell the property, finance it and generate income in the way that you sort of more core to the ACRE business model?