Ashford Hospitality Trust, Inc. (NYSE:AHT) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

So, getting rid of the first quarter last year is very, very helpful in sizing up any potential paydowns on those tests. And as we continue to see numbers improve, I think the — it’s likely the — I think the Highland paydowns are probably fairly small, hopefully less substantial than what we saw with our JPMorgan 8-Pool. The KEYS Pool gets a little bit more complicated and we’re still kind of just now beginning substantive discussions with the servicers on that one.

Deric Eubanks: And Tyler, this is Deric. In terms of the refinancing market, it continues to be a difficult time to get hotel financing. Thankfully, we don’t have a lot of final maturities this year, so we don’t need to be in the market seeking much debt financing. And the financing that we have in place is pretty attractive from a spread perspective. So, we’d like to keep the debt that we have in place as long as we can by exercising these extension options. Hopefully, as we progress through the year and the market gets some visibility on what the Fed is going to do with interest rates, we’ll start to see spreads come down to where it can be a little bit more attractive to get debt financing. And because obviously, we’ve got a lot of maturities that we will have to address in the outer years and we want to get in front of those. And so as soon as we can access attractive debt capital to push out maturities, we will be doing that.

Tyler Batory: Okay, great. That’s all from me. Thank you.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question is from Chris Woronka with Deutsche Bank. Please proceed with your question.

Chris Woronka: Hey, good morning guys. Just to kind of revisit the 2023 maturities you’re talking about. Rob, I know you mentioned handing KEYS back is always an option. What — when you think about that, is it always purely a financial decision? Or is there more of a strategic decision in terms of not just what hotel can generate in EBITDA, but your assessment of, I guess, current market value or NAV?

Rob Hays: Well, I mean, there’s, I guess, a subjective aspect as you’re trying to distill things down into a quantitative decision. I mean you’re trying to figure out where are those pockets of value that maybe something can become something else. But at the end of the day, it’s still going to come down to financial decisions. I mean we — we’ve been through situations in our past, whether it’s through the financial crisis or the early stages of COVID, where we work with lenders, try to come up with solutions in order to try to keep assets alive and going. Sometimes you just can’t come to those agreements and you end up giving back assets. And those are just financial decisions. And we — I think we gave back 15 assets during the early stages of pandemic and I don’t think we regret any one of those from economic standpoint as we sit here today.

So, I think that’s what we look at. We get — we’ll typically get BOVs from some of the big national valuation firms or brokers to see where the market is. We kind of look through the strategic plan of where do we think this asset is, what’s the CapEx required in it, right? Because we have some assets that you’re right, they’re willing to keep only because you see some longer term upside after an effective CapEx program or something. And you have others that maybe you have a big CapEx numbers coming up and it just doesn’t make any sense in terms of keeping the asset. So, you kind of wade through all of that. And I think what we try to do is do a rebuy analysis, where we just pretend like we were going to — this capital that we’re putting in is what it would cost to take down the asset and would we do that today given what we see and how we underwrite it.