Ashford Inc. (AMEX:AINC) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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It’s a seasonal thing and certainly, there is a weather activity that hits us in Q3 and Q4. So I don’t see it as of any particular concern, and I expect RED to grow significantly. In terms of acquisitions, we are hot on the trail of a couple, and we would love to grow into other geographies and believe that we will do that so that we can kind of mitigate some of the impact when we do have weather events in the Caribbean and South Florida. So I think RED will be on track to make some acquisitions that are exciting in the near term here.

Bryan Maher: Just last for me, I have two more questions. On the Ashford Trust untraded preferred raise, is there a traded amount there, like how might that raise be? And then secondarily, I think some of us are fairly surprised by the success in the size of the Braemar non-preferred traded €“ non-traded raise. Might Ashford Securities pays money for other entities that aren’t Ashford related?

Deric Eubanks: Hey, Bryan, it’s Deric. I’ll take that. So to answer your question on the Ashford Trust raise, it’s a $500 million offering. So that’s the amount of the offering. It will be open for 3 years or if we hit the size prior to that, then we could close it early. The Braemar offering was the same, except they got kind of sidetracked because we initially filed the perspectives for that right before COVID. And then as you know, what happened in the hotel industry during COVID, we kind of shelved it for a little while. And then by the time we finally got it off the shelf and opened the offering, we only had about 1.5 years left on it. And so those registration statements kind of have a finite life to them. So we were out there for about 18 months or so, as you said, raised $460 million.

We’re very pleased with that offering amount. And at AHT, we’re just ramping up, and we’re just getting started. So it’s really hard to know where we will ultimately end up. We’ve got a great syndicate of broker dealers that we’ve worked with and that we are working with. And obviously, a lot of those groups were involved with Braemar, and now we will sort of transition them over to the Ashford Trust raise. In terms of your second question about raising capital for other groups, that’s clearly something we could do. I think from our perspective, we would just want to make sure it’s something that would be smart to do, it’s something that would be profitable for us. So I’m not sure €“ I wouldn’t say that you should expect us to do something like that anytime soon, but it is something that is always a potential for us.

And as we said in the prepared remarks, we’re very pleased with the organization that Jay Steigerwald has really set up. We started really from scratch. And he’s really put together just a great team, and they kind of hit it out of the park with their first offering. So we couldn’t be more pleased with that group and how well they have ramped up and clearly, I think top performers in that space. So very, very pleased with that.

Bryan Maher: And thank you. That’s all for me.

Operator: Thank you. This brings us to the end of the question-and-answer session. We’d like to thank you for your interest in Ashford Hospitality. You may disconnect your lines and log off the webcast at this time and enjoy the rest of your day.

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