Cohen & Steers, Inc. (NYSE:CNS) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

John Dunn: Got you. And G&A maybe — the core G&A flat year-over-year, maybe — looking forward, what are some of the — you’ve done a ton of investing over for many years now. What are the kind of the levers you can pull to dialed up or dial it back and your willingness to do that, just also given that you have put a lot of things in place already?

Matthew Stadler: Right. I mean, look, we — our controllable G&A is about 30% to 35% of total G&A. We’ve always been very thoughtful about deploying capital towards items that incur expenses and trying to keep those under control. I would say that the only variable in there that might be a little higher would be, as John and Joe have pointed out, the client activity will start to increase. We might have more business-related travel and entertainment and conferences, which were important to do. But all the other things, inter-office travel and things that are not client-facing or the things that we’re really paying a lot of attention to. So, I think achieving flat year-over-year, excluding the build-out, which as you point out, are you going to be baked in the numbers 23% versus 24%. I would say that the things that we can control will be pretty tight on that. But again, next call, we’ll provide some guidance on where we think G&A will be.

Joe Harvey: I’ll just add that with the corporate infrastructure investments that we’ve made are going to set us up for many years of growth. And so those — while they hit quite a bit this year, we’ve rounded the turn, and those are going to be behind us going forward. On the personnel and headcount front, we’ve got a lot of opportunities, but we’re very mindful of where the markets are, where our AUM is, and we’re going to be very disciplined about on our hiring process, whether it’s adding new people or replacing people until we get through this regime change. So, we’re very conscious of this on all fronts. However, based on our view on where the markets are, we are going to position ourselves to capitalize on opportunities for our clients.

John Dunn: Great. I did want to touch on advisory. It’s positive first time in eight quarters, I think, like what type of clients, what regions drove that? And did U.S. advisory participate?

Matthew Stadler: Well, absolutely. And U.S. advisory, the people who are involved with on the sales side, touch on what we do in other regions as well. So, it’s a unified team. But in the quarter, the fundings came primarily from real estate. The biggest one was from an existing client in global real estate, but we also had some smaller U.S. real estate fundings. It also includes sub-advisory, which might include OCIO providers here in the U.S., but clients in other regions. So interestingly, we had a couple of fundings from our multi-strategy real assets portfolios, which is consistent with the comments Jon and I made about that strategy. So the activity has picked up, and it’s U.S. advisory. But again, in many cases, it’s a global team and it requires contributions from different parts of the world.

John Dunn: Got you. And then the non-Japan sub advisory sometimes doesn’t get as much attention. It did better this quarter. Can you remind us, like frame that business and who are your clients there? What regions that you’re in a couple of years after you reframed it. And then what should we be looking there to drive inflows in that channel?

Joe Harvey: Yes. Historically, our flow results from sub-advisory hasn’t been great. And it’s just been a more challenging business. But in the quarter, we had a couple of new mandates and fundings from existing mandates. The two multi-strategy real assets portfolio as I referenced, were sub-advisory situations from different financial services firms, one in Canada and one in Taiwan. And the other was an OCIO provider that is managing money for a Korean entity. So, I wouldn’t say right now that there’s necessarily a trend on that front, but it was certainly positive to see it improve recently.