Redwood Trust, Inc. (NYSE:RWT) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Christopher Abate: We’ll try to divide and conquer here. On the resi front, spreads, obviously, were quite a bit tighter, a year ago, but I think the bigger story is what’s happened in the past few months. And in early December, mid December, prime, Jumbo, AAA as we’re trading two to three points back of agencies, now it’s closer to one and five eighths or so. So, there’s been a big snapback, which is, significantly improved the economics of securitization. Again, for us, that’s a very good sign but running that business and leaning in a rate involves a lot of different moving parts, one of which is you’ve got to carry fixed rate mortgages with an inverted yield curve, you’re incurring all of the spread volatility. So getting up and down in a securitization requires additional risk, frankly.

So I think what we’re trying to do is continue to get more efficient with that business and we mentioned that we lowered the capital by 70%, over the course of the year. As we look to distribute our remaining sort of last year inventory, we think that capital number can go down further, could probably go down to something closer to 50 million. And really, what that does is creates a nice base case to lean back in, when we’re ready to go, and that money doesn’t disappear. They can be redeployed, and all of this sort of pencils out into the 400 plus million of unrestricted cash that we’ve amassed here, in the last few weeks and months. So all of that can be deployed, it can be invested, it can be used to buy back debt, buy back stock. So, I think the goal of the fourth quarter was, in some sense a modest restructuring to get us in a position to kind of go back on offense, which is exactly what we’ve done start here.

Dash Robinson: On the Wells front, which I think you refer to, I think that’s a tremendous long-term opportunity for us and for our long-term manage shareholders, that’s somewhat of a bellwether of sorts, you know, I wouldn’t say Wells by and large has been the largest corresponding aggregator in not agency, particularly jumbo since the great financial crisis. So exiting that space really is found opportunity for us, and potentially others. So it’s not it’s not an overnight shift. But I think, again, for a company that’s heading into its 29th year, our business is the resi business. And as things evolve here, we expect that to significantly support our competitiveness in space, with a major and major forest like Wells, stepping back, so, I do think that’s very notable and potentially a very big long-term tailwind for us. But in the near-term, the real emphasis is the fed its stability and rates, and particularly in housing, and the economy that we’re most focused on.

Christopher Abate: Eric, to take your questions around BPL, if you sort of divide the bridge portfolio into three areas, multifamily, built for rent and then the single family stabilization strategy, I would say, in majority of cases on the multifamily side, first sponsor that wants to hold on to the property and has the capital tenor to do that. Plan A will likely be most of the time an agency or a HUD takeout. Some of that, as you know is going to depend upon the nature of the underlying tenants, the affordability angle, things of that nature. Agency and HUD takeouts are we see that very commonly to extent the sponsor wants to stay in the investment. But many of our multifamily sponsors I’d say most do focus on tenants where the GSEs and HUD are actually in a spot of continuing to lean in around housing affordability and things of that nature.