AFC Gamma, Inc. (NASDAQ:AFCG) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Leonard Tannenbaum: Second question first. Yes. I really don’t — I think this is an appropriate level of dividend. I don’t think we’re going to — we’re getting paid for at the same time, we want to make that distribution to shareholders that they deserve. And so I think paying that 85%, 90% area is appropriate and you can probably see us continue there, of course, there’s going be variance of earnings each quarter. But so far, we’ve been able to earn our dividend each quarter. Looking at the commercial real estate environment, the banks really pulled back four months to six months ago, which create — to me creates this amazing opportunity. It does take — surprising to me and it takes the same two months to five months to close a deal that it doesn’t cannabis.

It just takes a long time. And so though we started developing the pipeline nine months ago, it’s now you have the number of deals that are finally getting towards the end of saying they close or not closed, but they get sort of towards the end of that two-month to five-month period where they can close. When we’re looking at it, it’s hard to force rank the way you want to force rank, because I’ve done this for 25 years and I’ve done this in direct lending for $5 billion of my previous firm. So what we do is, I have just a general philosophy as being, what I call, a capital structure investor, where we have significant equity below us and significant enterprise value below us. We did the same thing in cannabis, where we wanted to make sure there was enough cushion should the markets fall apart, which they did and we still feel covered.

So — but we needed — and we needed that cushion. I think the real estate the same way. You can see different real estate investments that people try to minimize the amount of equity and maximize the amount of debt and I find this very risky. We don’t want to be taking over properties, we want relationships and we want to be an institutional lender of the space. So I really looking — we’re looking for those situations where we have significant enterprise value and equity, lower loan-to-cost, lower loan-to-value. But we’re looking across sectors, because we have expertise across sectors.

Michael Elias: Great. Thanks for the color. That’s all I had. Thanks.

Operator: Thank you. And there are no other questions in the queue. I’d like to turn the call back to Mr. Len Tannenbaum for closing remarks.

Leonard Tannenbaum: Thank you. Thank you everyone for listening. We look forward to reporting our first quarter not too distant future since this was our year end results.

Operator: Thank you. This concludes today’s conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.