Bridge Investment Group Holdings Inc. (NYSE:BRDG) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Christopher Jaroch: And Ken maybe I’d follow on that a little bit. I mean I think secondaries — because of the diversification because of the risk mitigation sort of comes with that, the cash flowing aspects to it, the shorter duration version of it is very well tailored for the wealth management channel in the sense that if you’re looking for an entry point into private equity, what better way to get into it through a highly diversified portfolio of secondary opportunities. So I think from that standpoint, the product itself will be very attractive for that end market.

Ken Worthington: Great. Maybe in terms of the quarter and the results, income from top property operations and insurance income were a bit higher than trend. What drove the better results here? And I guess we’re kind of looking for sustainability, if they are sustainable.

Katherine Elsnab: Let me speak to the insurance results first. That was really driven by claim history that occurred during 2022. And that will vary just based upon actual incidents that occur. As we think about the property operations, as our fee earning AUM continues to grow, that balance will continue to increase. And so those are really the largest drivers, and we continue to deploy properties — deploy capital, particularly in the Multifamily sector and — Multifamily and Workforce sectors, those will continue to scale.

Jonathan Slager: Right. They kind of go hand in hand with that recurring fee income that we like to focus on in terms of kind of the core business.

Robert Morse: Ken, we mentioned this, I believe, in an earlier earnings call, the strategic decision to be forward integrated into property management, we think is really an important component of how we post performance. We think that we can generate alpha at the asset level. We think, particularly in the changed interest rate environment, where leverage has gone from being an unmitigated positive in terms of financing real estate acquisitions to something that’s more in the neutral range probably in the whole scheme of things. In this new environment, property management gives us an element of alpha that investors who are not forward integrated just don’t enjoy. And so we’ve worked hard over the years, and we continue to work hard to optimize that approach to property management. We think we’ve had a lot of learnings over the past 32 years or so as we’ve grown our property management, and we think it’s a huge asset for us and for our investors going forward.

Operator: Our next question is coming from the line of Sumeet Mody with Piper Sandler.

Sumeet Mody: Wondering if you guys could talk broadly about the deployment opportunity today versus 3 months ago? Any changes you might be seeing there? And then on the transaction fees in the quarter came in a little lower than we were expecting. Can you help us frame how to think about those fees for this year kind of given the backdrop that we see?

Robert Morse: Jonathan, how about over to you on that?

Jonathan Slager: Sure. Sure. On the transaction fees, I think we are seeing, I think, the very interesting opportunities that the debt markets have sort of presented, which on the negative side, I think there’s been this bid-ask spread that I think was alluded to in our call. We’ve seen a much slower market. I think that the broad statistics are saying the overall commercial real estate market is down like 70% in terms of volume, which, of course, everyone is subject to. We’re starting to see some green shoots of that coming back. We’re also starting to see some of the opportunistic things that might be coming from the impact of higher rates, including the significant need for reserves to be put aside for rate cap purchases and other things that are connected to floating rate debt.