And we went about that with — I went about that with great urgency. Over the last 12 to 24 months, I’ve been very much in contact with lots of the other potential buyers of the company. I’ve flown around the world. I’ve gone to Vancouver. I’ve gone to all kinds of other places to meet with these — with potential buyers. And I feel like I have a pretty good sense for what the company should do. I’m not on the Board so — others are. But I think that they have more access to information about why or why not those things have not happened yet. I can tell you, I’m personally frustrated that they have not happened. I do understand the idea behind monetizing the Quebec mills and monetizing the land that they did first. I — you can look back with 20-20 hindsight and say, “oh, they should have just sold the whole company when all of the prices were high.” Sure, I don’t disagree.
That would have been great if they had sold it at a much higher price. The fact of the matter is, interest rates have gone from 2.5% to 7% or 8% or whatever they are now as of today, I think like 7.5% average mortgage rates. And that’s impacted the housing market and that’s — lumber prices have fallen some. So that’s not been great. A lot of the other publicly traded lumber companies have gotten hit as well. And that doesn’t mean that it was a bad decision for the Board to do what they did. They were trying to maximize — I’m guessing that they were trying to — I wasn’t involved in this decision, but my guess is that they were trying to maximize value for shareholders and get the best possible price. So now you say, well, where do we go from here?
And I say, well, they have a CEO in place that’s an operator that they just put in place. I have not spoken to him and I don’t know him. So hopefully, he’s good. I trust the Board that they’ve done a good job selecting him. And I think that as an ongoing concern, you’ll likely have to run your company properly until there’s a strategic transaction to do. There’s other things that they can do like monetizing some of the assets that we purchased, like the Kenora mill, land around that. There’s other things that they can do like that. I think that a lot of people have been wondering like when they will monetize or sell or get rid of the newsprint mill. And I think that some of these things are really important for them to do so that, going forward, we can be in a position to best maximize value for shareholders.
I have no view on whether interest rates will go up or down or lumber prices will go up or down. That is better than your view or anyone else’s on this call. I’m sure everyone has their own view if interest rates are going to stay high, they’re going to go down, lumber prices are going to go up or down. I think that my view is as educated as everyone on this call. But beyond that, I think that there’s more value in the company than the stock price. And I’m hoping that we can have a favorable transaction at some point in the next few months or a year. But that’s what we want as shareholders. But again, we also don’t want to be desperate as shareholders. If it takes multiple years to monetize, I guess, that will be the course. Like that’s what we’ve said with Firefly, but hopefully, they do something very soon.
Bill Brewster: Thank you all for your time.
Todd Major: Thank you, Bill.
Operator: [Operator Instructions] Okay. As we have — sorry, we do have a question. Bill has come back into queue. Your questions are coming from Bill Brewster, who is an Investor.
Bill Brewster: All right. One more. So Kyle, on iCoreConnect, I’m curious how that deal — what your perception of that deal is now that it’s closed and how you think after you have structured that deal. I think from the outside looking in, it’s kind of hard to maybe understand exactly what happened, but my sense is it turned out pretty well. So I’m curious for your thoughts.
Kyle Cerminara: So I think that there’s a lot of companies on the — that trade on the pink sheets or over the counter that are not great companies. But there’s also some companies that are good companies, and many of them would like to have access to more capital to grow. And it’s very hard to raise lots of capital as a pink sheet traded company or OTC-traded company without SEC filings and other things. I think investors sometimes don’t realize like all the laws related to raising capital when you’re not an SEC filer. Being an SEC filer generally makes it easier to raise capital, if that’s your desired goal, to raise capital and grow. So the SPAC market, as you know, had hundreds of SPACs that were launched in 2020, ’21 and got oversaturated with people looking for deals.
