Manulife Financial Corporation (NYSE:MFC) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Darko Mihelic: And to be clear, that’s irrespective of what rates do and cap rates and so on?

Scott Hartz: Yeah. I think cap rates is that secondary impact, it’s all real estate, and that just is sort of cyclical. And if rates decline, those values will increase. If rates don’t decline, we’ll get that back over time in the run rate earnings. I don’t worry as much about interest rates. Office is really what is the future of the office. It’s very unclear. And so it feels like certainly a riskier segment of the real estate market.

Roy Gori: Darko, I just want to add a couple of quick comments to Scott. So I would say that one of the big focuses for us, not only across our ALDA portfolio, but certainly across our real estate portfolio is the diversity of our portfolio. And 38% of our real estate portfolio is US, but 32% is Canada and 26% is Asia. And 30% of our office portfolio is also Asia, which, again, provides us good diversification. So we feel that having a diverse portfolio is a really important part of our strategy in a way that we can, a, reduce volatility, but also optimize returns.

Darko Mihelic: Okay, great. Thank you very much. Appreciate that.

Operator: Thank you. There are no further questions registered at this time. I’d like to turn the call back over to Mr. Ko.

Hung Ko: Thank you, operator. We’ll be available after the call if there are any follow-up questions. Have a good day, everyone.

Operator: Thank you. The conference has now ended. Please disconnect your lines at this time. And we thank you for your participation.