MFA Financial, Inc. (NYSE:MFA) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Craig Knutson: So I mean, again, it’s a little bit early to tell, but suffice to say the convertible market, given where the stock is trading relative to book is probably not all that viable because even a high conversion premium, call it, 15%, would still be well below book value. So it’s on the radar screen. You’ll see in the queue that we bought back a little over $10 million of that in the secondary market during the third quarter or so. And there are opportunities from time to time to buy that in the secondary market. It’s not at a big discount but it chips away at it. But we — I don’t think there’s a month that goes by Eric, that we don’t take a meeting with some with bankers that have one idea or another as to how to approach that. So it’s definitely on the radar screen. We definitely don’t plan to default on it. But how exactly we’re going to fund that and pay it off, it’s too early to tell.

Eric Hagen: All right. Fair enough. Last question. I mean, if you’re an investor that was looking for, call it, differentiation in the non-QM and the business purpose portfolios across the mortgage REIT space, if you will. Like what kind of characteristics would you highlight or like turn to for investors to kind of piece apart that differentiation potentially?

Craig Knutson: Sure. So I’ll start and let Bryan and Gudmundur chime in. I would say, number one, you can look at the quality of the portfolio, right? And I mentioned it, Bryan mentioned that, Gudmundur mentioned, that delinquencies continue to be very low. We have a lot of experience from our history of buying reperforming and nonperforming loans working out assets that do go delinquent to optimize outcomes and a proven track record of doing that. So I would highlight the quality. And you haven’t seen the spike in delinquencies that you’ve seen elsewhere. You guys want to add anything?

Gudmundur Kristjansson: Yes. I think I would just add a couple of things to that. I mean our recourse leverage is 2x. And I think it’s important to keep that in mind as we think about kind of the inherent leverage in the organization. And we pointed out that a substantial amount. I think 77% of our whole loan portfolio is a non mark-to-market form. So that is a very strong liability structure. One of the things you mentioned also, from a rate perspective, we got $3 billion of slots roughly against $2.8 billion of assets that were mark-to-market financing. So from a rate liquidity perspective, that’s a good balance. As it relates to kind of the credit assets themselves, I mean, we’ve touched on an important item here throughout the call, which is our wholly owned subsidiary, Lima One.

I mean this is one of the elite, best BPL originator in the space. We have the ability to create our own credit assets in an environment where coupons and return profiles are probably one of the best that they’ve been in the last 15 to 20 years. And so when you look at the coupons that we can create with the attachment point to the property, the quality of the borrower, I don’t think you’ll find that in many other places. And so I would think that’s a really, really differentiating factor.

Bryan Wulfsohn: Yes. As it relates to the non-QM sourcing, right, we have several relationships with very deep relationships. We never really went out there to try to be a conduit to serve 50 to 100 sellers. We believe there’s a benefit to us of really getting to know the principles of the shops and so we know the credit that is getting originated there versus just spamming guidelines out to the — across the country and just taking in any loan that happens to fit those guidelines. So when we’re aggregating loans, we really have a comfort that a 65% LTV, 730 FICO is going to perform a way we would expect. It’s not — there aren’t really any surprises in our portfolio.