Sachem Capital Corp. (AMEX:SACH) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

John Villano: Yes. And the first thing that comes to my mind, and I’m sure yours is the financial situation that occurred with Broadmark. That was a situation where Broadmark was born from a SPAC. They had $1 billion in cash, and they lent it like drunken sailors. That’s not our game, that we don’t play that. We’ve always, always walked before we ran, sometimes being a little too conservative at times. While we desire to be a larger company, it’s been slow and steady here since our inception. And we are always looking for accretive investment capital because there are significant opportunities. And our Urbane acquisition is part of the plan to take advantage of those opportunities that we think are coming and coming fast.

Tyler Batory: Okay. Okay. Great. That’s helpful. In terms of the cost structure, I mean, you kind of mentioned, I think, investing in the business. Where are you in terms of headcount right now? I mean, would you anticipate that moving higher next year? I mean, might it move lower given the environment?

John Villano: So part of our initiative here is to move to larger loan sizes with better sponsors. And what that does is it kind of caps our headcount. With a lot of these smaller borrowers take a lot of our time, a lot of our legal effort, a lot of our treasury people. We want to start getting away from those. So at the moment, we’re looking to find a place to put them. But our move is to larger deals, which we’ll keep track of headcount, keep it in line. And to be very specific, I think we’re in pretty good shape here with comp. As you may be aware, we have moved to our new office facility. We’ve outgrown our last building. And now with all of us here basically under one roof, we’re efficient, we have a great working space, and we do have room for growth here. But at the moment, I think we have enough people to get us at least through the first half of the year without bringing on more bodies.

John Warch: Just to add, I think we’ll strategically add as appropriate during the year. We’re not going to do it well in advance and get ahead of our skis as we said, but we’ll be conscious of, hey, volumes up or whatever and add in the right place. But I don’t think you’ll see a lot of adds, but it will be adds that makes sense with what’s going on.

Tyler Batory: Okay. Just one last question, really more general in terms of the dividend. I mean, I know it’s something a lot of investors are focused on in terms of this whole return. Just how are you thinking about the level of dividend payout right now. Just any broad commentary you can make in terms of kind of how comfortable you are with where the dividend is?

John Villano: Again, I don’t want to project the future because we don’t know. But as I sit here today, I’m pretty confident on our ability to continue to pay dividends. And last year, we tried to move our dividend up. We moved it from $0.12 to $0.14, back to $0.13. We’re trying to find a stable ground. So you may see it move up $0.01 back and forth, but it’s really just us the ebb and flow of our business. Our goal here is to always increase the dividend and reward our shareholders, but you can’t — you never know how the quarter will end until it ends. So we’re trying to be a little conservative. We don’t want to jack the dividend and then pull it back. And to that end, if you saw in our press release, our non-GAAP earnings were $0.53.