Safehold Inc. (NYSE:SAFE) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Marcos Alvarado: No. It’s a little bit of a puzzle. We are certainly pitching that as a solution and as a product and we think we can help distressed capital structures live for another day or live for a new owner. But what we’re actually seeing is those transactions are taking extremely long to get done, if at all. And so at least right now, we’re seeing a fair amount of kicking the can down the road. I’m not saying that that isn’t going to change. It could change as we cross over in the year. But as of right now, we don’t see this kind of wave of distress starting to hit. If you’re asking my personal opinion, I think it will come eventually. It’s just it’s not there today.

Rich Anderson: Okay. And Brett, you mentioned the value or maybe it was Jay mentioned the value of your long-dated liabilities. Is there a way to quantify that, like, if you were to mark-to-market your debt, is there a number that you sort of monitor to sort of say this is how much it’s worth in this environment?

Brett Asnas: Yeah. I mean, that’s precisely what we’re trying to get across to folks, which is, and we have this laid out in our corporate presentation. When you start to think about our long-dated liabilities, running out those cash flows, discounting them at an appropriate discount rate, treating both sides of the balance sheet in a similar manner and fairly, we think that that mark-to-market value today is quite meaningful, right? It depends what discount rate you want to use. But I think the middle of the road, even $0.5 billion, when you start thinking about that number at today’s rates, even could potentially even be greater than that, that’s incremental value that we feel like the market is not fully appreciating.

And I think part of the reason why also, a lot of folks have shorter maturity profiles, right? They have shorter assets and I think for us, when you’re looking at 99-year cash flows and discounting them back at what we believe is high-grade risk, so are those, 23 years of weighted average maturity profile. We have a lot of pieces of debt due in 30 years to 50 years and we think that’s a really important value component. So we try to lay out that kind of net present value sensitivity for people, because we think it’s certainly underappreciated right now.

Rich Anderson: Okay. Last for me, $858 million of liquidity, not including the joint venture commitments. But — and you kind of bit your tongue and raised equity. It worked for you from a ratings perspective and to lock up sort of the financial profile, the company for now in a tough environment. But where is it? What’s the trigger where you get to– what’s the liquidity number that you get to where you say, well, we got to start thinking about raising more capital. You obviously don’t want that $850 million to get anywhere near zero. So I’m just wondering when you start thinking about it again and hopefully it does become a problem because you’ve deployed some of that liquidity, but I just curious?

Brett Asnas: Yeah. That’s the real goal here is to be able to take advantage of some of these attractive asset economics, Rich, and right now, I’d say, the volume is pretty muted just from a transaction standpoint in the real estate world and then they’re getting our cost of funds to match up in a way that we’re comfortable with locking in long-term. So we haven’t we haven’t really had to think too much about when the trigger is. But we like to have plenty of liquidity on hand. Historically, we’ve said, $0.5 billion feels comfortable. So between the JV and the lines, we think we’re well positioned for that. Candidly, I think, we’re hoping we’re almost at the end of the rate cycle and I think on the other side of it is a lot of opportunity for us and we think there’s plenty of places to pull capital from once transaction volume picks up.