Safehold Inc. (NYSE:SAFE) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Harsh Hemnani: So given the recent pullback in treasury yields. I’m wondering if you are confident in your ability to preserve the high yield you were able to originate at in the fourth quarter. You mentioned the investment pipeline for the future is looking better, it’s improving. But perhaps the deals that you closed in the back half of this year, how confident are you in being able to originate at similar yields?

Marcos Alvarado: Harsh, so I’m going to make a just a big macro call on our business. I think our belief here is that if we’re creating these assets north of a 6% ROA, we will be rewarded. I think the balancing act is obviously managing our cost of capital, both from a debt perspective and an equity perspective to make these transactions accretive. So I would say it’s a balancing act. I think those kind of almost 7% yields. I wish I could tell you they were flowing in but I don’t expect those to continue. But I do think kind of low to mid-6s in this sort of rate environment feels achievable for our business. And I think long term, we’ll be rewarded for that.

Harsh Hemnani: That’s helpful. And then — so CARET, the authorized shares there, it increased from about $10 million to $12.5 million. I understand at this time, authorized shares are not yet issued. But what I want to confirm is, first off, why the increase? What’s the philosophy behind that? And second, when we share ; I just want to confirm that the proceeds from those issuances would go to sales, correct?

Jay Sugarman: Yes. So on the first part, Harsh, the goal with the MSD negotiations was to really build out CARET in a fully fleshed out form, that will take us for many, many, many decades. So the — just changing the authorization a bit was to anticipate over the coming many, many, many years, the ability to issue a modest amount for lots of different reasons within the purview of the board. We wanted them to have the flexibility over the long term without having to keep going back. So that 20% increase is really anticipatory of the long-term future of CARET, nothing imminent. Second part, Marcos?

Marcos Alvarado: Yes. Harsh, so the — I think your question was if you raised proceeds at Safe does that go to the ground lease business? And the answer is yes. So we would redeploy those to invest in ground leases.

Harsh Hemnani: Okay. And then last one for me. For this quarter, what proportion of them were originated by Safe, what proportion of the acquisitions were originated by Safe versus just acquiring existing ground leases? And also, could you touch on the rent coverage this quarter? I know it was in line with your investment targets but closer to the low end and it represented sort of a meaningful slowdown or a meaningful downtick versus the previous few quarters. So maybe you could touch on why that was.

Marcos Alvarado: Sure thing. So 100% of the 3 assets were originated, so none were existing ground leases. And then our coverage construct for assets that are in transition or in development is we take a haircut to the sponsor’s numbers typically and then we take an incremental haircut to that number just to be conservative. So the 2.3x coverage level probably reflects almost a 20% to 25% discount to the sponsor underwriting.

Operator: Your next question for today is coming from Ki Bin Kim at Truist.