Starwood Property Trust, Inc. (NYSE:STWD) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Jeff DiModica: Yes, Jade. We would love to have the banks come to us. We’re super fortunate to have this L&R business. As I mentioned on the prepared remarks, we have over 200 people who have done this for over 30 years and worked out $88 billion of assets. It could be the banks. Hopefully the FDIC is listening and they give us a call. There are certainly lots of property owners, pensions, insurance, other investors, large players who could use our health, the broker network that we use every day at Starwood Capital and have relationships with all the biggest brokers. They get asked to do reviews and portfolio valuations every day. They are not experts at working out assets. They are experts at buying and selling and financing assets and we want to go to them and have them bring us the opportunities that they’re seeing to both evaluate and help in work out.

We — this is what we do, dealing with workouts between bespoke, interactions between banks and clients or securitizations. We have experience in doing it all. And you’re one of the people who pushed us over the last few years. So we appreciate that. We’ve now hired a team. And we think it’s an extremely exciting opportunity. And hope that, people listening. Who are wondering about their portfolio valuations or asset valuations or what to do in a difficult time want to come to a shop that has done this 88 billion times over the last 30 years. So we think we have a lot of expertise to offer here. And we’re really hopeful that we can grow this into something you are right. The time is now.

Barry Sternlicht: Just a quick — not everyone in our group has been at 30 years. The head of the group is 30 years.

Jeff DiModica: But the group all together is 30 years.

Barry Sternlicht: Yeah. And we’ve been doing this, 30 years. But — and the guy who runs it with us is actually 31 or two years. It is much like Guggenheim surge as the front-end and for small insurance companies we should be the back-end for many regional banks and maybe some of the larger players like the FDIC, but we do have an incredible ability to do this. I think they’ll work in tandem, Jade. I think the increase in the name or the actual book that we have $101 billion or $102 billion in servicing — named servicer, that number is what’s actually being REO or serviced by us, I think it’s seven or eight today or six to eight something like that that number should go back up. I mean you can see we’re going to get a lot of business. It won’t be as profitable as it was before, because the CMBS securities, the loan documents have changed. They’ll still be profitable. This could be bigger and could that. So we’ll get to work and get the shot.

Jade Rahmani: And do you see as a follow-up M&A as an interesting deployment opportunity within this segment. There’s many financials in the non-bac space that are under duress due to their capital structure and there could be fee income services businesses within that. We’ve seen others in my coverage such as Newmark, grow in the servicing sector. And there’s also the private broker and maybe brokers cover the rigs that are faced in track.

Barry Sternlicht: Send us their names.

Jeff DiModica: Anyone listening please call us. We got a difficult time. The premium book value to our peers obviously it’s accretive, if we are able to consolidate the industry. We would love to consolidate the industry. We think we’re well positioned to consolidate the industry. Boards of directors who own a book value that they believe in more strongly than the market believes in or have been unwilling to-date, to date us, but we would love to go on a lot of dates, if you have anyone listening to this call that would like to become part of Starwood.