Earnings call transcript: Seven Hills Realty Trust Q4 2024 misses EPS forecast slightly

Seven Hills Realty Trust, with a market capitalization of $196.12 million, reported its fourth-quarter 2024 earnings, revealing a slight miss on earnings per share (EPS) forecasts. The company posted an EPS of $0.33, just below the anticipated $0.34, while revenue fell short of expectations at $7.68 million against a forecast of $8.28 million. Despite these misses, the company’s stock showed a modest decline of 0.15% in after-hours trading, reflecting a relatively stable investor sentiment. According to InvestingPro, the company maintains a strong financial health score of 2.71, rated as "GOOD," with several positive indicators suggesting resilient fundamentals.

Key Takeaways

• Seven Hills reported Q4 2024 distributable earnings of $4.9 million, or $0.33 per share.
• The company declared a dividend of $0.35 per share, yielding an annualized return of 10.6%.
• Loan commitments rose by 8% to $641 million, indicating robust lending activity.
• The company reduced its office exposure and expanded its loan portfolio in student housing and hospitality.

Company Performance

Seven Hills Realty Trust demonstrated solid performance in Q4 2024, with distributable earnings reaching $4.9 million. The full-year distributable earnings totaled $21.3 million, or $1.45 per share. The company continued to expand its loan commitments, which increased by 8% to $641 million. This growth is attributed to strategic lending in student housing and hospitality sectors, reflecting a shift away from office exposure.

Financial Highlights

• Revenue: $7.68 million, below the forecast of $8.28 million.
• Earnings per share: $0.33, slightly under the forecast of $0.34.
• Dividend: $0.35 per share, with a 10.6% annualized yield.
• Total (EPA:TTEF) loan commitments: $641 million, an 8% increase from the previous quarter.

Earnings vs. Forecast

Seven Hills Realty Trust’s actual EPS of $0.33 narrowly missed the forecasted $0.34, marking a minor deviation of approximately 2.9%. Revenue also fell short by approximately 7.2%, coming in at $7.68 million against an expected $8.28 million. This performance aligns with a cautious market environment but shows resilience given the company’s strategic focus on diversified lending.

Market Reaction

Following the earnings release, Seven Hills’ stock experienced a minor dip of 0.15%, closing at $13.23. This movement places the stock within its 52-week range of $11.83 to $14.66, indicating a stable investor outlook despite the earnings miss. The slight decline reflects a tempered market response, likely influenced by the company’s ongoing strategic initiatives and strong dividend yield.

Outlook & Guidance

Looking ahead, Seven Hills projects Q1 2025 distributable earnings between $0.30 and $0.32 per share. The company aims for $100 million in net originations for the year and anticipates 6-7 loan repayments totaling approximately $200 million in the second half of 2025. Analyst price targets ranging from $14.50 to $15.00 suggest potential upside from current levels. For comprehensive analysis and detailed valuation metrics, investors can access the full Pro Research Report available on InvestingPro, which covers over 1,400 US stocks with expert insights and actionable intelligence. The current pipeline includes significant term sheets and refinances, underscoring a proactive growth strategy.

Executive Commentary

Jared Lewis (JO:LEWJ), Vice President, emphasized the company’s strategic capital deployment, stating, "We continue to be thoughtful about how we deploy our capital." President and CIO Tom Lorenzini highlighted the supportive nature of lending partners, reinforcing confidence in the company’s business model.

Risks and Challenges

• Market volatility could impact loan origination and repayment schedules.
• Interest rate fluctuations may affect floating-rate loan returns.
• Increased competition in the lending market could pressure margins.
• Economic downturns might influence borrower defaults or non-accrual loans.

Q&A

During the earnings call, analysts inquired about dividend sustainability and the company’s leverage strategy. The management addressed these concerns, highlighting a current leverage ratio of 1.6x with a target around 2x, and expressed confidence in maintaining dividend payouts. Additionally, discussions touched on the company’s access to the CLO market and strategies for upcoming loan maturities.

Full transcript - Seven Hills Realty Trust (SEVN) Q4 2024:

Matt, Moderator/Operator, Seven Hills: Good morning. Joining me on today’s call are Tom Lorenzini, President and Chief Investment Officer Fernando Diaz, Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer and Jared Lewis, Vice President. Today’s call includes a presentation by management followed by a question and answer session with analysts. Please note that the recording, retransmission and transcription of today’s conference call is prohibited without the prior written consent of the company. Also note that today’s conference call contains forward looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and other securities laws.

These forward looking statements are based on Seven Hills’ beliefs and expectations as of today, 02/19/2025, and actual results may differ materially from those that we project. The company undertakes no obligation to revise or publicly release the results of any revision to the forward looking statements made in today’s conference call. Additional information concerning factors that could cause those differences is contained in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission or SEC, which can be accessed from the SEC’s website. Investors are cautioned not to place undue reliance upon any forward looking statements. In addition, we will be discussing non GAAP financial numbers during this call, including distributable earnings and distributable earnings per share.

A reconciliation of GAAP to non GAAP financial measures can be found in our earnings release presentation, which can be found on our website at 7reit.com. With that, I will now turn the call over to Tom.

Tom Lorenzini, President and Chief Investment Officer, Seven Hills: Thanks, Matt, and good morning, everyone. On our call today, I will start with an update on our fourth quarter activities and performance, followed by an overview of our loan portfolio before turning it over to Jared to discuss the macro perspective and the opportunities that we are seeing in this competitive environment as it relates to our pipeline. Fernando will then review our financial results before opening the call to questions from sell side analysts. Before jumping into our quarterly results, I would like to highlight that for the full year, Seven Hills soundly outperformed our benchmark index, the NAREIT mortgage commercial financing index by more than 20%. This is the second consecutive year that we have outperformed this index allowing us to deliver meaningful shareholder returns, which is a testament to the quality of our borrowers as well as our underwriting and portfolio asset management.

Turning to our fourth quarter results. Last evening, we reported distributable earnings per share of $0.33 which met the high end of our guidance range. We further strengthened and diversified our portfolio by increasing our total loan commitments during the quarter to $641,000,000 from $594,000,000 at the end of Q3. Our average loan commitment also increased quarter over quarter from $30,000,000 to $31,000,000 Our loan portfolio continues to perform well and currently has a weighted average risk rating of 3.1. We have no five rated loans, no loans in default and no non accrual loans.

We ended the quarter $70,000,000 in cash and ample borrowing capacity after receiving eight loan repayments totaling $165,000,000 during the year, positioning us to further grow our portfolio by strategically taking advantage of opportunities in our pipeline to generate attractive risk adjusted returns. Prior to our recycling any capital generated through future loan repayments, we would expect to grow our portfolio by approximately $100,000,000 in 2025. Turning to a few additional highlights from the fourth quarter. We were active during the quarter closing two loans totaling $87,000,000 The first loan was a fully funded $42,000,000 refinance of a student housing property serving the University of Mississippi. And the second loan was a $45,000,000,000 commitment to finance the acquisition of 178 room hotel located here in Boston.

Also during the quarter, we received one loan repayment, our Starkville Mississippi loan, which totaled $37,000,000 Then in early January, we closed on a $31,000,000 bridge loan to finance the acquisition of another student housing property, this one located at Texas State University in San Marcos. Looking forward, we are not anticipating any first quarter repayments, but do expect six to seven loans totaling approximately $200,000,000 being repaid in the back half of twenty twenty five, which should position us well as the markets continue to improve. Turning to our loan book as of December 31, Seven Hills portfolio remained 100 invested in floating rate loans, which consisted of twenty one first mortgages with an average loan size of $31,000,000 and total commitments of $641,000,000 an increase of approximately 8% or $47,000,000 from last quarter. Future fundings decreased modestly to 5% of total commitments and our investments have a weighted average coupon of 8.2% and an all in yield of 8.6%. In aggregate, the portfolio has a weighted average maximum maturity of two point six years when including extension options and a stable overall credit profile with an average risk rating of 3.1 and a weighted average loan to value at close of 67%.

We continue to thoughtfully diversify our loan book. As of today, our office exposure has been reduced to 26% of our total outstanding loan dollars, down from 30% at the end of Q3. But more importantly, all of our office loans are secured by well leased properties, remain current at debt service and continue to be actively supported by our borrowers. In addition, 52% of today’s portfolio consists of multifamily and industrial loans, followed by select service hospitality and grocery anchored retail loans. Geographically, we continue to be well diversified across the country.

From a capital perspective, our lending partners remain incredibly supportive of our business. We amended our UBS master repurchase agreement by extending the maturity date to February of twenty twenty six, while also increasing the maximum facility size by $45,000,000 to $250,000,000 Secondly, we extended the maturity date of our $125,000,000 Wells Fargo (NYSE:WFC) master repurchase facility from February 2025 to March of twenty twenty six. Before I turn the call over to Jared, I would like to mention that in December, Seven Hills elected Anne Danner to our Board as an independent trustee. Anne brings more than forty years of real estate industry experience and her strong background in residential and multifamily development, investment and operations will be a significant asset to Seven Hills going forward. With that, I will now turn the call over to Jared.

Matt, Moderator/Operator, Seven Hills: Thanks, Tom. I’ll provide a quick macro perspective update. As mentioned on our last call, at the end of the third quarter, we began to see real optimism in the market as the Federal Reserve began reducing interest rates. As a result, over the fourth quarter, we saw a significant increase in loan request activity and averaged over $1,200,000,000 of monthly loan registrations during the quarter. More notably, however, we saw an increase in credit quality and in particular transactions that fit our stringent underwriting criteria, evidenced by a substantial increase in term sheets issued when compared to the same period last year.

Beginning at the end of the last year and so far in early twenty twenty five, we have seen a great deal of liquidity return to the market. The CMBS and CRE CLO markets are active and competition among lenders for new loans continues to drive spreads downward, particularly in the multifamily sector. The confluence of recent interest rate reductions, increased liquidity and and the bottoming of real estate values gives property owners and borrowers more conviction to make buy, sell or refinance decisions. With significant upcoming loan maturities, this combination should help fuel increased transaction activity as we progress into 2025. Furthermore, a significant amount of these upcoming loan maturities are floating rate bridge loans originated in 2021 and 2022 and do not readily qualify for permanent financing today.

Many of these properties are likely to require additional investment in new floating rate debt to facilitate the completion of their business plans and to allow for additional time for property NOI to stabilize. As I mentioned earlier, our pipeline of financing opportunities remains robust. And while borrowers are evaluating both fixed and floating rate options, we are seeing that many are more open to signing floating rate loans for the near term flexibility they offer. Like many lenders, we continue to see an increase in opportunities to finance multifamily properties. However, we continue to be thoughtful about how we deploy our capital and have found success targeting sectors of the multifamily market where there’s less competition like student housing.

We also continue to see interesting opportunities in the industrial, hospitality and retail sectors where we can leverage the expertise of the broader RMR platform to help us better evaluate transactions that generate stronger risk adjusted returns on our investments. Generally speaking, this is a good environment for floating rate lenders like us. The relative stability of short term rates compared to the recent volatility and the ten year treasury rate make floating rate loans useful for a wide array of circumstances. This allows us to be very selective during our credit analysis process, while still being able to strategically expand our loan portfolio. To that end, we currently have two outstanding term sheets on industrial and hospitality properties totaling $65,000,000 In addition, we have one $19,000,000 loan in diligence with a repeat borrower for the refinance of the student housing properties serving Vale University.

This loan is a three year initial term with two one year extension options subject to property meeting certain requirements. Barring any issues and diligence, this loan should close within the next thirty days. Now, I’d like to turn the call over to Fernando.

Fernando Diaz, Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer, Seven Hills: Thank you, Garrett, and good morning. Yesterday, we reported fourth quarter twenty twenty four distributable earnings of $4,900,000 or $0.33 per share. For the full year, we reported distributable earnings of $21,300,000 or $1.45 per share compared to our dividend of $1.4 per share. In January, we declared our regular quarterly dividend to shareholders of $0.35 per share to be paid tomorrow, February 20. On an annualized basis, the dividend yield on our stock is approximately 10.6% based on yesterday’s closing price.

Our seasonal reserve remains modest at 140 basis points of our total loan commitments as of December 31 compared to 160 basis points as of September 30. Our seasonal provision decreased $450,000 for the third quarter, primarily due to an improvement in the macro forecast used in our CECL model and improved performance at certain of our loans during the fourth quarter. As a reminder, to help protect us against investment losses, we structure all of our loans with risk mitigation mechanisms such as cash flow sweeps, interest reserves and rebalancing requirements. And we do not have any collateral dependent loans or loans with specific reserves. As of year end, Seven Hills maintained its conservative leverage metrics and continues to have ample liquidity.

We ended the quarter with $70,000,000 of cash on hand, ample borrowing capacity and a weighted average borrowing rate of sulfur plus two twenty three basis points. Total debt to equity increased 1.6 times from 1.4 times at the end of the previous quarter, primarily due to the two loan originations in the quarter Tom discussed earlier. We believe that our conservative leverage and available borrowing capacity provide a strong opportunity to originate accretive loans that will benefit the company. Turning to our outlook and guidance. We expect first quarter distributable earnings to be in the range of $0.3 to $0.32 per share as a result of the fourth quarter payoff and the timing of the closing of new originations currently in our pipeline.

As Tom and Jared discussed, we have a robust pipeline with several loans in advanced stages of negotiation. However, these loans will not close until later this quarter or in the second quarter. That concludes our prepared remarks. And with that, operator, please open the lines for questions.

Speaker 3: Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. And the first question will come from Matthew Ertner with Jones Trading. Please go ahead.

Matthew Ertner, Analyst, Jones Trading: Hey, good morning guys. Thanks for the question. And Fernando, thanks for that clarification on the interest income and kind of the timing there, because that was actually the first question that I had. But I guess turning to the portfolio, targeting $100,000,000 in net originations, and I believe you said $200,000,000 in payoffs. How comfortable are you guys at the current level with the dividend and portfolio size?

And just kind of thinking about run rate earnings going forward, once those loans do close later half 1Q, early Q2, you kind of expect that to be fully supportive of that 0.35 dividend?

Fernando Diaz, Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer, Seven Hills: Yes, I can start with that and perhaps Tom can add some color in terms of loan production. As you know, Matt, the Board evaluates dividend on a quarterly basis based on market conditions, loan originations and payoffs and the forward path of interest rates. So So it’s something that the Board looks on a quarterly basis. And I think we continue to evaluate that along with the Board in terms of dividend.

Tom Lorenzini, President and Chief Investment Officer, Seven Hills: And then Matt, I think certainly important to that question is going to be our pace of production. For the year, we’ve already closed one transaction earlier this year for $31,000,000 We’ve got another in the $19,000,000 that we mentioned that’s in closing. So we’ll have those two close this quarter. And then we’ve got another $50,000,000 60 million dollars that we can put out in two more deals probably in second quarter at some point and then we start getting the repayments and recycling that cash. So as far as supporting the dividend, it’s really going to just depend on how quickly we can get the initial dollars out to continue to support the plan.

Matthew Ertner, Analyst, Jones Trading: Got it. That’s helpful. And then kind of as a follow-up to that, when looking at payoffs, how much insight can you guys see into that? Because it looks like with the original maturity date, there’s about 58% of the portfolio give or take that was scheduled to mature this year. And you mentioned the back half, but how good of a look into that do you guys have?

Tom Lorenzini, President and Chief Investment Officer, Seven Hills: Well, look, we certainly speak with our sponsors at a minimum monthly as they provide their performance package on the properties. But we’re acutely aware of these upcoming maturities and we’re working with the sponsorships. So what I can tell you is that when we look through the schedule here, there’s a handful there’s 11 loans that are going to mature in 2025. Several of those we know will extend. Some have the extensions by right.

There’s some early maturities coming up quickly now. We’ve got one in Maryland on a retail center. They are actively pursuing two paths to either sell or refinance us. There may be a short term extension we do there. And then we’ve got another property outside of Chicago and Downers Grove that is maturing here at the February.

We’ve agreed to extend on a short term basis there as well while they continue to work with their bank on a refinance. And then the rest of the loans, if you look at the schedule, they’re really not scheduled until Q3 and Q4.

Matthew Ertner, Analyst, Jones Trading: Got it. Yes. That’s very helpful. Thank you for that.

Speaker 3: Our next question will come from Chris Mueller with Citizens JMP. Please go ahead.

Chris Mueller, Analyst, Citizens JMP: Hey, everyone. Thanks for taking the questions and congrats to a nice close to 2024. So I guess how are you guys thinking about leverage in 2025? And just to put that in a little context, the Centimeters REITs typically used to operate in a three zero one type leverage scenario, but you guys are well below that today, which gives you a lot of flexibility going forward. So just curious on any thoughts you guys have on leverage going forward?

Matthew Ertner, Analyst, Jones Trading: Yes. Happy to take that. We as you

Fernando Diaz, Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer, Seven Hills: know, we finished the quarter at 1.6x with the amount of capital that Tom alluded to earlier, probably putting another $100,000,000 to work. That can get us comfortably probably around two times leverage, which is probably a little bit under where we want to be. But at this point, maximum leverage will be about 2.5 times, but currently probably around two or a little bit north of two as we put

Tom Lorenzini, President and Chief Investment Officer, Seven Hills: the money to work. And part of that equation, keep in mind is that on I think four of the six office loans that we have were pretty under levered. So that factors into keeping that number low.

Chris Mueller, Analyst, Citizens JMP: Got it. That’s helpful. And then maybe something that would impact that leverage a little more dramatically. We’re hearing and you guys touched on this in your prepared remarks that securitization markets are tightening up, becoming a little more attractive. So is CLO something that could fit into the Seven Hills vehicle and just how are you guys thinking about the CLO market as we sit today?

Matt, Moderator/Operator, Seven Hills: Hi, Chris. This is Jared. I can address that. Yes, with respect to our the CMBS and CRE CLO markets, they’re definitely back. They’re very active and they’re a huge catalyst to driving spreads downward.

As a result of that, we gained the benefit of that with our repo facilities as well. So where CLO prints happen, kind of translates into our borrowing costs as well. So that’s a benefit to us. Our ability, however, to access or tap into that CRE CLO market is a little bit challenging today given the size of the portfolio. As you know, the majority of those structures are collateralized with multifamily properties.

And generally, they’re anywhere from $750,000,000 to $1,000,000,000 for each of those deals. So for us to really access that market, we’d have to originate all of our loans in that probably multifamily world and start from scratch all over again. Our portfolio we think is performing well and so we continue to find ways to generate returns elsewhere.

Chris Mueller, Analyst, Citizens JMP: Got it. So CLO would kind of be a next chapter once we get through this current cycle. So appreciate the comments today and look forward to seeing the story play out in 2025.

Tom Lorenzini, President and Chief Investment Officer, Seven Hills: Thank you.

Speaker 3: With no further questions, this concludes our question and answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Tom Lorenzini, President and Chief Investment Officer, for any closing remarks.

Tom Lorenzini, President and Chief Investment Officer, Seven Hills: Thank you very much for joining our call today. The call is now ended.

Speaker 3: The conference is now concluded. Thank you for attending today’s presentation. You may now disconnect.

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