TPG Mortgage Investment Trust, Inc. ($MITT)

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the TPG Mortgage Investment Trust, Inc. First Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. [Operator Instructions] I'd now like to turn the call over to Jenny Neslin, General Counsel for the company. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the First Quarter 2026 Earnings Call for TPG Mortgage Investment Trust. With me on the call today are TJ. Durkin, our CEO and Presiden, Nic Smith, our Chief Investment Officer; and Anthony Rosiello, our Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin, please note that the information discussed in today's call may contain forward-looking statements. Any forward-looking statements made during today's call are subject to certain risks and uncertainties, which are outlined in our SEC filings, including under the headings Cautionary Statement regarding Forward-Looking Statements, Risk Factors and Management's Discussion and Analysis. The company's actual results may differ materially from these statements. We encourage you to read the disclosure regarding forward-looking statements contained in our SEC filings, including our most recently filed Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2025, and our subsequent reports filed from time to time with the SEC. Except as required by law, we are not obligated and do not intend to update or to review or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. During the call today, we will refer to certain nonGAAP financial measures. Please refer to our SEC filings for reconciliations to the most comparable GAAP measures. We will also reference the earnings presentation that was posted to our website this morning. To view the slide presentation, turn to our website, www.mit.tpg.com and click on the link for the Q1 2026 earnings presentation on the home page. Again, welcome to the call, and thank you for joining us today. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to TJ.

Thank you, Jenny, and good morning, everyone. During the first quarter, we experienced a familiar dynamic. In the beginning of the quarter, the company benefited from additional moderation of interest rate volatility, lower rates and strong residential credit fundamentals, along with increased demand for risk across the entire non-agency capital stack from investors. However, these favorable conditions abruptly unwound in March following the escalation of the conflict in the Middle East weighing on asset valuations broadly. Despite the challenging macro backdrop that put pressure on mitt's book value for the first quarter, declining from $10.48 to $9.97, we maintained a disciplined leverage profile and remain focused on executing our core strategy of rotating capital into higher returning residential credit strategies and scaling profitability at Arc Home. These efforts produced EAD of $0.26 for the first quarter, more than covering our most recently declared dividend of $0.24. Further, we'd like to note that although it's too early in our process to comment on April book value, we believe we have already recovered at least 50% of the previous quarter's unrealized book value decline. Before turning the call to Nic to go into more details, I would reiterate that we have consistently executed on our previously stated objectives and believe we have clear line of sight into more powerful ROEs and EAD as we look ahead into 2026. We have been able to raise our dividend in 4 of the last 6 quarters as we continue executing on our stated objectives discussed on our last quarter's call. We look forward to continuing to share our progress in the coming quarters. I'll now turn the call over to Nic.

Thanks, TJ., and thank you, everyone, for joining us today. We ended the first quarter with an investment portfolio of $8.1 billion. Our activity remains focused on home equity and non-agency credit, where we continue to see attractive risk-adjusted returns and strong structural demand. We securitized approximately $500 million of home equity loans, building on a partnership formed with a market-leading home equity originator a few years ago. Home equity remains core to our strategy, and we believe this segment will provide the company compelling opportunities as this residential housing segment continues to grow. In addition to this transaction, we executed another securitization subsequent to quarter end, comprised of approximately $430 million non-agency residential mortgage loans. Importantly, we maintained our disciplined leverage profile. The company's economic leverage stands at a conservative 1.7 turns. While we have been able to grow earnings at these leverage ratios, we believe we can prudently move this up over time to drive additional earnings power. The credit performance of the company's residential portfolio continues to be a core strength. Serious delinquencies in our non-agency portfolio stand at just 1.3%, while our home equity portfolio is even lower at 0.4%. The portfolio is comprised of high-quality borrowers with significant equity in their homes. On average, the non-agency and home equity portfolios have a low 60% loan to value. On the commercial side, we are seeing positive momentum as we manage our Legacy WMC commercial holdings to exit. We are focused on derisking these positions, which will further free up equity for redeployment in our core strategies, higher returning residential. Moving on to Arc Home. Arc Home has reached a clear inflection point. Despite the macroeconomic headwinds this quarter, Arc Home delivered a meaningful contribution to our EAD of approximately $0.04 per share. We continue -- we saw continued strength in lock volumes of $1.3 billion, a 25% increase year-over-year, driven by strong non-agency originations. Our decision to increase ownership stake at 66% is starting to pay off as the platform gains market share and improved gain on sale margins. Before handing the call over to Anthony, I'd like to close with some thoughts around our strategy and the macro outlook. We entered the second quarter with significant momentum. While market volatility impacted our book value this period, we see a path to recovery. Since quarter end, we observed an improving, though admittedly fragile macroeconomic environment. If this continues, we expect a return to trends we saw in the earlier parts of this year and believe this environment is likely to lead the market to revisit the types of the year, which would reverse much, if not all, of the book value decline we saw in Q1. As TJ. mentioned in his remarks, at this point, we believe we've already recovered at least 50%. We are well positioned to navigate this volatility and continue to grow earnings while delivering superior risk-adjusted returns. Anthony, over to you.

Thank you, Nic, and good morning, everyone. During the first quarter, we continued to focus on rotating capital into our home equity portfolio. We successfully executed one home equity loan securitization and maintained our momentum in the securitization markets with an additional deal in April. Most importantly, we realized continued strength in our earnings available for distribution, or EAD. This performance was supported by earnings growth at Arc Home despite a volatile quarter, which resulted in our EAD once again exceeding our increased dividend level. Reflecting this ongoing improvement in earnings, we announced our fourth dividend increase since the beginning of 2025, raising our quarterly dividend to $0.24 per share. Moving to our financial results. Book value decreased 4.9% to $9.97 per share, resulting in a negative 2.6% economic return when considering our $0.24 dividend. We reported a GAAP net loss of approximately $8.7 million or $0.27 per share, entirely driven by net unrealized losses on our investment portfolio, which were partially offset by gains on our hedge portfolio and investment in Arc Home. Overall, these unrealized losses reflect the March macroeconomic volatility, which drove rates higher and caused spreads to widen. Despite these unrealized losses, which have begun to retrace in April, the company's operating performance remains strong, delivering durable net interest income, earnings growth at Arc Home and a controlled expense load, all of which supported our increased dividend and demonstrate the embedded value of our strategy. Specifically, EAD of $0.26 per share increased from the prior quarter and fully covered our $0.24 dividend. Net interest income, including hedge income was $0.67, which exceeded $0.45 of operating expenses and preferred dividends to generate net earnings of $0.22 per share. Arc Home contributed an additional $0.04 to EAD, driven by continued strength in origination volumes and improved gain on sale margins. While the performance of our investment portfolio and Arc Home delivered a double-digit ROE on book value, we see meaningful upside as we optimize the balance sheet. Specifically, the deployment of liquidity from unlevered home equity loans and the resolution of nonaccrual commercial loans represent clear catalysts to deploy capital into higher-yielding residential investments, further enhancing shareholder returns. Lastly, we ended the quarter with approximately $100 million in total liquidity, consisting of $49 million in cash, $50 million of committed financing on unlevered home equity loans and $1 million of unencumbered Agency RMBS. This concludes our prepared remarks, and we'd now like to open the call for questions. Operator?

[Operator Instructions] We'll take our first question from Doug Harter with BTIG.

Can you talk about your thoughts on increase -- continuing to increase the dividend versus some ability to retain some capital just given your commentary that you expect further upside in earnings power.

Yes, Doug, it's TJ. Good to hear from you. I think we're running fairly conservative economic leverage. So in terms of having excess liquidity for margin call risk, I think we've done a good job of alleviating a cash drag. And then as we think about growing earnings power, continuing to rotate the equity out of the CRE loans, which I'm happy to talk about and then other capital rotation from potentially calling seasoned deals, et cetera. So I mean, I think we see a pretty linear path of how you rotate capital without needing to reserve a ton for other purposes.

Right. But I guess just as you think about that increased earnings power, how do you think about how much of that kind of gets passed through the dividend versus how much of that could be retained for -- to support future growth?

I mean I think we're looking to continue to pass that through to our shareholders in the form of the dividend and then satisfy the retest.

And TJ., if I could take you up on your offer to kind of talk a little bit more about the CRE loans and kind of how we should think about the timing of resolution there and freeing up that capital.

Yes. I think big picture, we're making good progress on the remaining assets. It's taking longer than any of us would like. I think this is evidenced -- the progress is evidenced. We've been able to extend our facility with our lender out 6 months. So we have clean financing through September of this year. From an asset perspective, I would really sort of break it up into 3 distinct situations. The retail asset sale process is moving along nicely. We would hope to have much more detailed information to share with you on next quarter's call. And then two of the four hotel assets have a signed LOI, and we're progressing accordingly, albeit behind probably where the retail asset process is. And then I think the last two hotel assets are going to be behind that and take a bit longer. And we're working through those locations and hope to have them sort of wrapped up by the end of this year, but it may drift into '27 for the last two.

We'll move next to Marissa Lobo with UBS.

Could you give us some more information on [indiscernible] exercise call, right, [indiscernible] of that remains to be executed? How do you feel about the current [indiscernible]?

Thanks for the question, Marissa. So as we stated in previous prepared remarks and Q&A historically, a lot of that has to do with outright levels of spreads and interest rates. Obviously, over the last quarter, we saw retracement to higher rates, higher volatility, higher spreads. Into the beginning of this quarter, obviously, we've gotten a good amount of that back, maybe not completely in the front end of the curve. All of these elements play into what the economics on calling transactions. We're not going to hold out for every last penny, but we'll look for stabilization of the market, which is happening pretty quickly. So hopefully, we have good news in the coming quarters on actually executing on them and then sort of the path forward from there, if that answers your question.

That does. And could you also expand on the opportunity in agency eligible loans? What is your outlook there for volume and [indiscernible] in the near term?

I mean on the agency eligible side, we've done a decent amount of this issuance in previous years, previous quarters. A lot of our focus has really been more on higher returning opportunities in the non-agency and home equity space. There's still compelling opportunities, although less compelling in our view. There have been market participants that have entered that space with lower cost of capital, which maybe makes it a little bit less interesting to ourselves. That being said, I do expect to see others continue to grow and participate in that marketplace.

We'll move on now to Crispin Love with Piper Sandler.

I have a follow-up on the earnings power and ROEs. You're generating, I think, roughly 10% core ROE today. I'm curious where you think that could trend, what ROE targets are attainable and over what time frame as Arc continues to be a larger contributor to EAB and as you rotate capital into higher return resi investments as the WMC investments mature.

Yes. So if you -- thanks for the question, and thanks for dialing in. So this is Nic. When you think about you're growing the ROE of the company, it's going to be derived from three primary sources, which we've said over previous quarters, really the returning of equity capital in the commercial book, growing ROEs at our home and then the calls. All of that gives us line of sight into sort of achieving the ROEs that are being achieved across the broader business as we have disclosed in the earnings presentation. And that's really the path forward, is really just taking those pockets and redeploying capital. Obviously, on the Arc Home side, that's less of a redeployment story, but we believe that there's strong momentum there, and we expect that to continue.

Okay. Great. And then just on Arc Home, can you discuss a little bit what you've seen so far in the second quarter, just high-level trends, volumes, mortgage rates peaked around quarter end, have improved since -- improved a bit since then. So getting into a little bit of a seasonally more conducive environment for mortgage, but still a little bit of a challenging backdrop. So just curious where you stand right now on Arc Home and trends you're seeing.

Yes. Normalizing for the seasonality, maybe slightly below budget, but it's still early. We're still seeing gains. So maybe that just speaks to the ambition of the budget -- of our ambition of our budget there. So there has been a lot of healing. The gain on sales have been healthy and the expectation is that the budgeted volumes will normalize and achieve what we originally penciled out. So early signs are good for Q2. And as you alluded to, obviously, seasonally, this is an important part of the year for them.

We'll move next to Bose George with KBW.

This is [Frank Labetti] on for Bose. I just want to start with a follow-up on the commercial discussion. Do you think we could expect additional marks on some of the sales? I know that they continue to be ongoing, but any color there would be great.

Yes. So I think as we continue to go through the sales process, get more information from the market, I think we're generally reflecting that in the current valuation. So barring surprises, I would say the answer is no.

Okay. Great. Then pivoting to the home equity, you scaled it nicely over the past few quarters. Trying to think about how large can that get as a percentage of the portfolio? And then you note 29% ROEs. Is that -- are those returns still available on new production today? And where is the best risk-adjusted returns in that market today?

Yes. Thanks, Frank. So this market has expanded pretty, with a good pace, call it, 25% a year really in earnest since, call it, '23. We expect that pace to continue or to accelerate. We expect it to be the largest non-agency sort of -- or securitized product nonagency sector in this -- at some point this year, if not next. So we still think there's a lot of runway for the opportunity. From a return standpoint, while there is increased competition, it's not nearly as competitive as other segments of the non-agency market. And that's despite its performance having been a standout versus the broader non-agency market. So we still continue to see a good amount of opportunity in this segment. And from a deployable capital standpoint, we don't have any concerns on being able to recycle capital into this segment for May.

And we'll take our next question from Trevor Cranston with Citizens.

There's been some reports about increasing delinquency levels in some of the recent vintage non-QM products. Can you guys comment specifically on your non-QM segment of the portfolio if you guys are seeing any sort of deterioration in performance? Or just an update there would be great.

Yes. So one, the sort of underperformance of non-QM is less relevant to mitt given our transitioning over to other segments over 2 years ago, most notably really the agency eligible segment and then the home equity segment. Our agency eligible book is performing better than prime jumbo, which is shocking to say out loud, but that's a fact. And then our home equity segment, the delinquencies are less than 1/4 of the delinquencies of the broader non-QM market, which is where most of the concern is. So mitt as a vehicle is inflated versus sort of the underperformance versus underwrite. We still are constructive broadly in the non-QM space. But I think it's worth noting that generally, our credit selection has been tighter than the broader universe, which is driving some of that outperformance. So we don't view our book as a comp versus other folks over the years, but there's been some degradation in performance for various reasons. We don't see mitt as being exposed to that.

[Operator Instructions] We'll move on to Jason Weaver with JonesTrading.

I was just curious about the 9.5% notes of '29. Those are obviously the most expensive part of the capital stack right now. It's 3 years out, but I believe they'll become callable relatively shortly. And with your EAD coverage, have you -- tell us how you're thinking about maybe doing a refinancing, tender partial paydown. Any thoughts there?

Yes. No. I mean we're always evaluating the entire capital structure. To your point, they are becoming callable. There's 2 separate notes that were issued not too far away from each other, and they'll be coming up later this year to extent rates in the market, move in the right direction, we'll certainly be looking to explore refinancing or delevering those.

Got it. And then on just overall purchase activity, your volume this quarter was well below the fourth quarter, I think, $87 million versus $284 million or so. Is that more of a strategic or a timing issue over time? Were you waiting for wider spreads to get involved? Or can you talk about that a bit?

It's a little more complicated than that. So while the portfolio decreased on a GAAP basis, it's really because the structures of the most recent transactions, resulted in the company not consolidating these deals. Had we consolidated those deals, we actually would have had modest growth. So I think there's a little bit of form over substance given those nuances.

At this time, there are no further questions in queue. I will now turn the meeting back to our host for any closing comments.

Thank you to everyone for joining us this morning and for your questions. We appreciate it and look forward to speaking with you again next quarter. Have a great day.

Thank you. This brings us to the end of today's meeting. We appreciate your time and participation. You may now disconnect.