Purvi Kamdar - Director of Investor Relations Andrew Farkas - Chairman Robert Lieber - Chief Executive Officer David Bryant - Chief Financial Officer Paul Hughson - Head of Debt and Equity Principle Investment David Bloom - Senior Vice President-Real Estate Investments Matthew Stern - President.

Analysts:.

Good day ladies and gentlemen. And welcome to the Resource Capital Corp's Q1, 2017 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only-mode. Later, we will conduct the Question-and-Answer Session and instructions will follow at that time. [Operator Instructions]. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded.

I would now like to introduce your host for today's conference, Mr. Purvi Kamdar, Director of Investor Relations. Ma'am you may begin..

Thank you. Thank you for joining the Resource Capital Corp earnings conference call for the first quarter ended March 31, 2017. I’m Purvi Kamdar, Director of Investor Relations. When used in this conference call the words believes, anticipates, expects, and similar expressions are intended to identify forward-looking statements.

Although, the Company believes that these forward-looking statements are based on reasonable assumptions, such statements are subject to certain risks and uncertainties, which could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in the forward-looking statements.

These risks and uncertainties are discussed in the Company’s reports filed with the SEC including its reports on Forms 8-K, 10-Q and 10-K, and in particular, Item 1A on the Form 10-K report under the title Risk Factors. Listeners are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date hereof.

The Company undertakes no obligation to update any of these forward-looking statements. Furthermore, certain non-GAAP financial measures will be discussed on this conference call. Our presentations of this information is not intended to be considered in isolation or as a substitute for the financial information presented in accordance with GAAP.

Reconciliations of these non-GAAP financial measures to the most comparable measures prepared in accordance with the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles can be accessed through our filings with the SEC at www.sec.gov. Let me now turn it over to the Chairman of RSO, Andrew Farkas for opening remarks..

Thank you Purvi. Good morning everybody, we are here in New York having this call with you. And with me today I have Bob Lieber who is RSO's CEO, Dave Bryant, who is the Chief Financial Officer, Paul Hughson, who is head of Debt and Equity Principle Investment and Dave Bloom, Head of Real-estate.

Also with us today is Matt Stern who you recently read this morning has been appointed as president of RSO and I want to take the opportunity to welcome Matt.

For those of you who are not intimately familiar with the culture of Iron Capital and C-III Companies, I considered our management to be what we called mission deployable based on the status of any given projects or company in which we are working. RSO’s defensive and restructuring planning stage for RSO is pretty much over.

So while we are continuing to implement liquidations of various different assets and non-core businesses it's time now to really turn our focus to the OpEx side, net income growth, capital based growth and we believe that Matt Stern is very, very well qualified to lead the company to this end.

Matt was one of the leaders of the M&A team when we acquired Resource America and he knows this company like the back of his hand. He will be working hand-in-hand with myself and Bob Lieber who will continue as a Chairman and CEO respectively.

So Matt’s position here should be considered something that is augmenting our skill set and not replacing the skill set, but having somebody who is going to wake up every morning and thinking about net income growth and capital growth is something that is now primary to the business plan in our next stage.

During the first quarter RSO continue to execute on the strategic plan that we laid out in November 2016. Joining on the expertise and experience in C-III's established full service platform, we feel that RSO is well positioned to dispose of the non-core businesses and investments and ultimately increase value for shareholders.

Shareholders should note that the C-III management and RSO officers including myself own over 1.2 million shares in the company. So our ores are in the water pulling in the same direction as yours.

Over my past 30 years in real-estate space, I have taken over the management responsibilities of numerous real-estate finance companies during the process of building each one of them, these including Signia Financial Group, Island Capital and C-III Capital Partners.

Previous experience and a dedication of our focused group of managers many of whom have 25 plus years tenure with me. We are confident we will be able to see this plan through and continue to unlock value for investors.

With that, I'll turn it over to our CEO Bob Lieber who will provide a more detailed update on the progress and the additional transparency to moving on forward on this front..

Thank you Andrew and good morning everybody. I also want to welcome Matt to RSO team, I think he is going to be a great addition to what we are doing here. It has only been a couple of months, two months actually since our last call and we want to provide a brief update on our progress with the strategic plan.

And since March 10 the time of our last call, we have monetize an additional 23 million of loans in securities, bringing the 2017 first quarter monetization to 56 million and total monetization to over 100 million of the 480 million of investment that we targeted to exit as a part of our strategic plan communicated last year.

You may have noticed in the press release that we added an additional table titled Schedule 3, Strategic Plan Update. We have created this table in an effort to improve the transparency and allow the market to track the progress of our strategic plan.

As we move forward, this table will provide a status update on where we are in divesting non-core assets and the results of those efforts. The table breaks out the various categories of assets that comprise the total 480 million and I would like to take a moment to talk you through the layout of the table.

Again it's on Schedule 3, which is towards the back of the earnings press release and the column will show you the components by category and the 480 million which were the asset that we laid out to be liquidated overtime.

As we move from left or right across the page the second column shows the impairments of and/or other unrealized adjustments that have not yet been monetized by the company totaling about 41 million. The middle column provides realized losses and recognized interest income on assets that have been monetized or exceeding totaling about 8 million.

The column title Monetized Through March 31, 2017 shows proceeds received from the monetization and exiting of these assets and the final column on the right provides the current book value of the remaining identified planned assets.

There may be question about that and Dave will go into more color behind those number if you have questions about that. But our goal here is to improve the transparency about the disposition activities and I do want to take the chance though to remind everybody that the timing and proceeds from these activities is unpredictable.

Liquid securities can be sold when we see favorable pricing in the markets and we have or when we see required additional sources of liquidity. However, the process for disposing of the legacy CRE loans and operating businesses maybe lengthier and is not as much that we can share about the progress until these transactions are actually complete.

I’ll note, in the first quarter of 2017, we did monetize one of our held-for-sale CRE loans and reported a $7 million GAAP gain, the $32 million was written down to $14 million in the fourth quarter of 2016 based on appraised value, and we are fortunate to receive proceeds of $21 million on this loan during the first quarter.

We are extremely pleased with our real-estate team was able to negotiate a discounted payoff in excess to the appraised value this successful result is indicative of the experience of our real-estate mortgage team as well as C-III special servicing business, which has resolved greater than $50 billion commercial real-estate loans over the past several years.

In terms of deploying proceeds from monetization, the RSO commercial real-estate debt team is in the market and beginning to gain traction again. Borrowers have not viewed RSO as a viable source of financing, while Resource America was engaged in the process to explore strategic alternatives.

In the first quarter, RSO originated six new loans with an aggregate committed balance of approximately $130 million. With five new loans totaling approximately $100 million in process today, we note that our origination pipeline continues to grow.

The market for RSO's traditional bridge loans remain strong as well as other CRE debt investment is strong and our team is fully engaged and sourcing new opportunities. The RSO's existing origination channels are fully activated and the broad C-III network has come together to provide new opportunities for the RSO platform.

The origination trajectory is positive with deal flow increasing month-over-month and we will continue to report originations on a trailing basis when we can speak with specificity about the quarterly and year-to-date production.

A comment on the market, despite an increasingly competitive market out there today, we believe that opportunities do exist to deploy proceeds into attractive yielding and investment opportunities and our pipeline will grow overtime.

That said, we will continue to exercise the credit discipline that is the foundation of C-III's platform and the management team's track record. Lastly, we are stabilizing book value, which was an explicit stated objective of ours last year.

We advice that we intended to declare $0.05 per share per quarter dividend for each quarter during 2017 and to put this book value in some context this was the first period since September 2014 that RSO's quarter-over-quarter book value remained flat. We are keenly focused on preserving the maximizing shareholder value and see this as a good trend.

Now, I'll ask Dave Bryant our CFO to discuss the financial results. David..

Thank you Bob. Our GAAP net income eligible to common shares for the three months ended March 31, 2017 was $2.7 million or $0.09 per share. At March 31, our GAAP book value per share was $14.60 relatively flat as compared to $14.17 at December 31, 2016. The quarter-over-quarter decrease in book value can be attributed to the following.

Net income of $0.9 per share offset by a common dividend of $0.05 per share and $0.05 per share associated with restricted stock divested during the period. We reiterate that this dividend guidance of $0.20 per common share for 2017 is expected to help minimize any book value degradation as we continue to execute on the strategic plan.

As Bob mentioned, we have monetized $100.3 million of assets since announcing the strategic plan including $55.6 million during the three months ended March 31.

Proceeds during those three months ended include 21.3 million from our legacy CRE loan portfolio, 15.8 million from our commercial finance segment, 13.6 million from a partial liquidation of [Pelium] (Ph) Capital Partners, which is unconsolidated subsidiary and 4.9 million from our middle market lending segment.

The supplemental schedule we have included in the earnings release provides additional details on this activity and that current carrying value of the remaining assets, we anticipate disposing of over next several quarters.

Approximately 93 million of the remaining 331 million carrying value of identified assets or liquid assets and securities and the balance is comprised of legacy CRE loans and non-core businesses that we will of course look to maximize value on.

On our last call, we introduced core earnings, and we have enumerated the principles of the calculation in this earnings release. I'll take a minute to recap this metric. We adjust net income by removing results from all non-core assets, which includes those classified as discontinued operations and assets held-for-sale.

Moreover, the calculation also includes adjustments for industry standard items such as non-cash equity compensation expense and unrealized provision and impairments.

As a reminder, we have also included a segment view of the core earnings calculation that allows investors and analyst to gauge the progress of our strategic plan as we transition to a CRE debt investment platform. We had a core earnings net loss of $0.11 per share down from the loss of $0.12 to the fourth quarter of 2016.

We expect to see this trend improve as we monetize additional assets and reinvest those proceeds into CRE debt oriented investments. Turning to our commercial real-estate portfolio, our three most recent securitizations that closed in 2014 to 2015 are subject only to over collateralization tests, which we have comfortably passed.

The existing vehicle financing our commercial real-estate loans continue to perform well and have produced reliable cash flow. We have total capacity of 615 million on our commercial real-estate term facilities and have approximately 213 million available at March 31.

We are match funded with non-recourse floating rate term financing on a substantial portion of our lending platform and look forward to issuing a new CRE securitization in the near future as and if market conditions permit. We also expect to utilize our warehouse lines to allow us to refinance assets from 2014 vintage CLO that has deliver.

Further, our 1.3 billion commercial real-estate portfolio is substantially all floating rate self originated home loans. During the three months ended march 31, 2017 we closed six new commercial real-estate loans with a total commitment of 128.9 million and an average loan balance of 21.5 million.

Our GAAP leverage stands at 1.8 times down from 1.9 at December 31. The decline was a result of net pay downs of 59.7 million on our liabilities offset by an increase in our book value of $2.1 million. We remain focused on the execution of the strategic plan. We believe that we had ample liquidity to fund the business on a going forward basis.

As Bob just mentioned, we expect to deploy this liquidity judiciously in risk adjusted, higher yielding commercial real estate debt and debt securities. With that, my formal remarks are completed and I'll hand the call back to Bob Lieber..

Thanks Dave. And thanks to all of you for joining our call today.

We appreciate your interest and support and we want to reiterate that 2017 is a transition year and maybe bumpy, but as we continue our efforts to refocus the investment strategy of RSO, restructure the balance sheet and increase our commercial real-estate debt originations and execute on our strategic plan we are optimistic about the future.

With that ,I will open up the call to any questions..

Operator:.

Okay well again, thank you all if you do have questions that come to you after you have gone through any of the materials we have provided don't hesitate to call, we are happy to discuss with you our progress and our goals for RSO and we look forward to speaking with you again soon..

Thanks everybody very much. As Bob said, we are constantly available. Thank you..

Ladies and gentlemen thank you for your participation in today's conference. This does conclude the program. You may all disconnect. Everyone have a great day..