In the presentation, we will conduct a Q&A session for analysts. Analysts are asked to raise their hand to register for a question. As a reminder, today's call is being recorded. I would now like to turn the meeting over to Blair Tamblyn. Please go ahead.
Thank you, Operator. Good afternoon, everybody. Thanks for joining us to discuss the first quarter financial results. I'm joined, as usual, by Scott Rowland, CIO; Tracy Johnston, CFO; and Geoff McTait, our Head of Canadian Originations and Global Syndications. As we discussed on the year-end call, we're seeing an overall improvement in business fundamentals in 2024, with Bank of Canada rate cuts spurring increased financing opportunities. It was a solid first quarter, highlighted by healthy income levels, allowing us to build on our long-term track record of stable monthly dividends. Of note, net investment income was CAD 28.6 million. We generated distributable income of CAD 0.19 per share at a payout ratio of 93%. EPS was CAD 0.18 a share, comfortably within the expected quarterly range. Transaction activity was solid in the first quarter, and the pipeline is building as we forecasted at year-end.
While the broader market volatility from tariff disputes has caused delays in a few instances, our portfolio is expected to be well protected from any near-term implications. Over 18 years as a leading private lender in the transactional lending space, we have successfully navigated macro issues of all types to generate the attractive risk-adjusted yield our shareholders have come to expect. This track record speaks to the resiliency of our strategy and our core asset classes, led, of course, by multi-residential. With this strong foundation, you can expect to see us actively communicating with TF Story in coming quarters, highlighting that our dividend today represents roughly a 10% yield, more than 7% premium over short-term Canadian bond yields. At CAD 8.28 per share, which is net of our ECL provisions, of course, our current book value is roughly 20% above the weighted average trading price in Q1.
I'll ask Scott to take over for the portfolio review now. Scott?
Thanks, Blair, and good afternoon. I'll comment on portfolio metrics and provide a brief update on material progress on staged loans. I'll ask Geoff to comment on the originations activity and lending environments. Looking at the portfolio's KPIs, most were stable relative to recent periods and consistent with historical averages. At quarter end, 79.7% of our investments were in cash-flowing properties. Multi-residential real estate assets, apartment buildings, continue to comprise the largest portion of the portfolio at roughly 60%. As Blair highlighted, this core asset class has shown to be durable in periods of economic uncertainty. First mortgages represented 88.3% of the portfolio. As expected, we have seen this percentage trend upward toward 90%. Our weighted average LTV for Q1 was 66.2%, up from 63.3% in Q4, consistent with our plan to increase LTVs on new originations back to historical levels.
The portfolio's weighted average interest rate was 8.7% in Q1 versus 8.9% in Q4 and 9.9% in Q1 last year. The decrease mainly reflects the Bank of Canada's policy rate cuts of 225 basis points between June 2024 and March 2025. The WER is also reverting toward a longer-term average. For example, since 2016, which captures a few rate environments, the average WER exit rate is 7.9%. With rates coming down, we are seeing a corresponding decrease in interest expense on the credit facility, supporting a healthy net interest margin. Portfolio WER is also protected by the high percentage of floating-rate loans with rate floors, close to 85% of the portfolio at quarter end. Roughly 88% of the loans with floors are currently at their rate floors.
In terms of the asset allocation by region, there were no major shifts to highlight, with approximately 92% of the capital invested in Ontario, BC, Quebec, and Alberta, and focused on urban markets. From an asset management perspective, we provided extensive disclosure on the staged loans at year-end. Throughout 2025, you can expect us to update on material changes as we continue to pursue resolution and monetization of these loans. The overriding comment here is our team remains deeply engaged in these files, and they are progressing as planned. We successfully closed on the sale of three senior living facilities previously recorded as assets held for sale, freeing up capital we're recycling into higher-yielding mortgages in our core asset types. We continue to expect that over the course of this fiscal year, this portion of the portfolio will decline toward historical averages.
On that note, I'll ask Geoff to comment on the transaction activity in the portfolio.
Thanks, Scott. It was a good start to the year for new investments as we build back the portfolio to historical levels. The portfolio is 10% or CAD 100 million higher than Q1 of last year. In Q1, we advanced nearly CAD 150 million in new mortgage investments and advances on existing mortgages, all focused on low LTV multifamily investments. As Blair highlighted, the sudden and unexpected volatility in financial markets from tariff issues caused some borrowers to shift timelines modestly. However, we expect these delays to be transitory. Total mortgage portfolio repayments in the quarter were CAD 136.8 million, resulting in a turnover ratio of 12.7%. We ended the period with the portfolio balance a bit under CAD 1.1 billion, which was a modest decrease from Q4.
Looking at these trends over the past several years, on this slide, you see a recovery in volume in 2024 as activity returned to normalized levels and the WER returning to historical levels as Scott mentioned. In addition to the improved market environment, we're beginning to see increased activity resulting from Timbercreek Capital's status as a CMHC-approved lender. Recently, Mike Sagert was appointed Executive Director to lead this program. Mike is an industry veteran, and we're excited to work with him to grow this business line, which will bring benefits to our bridge lending business as well, allowing our team to deepen borrower relationships by providing a broader range of financing solutions. In summary, we're well positioned to deploy capital into high-quality loans this year. I will now pass the call over to Tracy to review the financial highlights. Tracy?
Thanks, Geoff, and good afternoon, everyone. As the team has highlighted, the portfolio has returned to a more typical size based on strong originations, and we are seeing this translate to top-line income and DI. Q1 net investment income on financial assets measured at amortized costs was CAD 28.6 million, up from CAD 27.9 million in Q4 and CAD 24.6 million in Q1 of last year. We reported strong distributable income of CAD 15.4 million or CAD 0.19 per share, compared with CAD 15.8 million or CAD 0.19 per share in Q1 last year. The payout ratio on DI was 92.8% this quarter. We recorded a reserve on net mortgage investments and other loans of CAD 1.6 million, reflective of the changes in stage two and stage three loans. Net income increased to CAD 14.8 million this quarter, and net income before ECL was CAD 16.4 million versus CAD 15.4 million in Q1 2024.
Looking at quarterly EPS over the past three years, with and without ECLs, you will see it has been quite stable, as has DI per share. Over the medium term, quarterly DI per share has been between $0.17 and $0.21, averaging just over $0.19 per share over this time period. In short, the monthly dividend remains well covered. Let's quickly look at the balance sheet. The value of the net mortgage portfolio, excluding syndications, was just under CAD 1.1 billion at the end of the quarter, an increase of about CAD 100 million year-over-year. At quarter end, we had zero net real estate held for sale as we closed the sale of three senior living facilities, as Scott Rowland mentioned earlier. The balance on the credit facility was CAD 331 million at the end of Q1, down from CAD 396 million at the end of Q4 based on the increased portfolio.
The credit utilization rate at the end of the quarter was 83%. We have ample capacity to deploy new capital against the pipeline Geoff and team are building. I'll now turn the call back to Scott for closing comments.
Thanks, Tracy. We continue to have a positive outlook for 2025. Conditions in the commercial real estate market are stabilizing, which is good for overall transaction activity in our pipeline. The CMHC lender status, Geoff mentioned, should act as a tailwind for our bridge loan business. Distributable income is strong, and we see this continuing. Lastly, we are taking the right steps to resolve the remaining staged loans and free up this capital for new investments. While the tariff-driven uncertainty has been impactful to a broad range of businesses, in the short term, our focus on multifamily lending keeps us well insulated. As said, our team continues to monitor developments closely and are prepared to modify our investment parameters should conditions change materially. That completes our prepared remarks. With that, we will open the call to questions.
We will now take analyst questions. As a reminder, if you have a question, please click the raise hand button on the bottom right screen below. The first question comes from Graham Ryding. Graham, your line is open. Please go ahead.
Hi, can you hear me?
Yeah. Hey, Graham.
Afternoon, Graham.
I got through this time. Great. Can you maybe just elaborate on it sounds like you got some confidence on your stage two and three loans that they should improve. Can you just elaborate a little bit on whether that's specific visibility on some individual situations that you think should cure, or is it just more broad-based confidence in your ability to just navigate workout situations?
Yeah. I mean, as we, I guess we discussed, it's Blair, Graham. Sorry. We have clear visibility to, call it, CAD 80 million of resolutions this quarter. And that's what we're happy to be on the record, if you will, about. On a broader level, for the remaining, Scott and Geoff can speak to this as well, of course, but for the remaining, call it, CAD 220 million, we'll continue to do what we've been doing, and that's work towards resolutions that are helpful to our shareholders, which we remain confident about.
Yeah. This is Scott. I concur with exactly what Blair just said. CAD 80 million more in the near term, which is some significant movement for us. We've worked on those files for around over a year. A few smaller files should make material headway in the coming quarters. We have a larger file in the Vancouver area that also, I would think, we should have material progress in by the end of the year.
Okay. Great. Just wondering if you see pressure in the condo market right now. Is that feeding through at all into the multifamily space, either in valuations, vacancy, demand from investors to deploy capital? Any commentary there?
Yeah. I'll maybe take a stab at it and then turn to Geoff as well. The condo market is interesting, right? It's sort of different in different cities. The specific condo market, Toronto comes to mind first and foremost, which is somewhat frozen, right? There is a lot of supply coming, and there's some weakness in housing prices. That's very much sort of on the non-commercial real estate side, right? That is on owner-occupied single units, of which Timbercreek Financial is not exposed to that market. When it comes to our sort of more bread-and-butter traditional multifamily, which for us is normally assets that were built, sometimes they're older assets, right? Like not brand new products. Less so, Graham. That market is more stable. The rents tend to be lower and remain well occupied. Geoff, anything to that?
Yeah. I mean, I think those are all fair comments. I mean, obviously, what we are seeing incrementally on the development land side of the world is that historically, what were tagged to be condo development sites are now being reconsidered as multi-condo sites. Again, newer product that does not compete generally with the product that we are primarily focused on, but fundamentally does help support multi-residential values versus condo for sale values.
Yeah. I think the last comment I would make on this is it's interesting. Again, I'll come back to Toronto just because it's the largest market in the sort of classes that you have right now. There's the uncertainty in the market, and you have a large number of supply that sort of hit the market in these individual condo units. Because of the sort of prices to build and some of these uncertainties, there's really no new product projects going into the ground or being built, which is interesting. If you start looking through to the numbers, forecast for two, three years from now, Toronto, you're going to see a very supply-constrained market again. It's an interesting thing for it's sort of an ebb and a flow.
The problems that you have right now, which are some vacancy and maybe you're seeing some higher-end rents coming off, it's more than likely going to be in a very supply-imbalanced market in two, three years' time. As we go out and do lending again, most of it doesn't affect us because it's sort of a little bit of a different business than what we're in day-to-day. We feel just pretty good about, in general, again, people needing to rent in these markets.
Okay. Perfect. And then beyond multi, any or perhaps even with specific verticals within multi, any sort of opportunities you're seeing developing in this market that perhaps weren't around three to six months ago?
Listen, I think for us, we have a pretty balanced approach, right? We like to be sort of in that 60% plus multi-exposure. For the commercial asset classes, we sort of take a bit of a diversified view on that, where we're going to do not as much office. We try to do some industrial. We do some retail. We do think retail is becoming a more favored asset class, especially stuff that's sort of grocery-anchored. There hasn't been any new supply in a very long time, so you've seen some positivity there. We're probably keeping a bit of a closer eye to industrial right now, just depending on what happens with some of these sort of tariff-related impacts, export-related impacts. We are having a lot of sort of risk conversations about that. We'll see if there's some opportunities that come out of there.
I think lastly is just coming back to this sort of the condo or some of these sort of development markets, land markets that have been impacted today. We do not have a lot of exposure, but we are certainly talking about three to six months from now or sort of over the next 24 months. There might be some compelling opportunities for us to provide some capital to some strong sponsors who might need some additional capital than they normally would need in this type of a market. We will look to be opportunistic if we think it is a good deal for the TF shareholder.
Okay. Excellent. That's it for me. Thank you.
The next caller is Stephen Boland. Stephen, your line is now open. Please go ahead.
Hi, everyone. Can you hear me okay?
Yeah. I see you.
Okay. Just following on Graham's question, just you've got 39 loans maturing in 2025. Should we then just expect multi-rez? I know it's the vast majority of your loans anyhow, but I mean, is it going to be an exception to do other types of loans? I guess the second question is just, are you seeing any particular softness or areas that you don't want to go to in terms of geography?
Yeah. That's a good question. I'll start with the first part. Yeah, we certainly expect normal repayment activity. As we, again, somewhere in the neighborhood of half of our portfolio will roll in any given year. We expect that to happen. When it comes to targeting asset classes, the very rough rule of thumb for us, call it two-thirds multifamily and a third in other commercial, right? We still believe that's a healthy mix for us. We'll continue to support that mix. When it comes to geography, particular weakness, I mean, listen, if we go back a few years ago, we were more concerned about some of the Calgary and Edmonton. I would sit there and say that was because of the supply issues more affecting office than other asset classes.
I kind of like, we kind of like looking at the country in thirds still right now, like a third out west, a third in Ontario, a third in Quebec in the east. Really, we're just keeping, I wouldn't say the particular geography we're trying to avoid at all or necessarily lean into. I think we're just very much looking at the supply and demand and the micro conditions around our investments and making sure we feel we're in a good position. We're not going to lean into areas where we feel there's a lot of supply coming into a market. We're just going to continue to sort of do our sort of our standard operating procedure. I'm looking at Geoff.
Yeah. No, I mean, I think that's all fair. I mean, I think it really comes down to liquidity, right? As we look at different opportunities, be it asset class or geographic location, it's what is the liquidity and demand for that specific asset class and that specific location. Again, our focus will always be sort of primary market focused and dip into the secondary in the multi-rez space where and when we can rationalize the opportunity and the liquidity therein. Again, very fundamental part of our analysis of every deal, we do not have big Xs across anything per se. It's unique circumstances underline. Fundamentally, even in some of the primary markets, we may pull back just based on the outcome of that analysis.
I guess as I'm listening to Geoff there, honestly, after we had a difficult couple of years, right, in the market, coming out of COVID and then rising rates was tough on borrowers. We're actually, if I had to make a macro comment, I actually think we're quite optimistic that loans that we're doing in sort of that 2024, this year, 2025, we think these are good. We call them vintages, right? Good years to lend where values are down some, interest rates are coming down. We think our borrowers are in a stronger position. We see a lot of green lights on the board for new investing. We think these are going to be strong years for us to put money to work.
Sorry, quick follow-up just for Robert. Just Timbercreek Financial's balance sheet, you're comfortable you can achieve your kind of goals this year with the existing balance sheet?
Yeah. Hey, Steven. It's Tracy. Yeah. Yeah. I think we obviously monitor it closely, but still comfortable with where we're trending on things.
Okay. Thanks very much.
The next question comes from Jamie. Jamie, please go ahead.
Hey. Good afternoon.
Hey, Jame.
Hey. First question, just on the, I guess, the market outlook around some of your clients or potential clients delaying some of their decisions. Are you starting to see any of that come back online, or are these more shelved longer term? Maybe just a little bit of color on some of those conversations you're having with potential clients.
Yeah. Listen, I mean, I think the Q4, Q1 pipelines were very robust. For sure, within that Q1 reality, we did see timelines to close these transactions push. I would say the vast majority of them, it is literally just a instead of a Q1 close, they're pushing into Q2. Fundamentally, that captive volume for us and our pipelines on deals that we've worked on will fund. I think with the Trump tariff reality and the uncertainty that came with it, I think the Q1 pipeline softened a little bit. Again, I think that's an interim wait-and-see period as things flush out on that basis. Fundamentally, again, I don't think it's something that is being shelved on a longer-term basis just based on the trends for the Q2 pipeline today. It continues to be very active.
It is just a lot of noise around that reality and what that will ultimately mean. Fundamentally, in particular, in the multi-residential space, it continues to be an actively traded asset class.
Okay. Is it primarily or only a shift from the potential borrowers, or has Timbercreek made any adjustments in how they view the world as a result of some of this uncertainty?
I mean, it certainly is the borrowers to a degree. Again, for us, it is a fundamental question underlying the analysis that we're undertaking. Again, I think it's a different analysis depending on the asset class specifics. As you get into industrial, as an example, where and when you are digging in much further to understand the underlying operations of that tenant, and is it a North America-based business? Is it a Canadian, specifically domestic business? How are those things going to impact that tenant's ability to pay? It is something that we are absolutely considering and focusing on. I think we don't have, candidly, all the answers at this point as we're trying to figure our way through it. It's 100% a focus of what we're thinking through and trying to understand, yeah, how is it impacting costs? How is it impacting tenants?
How is it impacting our borrowers? What does that mean from a loan structuring standpoint in terms of how much money we're prepared to lend?
Yeah. Last one.
Yeah. Just a bit. I mean, as you know, we're underwriting these loans as if we're buying the assets. I mean, that's the way that we lend. Of course, we're not buying them. We're looking at terms of leases or lease rates on turnover over the period of time, generally speaking, that we think we need to be invested. We don't really have to have a 10-year view, which we would if we were owning them. That's one of the benefits, I think, of this business of being a transitional lender. You can generate equity-like returns in a position where you're, generally speaking, you have whatever, 30% equity from the borrower in front of you. We're looking at baseline values that are, call it 15 or pick the asset class, right?
On average, call it, I don't know, 15%-18% lower than they were two years ago. That is kind of what Scott was talking about a minute ago, why we feel pretty good and are not hammering on the brakes because we do not need to. There is still lots of flow. There are lots of businesses that are going to thrive as rates return to sort of a more normal or they have returned to a more normalized environment.
Are you seeing your competitive position improve in this environment, or is everybody sort of making the same decisions?
Yeah. Listen, I think, I mean, it's always interesting where and when you go through a transitional period or a period of uncertainty in terms of how the market adjusts. I think, again, we're not turning the Titanic here. We can be pretty nimble, and we can adjust fairly quickly. I think what we're seeing is probably tail end of Q1 where the rest of the market hasn't necessarily adjusted as quickly. Again, we're winning our share of business. We've lost a subset of loans that we bid on based on what we believe to be rational bids from other lenders who aren't quite necessarily as nimble as we are or necessarily as thoughtful in their analysis as we are. Again, fundamentally, those are one-offs, not the norm.
We continue to compete favorably within our market comp set and continue to win our fair share of deals. I think it's, I don't know if we're necessarily getting a significantly outsized market share, but we're certainly maintaining a pretty standard and consistent historical execution rate. I mean, obviously, you compete on a cost-to-capital basis as well, right? That, I think, is relevant. I mean, we've talked pretty openly about how we've been working through our legacy loans. As Scott said, and we've all said, we're feeling pretty good about entering a phase of certainly stability and growth at the appropriate time. Without naming any names, it's not the case for everybody. Whether they're public or private lenders, there are different portfolios around with different constructions. We feel good about our ability to compete there, sort of where we're sitting today.
Okay. Last one, just the land inventory. Just curious as to an update on how you're viewing that and the realizable value there. What gets you comfortable with that property?
Yeah. So we are actually moving towards this is the year we're hoping to disposition most of it. There's a couple of deals that are close that are too close for me to sort of comment on at the moment. We're hoping to move a portion of it soon and then maybe a significant portion later this year, maybe sooner than later. Probably an update in the next call. I'm feeling pretty good about our basis and our ability to disposition that land inventory, hopefully in 2025.
Okay. Thank you.
Thanks.
There are no other questions at this time, so I'll turn the meeting back to Blair for closing remarks.
All right. Thank you, Operator. Thanks, everyone, for joining us today. We certainly look forward to answering any subsequent questions that you may have. We will look forward also to talking in 90 days. Have a good afternoon.