Good afternoon, and welcome to Ares Commercial Real Estate Corporation's Conference Call to discuss the company's Q3 2021 financial results. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded on November 3, 2021. I will now turn the call over to Veronica Mayer from Investor Relations.
Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us on today's conference call. I am joined today by our CEO, Bryan Donohoe, Tae-Sik Yoon, our CFO, and Carl Drake, our Head of Public Company Investor Relations. In addition to our press release and the 10-Q that we filed with the SEC, we have posted an earnings presentation under the Investor Resources section of our website at www.arescre.com. Before we begin, I want to remind everyone that comments made during the course of this conference call and webcast and the accompanying documents contain forward-looking statements and are subject to risks and uncertainties.
Many of these forward-looking statements can be identified by the use of words such as anticipates, believes, expects, intends, will, should, may, and similar expressions. These forward-looking statements are based on management's current expectations of market conditions and management's judgment.
These statements are not guarantees of future performance, condition, or results and involve a number of risks and uncertainties. The company's actual results could differ materially from those expressed in the forward-looking statements as a result of a number of factors, including those listed in its SEC filings. Ares Commercial Real Estate Corporation assumes no obligation to update any such forward-looking statements. During this conference call, we will refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures.
We use these as measures of operating performance, and these measures should not be considered in isolation from or as a substitute for measures prepared in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles. These measures may not be comparable to like-titled measures used by other companies. Now, I would like to turn the call over to our CEO, Bryan Donohoe.
Thanks, and good afternoon, everyone. This morning, we reported another quarter of strong and stable results with Distributable Earnings of $0.37 per share, continuing to fully cover our regular and supplemental dividends. We originated $485 million in new commitments during the quarter, bringing our total year-to-date originations to $1 billion. In the first nine months of the year, we have already surpassed our previous yearly record of $955 million. At quarter end, the portfolio was $2.4 billion, up 33% year-over-year, with portfolio growth in all four quarters. While we are seeing a surge in commercial real estate activity and improving fundamentals, our originations momentum also reflects the growing presence of the broader Ares real estate platform.
The Ares Real Estate Group now stands at $36.5 billion in global assets under management with approximately 200 investment professionals in 17 offices, including Ares acquisition of the Black Creek Group. We are a constant presence in the market, continuously buying, selling, borrowing, and lending against high-quality real estate throughout the top MSAs in the U.S. and Europe. There are numerous benefits to this. First and foremost is the depth of the relationships that we maintain in our target markets, which help us drive value in our investment universe. When you combine our relationships and the opportunities generated with the data, information, and experience within the Ares platform, the result is a broad funnel and a very selective investment process. For example, we are pursuing more investments in the industrial logistics sectors, which align with the activity and conviction of the broader Ares platform.
As of quarter end, the Ares real estate platform owns over 200 industrial investments and approximately 145 million sq ft of industrial space. ACRE has the opportunity to benefit from this in-house product expertise, which allows us to lend earlier in the life cycle of an industrial asset. As our debt platform also continues to scale, currently standing at $9 billion of AUM across all our vehicles, we have become an even more attractive partner to the highest quality institutional sponsors. This quarter, we had an almost even split between repeat sponsor business and new sponsors. Our incumbent borrowers appreciate the reliability and efficiency of our execution, and these relationships enable us to make new commitments with attractive risk-return profiles. We are also pleased to have provided financing to new relationships this quarter.
Our new relationships are with well-established sponsors like Shorenstein and Northwood that have come to appreciate that we can provide a broad array of capital solutions. We continue to efficiently deploy the capital that is available to us, including fully deploying the capital from our June equity offering at a consistent weighted average ROE in the low double digits. In the Q3 , we originated three loans for $282 million secured by Class A LEED Gold certified office properties with desirable amenities reflecting the relative value that we are currently seeing in certain assets. These loans were in our target markets, which include regions with strong demographic growth engines like e-commerce and technology or are linked to national universities. All of these loans were for new acquisitions at post-COVID valuations to well-established institutional sponsors with strong track records.
Our robust activity is continuing into the Q4 with a deep pipeline of diversified loans. As a result, we expect to remain fully deployed through year-end, which should support our earnings. Our originations pipeline reflects the relative value that we are finding across the spectrum, from larger loans with top sponsors to efficiently partnering with nimble sponsors on portfolios of loans in thematic investments where the macro tailwinds are significant. Good examples of these loans would be self-storage and industrial-related assets. While continuing to target opportunities in the Sun Belt and states benefiting from tax migration, we are seeing opportunities in gateway cities where values in certain sectors have reset lower. These cities are now attracting strong capital positions out of the equity side, and given our limited exposure to these areas pre-COVID, we can provide moderate leverage at these reset values at attractive targeted returns.
Our loan book continues to be well-positioned, with approximately 98% invested in senior floating rate loans and approximately two-thirds of our loans collateralized by multifamily, office, industrial, and self-storage properties. We continue to be underweight hotels and retail exposures, and the credit quality of our portfolio remains stable. Before I turn the call over to Tae-Sik to discuss our financials in further detail, I want to note that we declared our regular $0.33 per share quarterly dividend and our $0.02 per share supplemental dividend in the Q4 . We expect to more than fully cover both our regular and supplemental dividends from our Distributable Earnings for the full year 2021. With that, I'll now turn it over to Tae-Sik.
Great. Thank you, Bryan, and good afternoon, everyone. Earlier today, we reported GAAP net income of $10 million or $0.21 per common share and Distributable Earnings of $17.5 million or $0.37 per common share. This brings our total Distributable Earnings for the first nine months of the year to $1.14 per common share, well in excess of the $1.05 per common share that we have paid in dividends for the comparable period, including $0.06 per common share in supplemental dividends. Our earnings this quarter benefited from strong momentum in originations accompanied by subdued repayment activity, which resulted in a record portfolio of $2.4 billion in loans held for investments at quarter end. In addition, we continued to benefit from LIBOR floors, which had a weighted average rate of 1.17% at quarter end.
Our leverage remains modest, with a debt-to-equity ratio of 2.5 as of the end of the Q3 , excluding CECL reserve. Our CECL reserve was at $24.5 million at the end of the Q3 , a net increase of $6.4 million from the previous quarter. This $6.4 million net increase in CECL was primarily due to recognizing initial reserves against the $485 million in new loan commitments for the quarter, as well as extending the expected maturities of a few loans. As a reminder, changes in CECL reserve does impact our GAAP net income, with the net $6.4 million change this quarter representing approximately $0.13 per diluted common share. Changes in CECL reserve, however, are added back from GAAP net income as part of calculating our distributable earnings.
We had no material changes to our overall portfolio-wide risk ratings, with our weighted average portfolio risk rating remaining at 2.8, with 92% of the loan portfolio rated a three or better, all on a 5-point scale. Similar to past quarters, approximately 97% of our loans made their contractual debt service payments for the Q3 . We did, however, add a second loan this quarter to non-accrual status. It is a small $14 million senior loan backed by a residential property located in Los Angeles. Despite its non-accrual status, however, we believe that the loan is protected through sufficient collateral values and have not taken an impairment on this loan. Together with the one other senior loan backed by a hotel property outside Chicago, the total balance of the two non-accrual loans represents less than 2% of our overall total portfolio.
Finally, before I turn the call back over to Bryan, let me touch upon a question that we have been recently asked from several shareholders about the impact of potential higher interest rates on our earnings. As we have discussed previously, we believe materially higher short-term rates will positively impact our distributable earnings as the vast majority of our loans pay us interest based on LIBOR.
While the majority of our loans have LIBOR floors that are currently in the money, our most recently originated loans, particularly those in 2021, do not have significant LIBOR floors and will benefit from material increases in short-term rates. At the same time, early this year, we hedged a significant portion of our floating rate liabilities so that increases in LIBOR won't have a basis point by basis point increase in our funding costs. With that, let me turn the call back over to Bryan for some closing remarks.
Great. Thanks so much, Tasek. In summary, ACRE delivered another strong quarter of stable distributable earnings. The portfolio is at a record $2.4 billion. Our origination activity is at record levels, and we continue to find opportunities to achieve consistent all-in yields with what we believe are higher quality assets than available to us pre-COVID. We have the opportunity to continue to optimize our balance sheet efficiency, and we are well positioned to benefit from a rising interest rate environment. With that, I'll ask the operator to please open the line for questions.
The first question will be from Douglas Harter of Credit Suisse. Please go ahead.
Thanks. I just wanna get your thoughts around leverage going forward. You know, 2.5 times seems, you know, relatively conservative versus some of your peers, but you kinda commented that you were, you know, kind of relatively fully deployed in terms of capital. Just kinda wanna get your thoughts on leverage.
Sure, Doug. This is Tae-Sik Yoon. No, thank you very much for your question. No, you're absolutely right. You know, our long-term target leverage rate for our company is 3.0. Obviously, prior to the pandemic, those were the type of levels that we were able to maintain. During the pandemic, we obviously emphasized liquidity, and so took our leverage down as low as the lowest 2s, and we have been building up from there. You know, fortunately, we have been able to, you know, more than maintain our earnings, more than able to cover our dividend with lower levels of leverage. It is our intent, it is our goal to take it up to approximately 3.0 on a longer term basis.
Some periods it'll be lower than that, some periods it'll be slightly higher than that, but we do think it'll be hovering right around 3.0, which really means, you know, versus September 30, 2021, you know, that we have about half a turn of leverage, which is around $350 million of additional capacity that we wanna put, you know, onto the balance sheet, largely in the form of debt capital, you know, to get us to that 3.0-3.0 leverage ratio.
Yeah, I guess just to be clear on that, Tae-Sik, I mean, I guess, are you comfortable in today's environment kind of getting up to the 3.0 level versus kind of the conservatism, you know, you've shown in the post-COVID world?
Yeah, I'll let Bryan speak on as well in terms of the, you know, the credit quality. Certainly, you know, one of the things that we've always have emphasized is that, you know, not all debt is treated equal. For example, when we lever our loans using CLO debt, collateralized loan obligation debt, you know, we feel very comfortable actually taking it above 3.0. In fact, you know, the two CLOs that we have today, you know, have closer to 4-to-1 debt-to-equity leverage ratios. That is because the type of assets that are included in those CLOs, as well as the type of debt being non-mark-to-market, being match funded, you know, really gives us more comfort to take on more leverage than the average 3.0.
On the other hand, you know, when we're leveraging a loan-by-loan using some of our warehouse lines, other forms of financing, oftentimes we will be below 3.0. So I think really to answer your question, it is more of a loan-by-loan, financing-by-financing decision in terms of risk and reward. But yes, I would say, Bryan will comment further, but I would say we are comfortable given the type of quality assets that we have today and the overall balance sheet today, the fact that we have almost 60% of our liabilities in the form of non-recourse match-funded debt, that we are comfortable at that 3.0 level.
I would just add, Doug, I think this is more of a timing issue, more a when than an if. I think it's there's ample liquidity in the space today, and being a part of the Ares platform and reduced borrowing costs that come alongside that, we think this will be something that will have further results over the next couple of weeks and months.
Great. Thank you.
Thank you, Doug.
The next question is from Stephen Laws with Raymond James.
Hi. Tae-Sik, I guess, first, can you comment on the REO asset, you know, revenue was up. Looks like, you know, margins are, you know, profitable and have increased, you know, over the last few quarters. Can you talk about the outlook there as well as the seasonality we should think about in that asset?
Sure. No, absolutely, Stephen. Thank you very much for your question. Yes. No, I think our hotel, we're very pleased with its performance. Clearly, it was impacted, just like I think almost every other hotel, during COVID. I do think a couple things have benefited us. One is, you know, some of the competition, you know, in the immediate area have either shut down permanently or on a temporary basis and have left, you know, fewer competitors, fewer choices. We've also been very much benefiting from a focus that we've had to put in, you know, some essential workers, and they have been a very strong user, and we're very grateful for that.
We have, you know, very much focused on group business, and, you know, that has created a lot of tailwind for us. The third, I think is that, you know, we've, you know, we've always mentioned that, you know, we have very strong asset management capabilities. This is not something we outsource to a third-party servicing company. This is not something that we defer to someone else. This is something that we have in-house, you know, as part of our asset management business, real estate asset management business here at Ares. We actively manage this hotel throughout, you know, throughout COVID to make sure we're optimizing both revenues and expenses.
On the expense side in particular, you know, we have really been running this hotel, you know, quite efficiently, you know, in terms of the type of amenities, the type of services. We absolutely wanna provide our guests, you know, as many amenities and services as possible, but at the same time, being very judicious about costs and expenses. You can see that operating costs are variable with, you know, revenues, but that we're able to, you know, maintain a positive operating margin. What we're seeing is that, you know, as travel comes back, and especially as business travel comes back, you know, we're starting to see more and more, pickup in activity. You know, seasonally, as you mentioned, you know, Q4 is a pretty good quarter generally.
You know, we always find that Q1 is generally the hardest coming out of winter, you know, for this Northeast Corridor. Q4 tends to be a pretty positive quarter, and we expect, you know, the hotel to continue to show improvement in performance.
Great. Appreciate the color, Tae-Sik. Second question. Bryan, can you talk a little more about office? You know, majority of your three key originations were collateralized by office assets. Can you talk about what you're seeing there, you know, why, you know, you guys believe that's the most attractive risk reward to deploy capital today and kind of your outlook for that asset class in the coming quarters?
Yeah, absolutely. I think we found some unique opportunities, again, given our clean allocation to some of the gateway markets going into COVID. And then we remain extremely particular about the type of office that we will seek to finance and even take it another step, specifically, what sponsors we wanna partner with on those capitalizations. You know, what attracted us to the deals that we invested in during the quarter was really a reset basis. New York office, for instance, down somewhere between 15%-30%. We did not have an allocation there, so when we think about that from an historic basis, there was certainly some attractive macro parts to the story. The types of investors we partnered with, we mentioned on earlier on the call.
I think that type of intellectual capital was something that was really important to our underwriting. Then the types of buildings, we mentioned the LEED certification. I think that will provide some defensive nature to our investments from just any things that might come up over the future, such as carbon taxes and the like, and that was certainly a big part of our analysis. These buildings, we were fairly provincial about what we like in the office sector. We think these buildings in particular will be actually a recruiting tool and be outsized beneficiaries of a return to work environment that we're seeing really in New York on a weekly basis.
Great. Thanks for that color, Bryan. I appreciate you taking my questions today.
Absolutely. Thank you.
The next question comes from Jade Rahmani of KBW.
Thank you very much. A big question investors are thinking about is the sustainability of distributable EPS, considering the runoff of loans that have high LIBOR floors. You mentioned that in terms of deploying the capital you raised, you were able to achieve consistent ROEs, and your commentary has characterized the earnings as stable to the $0.37 distributable EPS rate as a sustainable number to think about.
Jade, thank you again for your question. Yeah, no, I think, you know, we are, you know, we feel very good about our earnings certainly, this quarter. You know, we are very focused on, as you mentioned, the runoff, eventual runoff of our LIBOR floors. You know, frankly, it's occurred a little slower than we had anticipated. We only had 2 loans, for example, run off this quarter, and therefore, you know, we're pleased with where our portfolio sits today. I guess in your question about sort of go-forward earnings, you know, again, as you know, we don't give specific guidance on, you know, on our earnings.
Right now, you know, I guess looking ahead to 2022, you know, what we're really planning on doing is, you know, recognizing that we'll continue to have runoff of our LIBOR floors. You know, I think what it'll be very important to do is to make sure that we can pull every lever possible, so that we can continue to optimize earnings. One of the things that we've done is obviously, you know, first half of this year, we raised about $200 million of new capital. That significantly increased our capital base such that, you know, one of the benefits we've talked about is with further scaling of our business, you know, we should be able to scale our expenses.
You saw that this quarter in particular, Q3 , which is the first full quarter of having this additional capital, you know, our expense load on capital, you know, was probably one of the lowest that we've ever had, was under 30 basis points for the quarter. Even if you annualize that, you know, you can see that the run rate is much more efficient. The other, as we mentioned, is that, you know, we do plan on using a bit more leverage. We've been able to generate the type of earnings that we had, you know, more than fully covering our regular and supplemental dividends for the past three quarters, you know, with significantly less leverage, you know, low to mid 2s. I think the optimized model really looks at something around the 3.0 range, as we mentioned.
You know, the third is, I think, you know, we continue to see pricing of our liabilities go down. You know, we experienced certainly that with our latest CLO earlier this year, and, you know, we'll continue to see that. As you know, we're coming upon the maturity of our term loan, and suffice to say, you know, we would feel very comfortable saying that, you know, as we look to, you know, refinance that term loan or put in a new type of financing, that we do expect to achieve material savings on interest expense, you know, on the term loan.
You know, long-winded way of saying, you know, while we won't have a permanent benefit of LIBOR floors, we do expect to offset somewhat that runoff of LIBOR floors, you know, with other ways that we can optimize our business model. Maybe importantly, you know, as we mentioned on our opening remarks, you know, should interest rates rise, again, no one knows, but if you look at today's LIBOR curve, you know, there is some built-in expectation of increasing LIBOR. You know, again, we think that is something that can help us as a further tailwind.
You know, because we've hedged, you know, a substantial portion of our liability costs, and certainly the new loans that we booked in 2021 have LIBOR floors that are not, you know, significantly or materially in the money, you know, material increases in LIBOR will benefit us. I would say, you know, for example, if you look back at our earnings in 2018, 2019, you can see that, you know, full year earnings, Distributable Earnings were $1.40 or so, which would have covered, you know, our 35-cent dividend for the year. Of course, that was done in a higher interest rate environment where LIBOR was, you know, closer or right at that 2% average mark, you know, for those years.
I think there are definitely ways to, you know, again, run our balance sheet, run our company more efficiently to offset the LIBOR floors. We'll see about what happens with actual interest rates. I think those are really the factors that'll play into what our future earnings look like.
Thank you very much. Are you expecting for the Q4 a pickup in repayments? On the funding side, would you expect something similar to the Q3 ?
Yeah. Maybe I can start with repayment, and I'll turn it over to Bryan on the funding side. You know, Q3 , we certainly experienced less runoff than we originally anticipated. So far for the Q4 , we have not had any repayments, any material repayments. You know, we do expect, I would say, more normal level of repayments towards the end of the year. As you know, seasonally, there is a lot of transactional activities that happen in the Q4 , particularly right at year-end. We are closely monitoring and working with a number of our borrowers where we do expect some material repayments to happen towards the end of the quarter. Obviously, given that lead time, you know, we are very busy building up our pipeline. I'll turn it over to Bryan to talk further about that.
Yeah. I think Tase covered it pretty well, but one thing I'd add to the equation here, Jade, is that the active asset management and constant dialogue we have with our borrowers gives us as much insight as possible to the timing of repayments. We'd like to try to understand what that looks like 45-60 days in advance, and then we'll certainly manage the pipeline as well as the warehouse facility to make sure that we can maintain as best we can efficient deployment of our capital base. As we sit here today, we feel pretty confident in the pipeline to effectively replace those assets that will run off during this quarter and subsequently.
Lastly, could you just say if you expect net portfolio growth in the quarter, which some of your peers have commented as to?
I mean, it's tough to predict it down to the quarter, right? Obviously, we're running something that we think about as more of an annual business or even longer term. Tough to predict exactly when the repayments and then redeployment of that capital will occur. If you look at the net portfolio growth over the past couple of years, certainly the trend would support for further growth. I think it's probably been echoed throughout the earnings calls of some of our peers. I think the activity in our space is extremely robust and there's no sign of abatement there. Again, tough to predict quarter to quarter, but over the long term, certainly feel pretty comfortable about portfolio growth.
Thank you for taking the questions.
Of course. Thank you.
The next question is from Rich Shane with J.P. Morgan.
Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my question this morning. I just wanna talk about the origination environment. Obviously, we've been asking a lot of questions in general about spread compression, floors rolling off. I am curious when you look at the dynamics with repayments and repricing, with base rates being lower and floors getting struck lower, is there an opportunity to pick up a little spread? Are you starting to, as you think about higher rates, require some sort of hedging on behalf of your borrowers?
Overarching, I would say that the environment is very positive for the lending community right now. We talked about ROEs being maintained in that low double-digit realm. You know, typically what happens in our space as base rates decline, spreads do widen. That can be especially true as we near the end of the year, just typically speaking. I think, while we don't necessarily directly compete with insurance companies and banks, a lot of the equity allocation that these firms would have received in the Q1 have largely been deployed. Just the supply of capital, especially when you think about how constrained we all are from a human capital perspective, you could expect to see some spread widening, both again, as a function of underlying base rates as well as just available liquidity.
when you combine that with the borrowing costs I referenced that we benefit from both as a real estate platform, but also within the broader Ares family of companies, I think that net interest margin really is our focus. Again, the ROEs that we're underwriting to are consistent with past performance as well.
Terrific. Thank you so much.
The next question will be from Steve DeLaney of Citizens JMP Securities .
Hi, Bryan and Tae-Sik Yoon, and congrats on a very solid quarter. Look, you've covered pretty much everything I was interested in, leverage, repayments, et cetera. I guess the only thing I would come back to on the hotel, and thanks for your comments on that, Tae-Sik Yoon, from a asset management standpoint. Certainly nice to see it break even, not a shock there, given the world reopening, et cetera. If we think about that, I mean, that's a $37 million asset. First question is, you don't have any financing on that property at this time, do you?
Steve, we do.
Oh, okay.
We have about $28 million of financing on it, non-recourse financing. Our, you know, our net equity position is, you know, right around $11 million for this asset.
Okay. We need to think of it closer to 10 or 11 as far as if you were able to, you know, transfer that off to someone else as far as your net pickup of investable capital. Obviously, you know, it would be a better return, I'm sure, on the 11, if you could find new loans at 3 times leverage than you're seeing now. Okay. Well, props on. I guess, Tae-Sik, would the plan be, to the extent that you could find a buyer as the hotel industry continues to recover, find a buyer at your basis, you would say goodbye, or is this something that you see, maybe a more strategic investment? You've worked hard to get it where it is, you know.
Do you want to potentially hold on to it and realize a larger gain?
Steve, no, really good question. Now, our goal, you know, as a lender, obviously, is to recover our capital, recover our loan basis.
Yep.
You know, we will actively manage and do all of the asset management possible to do that. You know, obviously, on the equity side of the, you know, the Ares Real Estate business, we own very similar hotels to, you know, to this property. So we know how to manage this from both an equity perspective and debt perspective. But no, the answer is, you know, we're not here to maximize value for the last dollar. We're here to, you know, fully recover our loan basis and put the dollars back to work in our primary and only business, which is, you know, as a lender.
Yep. I think that's certainly the right answer for a commercial mortgage REIT. Well, thanks for the comments, Tasekh. Appreciate it.
Absolutely. Thank you, Steve.
The next question will come from Timothy Hayes with BTIG.
Hey, good afternoon, guys. A lot covered, clearly. Just one follow-up, kind of wrapping that all together. Look, I know it's a board decision, and it's tough to give forward guidance, but you mentioned being able to cover or your expectation that you'll cover the total dividends paid, including supplementals this year. Just wondering if you can provide any comments on how you think about it next year. You know, $0.37 of earnings this quarter. You are hedged against rates next year, and your outlook does seem pretty positive in terms of, you know, growth. Although, you know, no one has a crystal ball. We don't know where repayments are going and when they could pick up.
Given just your comments, I'm just curious, you know, what headwinds to your ability to continue paying kind of $0.35 total dividends that you foresee and how we should think about that heading into next year. Thanks.
Sure, Tim. Thank you for your question. No, absolutely. You know, certainly our goal is to pay a consistent and growing dividend for our company. For 2021, you know, as we announced at the outset of this year, we absolutely did wanna share with our shareholders, you know, some of the benefit that the company has derived from LIBOR floors. We certainly felt very comfortable at the beginning of this year to basically say that, you know, our outlook would certainly feel very confident that we would be able to pay this supplemental dividend throughout 2021. You know, we did not give really any much guidance about what would happen thereafter. You know, we certainly didn't say we will continue, and we certainly didn't say we won't continue.
We said, you know, we felt very comfortable throughout 2021. Certainly with the declaration of the Q4 dividend, hasn't been paid yet, obviously, but with the declaration of the Q4 dividend, you know, we will have, you know, kept up to, what we said we would do. I think, you know, to maybe put some parameters, some bookends on kind of how we think about this. It is, you know, a number of factors. Clearly one of the factors will be, you know, how much further runoff that we could see on our LIBOR floors. Like we said, for the Q3 , you know, we saw much less runoff than expected so far, you know, early part of the quarter.
you know, as of today, we've had no additional runoff of any loans in the portfolio. as we did say, you know, we do expect, you know, meaningful repayments before year-end. that'll certainly be a important part of the equation. The other important parts of the equation is, you know, what we talked about before, you know, getting a little bit more optimized in terms of leverage. you know-
Mm-hmm.
We're already benefiting from scaling of expenses. We'll see where LIBOR is. Some of this, again, I don't wanna overcomplicate the message. We'll see kind of what happens with LIBOR, you know, with SOFR and other indices, taking effect as well. You know, we'll see where the markets are in terms of, you know, spreads and originations.
You know, so far, things look good. I think we'll be in a much better position on our next earnings call to cover our Q4 earnings and a little bit more outlook on 2022 to provide more specificity. Certainly with a little bit more passage of time, we will be able to do that. Right now, I would say, you know, very much stay tuned. I think it's a little bit of a evolving situation and story, but certainly our goal is to continue to share with our shareholders the benefit of you know increasing earnings and cash flow from our business.
Yeah. No, makes sense. But regardless, appreciate you walking through that and, yeah, we'll look forward to more commentary on that next quarter.
Fantastic. Thank you.
This concludes our question and answer session. I would now like to turn the conference back over to Bryan Donohoe for any closing remarks.
Thank you so much. First and foremost, just wanna thank the entire team for their contribution this quarter and say how great it is to be all back together in person. Thanks to everyone for joining today. We appreciate the continued support of ACRE and look forward to speaking with you again in a few months. Thank you.
Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes our conference call for today. If you missed any part of today's call, an archived replay of this conference call will be available approximately one hour after the end of this call through November 17, 2021, to domestic callers by dialing 1-877-344-7529, and to international callers by dialing 1-412-317-0088. For all replays, please reference conference number 10159872. An archived replay will also be available on a webcast link located on the homepage of the Investor Resources section of our website.