Millrose (MRP) Q3 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

DATE

Tuesday, Oct. 27, 2026

CALL PARTICIPANTS

• Head of Financial Planning and Analysis - Jesse Ross
• Chief Executive Officer and President - Darren L. Richman
• Chief Operating Officer - Robert Nitkin
• Chief Financial Officer - Garett Rosenblum

TAKEAWAYS

• Net Income -- $130 million, or $0.78 per diluted share, representing record third quarter performance driven by recurring option fee income.
• Adjusted Funds From Operations (AFFO) -- $133.5 million, or $0.80 per diluted share, marking the sixth consecutive quarterly increase in this metric.
• Q4 2026 AFFO Guidance -- $0.82 to $0.84 per share, reflecting management expectations for contributions from the existing portfolio and the DreamFinders acquisition.
• Total Revenues -- $211 million, comprising $209.5 million in recurring option fee income and $1.5 million in development loan income.
• Invested Capital -- $9.2 billion, including $1.3 billion in new investments and development funding deployed during the quarter.
• Share Repurchase Authorization -- $250 million, authorized by the Board of Directors to be funded through earnings and unused capital from the Lennar priority right.
• DreamFinders-Beazer Transaction -- $1.1 billion in total capital support, consisting of $580 million in land banking funding and $488 million in preferred stock carrying a 12% dividend.
• Non-Lennar Asset Base -- 42%, pro forma for the DreamFinders transaction, representing a diversification milestone beyond the Lennar Master Program Agreement.
• Total Assets -- $10.6 billion, with a liquidity position of approximately $800 million including cash and revolving credit facility availability.
• Debt-to-Capitalization Ratio -- 36%, which exceeds the long-term target of 33% due to recent M&A transaction funding.
• Senior Notes Issuance -- $1 billion, priced in two tranches including $500 million at 6.5% due in 2029 and $500 million at 6.75% due in 2031.
• Lennar Portfolio Yield -- 8.5%, supported by $6.3 billion of homesites under option contracts as of Sept. 30.
• Other Agreements Yield -- 10.8%, with management expecting an increase to 11% in the fourth quarter due to higher SOFR base rates and new transaction yields.
• Homesite Takedown Proceeds -- $800 million, which were redeployed into new land acquisitions and development opportunities.
• Counterparty Base -- 22 distinct clients, reflecting the addition of three new counterparties during the third quarter.
• Single-Family Rental (SFR) Pilot -- 1,233 completed homes across 18 states, acquired for an aggregate cost basis of approximately $333 million.
• SFR Pilot Equity Investment -- $120 million, representing approximately 1% of the total asset base net of $213 million in limited-recourse financing.
• SFR Underwriting Metrics -- 5% going-in capitalization rate, with projected levered internal rates of return between 10% to 12%.
• Book Value per Share -- $35.24, which management cited as a justification for implementing the share repurchase program at current market prices.
• Management Fee Expense -- $30.3 million, calculated at 1.25% of gross tangible assets and excluding the newly acquired SFR portfolio.
• Portfolio Composition -- 156,729 homesites across 834 communities in 30 states, managed under both the Lennar and non-Lennar agreements.

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RISKS

• Richman noted that "the combination of home prices and mortgage rates has put the dream [of homeownership] beyond their immediate reach" for more than 30% of prospective buyers who fail to qualify for mortgages.
• Richman warned that "when institutional capital retreats from build to rent, homebuilders lose an important channel of offtake," which can lead to higher inventories and reduced construction activity.
• Richman indicated that while the core business is performing, the market may be "searching for a new bottom" as interest rates continue to press affordability.

SUMMARY

Millrose Properties, Inc. (NYSE:MRP) reported record net income for the third quarter and announced a strategic shift in capital allocation, authorizing a significant share repurchase program while increasing its recurring earnings guidance. Management reported that the business remains resilient despite housing affordability pressures, evidenced by zero customer terminations and the successful closing of a major financing deal supporting industry consolidation. The company is diversifying its asset base away from its primary counterparty while simultaneously testing a new affordability pilot program centered on the intersection of rental housing and homeownership. Management stated that the company will prioritize total economic return by balancing dividend distributions with opportunistic share repurchases when the stock trades below book value.

• Management introduced a 90/10 capital allocation framework, intended to distribute 90% of earnings to maintain REIT status while directing 10% toward share repurchases.
• Richman stated, "This was always intended to be a crawl, walk, run strategy" regarding the single-family rental pilot, which serves as a prerequisite for a potential rent-to-own product.
• The company acquired the SFR pilot portfolio at an average price of $280,000 per home, which represents a discount to market value in excess of 10% according to third-party opinions.
• Management indicated that shorter duration M&A portfolios, such as the 2.5-year life of the DreamFinders assets, allow the company to return to its target leverage more quickly.
• The FHA recently expanded multifamily mortgage insurance eligibility to build-to-rent communities, a move Richman stated is "significant" for expanding housing supply and institutional capital access.
• Kennedy Lewis unilaterally proposed to exclude the new SFR assets from management fee calculations while the product remains in the evaluation phase.

INDUSTRY GLOSSARY

• AFFO (Adjusted Funds From Operations): A non-GAAP financial measure used by REITs to evaluate recurring operating performance by adjusting net income for depreciation, amortization, and non-recurring items.
• Built-to-Rent (BTR): Residential communities designed and built specifically for long-term rental rather than individual sale.
• Land Banking: A real estate investment practice where a company acquires land to hold for future sale or development, often providing homebuilders with an asset-light inventory solution.
• Master Program Agreement: A foundational contractual framework between Millrose and its primary counterparty, Lennar, governing land banking and homesite options.
• REIT (Real Estate Investment Trust): A company that owns, operates, or finances income-producing real estate and must distribute at least 90% of its taxable income to shareholders.
• SOFR (Secured Overnight Financing Rate): A benchmark interest rate for dollar-denominated derivatives and loans, replacing the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR).
• Takedown Proceeds: Cash received when a homebuilder exercises its option to purchase a finished homesite from Millrose for construction.

Full Conference Call Transcript

Operator: Hello everyone. Thank you for joining us and welcome to the Millrose Properties Third Quarter Earnings Call. After today's prepared remarks, we will host a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press *1 to raise your hand. To withdraw your question, press *1 again. I will now hand the conference over to Jesse Ross, Millrose's head of financial planning and analysis. Jesse, please go ahead.

Jesse Ross: Good morning, and thank you for joining us to discuss Millrose Properties Third Quarter 26 Results. Joining me on the call today are Darren L. Richman, our Chief Executive Officer and President Robert Nitkin, our Chief Operating Officer and Garett Rosenblum, our Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin, I would like to remind everyone that today's discussion may include forward looking statements and references to non GAAP financial measures. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied. For a more complete discussion of these factors as well as reconciliations of non GAAP measures please refer to our earnings release and investor presentation.

Both of which are available on our Investor Relations website. Given recent events, our prepared remarks today are more detailed than usual. With that, I will turn the call over to Darren.

Darren L. Richman: Thank you, Jesse, and good morning, everyone. I will begin with our core business and our financial performance, then spend some time addressing the recent attention surrounding Millrose and the steps we are taking to further enhance shareholder values. Let me start with the most important point. Our business continues to perform remarkably well, in the face of a challenging housing market and elevated interest rates. Continue to have strong visibility into our cash flows as of ninethirty, not a single Millrose customer has walked away from an agreement. That resilience is reflected in our financial performance. Earlier this month, we reached a major milestone in the diversification of our platform.

On October 20, DreamFinders completed its acquisition of Beazer Homes. And in connection there with, Millrose funded DreamFinders with approximately $1.1 billion of acquisition financing, a land banking investment in roughly 7 thousand homesites, more than half of them finished, and a 12% preferred investment in DreamFinders. Pro forma for that transaction, approximately 42% of our asset base is now invested outside the Lennar master program agreement. We underwrote, documented, and closed DreamFinders' transaction in a compressed time frame alongside a public company merger. Robert will walk you through the details shortly.

For the fourth quarter, we expect AFFO of approximately $82 to $0.84 per share and year end AFFO annual run rate above the $3.30 per share guidance provided on our year-end 2025 earnings call. This represents another increase in our recurring earnings power, marks the sixth consecutive quarterly AFFO increase, and underscores the durability of the Millrose business model even as the broader housing market continues to face significant affordability pressures. During the third quarter, we funded approximately $1.3 billion new investments and development funding.

Received approximately $800 million in net homesite takedown proceeds and increased invested capital outside the Lennar master program agreement by over $500 million to $3.4 billion We added 3 new counterparties in the quarter and now serve 22 distinct clients. We also continue to expand the reach of our platform, across our growing base of homebuilder and developer counterparties. Garett will walk you through the financial and operating details shortly. But before turning to those results, I want to address the recent attention surrounding our business, provide context for the initiatives we have been developing, and discuss how we are going to think about capital allocation and shareholder returns going forward.

Now let me turn to something many of you have been reading about. For a while, we have been working on an affordability initiative. And I want to begin by emphasizing that neither our concerns about housing affordability nor our efforts to develop new products should come as a surprise. We have been discussing the affordability challenges facing the homebuilder industry for some time. On our last earnings call, we specifically addressed the difficulties facing first time homebuyers and the various tools builders have been using to address those challenges. Including mortgage rate buydowns, incentives, and changes in product design. We have also consistently discussed our intention to expand the applications of our capital platform.

In July 2025, we announced a $3 billion financing arrangement with Taylor Morrison to support its Yardley build to rent platform. At the time I specifically described that transaction as an example of using our capital to help homebuilders address affordability challenges. Taylor Morrison also expressed its hope that Yardley renters would eventually become Taylor Morrison homeowners. We have since expanded our platform into multifamily housing and vertical construction, used our capital to facilitate industry consolidation. And on our last earnings call, we explicitly told investors that we were expanding our product suite and were already in the lab developing new products that would complement our existing business and deepen our relationships with homebuilders.

So the idea that we were working on affordability exploring the intersection of rental housing and homeownership, and developing additional applications for our capital is hardly new. We have been discussing these opportunities publicly for well over a year. The opportunity we have been working on to address is real. Everyday prospective homebuyers visit new home sales centers with the intention of purchasing a home only to discover that they cannot qualify for a mortgage. We estimate that more than 30% of prospective buyers are being denied at the mortgage qualification stage, after conversations with our homebuilder counterparties. Importantly, credit quality has not deteriorated in a manner that would explain the magnitude of the problem.

FICO scores have remained remarkably consistent. What has changed dramatically is the cost of financing a home. These are people who want to own a home. They are trying to achieve the American dream of homeownership but the combination of home prices and mortgage rates has put the dream beyond their immediate reach. We thought that was a problem we are trying to solve in a manner accretive to Melrose's shareholders while reinforcing our core business model. Millrose has pioneered land banking as an institutional product. We have applied our platform to large scale M&A. Vertical construction, built to rent and multifamily housing. Given that experience, we believe we are well positioned to develop an additional affordability solution.

Specifically, we are working on a product designed to sit between the for sale and for-rent markets as a bridge to homeownership. The concept was to allow prospective homebuyers who could not qualify for mortgage today to occupy a home as a renter. With a potential pathway to homeownership when their circumstances allowed. But before we could responsibly introduce such a product, we needed to establish that the underlying operating and financing infrastructure would work. There is another important consideration in understanding why we pursued this initiative. We believe Build to Rent is becoming an increasingly important component of homebuilder finance.

It provides another channel of demand for our homebuilder customer diversifies their source of offtake, and creates additional flex in addressing the affordability challenges facing the housing industry. The FHA's recent decision to extend multifamily mortgage insurance eligibility to qualified built to rent communities is significant. By expanding access to government insured construction, and permanent financing, the FHA is recognizing the growing role of build to rent in expanding housing supply and addressing affordability. Importantly, it also creates another potential source of institutional capital to support this market. Build to rent does not represent a problem with homeowner finance. It represents innovation in homebuilder finance.

And if you do not recognize build to rent as a crucial and growing component of the industry, then I believe you are materially underestimating the opportunity and value of the Millrose platform. For Milrose, every additional channel through which a home builder can sell a completed home expands the opportunity to finance production, accelerate capital recycling, and increase the value of our platform. But there has been a disconnect between the growing importance of build to rent and the availability of capital to support it. Higher interest rates have sidelined significant amounts of institutional capital, The publicly traded single family rental companies have been managing their own capital constraints and priorities limiting their ability to expand.

An uncertainty surrounding bipartisan housing legislation created an additional overhang until the legislative process was completed. Importantly, this retreat in capital has not necessarily reflected deterioration in the underlying assets. Both major publicly traded single family rental companies continue to report positive blended rent growth, strong occupancy and healthy renewal performance. Independent industry research has also pointed to improving rent growth as supply pressures moderate. So we have a market where the underlying assets continue to perform, but the capital available to support them has become constrained. And the consequences extend well beyond the rental housing market. When institutional capital retreats from build to rent, homebuilders lose an important channel of offtake.

That can translate into slower absorptions, higher inventories, and reduced construction activity. In other words, a disruption in the availability of capital for build to rent ultimately becomes a disruption in homeowner finance. We believed it was important to understand that disconnect firsthand. Rather than simply wait for institutional capital to return, we wanted to see how the product performed ourselves. We wanted to understand leasing dynamics, resident retention, operating costs, asset management requirements, and financing alternatives. And we wanted to determine whether the economics could support a scalable institutional capital market solution. That required us to own homes, albeit on a limited basis. And we believe Millrose is particularly well positioned to pursue this opportunity.

We already have deep relationships with homebuilders, visibility into their land pipelines and production needs, and established financing infrastructure and a balance sheet capable of supporting innovative capital solutions. Our platform operates at the intersection of housing and institutional capital, giving us a perspective that neither traditional rental housing operators nor stand alone capital providers necessarily possess. Importantly, this initiative maps directly to our existing operating footprint. We are not entering unfamiliar markets to establish an entirely new business. We are evaluating another application of our capital within the same homebuilding ecosystem we already serve. We held discussions with banks to understand the securitization process, and the portfolio characteristics and minimum scale necessary to access the market.

That work informed both the size of our investment and the financing architecture we wanted to optimize around. Our intention was never to replace the institutional capital providers that have historically supported this market. Quite the opposite. We wanted to understand what was preventing capital from participating and whether we could develop a structure that would facilitate its return. Against that backdrop, beginning on August 28, we purchased 1.23 thousand completed single family homes across 18 states for an aggregate cost basis of approximately $333 million This is inclusive of capital expenditures and transaction costs representing a net investment of approximately $120 million after financing proceeds.

We also entered into additional community build to rent contracts with expected net investment of approximately $50 million based on $100 million of expected asset level limited recourse financing and $150 million of gross purchase. Leasing and property management are being handled by Evergreen Residential. A nationally scaled institutional rental housing platform managing more than 30 thousand homes across 28 states. I want to emphasize that we deliberately structured this pilot around 2 distinct but complementary components. The scattered site portfolio allowed us to evaluate the economics of owning and operating completed homes. We can observe leasing velocity, rental rates, occupancy, resident retention, maintenance costs, the performance of third party servicing.

We can also evaluate the cash flow characteristics of the portfolio and its suitability for institutional financing including securitization. The purpose built rental communities provide a different perspective. They allow us to evaluate the economics of delivering homes directly into the rental market including construction costs, development timelines, community level absorption, lease up performance and the financing structures necessary to support that activity. Just as importantly, they allow us to better understand how build to rent can function as a reliable channel of offtake for our homebuilder customers. Taken together, these 2 approaches give us visibility into both the operating economics of rental housing and the capital required to finance its production.

We believe that understanding both sides of that equation is essential, to developing a scalable institutional capital solution. I want to be clear about something. Our first transaction in this area was with Lennar. But this was never intended to be a Lennar solution. It was designed as an industry solution for the homebuilders we serve. Millrose now has 22 counterparties. Since our inception, we have been a holistic capital solution for the homebuilding industry and that is still true today. The same is true for how we think about build to rent bridge to homeownership. The goal is a model that can work across the industry, not just for any single builder.

Let me put the size of this investment into perspective. Millrose has approximately $10.6 billion of assets. Our initial net equity investment of approximately $120 million represents just over 1% of our asset base, with an additional approximately $50 million of anticipated future investment under our community build to rent commitments. The investment was deliberately measured relative to our balance sheet, but the portfolio needed to be sufficiently large to test the operating and financial architecture including potential to access the securitization market. And there is another important distinction. These are durable income producing assets. We are not simply spending capital to conduct an experiment. We are investing in homes that generate rental income and retain underlying real estate value.

While providing the operating experience and information necessary to evaluate a potentially much larger opportunity. That is an important feature of how we design the pilot. We can learn from actual operating performance while maintaining an investment in tangible assets with continuing economic utility, regardless of whether we ultimately decide to pursue the broader initiative. In other words, the success of the investment does not depend on the success of the new use case. This was always intended to be a crawl, walk, run strategy. First, assemble a portfolio of sufficient scale. Second, observe how the homes perform and evaluate the operating servicing, and financing infrastructure.

And only then determine whether we have the foundation for a broader institutional financing solution. We have not made that determination. Our objective is not to become a large scale owner and operator of rental homes. It is to understand whether we can use our existing platform capital markets expertise and relationships with homebuilders to expand the source of capital available to the industry. That is consistent with what Millrose has done since inception. Identify inefficiencies in homebuilder finance, and develop institutional capital solutions to address them.

If we can help establish a more reliable and scalable source of capital for Build to Rent, we can create another channel of demand for our homebuilder customers diversify their sources of offtake, and strengthen the resilience of our platform through the housing cycle. This is not a departure from our core business. Is a natural extension of it. Going forward, we continue to believe strongly in the opportunities across build to rent, single family rental, and particularly rent to own. At the same time, we are seeing unprecedented public sector support at the federal and state levels for programs that align national housing goals with private sector returns.

I mentioned earlier the recent expansion of FHA financing for qualifying build to rent communities. I want to emphasize again that we were never trying to recast Millrose's business model. We view this as a corporate opportunity that was relevant to and adjacent to our core business, and we still do. I remain enthusiastic about the rent to own product we were incubating. We have spent considerable time studying past rent to own models and have designed this program specifically to address their shortcomings. We start with a customer who has already decided to buy a home but encounters challenges with mortgage qualification. Our product would offer a pathway to occupy a home as a renter.

With the opportunity to transition into ownership when they become mortgage eligible without the traditional lease up j curve for the capital vehicle. When you combine customer acquisition model with the ability to purchase homes at a discount and finance them with efficient asset level debt, we believe the resulting economics can generate highly attractive risk adjusted returns. Importantly, those returns are not dependent solely on home price appreciation. They are supported by the underlying rental economics, the acquisition discount, and the financing structure with the potential to transition to homeownership creating an additional source of value.

We continue to believe this is an attractive investment opportunity and we remain committed to careful evaluation of any future investment in the context of our current cost and availability of capital. There are also important facts regarding how this initiative was approved. And how we approach the economics. We filed an 8-K on September 1 to describing the relevant investment architecture and amendments to our various agreements were signed on August 27. The initiative was reviewed and approved by our independent board following a robust discussion. The single family rental homes we purchased will not be included in the calculation of management fee payable to Kennedy Lewis.

When our Board met to approve the fourth quarter management fee amount, Kennedy Lewis unilaterally proposed to exclude these assets from the management fee calculation Kenny Lewis believed it was an appropriate decision while Millrose's evaluating a new product that had not been yet proven. Now let me pivot to capital allocation and shareholder returns. The events of the past several weeks have also prompted us to take a fresh look at our business our capital allocation priorities and how we deliver value to shareholders. Given the discount at which our shares trade relative to book value, the market seems to be suggesting an earnings or dividend cut. We believe that it is fundamentally flawed assessment of our business.

Our cash flows remain highly visible, Our underlying business continues to perform remarkably well, and no customer has terminated an option agreement or threatened to do so. But rather than simply disagree with the market's assessment, we have taken the opportunity to reconsider how we return capital to shareholders. And we have reached a straightforward conclusion. When our shares trade at a meaningful discount to book value, repurchasing those shares can represent a more attractive use of a portion of our earnings than distributing every dollar as a dividend.

Accordingly, going forward, while our shares trade below book value, we intend to distribute 90% of our earnings consistent with maintaining a REIT status and directing the remaining 10% towards share repurchases. In that regard, our Board has authorized a $250 million share repurchase program. Now I wanna be very clear about how we intend to fund this program and, equally important, what we will not do. We will not borrow money to repurchase our shares. We will not compromise our liquidity, increase leverage to fund buybacks, or divert capital needed to support our core business. Our repurchases will be funded from earnings that otherwise would have been distributed to shareholders.

As well as any lost priority capital that becomes available from Lennar's capital priority right to the extent it is unused. The earnings allocated to repurchases would have been paid out in any event. We are simply choosing to return a portion of those earnings through a different mechanism when we believe doing so creates greater long term value for shareholders. And when our shares trade below book value, repurchasing them has an added benefit of increasing book value per share for our continuing shareholders. Have worked hard to establish a strong balance sheet, substantial liquidity, and a durable credit profile.

We intend to protect all 3. $250 million authorization provides us with flexibility to act opportunistically is not an obligation to deploy that capital nor does it represent a change in our financial risk appetite. We are not going to sacrifice the credit quality of the enterprise to pursue a higher share price. Is also an important distinction that I want shareholders to appreciate. A dividend reduction driven by deteriorating business performance is fundamentally different from a deliberate decision to allocate a portion of our earnings towards repurchasing shares that we believe are undervalued. Our decision is the latter. We are not changing the economics of our business. We are changing how we return portion of those economics to shareholders.

For too long, the market has evaluated Millrose principally through the lens of its dividend yield. We believe that overlooks the quality and visibility of our earnings. The strength of our balance sheet, and the value of the underlying assets. We want shareholders to evaluate Millrose based on the total economic return we generate, not simply the dividend yield displayed on a screen. Ultimately, our responsibility is to maximize long term value per share while preserving the financial strength and flexibility that underpin our business. We believe this capital allocation framework accomplishes both. For those who continue to question where our loyalties lie, consider the economics of our decision.

Repurchasing shares reduces our asset base, and consequently, the management fees payable to Kennedy Lewis. Yet that is precisely what we were doing. We are making a deliberate decision to prioritize shareholder value over management fee income. Our actions should speak louder than any assurances we could offer. Staying with the topic of capital, on our last earnings call, we acknowledged we will continue to evaluate our debt to capital target. While we have made no formal decision to change that target, we remain comfortable temporarily exceeding the 33% level we established at the time of our spin, particularly in connection with the M&A transaction such as DreamFinders' acquisition of Beazer.

We have discussed our thinking on this before, but I believe it bears repeating. When Millrose was spun out, the average duration of our portfolio was approximately 3 years. We were also managing a newly independent business without an established operating history of our own. Accordingly, we deliberately established a conservative leverage target to ensure that we had sufficient financial flexibility to manage our obligations across a wide range of market environments. That was an appropriate decision at the time. Since then, we have gained considerable experience managing the portfolio including through large scale M&A transactions.

And 1 thing we have learned is that the portfolios we acquire in those transactions tend to have materially shorter durations, closer to 2 years rather than 3. That distinction is important. Shorter duration portfolios generate a more rapid return of capital through homesite take downs, giving us greater visibility into the pace at which leverage return to our target following an acquisition. So in many respects, this is simply a matter of 33% debt-to-capital target against a portfolio with approximately 3 years of duration. When we acquire a portfolio with a duration closer to 2 years, we have greater confidence in our ability to temporarily operate above that target and return to it over a shorter period of time.

Our experience managing these acquired portfolios has reinforced that confidence. To be clear, we are not announcing a change to our long term leverage target today, nor have we made any decisions regarding a higher permanent leverage target. What we are recognizing is that the duration and cash flow characteristics of the assets should inform the amount of leverage we are comfortable carrying. Where shorter duration M and A portfolios allow us to return to our target leverage level relatively quickly. We believe it makes sense to retain the flexibility to temporarily exceed that target when the opportunity warrants. Our objective is not to maximize leverage.

It is to optimize the use of our balance sheet while preserving the financial flexibility and credit quality that have been central to our business model from the beginning. So let me bring this back to the bigger picture. Our core business remains strong. We continue to have excellent visibility into our cash flows, and no customers walked away an agreement or threatened to do so. Have been publicly discussing affordability challenges and the development of a new capital solution for more than a year. We committed just over 1% of our asset base to a deliberate pilot designed to develop whether we could develop a scalable bridge to homeownership.

The initiative was approved by our independent board supported by outside financial analysis structure with the intention of ultimately attracting third party capital. Millrose does not pay management fees on the single family rental investments under the management agreement. And we are proceeding deliberately intending to evaluate the performance of the portfolio before determining whether to take the next step. We were not trying to become a single family rental company. We were trying to develop a bridge to homeownership, in doing so, we were seeking to make Millrose more resilient across interest rate cycles while addressing 1 of the most significant challenges facing our industry. That is entirely consistent with the mission we established for Miller from the beginning.

We remain committed to Millrose's core business model by continuing to believe that the bridge between renting homeownership represents a meaningful opportunity for the broader housing industry. And finally, we are still in the lab. We continue to believe in the merit of finding a solution that meaningfully improves affordability while aligning the interest of homebuyers homebuilders, capital providers, and Millrosa shareholders. We will seek input from our investors and other stakeholders before continuing this effort. And evaluate it in the context of our cost and availability of capital. Any event, this was never intended to be a meaningful use of our capital. In the meantime, our focus remains squarely on executing our core business, continues to perform remarkably well.

I will now turn the call over to Robert.

Robert Nitkin: Thanks, Darren. Turning to our operating performance. We ended the quarter with approximately 157 thousand home across 34 communities in 30 states. We continue to diversify our customer base, increasing to 22 distinct counterparties. Our portfolio continues to perform well despite the challenges facing the broader housing market. During the quarter, we experienced no option terminations and received approximately $800 million in net repayment proceeds from Home Site takedowns and development loan repayments. We redeployed those sale proceeds into new opportunities, and continue to diversify our invested capital beyond the Lennar Master Program Agreement, increasing invested capital outside of the Lennar Master Program agreement $521 million to approximately $3.4 billion excluding any build to rent investments.

Other agreements generated a weighted average yield of approximately 10.8%, an increase from 10.6% last quarter. We have discussed previously, our option agreements in this category are generally floating rate with contractual floors, which provide a measure of protection against declining benchmark rates while preserving participation in higher rates. Recently, higher SOFR base rates have had a positive impact on our returns. A trend that has continued into the fourth quarter. Based on the level of base rates at the start of the fourth quarter, and pro form a for the transactions closed to date in the quarter, we expect an average yield of approximately 11% for these other agreements in the fourth quarter.

We continue to prioritize high quality counterparties attractive land bases, and transactions with manageable development risk. Our objective is not simply to maximize the nominal yields of new investments, it is to generate attractive, durable returns while maintaining the underwriting standards that protect our capital. Turning to the Dreamfinders transaction. On October 20, DreamFinders completed its acquisition of Beazer Homes, and in connection, Millrose completed the funding of its previously announced acquisition financing commitment. Milrose provided approximately $1.1 billion of transaction funding through 2 complementary instruments: The first was approximately $580 million of land bank funding net of option deposits received. The second was $488 million in funding for the purchase of DreamFinders' preferred stock, net of original issue discount.

The preferred investment was funded in 2 stages: $171 million at Millrose's execution of the subscription agreement on September 14 and the remaining $317 million at the October 20 acquisition closing. No Kennedy Lewis managed vehicles outside of Millrose participated in any of these DreamFinders-Beazer transactions. Pro form a for this transaction, approximately 42% of our base is now invested outside of the Lennar Master Program Agreement, significant diversification milestone for Milrose. Let me elaborate on the 2 components of the transaction. First, the land banking investment.

In a compressed time frame, our team underwrote, documented, and closed the acquisition of a geographically diverse portfolio of approximately 7 thousand homesites, More than half of those homesites are finished lots, and the portfolio has a weighted average life of approximately 2.5 years. Executing a transaction of this scale alongside a public company acquisition requires a combination of lot level underwriting sophisticated technology, standardized documentation, and the ability to commit substantial capital with certainty. These are capabilities we have spent years developing, and we believe they meaningfully the Milrose platform.

More importantly, we believe the economics of the transaction are a attractive for both parties, We acquired the homesites at a discount to their previously recorded book value, reflecting the valuation of the broader acquisition. Even in the current housing environment, we believe that acquisition basis supports attractive gross margins for Dreamfinders as it takes down and builds on these homesites. For Millrose, we expect the investment to be highly accretive. Including option maintenance fees and commitment fees earned for providing the transaction back stop through the M&A process. Second, the preferred investment.

We evaluated the preferred as a complement to the land banking transaction, as a means of supporting the full financing requirements of the acquisition, The preferred carries a 12% dividend in addition to original issue discount and commitment fees. We view its return and risk profile as consistent with our existing development lending business. Our underwriting focused on the asset coverage supporting the investment, including the owned home site and completed home inventory DreamFinders will hold following the acquisition. Together, these 2 investments allowed Milrose to deliver a comprehensive capital solution to an important homebuilding partner. We believe the transaction represents an attractive contractual return opportunity for our shareholders while meaningfully diversifying our invested capital.

The portfolio's weighted average life of approximately 2.5 years and high proportion of finished lots is consistent with our experience the portfolios acquired through M&A transactions generally have shorter durations than our original portfolio. That difference has meaningful implications for capital recycling. Shorter duration assets return capital more quickly, providing a natural mechanism for reducing leverage following a large acquisition. And as we gain more experience managing these portfolios, we have greater confidence in our ability to temporarily exceed our leverage target in connection with an acquisition return to that target through the ordinary course of business.

As builders evaluate acquisitions, they increasingly need capital partners that can provide certainty of execution, efficiently underwrite large portfolios, and deliver financing structures tailored to the transaction. Our permanent capital base, technology infrastructure, and operating experience has allowed us to provide those solutions at scale. These transactions can also bring shorter duration assets onto our balance sheet. Creating opportunities for attractive returns and accelerated capital recycling. We Looking ahead, our priorities remain consistent. Disciplined capital deployment, active portfolio management, prudent balance sheet and continued diversification across high quality counterparties. Our pipeline remains active, and we believe the opportunities to provide capital solutions across the residential housing industry continues to expand.

We are focused not simply on growing the size of Melrose, but on improving the earnings power, capital efficiency, and durability of the platform as we grow. I also wanna provide some additional context on the evaluation and negotiation of the build to rent portfolio that Darren discussed. While these investments provide an opportunity to evaluate the operating and consumer dynamics that could inform a future path to homeownership product. Their underwriting was not tied to the success of such a program. The investment decision was based on stand alone rental economics. With projected returns independent of whether residents ever purchased their homes.

Our real estate team negotiated a portfolio purchase prioritizing projected initial operating income yield while filtering for high growth markets that we believe will benefit from outsized rent growth and leasing absorption going forward. We believe our ability to acquire newly constructed homes at a competitive basis with attractive initial yields lower anticipated maintenance requirements, and multiple potential exit strategies represent a limited but compelling extension of our existing homebuilder finance platform. This opportunity does not depend on home price appreciation, it is grounded in the economics of our acquisition basis, and the income these assets can generate.

Our base case underwriting for the portfolio based on achievable market rents assumed an approximately 5% going in capitalization rate to 3% annual net operating income growth for an unlevered internal rate of return of approximately 8%. With leverage modeled at 65% loan-to-cost to cost, an interest rate of SOFR plus 120 basis points, the projected levered internal rate of return increased to a range of approximately 10% to 12% depending on other operating assumptions. This asset level limited recourse leverage is in place today, With $213 million funded against the assets, resulting in a $120 million use of Millrose Capital.

As an additional valuation analysis overlay, we acquired third party value opinions on the portfolio, that support an average discount to market value in excess of 10%, further supporting our transaction pricing. Going forward, we will evaluate the economics of the investment on a leveraged basis. We gain insight into rental demand, consumer behavior, property management, maintenance costs and ultimately, the potential pathway from renting to homeownership. We have not entered into any new rental home purchase agreements to date, subsequent to the end of the third quarter. With that, I will turn the call over to Garett, who will take you through the financial review.

Garett Rosenblum: Thank you, Robert, and good morning, everyone. Despite a challenging housing market, our portfolio continues to generate predictable contractual income supported by disciplined underwriting, strong counterparty performance and the continued deployment and recycling of permanent capital. For the third quarter, we reported net income of approximately $130 million or $78 per diluted share, driven primarily by $209.5 million in recurring option fee income generated from our growing invested capital base together with $1.5 million in development loan income. As we have said in prior quarters, adjusted funds from operations or AFFO remains the best measure of the recurring earnings power of our business.

AFFO for the quarter was approximately $103.5 million or $0.80 per diluted share reflecting continued growth in recurring option fee income on a higher average invested capital base. We are raising our end of year outlook. We currently anticipate AFFO in the range of $0.82 to $0.84 per share. This outlook reflects our expectations for the contribution of our existing portfolio recent capital deployment and the Dreamfinders acquisition, taking into account the timing of funding and the associated financing costs. Book value per share was $35.24 at quarter end. Management fee expense totaled $30.3 million calculated transparently at 1.25% of gross tangible assets.

Interest expense was approximately $47.1 million and income tax expense was approximately $4.9 million During the quarter, we declared our sixth consecutive quarterly dividend increase raising the quarterly dividend to $0.79 per share or approximately $131.2 million in the aggregate. The dividend remains fully covered by recurring AFFO. On the balance sheet, we ended the quarter with approximately $10.6 billion of total assets, and approximately $9.2 billion of invested capital. Our debt to capitalization ratio was approximately 36%. In September, we priced $1 billion of senior unsecured notes comprising $500 million aggregate principal amount of 6.5% notes due in 2029, and $500 million aggregate principal amounts of 6.75% notes due in 2031.

This financing strengthens our capital structure, enhances our financial flexibility, and positions us to support future growth opportunities while maintaining a disciplined approach to capital allocation. On October 20, we completed the transaction associated with Dreamfinder's acquisition of Beazer Homes. As Rob discussed, this included approximately $580 million of net land banking funding and $488 million of preferred instrument funding, including 171 million funded in September and the remaining $317 million funded at closing. As Darren outlined, we remain comfortable temporarily exceeding our 33% debt-to-capital-to-capital target when supported by duration and capital recycling characteristics of an acquired portfolio. Our financial priorities remain unchanged.

Providing ample liquidity preserving our credit profile while ensuring that we have the flexibility to support our existing counterparties and pursue attractive new opportunities with the financial flexibility to support our active deployment pipeline. Lastly, as Darren mentioned, subsequent to year end, our Board authorized the new $250 million share repurchase program reflecting our conviction in our book value and in the long term cash generating power of the platform. With that, I will turn the call back to Darren.

Darren L. Richman: Thank you, Garett. Let me close with a few thoughts. Our core business continues to perform remarkably well. Our contractual cash flows remain intact. Our counterparties continue to honor their commitments and our balance sheet remains strong. We are incredibly proud of what we have built and remain focused on being the capital provider that homebuilders can rely on, particularly during challenging market conditions. The Millrose business model was conceived in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. It was designed to be a permanent capital platform capable of not simply surviving but flourishing across market cycles. That philosophy remains central to everything we do. But resilience does not mean standing still.

While our business is in excellent shape today, we remain acutely aware of the forces shaping the housing market, particularly the impact of higher interest rates on affordability and homebuilder economics We believe our responsibility is to anticipate those challenges rather than wait for them to become problems. That may mean refining our existing strategies, developing new products or pursuing opportunities adjacent to our core business. It may also mean reconsidering how we allocate capital to maximize long term shareholder value. None of that represents a departure from our original mission. It reflects our commitment to making the business more durable, more adaptable, and more valuable over time. Our affordability initiative was born from that same philosophy.

We saw a growing problem facing our customers and prospective homebuyers. We began developing a potential solution. We continue to believe in that opportunity, even as we evaluate the most appropriate way to pursue it. We are not interested in managing Millrose simply for the conditions that exist today. We are building a business designed to succeed through the conditions we cannot yet predict. And we intend to remain proactive, disciplined, and thoughtful in doing so. With that, let's open it up to questions.

Operator: We will now begin the question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press *1 to raise your hand. To withdraw your question, press *1 again. We ask that you pick up your handset when asking a question to allow for optimum sound quality. If you are muted locally, please remember to unmute your device. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Your first question comes from the line of Julien Blouin with Goldman Sachs. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Julien Blouin: Hey. Thank you for taking the question. I just wanted to touch on the rental strategy. I just wanna get a sense of sort of how you are thinking about the path from here we think about it as for now, the program is paused as you sort of assess the returns on that program. And then in terms of what it takes to prove out those returns, I mean, I would imagine that you actually have to wait till this. The home is sold to a buyer on the back end since that will be know, an important determinant of the eventual returns on the program.

Darren L. Richman: Yeah. Julien, it is Darren. Thanks for the question. Just in short, the answer to your question is yes. This was meant to be a crawl, walk, run approach. Where we acquired communities, both scattered site, and built rent. And it is now comes down to observing the behavior, observing the rents, I will say that while it is early the feedback we are getting from renting these out is that the rental rates are pacing well above what we underwrote.

So the returns that Robert spoke to, it does look like they will ultimately be better I wanna correct 1 Notion because I think there is just tremendous confusion 1 notion I wanna correct is that this initial pilot program was not--I want to repeat, was not a rent to own pilot program. This was really about buying scattered site observing the rental rates observing the asset management, and getting feedback from the customer and the returns. And then the second element was traditional BTR. Again, what we are trying to do was understand leasing dynamics, resident retention, construction costs, It was.

This was a prerequisite to a program that we were also working on which was a rent to own program. And that program sat at the intersection of the for rent and for sale markets. And so that was gonna be more of a future state I just wanna be really clear. But to get to your original question, is, you know, you used the word pause. I would not disagree with that. But it was always meant to be and observe which is exactly the status we are in right now. Okay. Thank you. And then maybe just looking at leverage, it. I think you ended the quarter around 36%.

I think probably pro form a for DreamFinders-Beazer, will be, closer to 40% Does that feel like a good sort of sort of go forward level or should we think about potentially future takedown proceeds going towards paying down debt? that is exactly. It. it is gonna be using those proceeds to pay down debt. To get back to home around 33% debt to cap, because the reality is there is a lot more M&A out there in the marketplace. And so the operating posture for us could be to scale up in these moments where we can be a solution provider by moving quickly and constructing solutions to fit the needs of the of the acquisition target.

We can get paid more. You know, the returns are better and the underlying. Not just the returns from a headline option rate perspective, but also the credit enhancements we are able to get So the right posture for us would be to from time to time, scale up using leverage to do that. And then to reprioritize those cash flows as they come in to, repay debt. it is not just about serving the interest of the equity holders, but making sure sorry to interrupt, but making sure that we are also being true to the to the credit side of our balance sheet and to the rating agencies is a priority for us.

To move towards getting upgraded over time So we are trying to navigate both being a solution provider in the marketplace taking advantage opportunities when they come, but not becoming over reliant on debt to fuel our growth. Okay. Thank you very much. I will get back in the queue.

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Eric Wolfe with Citi. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Eric Wolfe: Hey. Thanks. So I think people might be just a little confused because, you know, in the prepared remarks, obviously, I understand the points you made about the SFI business. It did sound like you wanted to continue to grow that business. If that was my perception of it, your prepared remarks. But then a moment ago, it seemed like you said that the pause may be appropriate. So I am just trying to clarify you know, whether you are expecting to buy more homes in the near term above 330 million Or do you expect to keep the investment balance right at that, you know, for some time?

And then how long you think it is going to take to evaluate whether this business is what you thought it would be. Right? I mean, it seems like it takes beyond the lease up rate. You have to understand the NOI growth where you can sell the homes. So just trying to understand the specifics around how long you think it will take to evaluate it before you grow it again.

Robert Nitkin: Yeah. Thank you for the question, Eric. Yeah. So the point I think we are trying to make is that we really believe in the ultimate outcome of a program. But, again, the prerequisite is getting this in place and observing it. You know, just to clarify, the. This initial pilot, it is the 330 million basis of the SFR you mentioned. there is also an additional contract, but not yet closed. BTR, you know, communities portion of it that the laid out in all of the notes in the earnings presentation.

And so you may see some increases as a result of that But in terms of new contracting, you know, we are we are gonna continue to evaluate this because we just take, you know, the use of our capital seriously. Terms of making sure that in order to get to the place where we can credibly get a rent to own program in place that we really believe in, we gotta make sure that we can accretively operate a landlord, you know, rental housing business and observe all of the things that Darren mentioned. Yeah.

Darren L. Richman: 1. And, Eric, like, just to fill in. I mean, if you go to Page 16 in our deck, we pointed out the SFR assets relative to our asset base. To kinda highlight the absurdity of the focus on this. This is 1% of our assets. it is never gonna be a meaningful amount of our asset base. We pioneered land banking as an institutional product We extended into using it for wide scale m and a in the sector We extended it and pioneered using it for multifamily This was just another effort of thinking through capital as a tool to create an outcome It was never meant to be a pivot in our business.

And so I wanna be really clear. Like, no matter what we decide to do, this is gonna be an immaterial near meaningless amount of capital we use. I kind of equate it to if you were a chip company, designing computer chips, it would not be crazy to buy computers to see how those chips perform. And for us, yeah, we are we are we are land bankers. And we finance land, so we do not need to see how the house performs.

But understanding how the consumer interacts with the house, how the finance comes together, how the rent, how the asset management, helps us to inform potential solutions that we can create The goal of all of this is really not to be in this single family rental business. The goal of this was to reinforce our business with interest rates pressing through 5% on the 10-year, our business is intact and flourishing, but what happens at 6%, 7%, or 8%?

And so we wanted to make sure we were reinforcing our business today thinking through all the solutions available to the homebuilders we serve to make sure that there was no there was no backup in the system as interest rates. To the extent interest rates do continue to move higher. So it was a pilot program. It was meant it was it was exactly meant as that. We were gonna pause naturally to get feedback from it. But I will say 1 thing we are gonna add is speaking to our investors. Before we foreclose on any further action here. Right.

Eric Wolfe: And I guess that would be my second question because even if it is an immaterial sort of portion of your capital and earnings, having a material impact on your stock. So I guess sort of the question is, going forward, is there other things that you are considering Obviously, put the buyback in place, shareholder friendly. Thing. Are there other things that you are considering know, whether it is getting more feedback from the market or anything else to try to alleviate this sort of overhang that this has created on your stock?

Darren L. Richman: Yeah. And I appreciate that. Like, this was never meant to be a distraction. I think in most cases, if a if a company spent 1% of their assets, buying durable assets that have their own return I think most people would say, you know what? That makes total sense. In view of how this came out, this was not information, you know, we controlled. Do not want this to be a distraction. We do not want this to interfere with the good work that we have done to this point. We do not want this to distract, and that is why we spend so much time on talking about this. From the core business, which remains highly functioning.

I mean, here we are, a company that is taking up guidance yet again. Increasing the dividend, you know, yet again, And maybe on that point of dividend, so because I think our words are being parsed we are not looking to step back on the dividend quantum that we are paying out. So we may not on the 90/10, change the quantum of the payout we may just reprioritize the excess from the most recent quarter to stock buyback The other element, which is a bigger element to the buyback is really the lost priority capital right. As it relates to Lennar. Which could be quite meaningful.

And that is why we feel very comfortable with the $250 million program to start. Because if you thought. If you think just 10% of our dividend is about $50 million a year, that would carve out in the $250 million. But the more meaningful buyback is gonna be related to the lost capital priority. Right? So I think. I actually think that is a really good statement. By itself and should not be lost. That here we are willing to use Lennar Capital to the extent it is lost. For the benefit of buying back shares It shrinks our balance sheet. It shrinks the management fees to Kennedy Lewis.

But it is definitely in the in the best interest of our shareholders. Thanks. I am gonna That makes sense, Eric? Back in queue as well. Thank you. Yes. Understood. I am gonna let the others ask, and I will I will get back in queue. Thank you.

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Craig Kucera with B. Riley Securities. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Craig Kucera: Yeah. Hey. Good morning, guys. I appreciated the last comments on the dividend, you kind of want to circle back to the commentary Are you saying that you are basically going to reset the dividend to something like a 90% AFFO payout ratio with the remainder to buy back stock or is this 90% of taxable income for the REIT rules, and how does taxable income compare to AFFO?

Darren L. Richman: I think, really, what we are saying, Craig, is that are gonna preserve the optionality. it is not it is not our. We are not we are not stepping back. We do not wanna do any harm to the stock price. So if we are we are not looking to cut the dividend. What we are really saying is that the growth beyond the dividend we are paying out this quarter is visible to us. I think, you know, you will see it. We obviously raised guidance So the excess beyond the quantum we are paying out today would be used for the dividend for the share repurchase. Does that make sense? Okay. that is that is yes. It does.

It does make sense. This is this is meant to be a positive, not a negative. And not meant to be viewed as a cut in a dividend. But an end Not an or, but an end. We are gonna continue to pay out at the level we are paying out and we are gonna do a buyback on the incremental. Right. No. I appreciate that. it is the clarity. The market kinda sold off. When you were doing your commentary on the dividend, I think. So that is helpful. You know, in the past, you spent a bit more time talking about the housing market.

It appears optically that some builders are seeing some firming marginal improvement in gross margin, maybe lower volume. I am just curious as how you are, you know, characterizing you are seeing in the market today and are any watch list negative markets that have popped up?

Craig Kucera: Greg, I, I thank you for asking about our core business.

Darren L. Richman: Because that is exactly what we would like to talk about. it is it is, it is actually very interesting. Obviously, with rates moving up through 5% on the 10-year, has put renewed pressure on affordability I think you have you have heard other builders talk about commentary recently about you know, the business maybe searching for a new bottom. But, fundamentally, the market is in a much better condition than I think many spectators would either believe or understand. If you look at, like, single families, like, the. And we talked about this in the last few calls about a recalibration. Back to pre COVID levels in terms of sales. Per community per month.

And if you look at just the recalibration that is taken place in the market, you know, starts peak. Single family starts peaked in December 2020. Are off about 30% New home sales peaked in October 2020 and are off about 34%. The reason why I bring that up is because there is been kind of a fundamental retracement of production to meet demand And inventories themselves, single family inventories have come down as well.

And so what we are seeing is on the margin, builders coming into us to buy more land, And if we were holding this call or had the same question as of June 30, would have said that same store sales, even though we do not record it as that or report it as that, would have been down year on year, meaning less build or our builder customers were looking to buy less land. And put less land in service. So we grew through 36 because we had more customers, and because of M&A. But if we were just looking on a same store basis, we would have seen a downtrend in purchases.

Well, we are now seeing a renewed level of interest on the part of our builder clients to reload their land portfolios. So fundamentally, that supports the view that you are about where margins have largely troughed. Again, you know, with this more recent you know, interest rate spike, I think that is creating some challenges. But I think net, margins have started to stabilize in the industry. Okay. that is helpful.

Craig Kucera: Can you talk about what is baked in the fourth quarter guidance regarding third party investment outside of the DreamFinders transaction?

Robert Nitkin: Yeah. Sure. I am happy to. it is Robert. The majority is the impact of DreamFinders-Beazer obviously, which hits in about halfway October 20, that closed halfway through the fourth quarter. So the vast majority is growth through that and all of the returns that we are quite pleased with as we discussed. And then there is an additional, you know, smaller amount of just regular normal course other agreements growth. But vast majority of that number is just driven by the economics on know, half a quarter of DreamFinders-Beazer. And I hate to I hate to bring this up, but it is gonna be asked.

Any friction from the rental assets that we bought are also baked into our guidance. Yeah. I will also just add 1 thing, which is that, you know, that I spoke about in the prepared remarks. That the average yield you know, was 10. On that other agreement spot was 10.6 last quarter. 10.8 this quarter, and we expect that increase to continue into the fourth quarter like I talked about And that is not just, you know, SOFR and rising base rates, which it is rising. that is also just you know, higher yields overall, driven by the deals we have done, including Dreamfinder's Visa in the fourth quarter.

So sort of core margin is increasing and improving as well as the base rates.

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Ryan Gilbert with BTIG. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Ryan Gilbert: Hi. Thanks. Good morning, guys. I guess just, you know, first 1 on the on the change in dividend policy, and I appreciate all the additional color. That you have provided in the Q and A because I think it was a little confusing at first. But if I just get to, you know, your current dividend of $0.79, you know, divide that by 90%, that would get me to, like, around $0.88 of AFFO or distributable income per share? Is that kind of like, what you have got visibility into?

Darren L. Richman: Yeah. What if we are we are not giving guidance like that. I think what the point is the dividend payout or any change to it would be made opportunistically And so we are just trying to communicate a flexibility not trying to suggest there is an extrapolation into some earnings profile that were back-ending into it.

Robert Nitkin: Yeah. We are we are our core earnings metric. You know, our core metric in KPI was and is earnings per share and AFFO per share and so to the. As earnings grow, we are giving ourselves the optionality to use our capital most accretively as possible to drive our share, and that may be buying back shares, you know, with an appropriate amount. It may be rotation of some of the assets, Lennar or otherwise, like Darren alluded to, into share buybacks. And ultimately, there was a question about SFR and how we think about proving it out. Our cost of capital maps and is a driver to how we think about allocation going forward.

And we have to take into account what the market is telling us, our bondholders, our shareholders are telling in terms of our cost of capital, and the use of that capital. And so by this share buyback approval, we now have the flexibility to use the capital that is as accretive as possible given the share price and given the opportunities in front of us in any asset class. Yeah.

Darren L. Richman: Like, we may not direct any monies from the dividend. To share buyback. And it may all come from lost priority capital. Okay. Got it.

Ryan Gilbert: And, yeah, and just on that point, how much Priority Capital has been freed up so far? I mean, the amount of capital in the master program agreement has come down, but how much of that is available or, I guess, is unrestricted?

Darren L. Richman: Yeah. I would rather not give you a number because, you know, the. it is still fluid. You will note. I think it is on Page 8 that the Lennar agreement know, the amounts under the priority agreement have continued to come down. And so we feel very comfortable about the $250 million target buyback So without giving any specific numbers, I will tell you we feel very comfortable about the $250 million targeted buyback. Okay. Got it.

Ryan Gilbert: And then on the SFR program, the 5% going-in cap rate, I think we typically associate going in with in place NOI, but my understanding is that these properties were acquired vacant. Is that is that the case? And if it is, when do you think that. I guess, what is the timeline for achieving that underwritten stabilized NOI yield?

Robert Nitkin: Yeah. I apologize if the comments were unclear. That is a. An as rented yield based on the initial you know, rent projected to be in place, that yield. And projecting, you know, roughly 6 months until we get that portfolio rented. But our guidance includes the friction. Of carrying these homes. Exactly. Yeah.

Darren L. Richman: The mat. The maximum friction will be in the fourth quarter, is included in the guidance we gave. And know, again, we have a projection. We have an underwriting, but we are gonna evaluate it and gonna evaluate the pace of leasing, the rate of leasing, how accretive it is, and, you know, how our cost of capital reacts. To what we are doing. All those will be inputs into anything we do going forward to the extent we do.

Ryan Gilbert: Okay. Got it. And then what was the underwritten NOI margin? Yeah. We are we are gonna keep it to the metrics we have given so far. We are happy to continue to report going forward as the portfolio stabilizes. Okay. Got it. Yeah. I just. I would. I asked because the, you know, the 5% cap rate is basically right on top of the interest rate that you are financing the portfolio with. Okay. I will jump back in the queue. Thanks.

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Eric Wolfe with Citi. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Eric Wolfe: Thanks. Just to some other small ones on the rental program. Sorry to focus on it, wanna make sure people get their questions answered. You mentioned that the initial rental rates were coming out higher than you had underwritten leased so far. So I was curious sort of what percent of the sort of initial portfolio of know, over 1.2 thousand homes have been rented thus far? And if you could just give a bit more detail on sort of where you are seeing rental rates to what you underwrote.

Darren L. Richman: We are we are. I think there is been about 10% of the of it rented. It is scaling. So, like, every day, there is a wave of more rentals coming through. So as of yesterday, I think it was about 10% and I think we are pacing up about 10% above what we underwrote from a rent perspective. And the other thing I would say about the value of the homes we bought, and I think it is pretty well laid out on Page 16. The.

What I would note is that the kind of discounted nature of the average purchase price per home and that includes all capitalized costs And if you compare that number, the $280 thousand a home, that compares pretty closely with where Invitation Homes trades at. At current value per home. So, like, we know we bought these right. And we know they are leasing well. It was. The goal of this was to not lose money during this experiment process. And we thought we would make money.

Again, it. it is a pilot program, and it was in the lab as an experiment and it was. there is a lot of learnings that we get as a company that far outweigh necessary the total return associated with these homes. Got it.

Eric Wolfe: And then, I guess, the speaking of, I guess, the total return, I guess, I look at your core business, you know, you sort of have, 10.5 to sort of 11% unlevered, you know, yield. Know, sort of fixed. Right? So that presumably around the total return you get, see if there is no credit loss. You think that the SFR business would ever be able to get up to that? I guess I am just trying to figure out if you are starting at around a 5% yield. Right? You need pretty high growth or, you know, an increase in the home price to sort of get to that same level of unlevered returns.

So just curious how you are thinking about it for the initial portfolio of 330 million. That total return profile.

Darren L. Richman: Eric, Yeah. Eric, I think both Robert and I are chomping to answer this. I think it is it is demonstrably cheaper to rent a home today than it is to buy I think, the rental inflation that, we are seeing across again, we have access to proprietary data sources is higher than what the market is anticipating. I think they are independent consulting groups that have their own expectations. So I think I think the answer is yes. We do expect we can see a world where these returns pace to the returns, if not better.

Now the point is, the goal of this was not to try to make outsized returns on a rental product The goal of this was to reinforce and pressure test our business assuming rates continue to move higher through 6%, 7%, and 8%, And are there things we could do today to reinforce our business And we thought about it much more on an open architecture that the learnings that we are gaining can be shared.

Remember, Kennedy Lewis, we have we have access to hundreds of blue chip LPs So the learnings we get were really meant to be informative to the entire market to try and drive capital into elements of the business that right now are kind of capital constrained. Do you do you understand? Like. So we were trying to do no harm on 1 side, but make sure that we were this is sort of a risk management tool as we look out into the future. I understand. Like, I guess, obviously, the you know, the like, I. Who knows exactly why that stock does what it does?

But at the end of the day, I do think that people are concerned a bit about you know, a perceived conflict of interest with your largest know, counterparty or customer. I guess, you maybe talk about how much of the initial capital that was initially spun off that you have already been taken down by Lennar? And then, I guess, just any you know, thoughts on going forward the relationship there? Because I think the concern is that you know, if this was perceived to be, you know, driven by Lennar, are there other things like a pause or some other things that they are going to be taking you know, that could be more material. Right?

So this is an immaterial transaction. Because there would be something that is more material. So maybe just talk about, you know, the initial spin how much they have taken down thus far, the underwriting, the last year and a half, and anything else you can say about the relationship with Lennar. Yeah. No. I think those are I think those are good questions they get to the heart of the matter. So we are we are not upset about answering them at all. Our relationship with Lennar is I think, is great. I mean, Lennar to us is 22 different counterparties that we deal with.

Our relationship with everybody we serve, including Dreamfinders, and the acquisition of Beezer, I mean, we are. We really are. We. We have become a very trusted partner to many of the builders out there and I would I would go as far back as the group at B. Riley as well. In their purchase of Landsea. Like, you learn very intimate details about the strategy of a company when you are working side by side. On an acquisition of another company. Now in terms of Lennar pushing us into something, that is just categorically not true.

We maintain a very good relationship, but it is completely commercial and arm's length. it is backed up by the credit enhancements that we have in place with Lennar not only the deposit that we have, and the takedown schedules but the pooling that we have with them. We can spend as much time or as little time as you want on that. Now in terms of Lennar pushing us to do something because we were afraid of a pause, it is it is kind of kind of a ridiculous notion, and I do not mean to be I am not being critical of the question you asked. We have about $6 billion of assets with Lennar.

The build out cost is about another $4 billion. And these are round numbers, so do not directionally add this correct, but they are not I am sure they are not audibly correct. So let's say that $10 billion of land value with development it is 2:1 need to go vertical versus land. So that is like $30 billion of land and home it would take to construct the entire portfolio turn them into houses, and that does not include margin. Do you really think we were trying to avoid $30 billion by buying net a $100 million of homes.

I mean, it is like it. it is it is an incredibly bankrupt notion it is like trying to stop the flow of a river with a sponge. So, like, it. it is so far fetched of, like, us trying to prevent them from some behavior that is their unilateral right. If they wanna pause, they have. They could come to us and say, hey. We paused. So there is no there is no funny business that is happening between us and them where we are trying to get in front of some bad thing that was trying to happen to us.

I understand the notion of, like, how that became corrupted in the Twitter sphere and in the investment community. But it could not be any further from the truth. We undertook this pilot program because we were really working on an affordability solution, something that we have talked about very openly and honestly for the last year. Affordability is not a new phenomenon. And so it is very important that everybody in the industry make some investment intellectually or otherwise, in trying to find a solution to a very complex societal problem. And so this was not us being pushed into something This was not Lennar's forcing us or forcing our hand.

This was done on an arm's length basis We have been working with Lennar, I would say, with them for about a year on affordability program. We have not been bashful about saying that publicly and privately. So it made sense as part of that for us to have bought these homes and the price that we were offered made sense to us. We vetted it through the board. We hired a tier 1 investment bank who also spoke to our board on this on this opportunity. And so we are we are comfortable in the light of day that what we did was right. If I had to do it over again, I do it exactly the same way.

Robert Nitkin: And just, you know, some of your questions, like, I think, allude to, you know, how do we feel about the quality of our current portfolio, the spin assets, etcetera, you know, I would just say in line with what Darren said, like, everything has continued to perform. And, you know, we have heard across the industry that land prices are sticky We are seeing the power we have in the value chain which is 1 of the reasons we believe we have not had any terminations.

The stickiness of land in general, and ultimately, you know, particularly net of all of the deposits that we hold, we continue to feel really good about the value that we have not the least of which because we fairly often have builders come into us looking to find deals on land asking proactively you have any builders trying to renegotiate? You know, we would love to talk to you about that, and we have not had an opportunity to do that yet.

But, again, like, builders that we do business with, large builders, top-15 builders that we do not do business with come into us all the time and ask, you know, is there an opportunity for us to come in and take a position in some land that somebody else is trying to renegotiate? And that to us just speaks to the quality of land as a nondepreciating value holding option on home prices. No maturity, 1 of the reasons we like it. Plus it is impossible to get land approved for development. Like. And, you know, if we trace this back to the financial crisis, there were there were very few land light builders We could we could name them.

And they were looking to buy land on immersion basis even in the financial crisis. Today, we have 22 clients at Millrose. All of whom build on a land light basis. So if we did end up with land, we feel very good about our basis, our underwriting, the deposits we have, the credit enhancements associated with it, that we feel like the land we own will be asset protected. And that is the same reason why we cycled through $800 million of our land in the last quarter. Without a client, looking to terminate or renegotiate. In the ordinary course of business. And that is where the visibility is going into the fourth quarter.

And the first quarter of next year. Is that we expect that our land will be taken down in the ordinary course on the schedule as it is been outlined. Got it. Thank you. that is helpful.

Operator: There are no further at this time. I will now turn the call back to Darren L. Richman, CEO and president for closing remarks.

Darren L. Richman: Yeah. Look. I wanna thank for their time today, the endurance of this call. Went much longer than what we normally do. I thank everybody for the questions that were asked. We are available and will be available as a management team to continue to answer questions. Today and over the coming weeks. We were in a quiet period and could not respond. Appropriately. But we do plan to make ourselves available to clarify any of the errors or omissions misstatements that we have made or to correct any on the part of others.

Thank you again for your time and particularly thank you to all the shareholders who came into us with notions of goodwill over the last couple weeks. We really appreciate it.

Operator: This concludes today's call. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect.

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