Seven Hills Realty Trust (SEVN) June 2, 2026 Capital Markets Day Transcript

Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining our fireside chat today featuring Seven Hills Realty Trust. My name is Marissa Lobo, Mortgage Reit Analyst at UBS. We're pleased to cover Seven Hills at UBS along with 22 other companies across the residential and commercial mortgage rate sector. So Seven originates and invests in first lien mortgage loans secured by middle market and transitional real estate. The company is managed by an investment advisor, Tremont Realty Capital LLC. Tremont's a wholly owned subsidiary of the RMR Group, which is an alternative asset management company founded in 1986 that manages approximately $37 billion in assets. Today I'm joined by Tom Lorenzini, President and CIO, and Jared Lewis, Vice President of Seven Hills Realty Trust. Thank you so much for speaking with us today. So maybe for those who are new to the story, Tom, can you provide a brief overview of the Seven Platform, your investment strategy, how you're positioned for the current CRE lending environment?

Thanks, Marissa. And welcome, everybody, to our presentation today. Glad to see so many in attendance. So as Marissa just mentioned, Seven Hills is managed by Tremont Ruralty Capital, subsidiary of the RMR Group. We are based in Boston, suburban Boston in Newton, Mass. We are a sector-specific provider of capital, so we are providing senior-secured floating-rate mortgages across the middle market, which is where we focus. We define the middle markets as asset values between $25 to $100 million, dollars and then we provide credit provides senior secured loans in the range of 25 to 75 million dollars across all types of commercial real estate Seven Hills and Tremont Realty Capital we're 100% vertically integrated meaning that we are originating the loans ourselves through art through our team in-house capabilities for underwriting in-house asset management closing and then ongoing loan surveillance. All the loans sit on our balance sheet, and we take a very proactive approach in managing our assets. We are not a securitized lender, 100% balance sheet execution. The firm itself solely invests in and creates first mortgage loans. We are not a buyer of securities. We're not a buyer of real estate for our portfolio. Again, narrowly focus solely on commercial commercial credit we provide a financial loan that is generally it's flexible for our borrowers our borrowers are seeking flexibility to execute on a business plan or maybe there's a value add component typically to it it's generally going to be an acquisition loan and they're looking for flexible capital if they can repay in two to three years upon effectuating their business plan and that business plan might be the improvement of a multifamily asset where they're going to turn the units invest and invest in new interiors there and push the rents it could be a hotel that's going through a PIP or a property improvement plan could be the lease up of industrial asset it could be the lease up of a self-storage asset anything really along those lines where kind of there's a value creation that we're lending into and then they will exit the transaction or exit the investment through either refinance or a or a sale as far as uh tremont really capital one of the one of the things that's important here that we are very aligned with shareholders and our inside seven hills we own 20 of the stock between the management company and other insiders at the firm so our interests are are significantly aligned with uh with shareholders from that from that perspective great that's helpful context thank you maybe stepping back to the broader market environment

Jared. How would you frame the current CRE lending environment today, particularly in light of the volatility, geopolitical, tariff uncertainty? How is that impacting your transaction activity in the middle market?

Sure. So I will say it's very competitive. I think one of the things that we've seen is that there's a significant amount of debt liquidity in the market today from a lot of different sources of capital. So we certainly have our brethren and the peers in the mortgage REIT sector, but there's capital available from debt funds today. Life companies and insurance companies have new allocations at the beginning of the year that they need to get through. You still have a significant amount of capital being deployed by the agencies, the GSEs, and now the banks are back. And so I think that a lot of the banking issues that we in the market experienced a year, two years ago, a lot of those banks, regional banks in particular, have kind of taken their lumps, and their risk capital is a little bit more, I wouldn't use the term loose, but they've got capital to deploy back into real estate. So we're seeing competitive, you know, pressures from the reintroduction of, like, the regional and local banks that tend to play in our middle market sector. um what i will say with respect to you know rates volatility in the markets and the like um you know that has not really bled through or impacted the underlying performance of the collateral set that we're sort of looking at yet right like a year a year year and a half ago we had issues with uh or potential issues uh from you know tariffs and some of the trade wars and issues that we were experiencing we had expected to see you know some demand and supply pressures on commercial real estate and underlying fundamentals, but, you know, we haven't seen that yet as a result of sort of the issues in the Middle East and the war. It's really been a capital markets issue and a financing issue. And so despite the volatility of rates, I mean, the 10-year Treasury went from, you know, low 4.25-ish range to 4.60 in a matter of, you know, weeks. It's sort of settled back down now, but really what that does is it just causes borrowers and owners and even acquirers of real estate to really rethink sort of how they're going to capitalize their deals. It makes it much harder to underwrite the endgame, as it were, sort of how a loan, as Tom mentioned, you know, the loans that we make, they're value-add in nature, they're bridging from point A to point B. And so we generally want to look at what the prospects are for refinancing an asset are at the end of a two- or three-year period. And with that rate volatility, it's just been a little bit more challenging. But that's not to say that, you know, there aren't deals that are, you know, to be done. With respect to volume, the one thing that I would say is that the interest rate volatility, because of the fact that it's tough for investors to, you know, make heads or tails of where markets are going to be two, three years from now, given the volatility, acquisitions have slowed over the last few months, I think. We've really experienced that. The majority of our pipeline right now, I would say 70% to 75% of it are for refinance requests. particularly in the multifamily sector so there's there's definitely a demand for capital there are borrowers and owners that need to refinance debt we've all heard about it we talk about it all the time there's a lot of maturities there's a lot of debt that needs to be recycled through the system in the next two three years so those opportunities are out there it's just that I think because of the issues and you know global uncertainty and the like we've started to see acquisitions slow down just a little bit but that's not to say that it won't come back once things sort of settle down a little bit more.

Got it. And building on that, as the competition shifts and, you know, there's hesitation in the marketplace, can you talk about the benefits of the RMR platform? You know, how is that helping seven source opportunities, underwrite deals, and navigate different points of the cycle?

So I think the one benefit, given the platform that kind of supports us, is the fact that, you know, we're kind of agnostic to both geography and product type you know we look in source opportunities across all real estate sectors for the most part we look at mobile we'll look at multi-family obviously industrial retail hospitality on a case-by-case basis retail for sure and so all those property sectors are our sectors or areas and asset classes that you know are that our manager have experience in and have assets in and taking it a step further you know we have the ability to underwrite markets locally as opposed to just from a macro perspective and so given the the breadth of the platform and the amount of offices we have and boots on the ground we have across the country our geographic dispersion is pretty wide and so you know we can underwrite assets in markets that we either own property in or a parent company owns or that we've got experience in and i think that helps us really take a rifle shot approach to the business as opposed to a shotgun approach where we're not making sort of sector or macro decisions on where to deploy capital. We're looking at interesting opportunities with borrowers, sponsors that have stories that they need to finance with collateral that we feel really good about our basis in. So that's how effectively we're approaching the market today. There's opportunities everywhere because there's a lot of deals that need to be refinanced.

So, you know, we're not too worried about being able to find good opportunities from that perspective especially with the the elevated liquidity from your recent repayments and the proceeds from your rights offering you know how are you thinking about the balance sheet side leverage funding capacity and and capital deployment here so if not everybody everyone's not aware we did do a rights offering in December so we increased our float by about seven and a half million shares, raised $61 million of fresh equity for the firm, which we then are able to, through leverage, increase capacity by about $220 million worth of capacity to invest in the new opportunities. Year-to-date, I think we've got $100 million of repayments that have occurred. We anticipate probably another $100 million in repayments across three assets prior to the end of the year, most of which will be towards the end of the fourth quarter. So we have capacity within the system. From a leverage standpoint, we're currently quite under levered. I mean, we're 1.4 times. The goal here really is to get that probably over to two. But we have been, to date, we've maintained a pretty conservative balance sheet just kind of as we waited for kind of to work through some of the issues that were, you know, it's kind of happened on a macro basis with commercial real estate. so the for um jared had mentioned that i mean we're we've got we're seeing plenty of opportunities to put the capital out um so we remain very diligent in how we're looking at things um and adding across you know our portfolio right now is really quite diversified i mean we're you know it's between hotels office and industrial those are each almost 20 percent um you know multi-family student housing, medical office, mixed use and self-storage so there's a there's a breadth of products that we're lending on and and we will continue to do to maintain that maintain that diversity across product product property type as well as geography we're pretty well diversified across the country from an asset perspective from a capital from a liquidity perspective and funding capacity you know we've got four facilities currently um with uh with ubs with city with bmo and uh and wells fargo we have more than and we purposely expanded those and extended those with the rights offering or in conjunction with the rights offering to put us in a better position really to have excess capacity um so that we're able to take advantage of the uh the opportunities that we're seeing in the marketplace. So the year end, I mean, we're anticipating that we should probably net another $200-plus million of net originations or net portfolio growth towards the end of the year.

That's great. And speaking of the portfolio and turning to the office portfolio specifically, you've emphasized, you know, the book is performing, office exposure is largely concentrated in suburban markets, no new originations there but you know we see risk grades skewed towards threes and fours so how should we think about that and how are you thinking about the resolution path is it relying on fundamentals or you know take out options our office portfolio so there's five office loans four are rated a four and I think one is one is rated a three right now five being I guess the highest rating i.e. the worst rating one being the best all about all the office loans

are performing all of the office properties themselves are are occupied to the 80% or better all of the loans are covering their their debt service we do have some maturities coming up this year we will be working with those sponsors ideally the exit on the office loans really is most likely a sale in most cases one to two of them could potentially qualify for a refinance the others I think that the operators are looking at I'm saying they're probably going to be a via sale and while they we did just get repaid a couple weeks ago on one in outside in suburban Chicago where that sponsor was able to go to their to a bank and refinance us out so we were able to further lower our exposure to the office like I said I think we're just under 20 percent right now and we're fortunate in our portfolio with our sponsors our sponsors have continuously stepped up to support their assets and because they're well leased and this really kind of comes back I think part to how we look at the business and how we underwrite the business because our borrowers in all these cases generally are have institutional equity partners with them not heavily syndicated positions in these loans so they've got you know they have skin in the game, this means something to them. They don't take likely that they're going to get back an asset. And that really kind of comes down to knowing who your borrower is and who your sponsor is in these transactions and lending to the appropriate people.

Okay, great. And now shifting to multifamily, clearly there's a lot of capital flowing there today. Are you seeing any divergence between the headline fundamentals and asset level performance, particularly for newer vintages where, you know, we're hearing of concessions and lease-up pressure. So, yeah, anything?

Yeah, I mean, I think it's not a secret. I mean, that's the lion's share of the financing activity that's occurred in the last two, three years has been in the multifamily space, and I think rightly so. There's definitely a home ownership affordability challenge in this country, and given where rates were two, three years ago, is, you know, there was easy money to be able to buy, build, and renovate apartments. I mean, I think a lot of areas of the country are still sort of licking their wounds, so to speak, over the new supply issues. We've seen it. A lot of the pipeline of loan opportunities that we're seeing are for newer vintage, you know, construction assets coming off construction loans where borrowers have not necessarily hit the occupancy level that they need to hit. You still see concessions in markets, and you're still seeing in certain areas, not necessarily for newer construction, but you're seeing, you know, bad debt run itself through the system, depending on what sub-market you're in. That being said, as I mentioned, I mean, it's still the most liquid sector in the commercial real estate market. It'll always have an implied, somewhat of an implied guarantee from the U.S. government. You've got lots of different sources of capital to finance and refinance multifamily projects. So just to level set, I think that's the reason you're seeing so much fervor in that business and lenders are leaning in on that. What I will say is because of the competition to aggregate multifamily loans to sell into the securitized market, particularly in the CLO market, it gets really competitive and margins are grinding down very, very low. And I think for us, we certainly pick our spots. We look at opportunities to be able to lend into markets or sub-markets where we think that there's an attractive risk-reward for our cost of capital and we're getting paid appropriate for it. So I think the average credit spread you'd see on a commodity multifamily value-add three-year loan today is somewhere in the $250-ish range. So for $250, $265-ish probably. um you know so and that's for you know nominal leverage 65 70 percent leverage and so we'll look at sub markets and and the stories in certain areas where we might be able to push leverage a little bit or buy into a story where a borrower has a particular expertise or particular knowledge about an asset that you know we'll lend into so that that's how we're getting our multifamily exposure um and i think that's what we're seeing is that you know we're not going to deploy we We have a couple hundred million dollars of capital to deploy right now. We're not going to put it all into multifamily. We don't need to, nor do we want to, but we'll find good opportunities to generate the appropriate yield in that sector.

And staying on originations, you've seen some attractive spread so far in 2026. So what's been driving that increase?

I think it's a combination of, you know, we have a great origination staff, firstly. We have a team of professionals that are out, you know, have great relationships with mortgage bankers, with borrowers. And so we see a lot of deal flow, and we continuously churn the pipeline. And, again, we're not making sector bets and not deploying, you know, $2 billion or a billion, you know, of capital into any one asset type or project. We're looking to be really thoughtful about where we can maybe generate an outsized return to solve a problem for a borrower or lean in on an asset that we have a particular knowledge of. I'll just give you an example. We closed a multifamily loan in greater Atlanta just last week, and that was a deal that we probably pushed the leverage a little bit on that. But we've got a large multifamily operation at the RMR Group, and that asset happened to be a property in a sub-market that we had strong conviction in. We understood the history of that sub-market and really understood the borrower's business plan going forward. And so it was a deal that we were able to lean in on and provide a loan to a borrower, maybe a little bit higher leverage than others were willing to do. But we felt really good, strong conviction about it just because of our local market intel. So those are some of the examples or ways in which we've been able to get some spread. But then alternatively, outside of the multifamily sector, we're doing deals in the medical office sector, self-storage, a little bit of industrial, retail, hospitality on a case-by-case basis. And the margins and spreads for those asset classes are just generally wider than you would see for multifamily. Other lenders that we compete with aren't necessarily hunting in those grounds as much as we are. And so we're happy to do those deals because they're, I think, really attractive opportunities.

What I would add to that, too, and just to follow up on Jared's comment with the deal we just closed, because at the RMR level, we own all those assets, right? So if there's a situation where we were ever to have to take back an asset, we can certainly run the asset. And I think that's an important feature or fact for our platform that we have all those capabilities in-house versus you might see a debt fund or somebody else that really doesn't have the ability to operate the real estate should they ever have to take it back and they have to bring in somebody else to manage it and the receivers, et cetera, et cetera. And we can do all those things internally as a way to help protect shareholder value.

And it helps from an underwriting perspective too because you almost have too much knowledge as an operator because you might look at a market or look at a deal and there may be a history there of something that our team has owned and it may be a reason for us to move away from a transaction as much as it is to move into a transaction. And the only other thing I would say, Marissa, to your point about margins and how we're generating returns is, you know, our lending partners have been extremely helpful to us. I mean, you know, spreads have tightened. All of our bankers have been very supportive of our business. And, again, because we've got such a good relationship with them, we've been able to really drive down our borrowing costs, I think, as well. So we're creating a little bit more spread that way as well. So working with our bankers and our warehouse lines of credit to try to find the right fit for each of the loans that we're financing.

And I think it's important to turn to credit. It's a big feature of most of the evaluation in the sector now. But you've demonstrated very strong performance over time, no defaults, one REO. Can you speak to that, you know, how that consistency was achieved? And, you know, what's your broader approach to asset management through the cycle?

Yeah, and I think I may have jumped on the answer just a minute ago when I started talking about it, so apologies for that. But, right, I think because of the fact that we believe we're able to make better informed decisions given the data that we have within our broader platform. If we're looking at a hotel transaction, as the RMR, one of the equity REITs that we manage, we own over 100 hotels. Plus, on the private side, we own another 1,000 franchised hotels. So we've got great data in the hotel sector, right? So if we're looking at an asset, we're able to get real-time data as to what's happening in that market. I can do the same thing for multifamily. I can do that for industrial. We can certainly do that for senior housing. We can do that for medical office because we have all that data inside the ecosystem. So that's been a tremendous advantage to us, and that has helped, in my opinion, make better decisions, which is going to help minimize losses, right? and then we've also had the asset management that we do in-house internally we're not relying on a third-party servicer so we're getting the data direct from the sponsor so it's very real time it's monthly so we're able to see very quickly if there is an issue that's developing maybe something that we need to be concerned about that you know as we start tracking the financials and we so we're seeing the leasing activity reports on these properties etc helps us get ahead of things and so that we can work with so that we can work with the sponsor we did take back one REO a couple years ago in office building it's performing it's adding to our distributable earnings every quarter we will eventually dispose of the asset it's 82 percent leased right now they've had leasing activity it's a suburban Philly but you know what we're able to we were able to put that into our system and manage that internally which again I think was a terrific way to minimize minimize disruption one for the tenants of the building maintain the value and also just again protect the shareholder here.

And I think just adding on to how we're underwriting or structuring our deals is a lot of these loans are sort of bespoke business terms for a particular business plan and Tom talked about our borrowing base or our borrowers earlier and almost all of our loans, while they're non-recourse and this is a non-principle recourse type lending platform, we do have certain caveats in addition to bad boy carve-outs, we'll have borrower guarantees to replenish debt service reserves if necessary. We've got certain cash sweep triggers that are implemented into these loans that are kind of early warning signs whenever a deal kind of goes weary or goes off the tracks, not off the tracks, but if it starts to kind of lean in one direction that we have early warning signs and abilities in the loan documents for us to be able to kind of put things back on track. So I think that's a benefit of sort of the bridge lending world that we're in is that we can be really thoughtful about how to structure loan to protect the investment and our basis in the transaction. And our asset managers, just to add on to that, our asset managers are working throughout the diligence process and the loan closing process to work with the underlying owner, operator, borrower, and they develop a great rapport. And so, again, we're hands-on. This is our borrowers are our customers at the end of the day, and so we develop a decent rapport with them to help make sure that the business plan and the ability for the collaterals business plan to perform is at its best. So I just think that's kind of a white-glove thing that I think we try to pride ourselves on. So I think that's certainly helpful when it comes to credit.

Thanks for that. And, of course, we have to talk about the dividend. On Q1 call, you noted plans to maintain the $0.28 dividend at least through year-end, despite some near-term under-earning, with your expectation to returning to full coverage by year-end. So how should investors think about the trajectory of earnings growth?

Yeah, so, correct. We have indicated support for the 28 cents dividend through the end of the year. You know, right now we're, because of the rights offering and adding the additional $7.5 million of shares, right, we had some dilution from that perspective to earnings. So I'll think about it a little bit like a hockey stick, if you will. Our anticipation is that at year end we should be in a position where this is a covered dividend at that point. As I mentioned earlier, the net portfolio growth should be about $200 million, so it should bring us about $950 million of AUM, of loans on the books, which will get us, which will cover that dividend. And then going forward, we've got a handful of under-levered assets, some of which is the office assets and some industrial assets, that as those things turn over the next year or two, that will free up additional capital for us to invest. that will, again, further drive an increase in DE, further providing additional coverage to that dividend.

Okay, great. And just to close real quick, you know, what feedback are you hearing from investors today? And, you know, what elements of the story do you think are still, you know, underappreciated by the market?

I think we get painted with the same brush that a lot of other mortgage REITs that may have had significant office problems. And we kind of get lumped into that. I think there's also a little bit where the REIT sector itself or the credit sector is also getting lumped in with kind of this private credit, right, which we're just, you know, we are obviously very, we're senior secured positions, we're not taking, we're not lending the software companies, et cetera, like that. It's purely to a hard asset, which has value in the instance of a, if you have to take it back or whatnot. So I think there's some of that. We're also of a size where I think there's a little bit of, the float is not as robust as we would like part of the reason we did the rights offering was to get more float out there but I think that given the size of the firm that also has been somewhat of a restriction on certain on certain investors there you know we've got we're trading at about a 40% discount so you know we'd like the ideally we want to close that gap and really get back to the common markets at some point in our future to further grow the business because this is a growth story. Again, with the portfolio performing as it is, with the capital that we have to invest, you know, I think this is a terrific growth opportunity for our investor base right Great.

We have just a couple of minutes. I'd like to open up for any Q&A. Does anybody have any questions for Tom? Go ahead.

The loans themselves generally, from a loan term perspective, typically a five-year investment. Typically, it's three years with two extension options subject to the sponsor meeting certain extension criteria, but pricing will vary quite a bit, right? I mean, multifamily would typically be the tightest pricing, tightest spread. Hospitality is on kind of the other end of that spectrum, and then structurally, they'll just be different things as well because there's different reserves. Multifamily reserves are different than, say, a hotel reserve or for a leasing for a retail center or what have you, But from just a loan term perspective, they're basically the same. We typically have them structured with some sort of minimum interest period, so we're guaranteed minimum interest. Maybe it's 18 months, maybe it's 12 months, 24, it becomes somewhat of a negotiation, but about like that. There's typically a fee that comes in on the front end, and there may or may not be an exit fee, depending on the negotiation for that particular loan.

Okay, great. I think that's it. Thank you so much for your time today.

Thank you, Marissa. Thank you, Marissa.