Full Transcript: CaliberCos Q1 2026 Earnings Call

CaliberCos (NASDAQ:CWD) released first-quarter financial results and hosted an earnings call on Wednesday. Read the complete transcript below. This transcript is brought to you by Benzinga APIs. For real-time access to our entire catalog, please visit https://www.benzinga.com/apis/ for a consultation. Access the full call at https://edge.media-server.com/mmc/p/t5qsc227/ Summary CaliberCos reported a 16% year-over-year growth in platform revenue for Q1 2026 and a narrowed platform adjusted EBITDA loss by approximately $1 million. The company is expanding into digital assets and blockchain, focusing on building a treasury position in linked tokens and tokenizing real estate offerings. CaliberCos reaffirmed its full-year 2026 guidance, expecting revenues between $18 million and $22 million with positive adjusted EBITDA and net operating income. The company is progressing with its Hyatt Studios real estate developments and tokenization efforts, with construction financing secured for the Steamboat Springs project. Management emphasized improved financial visibility and liquidity, including a note conversion program to reduce debt, and highlighted opportunities in the real estate market due to current financing conditions. Full Transcript Gleiza (Conference Operator) Hello and thank you for standing by. My name is Gleiza and I will be your conference operator today. At this time I would like to welcome everyone to the CaliberCos first quarter 2026 earnings conference call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, press Star 1 on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, press Star 1 again. Thank you. I would now like to turn the call over to Ilya Grzovsky. Please go ahead. Ilya Grzovsky Good afternoon everyone. Welcome to CaliberCos' first quarter 2026 financial results conference call. With me today are Chris Loeffler, Chief Executive Officer and co Founder and Jade Leong, Chief Financial Officer of Caliber. Please note that we have a quarterly earnings presentation which will serve as a supplement to today's prepared remarks. You can access the presentation in the Investor Relations section of our website at www.CaliberCos.com. after management's commentary, we will open the call for questions. As a reminder, the information discussed today may include forward looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. Words like believe, expect and anticipate refer to our best estimates as of this call and there can be no assurance that these will actually take place. So our actual future results could differ significantly from these statements. Further information on the company's risk factors is contained in the Company's quarterly and annual reports and filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. It is now my pleasure to turn the call over to Chris. Please go ahead. Chris Loeffler (Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder) Thank you Ilya and good afternoon everyone. My comments today will address a few things. The first, an update on our strategic expansion into digital assets and blockchain. Second, some comments on CaliberCos' financial position. Third, our private equity real estate platform and related project activity and fourth, ending with an update to our revenue and profitability outlook for 2026. Before walking through these topics, I'll briefly frame the quarter. Our first quarter results were in line with the internal plan we built for 2026. Platform revenue grew nearly 16% year over year and our platform adjusted EBITDA loss narrowed by approximately $1 million. We also executed across both sides of the revenue plan we laid out at year end driving capital formation and project level financings. We are reaffirming our full year 2026 guidance today and Jade will walk through the financial details later in the call. I'll start with our digital asset strategy because I think there's more for the market to understand about what we have been building over the past nine months than is currently reflected in our share price. Before walking through CaliberCos' approach, it's worth establishing the scale of the opportunity we are positioning into. According to a recent report from Pantera Capital, the global tokenization market today represents approximately $320 billion in tracked value across 593 tokenized assets, up from roughly 200 billion in 2024. Tokenized U.S. treasuries alone have grown from nearly zero in 2021 to approximately 12 billion today. Institutional participants now include BlackRock, Franklin, Templeton, JP Morgan, Apollo, WisdomTree, Fidelity and every other major bank which now has a tokenization strategy. This is the market that Calibre's digital asset strategy and real estate tokenization work are being built to participate in over the coming years. When we announced our Digital Asset treasury or DAT strategy in August of last year, we laid out three priorities. First, building a Treasury position in digital assets specifically linked tokens to give Caliber and our shareholders exposure to the upside potential of the infrastructure technology we believe is core to the future of tokenized finance. Second, expanding Calibre's asset management platform into digital asset related products and investment vehicles, growing our fee generating AUM in this category as well as digital asset centric businesses, growing our earning potential through accretive transaction and third, applying tokenization technology to our existing real estate funds platform to enhance capital formation, add liquidity features for investors in our funds and reduce operating costs through a more efficient investment administration. Turning back to the DAT over the nine month period since we announced the strategy, the capital markets environment for digital asset treasury strategies has become significantly more difficult. The price of Link declined materially and the broader access to capital for companies pursuing this kind of strategy contracted across the marketplace. In that environment, we made a deliberate decision to slow the pace of treasury accumulation rather than continue deploying capital into a falling market. We believe that decision protected our stake our shareholders. At the same time, we accelerated execution on the other two pillars of the strategy to ensure that no time was wasted waiting for market conditions to come our way. Over the past nine months, we have built the internal team and external relationships required to tokenize our real estate offerings and are now actively working to tokenize our Hyatt Studios in Steamboat Springs offering in our Pure Pickleball and Paddle project, two of the first real estate projects in our portfolio to be tokenized. We deepened our relationship with Chainlink, the protocol underlying Link, and announced the first component of that relationship coming to fruition. The implementation we are currently executing of Chainlink ace, an automated compliance engine on our tokenized funds. We completed the build out of a master staking agreement that gives us the ability to execute direct staking relationships with no node operators as we grow the Treasury. This gives us a source of yield on our treasury assets and we continue to build an active pipeline of potentially accretive strategic opportunities, including potential acquisitions and joint venture partnerships that could accelerate our position and goals for the growth in the digital asset and tokenization space. Turning to the treasury itself at the end of the first quarter we held 507,560 link tokens with a fair value of approximately 4.5 million. During the quarter we sold approximately 55,000 link tokens for proceeds of half a million and redeployed that capital into our real estate platform to support the closing of project level financings including our Hyatt Studios development in Steamboat Springs. This is exactly how we believe a corporate treasury should function in a diversified asset management business. It provides flexibility to allocate capital where it generates the highest return for shareholders. Our real estate platform is where we're seeing the most immediate revenue growth opportunity in 2026 and the treasury supported that execution. Looking forward, we believe the recent stabilization in Lynx price reflects market conditions that support our long term thesis. To that end, we are evaluating multiple ways to harvest capital from our real estate platform, including from the short term cash positions Caliber holds in its growing pipeline of new projects and developments to again grow our Link treasury position. We remain long term investors in Link and long term believers in the technology and the broader chainlink ecosystem. We continue to see digital assets and tokenizations as a meaningful long term growth vector for Calibre and we are positioning the platform now to capture that opportunity over the coming years. Turning to financial visibility, our focus in 2026 is on executing financings and converting our existing pipeline into realized revenue. We've updated our Platform performance supplement through March 31, 2026 which provides investors with a clear view of our operating business. The supplement excludes consolidated assets and focuses on the portion of our platform that directly drives shareholder value. At the end of the first quarter, our estimated performance allocations totaled $99 million, down from $104 million in the prior quarter and up from $88 million in the year ago quarter. Turning to fundraising, managed capital at the end of the first quarter was $490 million compared to $517 million in the previous quarter and $495 million in. The decrease relative to the prior quarter was primarily driven by the disposition of assets, partially offset by New Fundraising Our underlying capital formation activity in the first quarter remained consistent with our plan and we expect managed capital to grow over the balance of 2026 as new fund offerings come into the market. In the first quarter, our wholesale distribution channel deepened its penetration with existing selling member firms by adding four new producing advisory relationships, bringing our total to 25 producing advisors. Subsequent to the end of the quarter in April, we signed two additional selling agreements with new firms that together represent 218 advisors who are now approved to distribute CaliberCos' offerings, meaningfully expanding the pool of advisors who can begin producing for us over the coming quarters. We continue to build momentum in the wholesale channel and believe these efforts will bear fruit in the second half of 2026. Moving on to a review of our real estate platform, we remain focused on investing in hospitality, multifamily and multi tenant industrial real estate, which we believe offers CaliberCos' investor clients the best opportunities in the current market environment. Now we'll turn to updates on assets we manage and the performance of our managed real estate funds. These updates are important because our revenue is directly tied to the progress of these projects, primarily as they reach financing and development milestones. In the interest of your time each quarter, I touch on what I think are the most important changes that occurred during and after the quarter's end, but will not attempt to comprehensively discuss every movement in every fund Starting with Hyatt Studios Our Hyatt Studios developments continue to progress as planned. We have launched three of the four investor offerings supporting our Hyatt Studios developments with the fourth launching eminently. The Hyatt Studios Steamboat Springs, Colorado transaction closed on acquisition and construction financing in April of 2026 and expected to break ground during the second quarter of 2026. Steamboat is the first of 15 planned and four identified Hyatt Studios developments under our agreement with Hyatt. Our next two projects that are named Scottsdale and Georgetown are are in earlier stages of development and we were highlighted recently in our April 22 announcement on the platform. We expect to share details on additional locations as projects advance through the site selection and entitlement phase. These assets are designed to transition into long term ownership within Caliber Hospitality Trust, which we expect would exercise an option agreement to acquire the assets once they are built and stabilized, offering Hyatt Studios investors a defined exit and CHT investors a proprietary pipeline of new income producing hotels. I will also note that we're working to tokenize our Steamboat offering as one of the first offerings we will tokenize turning to Caliber Hospitality Trust or cht, our private REIT vehicle for acquiring and holding cash flowing hotel assets. CHT is currently focused on acquiring high quality hotel properties at an attractive entry price, taking advantage of a meaningful price dislocation in the hotel space where we're seeing opportunities to buy high quality cash flowing assets at a discount to both their inherent construction cost and to longer term market values. We are pursuing these acquisitions through both direct cash transactions and through tax deferred contributions using CHT's upreach structure which gives existing hotel owners a tax efficient path to roll their assets into a diversified portfolio. A few Notable Developments in CHT this Quarter In February we announced the sale of the Holiday Inn Ocotillo in the Phoenix Chandler Submarket for 13 million. Proceeds from that sale are being redeployed for debt reduction and to support CHT's growth initiatives. We've also made a significant change in CHT's hotel management approach. A new hotel management company has been engaged to operate five of the six assets currently in the trust. The management transition began with the Hampton Inn and Suites several months ago and has already produced results. Gross operating profit margins improved significantly from 46% to 54% while maintaining similar top line revenue levels against a relatively soft hotel revenue environment. The remaining four assets transitioned to new management on June 9th and we expect similar profitability improvements across the portfolio as the new operators playbook is implemented. Finally, our pipeline of CHT acquisition opportunities has grown over the past quarter. We are actively working on refinancings across several existing CHT assets which we expect to fund property level improvements and contribute to our financing related revenue in the second and third quarters of 2026. We look forward to announcing additional CHT acquisitions and refinancings as closing timelines. Firm Moving On Our Pure Pickleball and Paddle project at riverwalk in Scottsdale, Arizona will deliver a world class facility featuring 50 courts, a full service clubhouse, a fitness center sponsored by Honor Health and catering by Wolfgang Puck. Pure continues to advance towards shovel ready status after the approval of Pure's building permits during the first quarter. The focus now is on finalizing construction financing and rounding out the overall capital structure which is actively in progress. We are also working on tokenization of this offering and are excited about the possibilities it will open up when complete. Turning to Canyon, our large scale mixed use project in North Phoenix in the TSMC and Apple Fab Development quarter. During the quarter the HUD construction loan application was approved and we are filing our firm application shortly. Phase one demolition is now completed. Also, all drawings for the first building are being resubmitted and the garage is close to filing its drawings as well. Moving on to Encore, we continue to advance site development and planning on the commercial leasing activity going on. We have an active LOI with 711 an LOI on the apartment site. United Properties remains in escrow on the industrial site and we're seeing activity from two major big box users for the retail site. On project financing, we're making continued progress with our selected financing partner and expect to close on a financing in the near term. Project execution remains tied to financing and infrastructure milestones which we expect to advance over the coming quarters. Caliber continues to advance its differentiated 1031 exchange offering which provides investors seeking to place 1 million or more in 1031 exchange capital a direct path to invest alongside Caliber in the same real estate acquisitions we are pursuing through our funds. The program is new and it uses a tenant in common or TIC structure that partners one investor with Caliber and in some cases with a small number of other Caliber aligned investors. Calibre serves as the administrator of the asset and related TIC interests and investors who enter through a TIC can ultimately complete a 721 exchange into our Core plus real estate fund, converting their interest into a diversified professionally managed fund on a tax deferred basis. The program is distinctive in the 1031 marketplace for several reasons. First, investors come in at CaliberCos' cost basis on the underlying acquisition rather than at the marked up basis typical of larger DST sponsors. Second, the program's cost structure compares favorably to other 1031 offerings in the market. And third, the eventual 721 exchange path into our core real estate fund provides a long term liquidity solution that very few 1031 sponsors can offer. We are now pursuing our second asset in the program, the Tonto offering. Tonto is a 46 unit value add multifamily project in Payson, Arizona where we plan to complete a light renovation while maintaining occupancy at 90% or greater throughout the renovation cycle. The strategy is to improve the asset's value and continue generating cash flow during the hold period. Value add multifamily is a category Caliber has historically executed against well and we are seeing opportunities to acquire multifamily assets at more attractive entry points today than we have seen in years. Patent to opportunity is indicative of these types of acquisitions and we expect to pursue going forward more through this type of program. We expect to announce additional 1031 exchange investments as they come into the pipeline. In summary, the first quarter was executed according to our plan and we expect the remaining of 2026 to be driven by the closing of project level financings across our existing portfolio, continued capital formation through fundraising and opportunities for new lines of revenue and cost savings through the tokenization of our real estate assets and CaliberCos' overarching digital asset strategy. Last quarter we issued 2026 revenue and profitability guidance for the first time. Today we are reaffirming those metrics. We continue to believe that our 2026 revenues should deliver in a range of 18 million to 22 million and both our adjusted EBITDA and net operating income will be positive. With that, I'll turn it over to Jade to review our financial results. Jade Leong (Chief Financial Officer) Thank you, Chris Good afternoon everyone. I'll start with an update on our efforts to address our corporate note maturities to improve our corporate liquidity position. As of the end of the first quarter, we had 148 individual unsecured notes with an aggregate principal balance of approximately 26.2 million, of which 24.5 million is scheduled to mature within the next 12 months. Each note generally has a 12 month term with an option to extend in addition to our broader plans and efforts to address the near term liquidity of the business, we have added an additional initiative. During the first quarter, CaliberCos' Board of Directors approved a Note Holder Conversion Program authorizing the ability of holders of CaliberCos' unsecured corporate notes to convert their notes into Series AAA Convertible Perpetual Preferred Stock. One third of the Series AAA Convertible Perpetual Preferred Stock is convertible at $2.50 per share of common stock, one third is convertible at $3.50 per share of common stock and one third is convertible at $4.50 per share of common stock. Management believes the perpetual Preferred stock structure is favorable to all shareholders as converted notes would be reclassified from debt to equity. This program supplements our previously announced CaliberCos Common Stock conversion program. Approximately 1.5 million of notes were converted into Series AAA Convertible preferred stocks since the program began. Additionally, approximately 1.9 million of unsecured corporate notes were converted into shares of CaliberCos' Class A common stock in a voluntary conversion program elected by the individual note holders during the first quarter. Together, these actions have reduced CaliberCos' corporate debt by approximately $3.4 million in this round of the program and approximately $5.3 million in total since the program's launch in October of 2025. Participation in the common stock conversion program is also voluntary with terms structured in accordance with NASDAQ rules for at the market transactions. We continue to believe these dual programs can reduce CaliberCos' leverage, improved stockholders equity and increased financial flexibility as we execute our plan towards profitability in 2026. Over the past 12 months we have made meaningful progress addressing our near term liquidity and we expect to continue making progress through a combination of capital initiatives and operational execution. Turning to our Results for the first quarter of 2026, platform revenue for the first quarter was $4.1 million compared to $3.5 million in the prior year quarter. Fund management fees increased 3.7% year over year while construction and development revenue declined primarily due to the timing of project financings. Several financings that were expected to close in the first quarter have been pushed out reflecting a shift in timing of rather than a reduction in underlying activity, and we expect these financings to contribute to revenue in 2026. Total platform expenses for the first quarter were 5.4 million compared to 6.1 million in the year ago quarter, a decrease of 11% compared to the prior year, primarily driven by reductions in payroll and related expenses. Average Employee headcount decreased 31% from the first quarter of 2025 to the first quarter of 2026 as part of our continued comprehensive cost savings initiatives to return Caliber to profitability. This moved our total employees from 74 to 51 as of the end of the first quarter. Platform adjusted EBITDA for the first quarter was a loss of less than half a million dollars compared to a loss of $1.4 million in the prior year quarter, a 75.9% improvement. As revenues continue to strengthen matched against an improved cost discipline across the business, we are on a predetermined yet steady path to return to profitability in 2026. In terms of our outlook for 2026, we continue to expect total revenue in the range of 18 to 22 million dollars. We expect approximately 60% of revenue growth to be driven by project level financings across our existing portfolio, with the remaining 40% driven by capital formation and asset management activities. Based on our current visibility into the pipeline financing activity, we believe we are positioned to achieve adjusted EBITDA profitability and positive net operating income in 2026. I'll now turn it back to the operator for your questions. OPERATOR At this time I would like to remind everyone in order to ask Question Press Star one. We'll pause for a moment to allow questions to come in. Your first question comes from Michael Diana from Maxim Group. Please go ahead. Michael Diana (Analyst) Thank you. So Chris, you talked a lot about what you're doing here. Depends on financing and refinancing. Could you just give us a sense for the environment for that right now, given where the Fed is, given the Iran war, given everything. What's your obviously you're reaffirming your guidance so you're obviously at confidence that all Chris Loeffler (Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder) those financings and refinancings are going to happen. But could you give us a little more color? Yeah, I wouldn't say it's back to the easy days of the, , the pre-COVID, pre-interest rate rise period. But I would say that, , real estate finance tends to go in cycles. We went through a very tough cycle between 2023 and kind of the end of 2025 when real estate financing volumes were down significantly. And while there's still a lot of challenges in loan portfolios, in private credit, there's still a lot of kind of financings that are past maturity and , issues across the board in commercial real estate, the ability to get new on existing assets and developments has not been better for us than it has been at least in the last couple months than it certainly has been in the last two years. So it is better, it's getting better and I would be pretty surprised if it reversed course because that's typically not how it works in real estate. We typically go through multi year cycles that resolve over time. And on the other side because there are still quite a few assets that are at maturity or past maturity and quite a few projects that are struggling from lack of ability to refinance. That's what's driving the opportunity for us to buy discounted properties. So we have suffered through the financing environment, but it seems to be getting much better and we're closing financings like we just did on Construction Loan and Steamboat at a really attractive kind of mid sevens rate. And we're seeing that that financing environment is driving our acquisition opportunities. Michael Diana (Analyst) All right, that's. Well thank you very much and that's really good to. OPERATOR Again, should you ask questions, please press Star 1 on your telephone keypad. Chris Loeffler (Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder) Great. It doesn't seem like there's any more questions, so thank you for your time today. CaliberCos Management will be participating in the Planet Microcap conference on June 16th through 18th in Las Vegas. If you are attending the conference and interested in arranging a one on one meeting with CaliberCos Management, please let us know or use the conference portal. Please visit our website at www.CaliberCos.com and follow the path for public shareholders there. You can download our financial supplement and sign up for the mailing list specifically focused for public investors. If you have any questions, please complete the contact us form so we can get engaged with you directly. Thank you for joining the call today. Have a good evening. You may now disconnect. Disclaimer: This transcript is provided for informational purposes only. While we strive for accuracy, there may be errors or omissions in this automated transcription. For official company statements and financial information, please refer to the company's SEC filings and official press releases. Corporate participants' and analysts' statements reflect their views as of the date of this call and are subject to change without notice.