Jack: maintain a more defensive posture. We also actively managed risk through TBA positions, initially shorting $500 million as a conflict intensified before unwinding those positions after raising liquidity through loan sales. We subsequently re-established shorts on a portion of our portfolio to maintain flexibility across the stack. We continue to hedge our agency portfolio with interest rate swaps, consistent with our SOFR-based funding and the carry advantage provided by current swap spread levels. On the credit side, our hedge composition shifted during the quarter from pay fix swaps and swaptions to interest rate caps, providing an asymmetric payoff in the event of a material decline in short-term rates. As Phil mentioned, we began retaining Home Express loans in the first quarter, and anticipate launching our first securitization in late Q2 or early Q3. These loans are representative of Home Express's normal production, with investor loans making up approximately 55% of the population, reporting a 70% average loan-to-value ratio, 735 average credit score, and 7% average coupon. We see securitization execution outpacing whole loan pricing in the current market, and given our flexibility to hold, securitize, or sell, we are well positioned to capture that differential. Turning now to credit, performance across our loan portfolio remains strong. Delinquencies in the legacy re-performing book ticked up, though this was largely due to the composition of loans we sold versus retained. On the RTL side, the dollar balance of delinquencies remains stable and loss is nominal. And in our investor loan cohort, Delinquencies driven by natural seasoning of the 2023 vintage are in line with expectations and reverted back into the mid-5% range as of the April remittance reports. Stepping back, the first quarter demonstrated both the value and the necessity of the transformation we have been executing over the past year. The loan sale activities released capital and materially improved our earnings capacity. Our growing agency portfolio gave us flexibility to redeploy and de-risk dynamically as conditions shifted. And Home Express continues to contribute to earnings while building a pipeline for our securitization program. We enter this year with a clear plan. Diversify the portfolio, strengthen liquidity, and grow durable sources of income. The actions we took this quarter advanced each of those objectives. We covered our dividend. We improved the composition of the portfolio, and we redeployed the capital freed up from the legacy transactions into higher returning opportunities. The strategy is delivering results, and we see continued growth in the earnings power of this platform. With that, I will turn it over to Kyle to discuss residential origination.
Kyle: Thank you, Jack, and good morning, everyone. Home Express delivered strong results in the first quarter, building on the momentum from the prior quarter. We originated $884 million in total loan volume, representing a 39% increase as compared to the first quarter of last year. Despite market volatility emerging late in the quarter, our origination volume, all of which is first lien residential mortgages, was not meaningfully impacted due to two key reasons. First, the loan submission to close process has a natural lag of about 35 days. As a result, much of our first quarter's volume was already in the pipeline before market conditions shifted. Our first quarter results therefore largely reflect the origination pipeline activity built earlier in the quarter. Second, consumer non-QM and business purpose loan demand is less dependent on rate-driven refinancing activity, which also supported our pipeline stability through the late quarter disruption. Looking ahead, our pull-through rates and broker engagement have remained relatively consistent entering the second quarter. Submissions did moderate briefly during the disruption, but activity has begun to normalize. Demand continues to be driven less by rate-sensitive refinancing activity and more by borrowers with specific financing needs, including consumer home purchases, cash-out refinancings, and investment property purchases. As a result, despite elevated and ongoing interest rate volatility, the underlying demand for Home Express's loan origination remains firm. Our experienced leadership team has successfully navigated many past market disruptions and cycles. That experience enables us to make strategic decisions and pivot effectively with changes in the market. One area we have been focusing on is increasing our percentage of consumer non-QM loans. which generally carry higher average loan balances. Our average loan size increased from 424,000 in March to 451,000 in April. This compares with a 410,000 average for the entire first quarter. By increasing the average loan size, we can generate more volume with the same number of loans, further improving our efficiency. Home Express delivered strong profitability in the quarter, generating an EBITDA of 11.4 million. Our net origination margin, which reflects both gain on sale as well as operating costs to produce our loans, was 114 basis points. In this environment, we remain focused on driving efficiency while maintaining disciplined pricing and sound underwriting standards. On the front end, we've integrated with Arrive so brokers can access our products and pricing directly in the workflow and submit loans without jumping between systems. That has helped reduce some of the back and forth and improve submission quality. We're also using AI to reduce manual work and underwriting, automating parts of income verification. Our efforts have helped us handle more volume and bring down cost per loan as we scale. We continue to assess other opportunities to incorporate AI into our systems. Credit quality on new originations remain consistent and And key metrics, including weighted average FICO and LTV ratios, were maintained in line with our historical loan production levels. To support production, we increased our total warehouse funding capacity to $1.5 billion during the quarter. That, combined with our strong cash position, provides ample liquidity to support our expected production levels. Our seven warehouse facilities are maintained with large and leading financial institutions. We also continue to deliver Home Express's high touch service model that distinguishes our platform, maintaining relationships with our more than 6,000 approved broker sources, which are serviced by our 142 account executives and related sales staff. As our first quarter results demonstrate, Home Express is contributing meaningfully to Chimera's earnings base. Going forward, we will continue to scale the platform responsibly, maintain credit discipline, and originate loans with attractive ECONOMICS. WITH THAT, I'LL TURN THE CALL BACK OVER TO PHIL. THANKS, KYLE.
Phil Curtis: TO SUM UP, WE'RE NOT OPTIMIZING FOR QUARTERLY OUTCOMES. WE'RE ALLOCATING CAPITAL FOR LONG-TERM COMPOUNDING. OUR OBJECTIVE IS STRAIGHTFORWARD. BUILD A RESIDENTIAL PLATFORM ENGINEERED TO PERFORM ACROSS INTEREST RATE CYCLES, CREDIT CYCLES, AND CAPITAL MARKET CYCLES. IF WE EXECUTE, INTRINSIC VALUE PER SHARE WILL GROW AND THE DIVIDEND WILL FOLLOW. THAT'S HOW WE RUN THE BUSINESS. And that's how we believe it should be evaluated. We'll now open the call to questions.
Operator: Thank you and good morning.
Marissa: securitization call strategy that unlocked capital, but it pressured book value a little bit. How much additional embedded optionality remains in the existing securitization stack? And how should we think about the trade-off between book value volatility and future earnings power?
Jack: Yeah. Hey, Marissa, appreciate the question. Just for context, I mean, as we're looking at these deals, as I think we've talked about on this call and prior calls, you know, the securitization, securitized debt impact, we're evaluating this very holistically, and we look at the opportunity cost of doing these deals versus the opportunity cost of just continuing to do nothing and letting the capital generate, you know, the existing returns. I mean, we have a pretty large portfolio of callable deals, and so we view our job as to constantly be evaluating the economics of calling those and re-securitizing them. But like we said in the prepared remarks, I mean, there's a difference between, you know, earnings generating capital and then the capital that is somewhat derived from, you know, valuation marks on our securitized debt.
Marissa: I appreciate that. And looking at the allocation loans still represent the majority of capital. but agency is growing. So what risk-adjusted return threshold determines whether incremental capital goes to agency or credit assets from here?
Jack: Yeah, I mean, so we are thinking about portfolio construction. And so, you know, the agency sleeve has been an important component of growth over the last year, one, for the liquidity and the optionality that we've been talking about and making sure that we maintain that. The loans, I mean, the credit element is a core competency of ours. So it's not that we necessarily are looking to decrease that allocation, so to speak, but we are looking to identify areas where we can, you know, extract underperforming capital and redeploy that into higher earning assets. And maybe back to your original question. You know, are there continuing to be opportunities in the portfolio to call deals, extract capital, redeploy it accretively? I think the answer to that is certainly yes. This was a very important quarter for us. It culminated in the sale of $1.2 billion of loans. So that was obviously a milestone effort on the team's part. I probably wouldn't expect in the near term something of that size, but I certainly think there's still opportunities to prune the portfolio and continue to thrive earnings power.
Marissa: Thank you very much.
Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Trevor Cranston with Citizens J&P. Please proceed with your question.
Trevor Cranston: Hey, thanks. Good morning. Question on the agency portfolio. You mentioned establishing a short TVA position in March. It looks like it was about a billion dollars at the end of the quarter. Can you say if you guys are continuing to hold that short TVA position or if there's been any other significant changes to the agency books since the end of the quarter?
Jack: No. I guess what I would say, we are using the TVA shorts for two different purposes. One, the one that we put on early in March was at the onset of the Middle East conflict. So that was purely a de-risking effort on the team's part that we were doing in preparation for the loan sales that were occurring and would raise liquidity later in the quarter. We did take that short off before quarter end. We had reestablished some other shorts. The 966 that you see in the prepared materials And we have, you know, continued to maintain that for all intents and purposes post-quarter end. And, you know, we use that in part when we see, you know, interesting spec pools that where we think the payouts are attractive or the stories or the call protection is interesting. Whenever we know that we're going to be raising capital at some point in the future, we don't necessarily want to be forced buyers of whatever is in the market at that time. So when we know capital is coming in, we may go ahead and purchase bonds, but we'll offset that risk by shorting TVAs. And that's what you see with that 966 for the most part at quarter end.
Trevor Cranston: Okay, got it. Makes sense. Then on the Home Express business, can you maybe give us a little bit of color on sort of the early indications on the second quarter, how volumes are holding up with higher mortgage rates. I guess I'd be curious if you've seen any sort of indication of changes in margin levels as well.
Kyle: Thanks. Volume in the second quarter should be very consistent with what we forecasted. So our volume has been increasing month over month. The margins appear to be holding up You know, we did a couple of trades to an insurance investor throughout the kind of market dislocation, and that helped us keep the margins. Now it seems like things are back to normal regarding margin activity. Okay, great. Thank you.
Operator: Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, as a reminder, if you'd like to join the question queue, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. Our next question comes from the line of Bose George with KPW. Please proceed with your question.
Bose George: Hi, good morning, guys. This is Frank. A little video on for Bose. Thank you for taking my question. To start, just kind of more of a macro question. Given the rate volatility, given some headline risks on unemployment, maybe can you talk about what you're seeing in the market there on credit? How have... credit conditions held up. Thank you.
Jack: Yeah, sure. I mean, if you look across our portfolio and we put like our delinquency history and some charts in the prepared materials, but look, I think what you, in some of the, you know, call it 2023 more seasoned vintage pools of let's say non-QM, we are starting to see delinquencies, you know, rise in what I would say is a normal course. There's certainly labor market conditions are starting to soften, so we would expect to see delinquencies reflect those conditions. With that being said, this is a much different underwriting than what we've seen pre-financial crisis. These loans have significant equity in them, which opens up opportunities for much more constructive workout solutions for borrowers, and I think that's reflected in the very, very low levels of losses that we've seen in all of these loans across non-QM and non-agency. So I think you'll continue to see delinquencies rise in the normal course, but also losses continue to remain very muted just given the amount of equity in the loans.
Bose George: Great. Thank you. And then on the Home Express platform, how does Camara think about you know, retaining servicing or MSR exposure going forward?
Jack: Yeah, I mean, that's a good question. And, you know, right now everything has been sold on a servicing release basis. You know from, you know, prior calls and our remarks that building an MSR sleeve is a very important component of our longer-term strategy. So there's certainly discussions about, you know, retaining servicing longer-term. I think we've still got, you know, some work to do on that front, but it's definitely on the drawing board and something that we would hope to do going forward at some point.
Bose George: Thank you.
Operator: Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes our question and answer session. I'll turn the floor back to Mr. Curtis for any final comments.
Phil Curtis: Thank you. Thank you everyone for joining our first quarter 2026 earnings call and we look forward to speaking to you next quarter. Have a great day.
Operator: Thank you. This concludes today's conference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.
