In This Article:
Participants
Adam Yates; Managing Director; Great Elm Group Inc
Jason Reese; Chairman of the Board, Chief Executive Officer; Great Elm Group Inc
Keri Davis; Chief Financial Officer, Chief Accounting Officer; Great Elm Group Inc
Presentation
Operator
Greetings, and welcome to the Great Elm Group fiscal fourth-quarter 2024 earnings conference call. (Operator Instructions) Please note that this conference is being recorded. I'll now turn the conference over to Adam Yates, Managing Director. Adam, you may now begin.
Adam Yates
Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us for Great Elm Group's fiscal fourth-quarter 2024 earnings conference call. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded on Friday, August 30, 2024. If you would like to be added to our distribution list, you can email GEG investor relations at greatelmcap.com, where you can sign up for alerts directly on our website, w.w.w.greatelmgroup.com.
A slide presentation accompanying today's conference call and webcast can be found on our website under events and presentations. A link to the webcast is also available on our website as well as in the press release that was disseminated to announce the quarterly results.
Today's conference call includes forward-looking statements, and we ask that you refer to Great Elm Group's filings with the SEC for important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from these statements. Great Elm Group does not undertake to update its forward-looking statements unless required by law.
In addition, during today's call, management will refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations to the most comparable financial measures are included in our earnings release. To obtain copies of our SEC filings. Please visit Great Elm Group's website under Financial Information and select SEC filings.
On the call today, we have Jason Reese, CEO; Adam Kleinman, President and General Counsel; Nichole Milz, COO; and Keri Davis, CFO. I will now turn the call over to Jason Reese, CEO.
Jason Reese
Welcome, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. Fiscal year 2024 was a defining year for Great Elm. Our management team was able to focus on growing a streamlined pure-play asset management business and driving shareholder value.
Looking back, we delivered an excellent fiscal 2024 as we were able to improve profitability, expand our platform businesses, and with clearly grow our assets under management. I would like to highlight several key milestone achievements this fiscal year.
Most notably, our GECC, Great Elm Capital Corp raised over $90 million in fresh capital from February in July 2024, significantly grown fee-paying assets under management by nearly 30% on prior year. This growth was accomplished through a series of capital raises made possible by an innovative structure that provided $36 million of equity capital for GECC.
first in February, GECC raised $24 million of equity capital to Great Elm Strategic Partnership 1, LLC. GEG supported this capital raise by investing $6 million, along with institutional investors, $18 million investment in the SPV, which in turn invested in $24 million of new GECC common shares at net asset value.
GECC continuing to utilize the structure as a template for a second equity capital raise in June. And this transaction, GECC raised $12 million of capital at NAV, via Prosper Peak Holdings, LLC. GEG made a $3 million investment into the SPV alongside a $9 million investment from other institutional investors.
We were able to raise capital at these SPVs due to our strategic relationships with sophisticated institutional investors and GECC's continued improved performance. We continue to work with our strategic partners to further enhance their relationship with [GECCZ], which we believe will provide additional benefits over time for both parties.
Additionally, in April, GECC completed an underwritten public offering of $34.5 million of five-year notes at a more than 50 basis points spread improvement as compared to GECC's August 23 note issuance. GECC's subsequently issued an additional $22 million of notes through a registered direct offering to an institutional investor in July.
The accomplishment of these capital raises at NAV and improved financing rates were a huge success for Great Elm Group and clear evidence of our commitment to further scale GECC'. These capital raises are integral to our business as it expand GEG's ability to earn fee revenue from GECC, providing both substantial recurring asset management fee revenue and potential incentive fee revenue from incremental capital. In addition, recent GEG continues to maintain a material direct investment in GECC and received $2.3 million of dividend income in fiscal year '24, inclusive of a special dividend paid in December '23.
Looking ahead, we believe our BDC is well-positioned to generate attractive risk-adjusted returns, board shareholders to release further capital in fiscal 2025. It should be noted that the financial accounting rules guide us to mark our $9 million investment in the SDVs to a material lesser value creating unrealized losses.
These unrealized losses contributed $3.8 million to our overall net loss of $0.9 million for the year. We believe the unrealized losses are temporary and will reverse over time as the SPVs received distributions from the BDC. Our real estate platform continues to expand over the past year. Monomoy BTS had a milestone fourth quarter of fiscal '24 nearing completion on our two inaugural properties in closing our first property sale in June, where we realized a gain on sale of over $1 million and a significant IRR.
We expect continued profitability in fiscal 2025 as the team focuses on selling its second property in the first half of the year and begins development on its third contracted design build projects. Build-to-suit pipeline remains robust with approximately 30 specifications entering 2025. We will continue to execute on these development opportunities to further enhance profits at GEG and create value for both our tenants and shareholders.
During fiscal '24 Great Elm launched complementary products and businesses to expand its alternative credit and real estate platform offerings. Back in November '23, we launched the Great Elm Credit Income Fund or GECIF. I'm pleased to report that after the first eight months of the fund, we have a solid start to building a strong marketable performance track record, and we plan to release capital conducive in fiscal '25.
Additionally, the last quarter in response to client demand, we launched Monomoy BTS construction management. A consulting business that enables clients to utilize our experienced team for overseeing in-house construction projects through our representative services. We begin earning fees from this business in fiscal '24 and are encouraged by the initial demand and growth prospects.
Outside of our core business, in fiscal fourth-quarter, GEG invested $5 million in a 10% preferred financing for [Korea], a revolutionary cloud AI startup backed by other best in class institutional investors, including Magnetar and Blackstone. This investment is a testament to the strength of our sourcing capabilities or our Board of Directors and our broader sophisticated networks that gives us a seat at the table and probably cutting edge investment opportunity.
Alongside these significant strategic developments, Great Elm Group experienced a strong fiscal fourth-quarter in 2024. We continue to grow our fee-paying assets under management on both a sequential quarter and year-over-year basis. Including the net proceeds from GECC’s July capital raise, fee-paying FPAUM and AUM increased 22% and 17% year-over-year respectively.
We generated total revenue of $9 million, tripling of revenue from the prior year period and adjusted EBITDA of $1.2 million compared to $0.4 million for the prior year period. We ended the quarter ending the year with nearly $60 million in cash and marketable securities deployed across our growing alternative asset management platform.
We improved our capital structure by opportunistically repurchasing over $4 million principal of our 5% convertible notes at 47% of face value and repurchasing $1.2 million shares of GEG common stock in the market for $2.1 million as part of our stock repurchase program. We are pleased with the continued performance of our credit and real estate verticals in the fiscal fourth-quarter and shoot to further accelerate the momentum at these key businesses.
GECC had another successful quarter for raising ample capital and substantially increasing the scale of our platform. In April, GECC further expanded its reach into CLOs, forming a strategic joint venture with an institutional partner to make investments in CLOs and related warehouse facilities. The JV is beginning to receive sizable distributions from our CLO investments, and we expect there will be a source of increasing income at GECC in the coming quarters.
GECC's performance in fiscal 2024 supported the payment of incentive fees to GEG totaling $2.7 million over the last 12 months. GECC's remains well-positioned to continue delivering fee revenue synergy, given the successful portfolio repositioning and recent expansion to CLO products. Combined, these initiatives should drive increased fee revenue activity as the GECC.
Monomoy, we put up solid performance over fiscal 2024. Over the last 12 months, a record $25 million of capital to acquire 13 existing properties amended 16 existing tenant leases for meaningful term extensions and expansion projects, executed renewal options at 12 properties with key tenants and entered into four new leases. Also, approximately 70% of the retail portfolio saw rental rate increases from value added services for lease renewals and contractual step-ups, private property management fee growth.
Lastly, Monomoy successfully refinanced a sizable debt facility without any material impact due to annual debt service and freed up an additional $10 million of growth capital. As referenced earlier, our build-to-suit business achieved a meaningful milestone with our first property sale.
The anticipated sale of our second property in fiscal 2025, our third contracted project under development in a meaningful pipeline of new projects for extremely encouraged by GEG's future growth potential with BTS and construction management and our opportunity for creating shareholder value with this business in fiscal 2025 and beyond.
I'd like to conclude by revisiting the three driving goals we've consistently outlined, enhance our financial performance, expand our platform and grow our assets under management. I'm extremely pleased with our achievements toward our goals in fiscal '24.
After divesting our non-core businesses in fiscal '23, our accomplishments underscore our commitment to reposition Great Elm in the alternative asset management space by growing our core alternative credit and real estate businesses and adding accretive differentiated products. Additionally, we continue to actively evaluate multiple strategic initiatives.
Moving ahead, we remain steadfast in pursuing opportunities to expand our businesses and allocate capital to promising new platform opportunities, offering attractive risk-adjusted returns. We are very excited about the future of Great Elm, and we are well positioned to accelerate our growth in fiscal 2025.
With that, I'll turn it over to Keri.