YBR takes alternative path
Yellow Brick Road executive chair Mark Bouris is pinning his hopes for the future of the company on the establishment of a securitisation program and the development of its own mortgage products, which would give the business more margin.On Friday, YBR announced that it had received final credit approval from an unnamed Australian bank for it to provide an initial A$120 million RMBS securitisation warehouse facility.The RMBS program, Resi Warehouse Funding Pty Ltd, will be owned in a joint venture between YBR and an "international alternative asset manager".Bouris said in his statement in the YBR financial report that establishing a mortgage product had taken much longer and been more difficult than he expected."However, we are now well advanced in our negotiations to access the bank wholesale and debt capital markets to fund our own products."Once complete, we can enter the market with our own mortgage product. We will likely do this under the Resi home loan brand, which we own, and we will distribute through our YBR network and Vow aggregator platform."The company reported a net loss of $37.4 million, which included an asset write-down of $33.9 million on the wealth management and lending businesses. The loss the previous year was $658,000.Lending volume was down 19 per cent and revenue fell 6.8 per cent to $183.8 million. Cash flow from operating activities fell from $2.9 million in 2017/18 to $379,000 in the year to June.Operating expenses were up 5 percent. The increase was due, in part, to redundancy expenses.Bouris said the network would continue to distribute wealth products, but they would be provided by a third party.