Apollo Reports Mixed Earnings on Heels of Loan Sale Announcement

Apollo Commercial Real Estate Finance reported a net income loss in its fourth-quarter earnings two weeks after the lender announced an exit of nearly its entire $9 billion CRE loan portfolio to Athene Holding.

The real estate investment trust achieved fourth-quarter net income of $26.1 million, or 18 cents per share, compared with $37.6 million, or 27 cents per share, in the year-ago period. The subsidiary of Apollo Global Management reported yearly profit of $114.4 million after registering a $131.9 million net loss for 2024. 

Apollo Commercial Real Estate Finance’s stock was trading up 51 cents late Wednesday morning at $10.78 per share, up slightly from the $10.64 per share it traded late afternoon on Jan. 28 when the firm announced it was about to sell off 99.7 percent of its loan portfolio. The stock has dipped 43 percent from its pre-2020 peak of $18 per share.

Stuart Rothstein, CEO of Apollo Commercial Real Estate Finance, said during Wednesday’s earnings call that feedback from the loan portfolio sale announcement, where it projects to generate $1.7 billion in common stockholders’ equity at the time of the deal’s closing, was “overwhelmingly” positive. The company plans to retain $486 million in net equity interest in the various CRE properties within the portfolio and will spend the rest of 2026 evaluating long-term CRE strategies. 

“I think people greatly appreciate the efforts to unlock value,” said Rothstein, who did not indicate what the REIT plans to do with the added capital. 

The mortgage REIT committed $1.3 billion of loans during the fourth quarter with $1.1 billion funded. For full-year 2025 it committed $4.4 billion of new originations and funded $3.3 billion.

Eighteen percent of the CRE lender’s $8.8 billion loan portfolio consists of U.S. CRE assets and 30 percent is made up of assets in the United Kingdom as of Dec. 31, 2025, according to Apollo.

Anastasia Mironova, chief financial officer at Apollo Commercial Real Estate Finance, noted that more than 60 percent of Apollo’s portfolio features originations post-2022 after the Federal Reserve began aggressively hiking interest rates to combat growing inflation. 

“This activity resulted in the overall growth of the loan portfolio, which increased by approximately $1.6 billion year-over-year on an amortized cost basis,” Mironova said during Wednesday’s earnings call. 

Andrew Coen can be reached at acoen@commercialobserver.com.