Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Our first question comes from Jon Arfstrom - RBC Capital Markets.
Jon Arfstrom - RBC Capital Markets
First of all, I always enjoy your comments David. They’re very helpful and frank, and that’s helpful in understanding your frame of mind.
Can you talk a little bit about the pipeline? Dave spoke about it earlier briefly but just curious if you feel like you’re seeing better opportunities in the pipeline? And Dave with your presence there do you feel like growth will accelerate a bit over the next few quarters in terms of your ability to put control investments to work?
David Gladstone
Jon I’ll comment and then turn it over to Dave to comment as well. My view of the pipeline is the same that you’d see in a housing market today. A lot of people have houses for sale but they’re just asking too much for them and the same is true in businesses. They want to get the top dollar so they continue to believe that they’re going to get top dollar like some friend of theirs did or they heard numbers before. But the market place has changed. There’s not enough debt money around to make the hot market that we had a year or year and a half ago, so as a result there are lots of companies for sale but the pricing tends to be relatively high. And Dave Dullum, why don’t you comment on that as well.
David A.R. Dullum
Just to add to that. Basically part of our approach with the pipeline and why we see it increasing right now and so on really has to do with slightly changing our positioning where we are able to offer if you will a product with our I’ll call it mezzanine plus and equity co-invest feature which as Dave mentioned because of the somewhat inability of primarily the equity sponsors having somewhat of a tranch that is not able to be filled by senior or the equity themselves, we feel we can play a role there still being very sensitive however to our overall cost of capital and therefore our return, which is clearly critical to our ability to pay our dividends. So in that regard we do see opportunity going forward.
Jon Arfstrom - RBC Capital Markets
You discussed a little bit about the discussions you’re having with your bank in terms of your debt renewal. Can you talk a little bit about what the discussions are like wit the banks that are not in the facility? Obviously it’s going to be more expensive and you alluded to that, but just generally give us a little bit of maybe qualitative information about how those discussions are going?
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