“Our view is that it will start to moderate. We probably still have some pressure in 2Q, but less so and then moderates through the rest of this year. And then we think you start to see things start to pick up in a positive way towards the latter part of this year into '25.”

In context

“nd our shareholders. And with that, I'll turn the call back to the operator for your questions. Operator: [Operator Instructions] And we have a question from Suneet Kamath with Jefferies. Suneet Kamath: Just wanted to start with VII. John, you had mentioned, I think, a real estate loss of 5.8%. Can you just unpack that a little bit? Was that actually losses on sales or appraisals? And how do you see that tracking as we move through the balance of the year? John McCallion: Sure, Suneet. Primarily appraisals and valuation. So we actually saw, if you recall, in the fourth quarter, it was fairly flat. Appraisals, they tend to lag a bit in terms of just market declines. And so we saw kind of a catch-up of that in the fourth quarter, which obviously gets reported here in the first quarter. Our view is that it will start to moderate. We probably still have some pressure in 2Q, but less so and then moderates through the rest of this year. And then we think you start to see things start to pick up in a positive way towards the latter part of this year into '25. That's kind of the outlook. Suneet Kamath: Michel, on your comments for future share buybacks. I think you used the word measured pace. Is that measured pace relative to what you did in the first quarter? Or is that relative to what you did in April? And is the plan to exhaust the $3.6 billion authorization in 2024? Michel Khalaf: Yes. Suneet, thanks for the question. So yes, I did use the word measure, and I was referring to the first quarter. But I think as you've seen in the first quarter and what you've seen from us over time is that we do move expeditiously and deliberately to return capital to shareholders, especially in the absence of other high-value capital deployment opportunities following divestments. We did so following the spin-off of our former retail business following”