Home Bancorp, Inc.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the HomeBank Corp's first quarter 2024 earnings conference call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to HomeBank Corp's Chairman, President and Board of Loan and Chief Financial Officer David Kirkley. Mr. Kirkley, please go ahead.

Thank you, Joelle. Good morning and welcome to Home Bank's first quarter 2024 earnings call. Our earnings release and investor presentation are available on our website. I'd ask that everyone please refer to the disclaimer regarding forward-looking statements in the investor presentation and our SEC filings. Now I'll hand it over to John to make a few comments about the first quarter. John? Thanks, David.

Good morning, and thank you for joining HomeBank Corp's earnings call today. We appreciate your interest in HomeBank Corp as we discuss our strong quarterly results and describe our approach to creating long-term shareholder value. HomeBank delivered a solid first quarter performance with healthy loan and deposit growth and continued expense discipline. We are quite proud of our accomplishments in the first quarter as net income was $9.2 million, or $1.2 and 14 cents per share, which generated a return on assets of 1.11%. Loans increased $40.1 million over the quarter, or about 6% annualized, which is in line with our expectations for 2024. Houston was again a big contributor to our loan growth as we relocated an acquired branch and opened an LPO to house the commercial team we brought on board in the fourth quarter. We will be relocating an additional branch next week in Houston as we continue to invest in our markets and seek ways to drive additional activity. First quarter deposits increased $52 million, following a $73 million increase in the fourth quarter. Deposits have increased by 6.4% since March 31st of last year, which we feel very good about considering everything that's happened in the banking industry in the last 12 months. Our loan-to-deposit ratio came down slightly to 96.3, which is still a little above the upper end of our target range. As we indicated last quarter, we saw some additional pressure on the net interest margin, which decreased to 3.64% in the first quarter. While the last couple of weeks has made predicting rates challenging, we continue to expect them to stabilize around this level in the next two quarters. With that, I'll turn it back over to David, our Chief Financial Officer.