10/30/2024

speaker
Operator

Welcome to the Northeast Bank first quarter FY2025 earnings call. My name is Bree and I will be your operator for today's call. This call is being recorded. With us today from the bank is Rick Wayne, President and Chief Executive Officer, Richard Cohen, Chief Financial Officer, and Pat Dignan, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer. Prior to the call, an investor presentation was uploaded to the bank's website, which we will reference in this morning's call. The presentation can be accessed at the Investor Relations section of the northeastbank.com under Events and Presentations. You may find it helpful to download this investor presentation and follow along during the call. Also, this call will be available for rebroadcast on the website for future use. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. During the question and answer session, if you have a question, please press star 11 on your touchtone phone. As a reminder, the conference is being recorded. Please note that this presentation contains forward-looking statements about Northeast Bank. Forward-looking statements are based upon the current expectation of Northeast Bank's management and are subject to risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially from those discussed in the forward-looking statements. Northeast Bank does not undertake any obligation to update any forward-looking statements. I will now turn the call over to Rick Wayne. Mr. Wayne, you may now begin.

speaker
Wayne

Thank you. Good morning. As indicated, I am Rick Wayne, the Chief Executive Officer of Northeast Bank, and with me are Pat Dignan, our Chief Operating Officer and Richard Cohen, our Chief Financial Officer. This morning, I will cover some of the highlights on page three of the slide deck. I also want to focus on some points on our asset quality, which are on slides eight through 10. And for the first time, a more comprehensive discussion on our small balance SBA program. which is slide on slide number 15. Included in the deck are the usual slides on our loan portfolio, including loan to value and other information. That's in the deck for you to review. Of course, it's updated for the quarter ending September 30th, but we won't cover that today unless someone has some questions. We'll discuss the loan activity for the quarter, and Richard will discuss our funding strategy, interest rate risk management, as well as including the funding around the loan purchase we made in the quarter. Now, moving on to slide three, without getting hyperbolic, I would say this was really one great quarter. Our loan production of $942 million was the second best quarter in the bank's history behind only the quarter in December 2022 when we purchased $1 billion of loans in a transaction that most of you are familiar with. This quarter, We had $733 million of purchased loans and $209 million of originated loans. From an earnings perspective, again, another really great quarter, we generated $17.1 million of net income. And except for the quarters in which we had Triple P loans that we sold, And those were in Q3 and Q4 of our fiscal year 21. This quarter was the highest level of net income in the bank's history. So broke a few records. A few other items I'd like to point out on the highlight page. We still have $23 million of availability. under the at the market offering our loan capacity as of september 30th was 462 million that's after the very large loan activity we had in the quarter earnings per share diluted were two dollars and eleven cents return on equity was seventeen point five three percent Our return on assets was 2.09%, and tangible book value per share was $47.80. If we now turn to the slides on page eight, first of all, I want to point out that we had an increase in our allowance of $27 million, which went from 0.97% of loans to 1.25% of loans. So we have a lot more coverage now in our allowance. And while non-performing loans increased by $9 million, it's a few number of loans and We estimate at least 7 million will be resolved in the next six months. So that is obviously good. And I do want to highlight in the bottom chart what happened with the charge-offs, which this quarter were 20 basis points. I'm not really focusing on the light green above that for this quarter or last quarter, because as you may recall from previous conversations, those are just balance sheet items. Those representing the green purchase loans where we had a credit mark and that under CECL, you're now required to increase the balance of the loan, set up the allowance. And the green mark was just simply charging off part of the balance, which we did not pay for. But the blue bar below a 20 basis, that's a real number. And I want to point out of what that was, because we don't have that many charge-offs. It was one loan out of a pool that we purchased 194 loans. The total purchase was had a UPB of 85 million. with $4 million of discount. And of all of those 194 loans, of which only 159 remain because there have been some payoffs, only two loans are non-performing out of that total 85 million or 194 loans, including this one. So the whole pool did really well. And this is one loan that we had a charge-off on.

speaker
Richard

If we now go to slide 15, I first want to provide some context to this discussion on our small balance SBA loan activity.

speaker
Wayne

In August of 2021, we entered into a loan service provider agreement and a marketing agreement with annuity to serve as our loan service provider for um small val well for a 7a loans was small balance or not now we're focused you know simply on on small balance and as it's and the reason we started with them you may recall also that they were our small p partner in triple p lending in which we originated $3 billion and purchased an additional $8 billion from other banks in a transaction that generated significant income for the bank. And based on that, we thought there would be an opportunity to go market to those borrowers small balance 7 loans. And when I say small balance, A lot of what we do is under $150,000 or even under $25,000. We do some that are higher than that, but not that many. And I was very cautious when I discussed this not to overpromise because we really did not know at all if there would be demand for this product, whether or not we could get the technology working, whether, you know, what our marketing spend would be. and whether it would be a good business plan. We're very interested in it working as a way to generate fee income uncorrelated to interest income, but we really didn't know. Well, it took a while to get there. Provide the right data here. When we started this in fiscal, I mentioned it was August 21 that it started, and we're at June 30 year end. We did 48 loans total for $6.5 million. And in the following year, FY23, we did 256 loans for $16 million. And for our last fiscal year, 24, we were starting to get some traction. That's for the whole year. We did 1,039 loans for ninety two and a half million dollars. And now and the reason we're really excited about it now for the quarter that just ended September 30, we did seven hundred and sixty six loans for eighty two point four million dollars. And I do want to make sure we're giving appropriate credit not only to our own team at Northeast Bank, but also to annuity as our loan service provider, and so that has already picked up. We also extended our agreement with annuity, which previously was going to expire in August of 26. It was a five-year contract subject to a lot of technical things that are, we have filed a 8K where we have posted the two agreements that I'm discussing. But generally speaking, it's another five-year contract with an automatic renewal for another five years unless one party opts out. So we now have the basis of a, we believe, a very solid business line platform to generate significant small balance SBA loans as well as, on the portion of the guaranteed loans. And the part that is unguaranteed, which for the last year or so has been only about 18%, based on the mix of loans, those loans yield prime plus 275. So this is an exciting business. And we will now continue to provide information on our SBA business each quarter. And with that, Pat?

speaker
spk06

Patrick, this is a big quarter for us. We purchased 191 loans in seven transactions with gross balances of $808 million and at a purchase price of $733 million, or $0.91. These were mostly bank-originated term loans sold for a variety of reasons, but mainly liquidity. The loans are secured mostly with retail, industrial, and mixed-use collateral, and located primarily in New York, New Jersey, and California. The weighted average loan-to-value on these loans was around 55% at our purchase price, with no loans above 65%. Generally, these loans were purchased at credit and yield levels consistent with what you've seen from us previously. Looking forward, we think there'll continue to be purchase opportunities for us, M&A activity appears to be picking up, and historically, that's been our biggest source of loan purchasing opportunity. In our real estate origination business, we closed $127 million for the quarter, a level we believe to be core. These included 17 loans with an average balance of $7.5 million. Lateral types include multifamily, hospitality, retail, and industrial. and generally located in New York, California, and Florida. At origination, the weighted average LTV for these loans was just over 50%, and average rates were just under 9%. Interestingly, about 40% of these loans were direct and 60% lender finance, which is a return to a more historically normal mix between these two loan products. Recall that in the last fiscal year, over 90% of our loan originations were lender finance, We think we became more competitive in the direct lending space as the year went on because an increase in real estate transactions led to a more confidence around valuation. Others are sharing that confidence. While many banks remain on the sidelines with respect to commercial real estate lending, there's a lot of new capital in the non-bank lender space, and we're starting to see some very aggressive lending as they chase yield. Fortunately, there remains plenty of opportunity in our lending niche

speaker
Patrick

based on our current pipeline we're optimistic we can maintain the current level of originations with loans that meet both our credit and yield requirements now i'll turn it over to richard thanks very much pat so i want to just quickly recap what we discussed in the previous earnings call where we spoke about interest rate risk and what might happen to us and how we're positioned in a rates down environment I'm going to speak to you quickly as well about prepayments and to remind you of the position the bank is in from a prepayment perspective. I'll speak about how we funded the purchases that Pat just spoke about. I'll speak about our general approach to interest rate risk management, and then I'll speak about what happened in practice once rates fell. A recap on the Q4 investor call. I'd said at that stage that we would benefit from interest rates falling. And the reasons for those that I gave was because of the flaws we have in place over our variable rate loans, the tendency of loans to prepay in a rates down environment, which I'll expand on in a short while, and the repricing of our liabilities, which to some extent is a lag factor. What I also said on that call is that we do not position ourselves for excessive exposure to changes in interest rates in either direction. Our analysis at that stage had said to us that with rates down, we would expect to initially have a compression of our net interest income, thereafter followed by an expansion, resulting on a net basis in a slightly positive effect over the year and, in fact, the subsequent two years in a rates down environment. One of the reasons that I've just spoken about is prepayment, and I'll speak quickly about that, and then I'll tell you what, in fact, has happened. as you'll see if you look at slide number 22 is we have a 223.5 million dollar rate mark discount to remind you what that represents the rate mark is the rate at which we have received a discount of the face value when we purchase the loans and the reason we receive that is not for credit reasons it's because the loan was originated at what is now a below market rate and we purchased the loans such as to produce return that we are targeting that 223.5 million dollars will enter our income statement in two different ways the first way is as an accretion in other words with the passage of time we bleed that discount into our interest income and we earn it over the period of the loan on the assumption that these loans do not default these loans would either accrete or in the event that they prepay we would take that discount in respect to the loan up front the reason why i'm focusing on that is that that discount would be a benefit to us in a rates down environment because everything else equal we expect when rates fall prepayments increase in um in our current approach the way that we approach interest rate risk is as follows we have a system in place which forecasts our balance sheet into the future. And it takes into account a number of different scenarios, both rates up and rates down by different amounts. And it also considers both a shock as well as a ramp, a shock being a sudden and significant change in rates and a ramp being a slow progression of rates, either rising or falling. That system that we use and run scenarios through had told us that a rates down environment would be favorable to us, but only marginally, which is exactly what we want. If the results said that we would be significantly favorably affected by rates down, that implies we've taken an interest rate position, which we do not do. Our objective in funding is to make sure that we match the best of our ability, the asset side of the book, to make sure that when rates change, there's a commensurate change in the cost of funding, and it's also to ensure liquidity is managed. In other words, for the maturity of the liabilities to match as closely as possible the maturity or the repricing of the assets. Turning to the purchases that Pat spoke about, that's exactly what we did. We looked at the repricing profile of the book that was purchased, and we matched that profile with brokered CDs. and had a laddered approach taking out broken CDs with different maturities to approximately match that of the book. What was interesting for us is to then, in light of the fact that rates fell 50 basis points on the 18th of September, we ran an analysis to see what actually happened to our income and interest expense over that period of time and what that might imply for the remainder of the year. Recall, as I said a short while ago, we expected an initially negative impact, and for that to reverse over the subsequent three quarters. What in fact happened was a pleasant surprise is that given the rate at which we were able to reprice our liabilities, which was better than we had modeled, the net effect in the first 18 days plus the subsequent, the next 12 days plus the subsequent 18 was the due to quicker repricing of the liabilities. The net effect on net interest income just for that month was relatively flat. So I reiterate what I'd said in the previous earnings call, that given the way that we are positioned, we would expect that NII would be positively affected by a rate-down environment, but not significantly so due to our approach to interest rate risk. We are attempting, wherever possible, to be as neutral as possible and not to take a position wherever we can avoid it. I'll turn back to Rick.

speaker
Wayne

Thank you, Richard. And I will turn it back to our listeners to see if there are any questions about what we have covered or otherwise.

speaker
Operator

Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. If you have a question, please press star 1-1 on your touchtone phone. If you wish to be removed from the queue, please press star 1-1 again. If you are using a speakerphone, you may need to pick up the handset first before pressing the numbers. Once again, if you have a question, please press star 1-1 on your touchtone phone. Our first question comes from Mark Fitzgibbon of Piper Sandler. He's on the line with a question.

speaker
Mark Fitzgibbon

Thank you. Good morning, guys.

speaker
Operator

Good morning, Mark.

speaker
Mark Fitzgibbon

First question I had, Richard, could you just follow up on the margin discussion a little bit? I heard your comments and they were helpful. Would you be able to share with us what the margin looked like for the month of October? Well, thus far for the month of October?

speaker
Wayne

No, we don't have that information available for October yet. Okay. Okay.

speaker
Mark Fitzgibbon

But it sounds like on balance, you expect the net interest margin to be down a little bit in the fourth quarter and then start to sort of flatten out. Is that a fair characterization?

speaker
Wayne

Well, with respect to the large purchase, Pat had indicated that we would expect that to behave like other purchases in the past. If we go back and look at Other purchases, you know, our purchase, yield on our purchase loan book, in recent vintage, it's been between eight and a half and nine, roughly. You know, we would expect that to be the case with our loans that we purchased. You know, we didn't put out, we don't have a number out for the funding but actually you could easily figure it out. It was about 420, 425 to fund those purchases. So I'm describing now a spread on that between probably three and a half and four, I think is a reasonable number for the spread we would expect to earn the large purchase volume on our originated loans that we put on the, you know, balance sheet, our originated loan portfolio for, oh, we say that it is on page three. You know, it's almost 9%, 885 on what we originated. And, you know, you could do this same analysis with respect to the cost of funds on that.

speaker
Patrick

Can I add one more thing there quickly, Mark? If you turn to slide 16, that may also give you some insight in terms of your question. So slide 16 talks about the impact of the cost of funds for the first quarter being 4.34% and dropping to 4.18, which is a point estimate at the end of the month. Remembering that that 16 basis point drop does not reflect all the other liabilities that will be priced. So merely in those 12 days, there was a 16 basis point reduction in our cost of funding. As I said, that would take some time to come through with some lags and would not reflect the impact of brokered CDs as those roll and reprice.

speaker
Mark Fitzgibbon

Okay. And then changing gears a little bit on the loan front, I guess I was curious, are you seeing a lot more loan pools today than you have in the past as the volume of that picked up? And in that same vein, I was curious, If it's likely we'll see another big loan pool purchase, you know, say in the next couple quarters, or do you think it's more likely that you'll sort of digest what you just put on?

speaker
Wayne

Well, the volume of loans for purchase is quite cyclical. There have been periods going up. We've been at this for a long time. You know, there are periods when there's a lot of activity, and there's periods where there has not been. You know, we're seeing a lot of activity in the market. But that's not to say, you know, we're necessarily going to have a lot more in our balance sheet. We're optimistic, but it's binary. As you know, you bid, you win, you don't win. But it's been pretty busy for quite a while as to whether or not we could expect another very large purchase. Very hard to say. There are certainly large pools out there. But whether we bid on them, whether we win on them,

speaker
spk06

um you know it's i don't want to provide a false hope we'll see we're certainly looking at a lot pat you want to answer that someone i would just add that the the loan sale advisors that we that we speak with frequently are all slammed they're very busy they're they're though again that doesn't necessarily mean they'll translate to actual opportunities because there's a lot of tire kicking in this business but um they're as busy as they've ever they've ever been and i'd say one thing that um is new and interesting is the number of single loan. There seems to be a growing number of banks and non-banks selling single loans, which we haven't seen in a while. It has been pools for quite a while. This is interesting in that it's a different kind of opportunity where we think we can be competitive on the side. So whether or not there's more whales out there, we hope so, but you never know.

speaker
Mark Fitzgibbon

In that same vein, I guess I'm curious what your thoughts are on adding to the ATM or doing sort of a spot capital raise to take advantage of, you know, some of these loan purchase opportunities and what you might be targeting for a capital ratio.

speaker
Wayne

You know, that is a very good question. You know, we have $23 million remaining in the existing It's a facility we like very much. I know you know this, Mark, but for other listeners, it has the benefit for us of being able to raise capital when we need it and not raising a lot of capital for working capital purposes and then not being able to use it. In 2012, we raised $55 million in a transaction that we thought there'd be a lot of loan purchasing opportunities, and there were not. Kind of the good side, we wound up over time buying back a third of our bank stock at about 16 bucks, as it turned out. And I digress, as they say. But with respect to the ATM we have now, that's why we put out the information. What is our loan capacity? And as we need the capital, we will sell stock out of the ATM to do it. And of course, where our stock is now trading, it's much more attractive to sell stock than when we were trading below tangible book. Now our tangible book is about 48 bucks and we're trading in the 90s now. As to whether we will do another one to answer your question, know you know the board will evaluate that and um make a decision as to how much although you know it's not it's a relatively inexpensive way to raise capital so um there's no guarantee but i would not be surprised if we wind up adding to the atm and allowing ourselves you know more flexibility going into the future i think it's a good sign for investors that you know we have confidence in the business when we're you know increasing the atm

speaker
Mark Fitzgibbon

Okay, great. And then one of the optics or metrics that stands out for you guys relative to a lot of other banks is that CRE concentration. And I think it was over 600%. And many banks are telling their investors that they're pushing down toward that 300% guidance that the regulators had given a while back. And I know you all feel differently about where you ought to sit on that. I wondered if you could just at a high level share with us a couple thoughts on why you think your company is different and justifies being able to have a much higher level than other banks?

speaker
Wayne

Well, first of all, the only kind of lending we do is commercial real estate and, of course, the small balance SBA lending. Our balance sheet is 97%. I'm rounding here, commercial real estate. We've been doing this for quite a while. We have been a lot of controls in place. We have an excellent experienced team. I'll remind listeners that Pat and I were doing this at Capital Crossing Bank, which was a bank my former partner and I started 30 years ago. We have a bunch of folks in the national lending business that came from Capital Crossing Bank and a bunch more that have joined us You know, we have an incredible record around asset quality. You know, the charge-offs, you know, have been really, really, really small. I think overall on a weighted average basis, the charge-offs on our purchase loan book have been five or six basis points, you know, with returns that have been, you know, call it 975 or so. And on the originated side, charge-offs have been really, really small, probably over $4 billion of originations. Some of the things that we focus on, not only risk management, risk control, and all the things that one would expect, we have very low LTVs. So kind of in the low 50s overall on our loan book, And that gives us a lot of protection. You know, we structure loans, you know, if it's an originated loan into bankruptcy remote entities with the highest default rate permitted under state law, typically with advances in our lender finance that are cross-collateralized, cross-defaulted, often even with the LTV set up with interest reserves and with, you know, on our part, because on the loan-on-loan, for example, So we have very good counterparts and we've been successful at it for a very long time. And we have in place a protocol for how many real estate loans we can have in buckets relating to the risk rating so that For example, in the highest risk rating, what we would call one through three, we could have 850% of capital in those. But in the substandard loans, you know, kind of rated eight and above, it's 30% in that bucket, 30% in that bucket. And so there's a relationship between how much we will have on our balance sheet and the quality of our loans, all structured.

speaker
Richard

to cause a level of very high-quality commercial real estate loans.

speaker
Wayne

I could go on much longer on all the things that make it great, but... That's a great answer. I'm bragging about the team, not me, but we have a great team.

speaker
Mark Fitzgibbon

I think that's a great answer. And then I... Sorry, I just got two more quick ones. Are there any plans to grow sort of the core deposits with either new branches, products, or anything to try to bring down that broker deposit number over time?

speaker
Wayne

Yes, but growing deposits, you know, is, you know, kind of brick by brick in some ways, unless there's, you know, a transaction. So I'd say, you know, in May now we have seven branches, and we have – now 900 million of deposits in those branches which for us um is the highest number in in quite some time on top of that we have government deposits in maine for another 400 that's about a billion three i've just described and then of course as you point out we have a lot of broker deposits which we actually like quite a bit it's very efficient we ordered up the money for that loan pool in a couple of weeks and brought in $750 million of deposits at good pricing. And with respect to growing it in a massive way in a transaction, of course, we see them from time to time and we're open to the idea. But so far, they have not been attractive in terms of the economics.

speaker
Mark Fitzgibbon

OK, great. Just a couple of little modeling things. I assume professional expenses were a little bit elevated due to the loan purchases, and we should see those start to come back down. Is that fair?

speaker
Wayne

No, I don't think it was that. Becca Jones' brand, just a matter of fact, do you want to answer that question?

speaker
spk08

Yes, general legal expenses, audit expenses as we grow, those just continue to increase slightly.

speaker
Mark Fitzgibbon

Okay, great. And lastly, the effective tax rate, you feel like that probably stays in that 32-ish percent range going forward? Yeah.

speaker
Patrick

I'm sorry. No, I was just going to say we do think so.

speaker
Richard

Great. Thank you. Thank you, Mark. Thank you.

speaker
Operator

Thank you. Our next caller comes from David Minkoff of DCM Asset Management. Your line is now open.

speaker
David Minkoff

Good morning, Richard, Rick, and Pat. Congratulations on another nice quarter. Actually, the quarter was even nicer than it appeared because, as you pointed out, those loans that were purchased at the high level were done late in the quarter and really didn't work its way into the quarterly numbers yet. We'll see that in the ensuing quarter. So... The report was even better than it looks. The $805 million loan purchase, which was kind of outstanding, what would the normal loan purchases have been in the last couple of quarters? I don't have those numbers in front of me. How were they running?

speaker
Wayne

We do have it. It's a slide on that which we could go over. Let's see, what page is that on...

speaker
David Minkoff

Well, I'm not on the slide. I'm on the phone call, and so I don't have access to the slides at that moment.

speaker
Wayne

No, I know. That was actually a question for ourselves to find. It's on page six. Well, this is not just the – this is the total – oh, yeah, we have both here. So on the purchase side, this was significantly larger than the last – If we go back a year ago, we purchased $52 million. The following quarter was $186 million. The following quarter was zero. The following one, which was June 30th, was $143 million. And then this, of course, was $732 million.

speaker
David Minkoff

Okay. So that's an incredible increase. Now, I'm assuming that those numbers and those purchases was done – at the same stringency that you've used in the past. I mean, you haven't lowered your standards to get those numbers up to that number, correct? Correct. You may look at, to get $732 million in purchased loans, what do you look at, $7 billion perhaps or something to come up with that number?

speaker
Wayne

No, it wasn't that because $732 million, a big chunk of that, was in one transaction. So we were pretty busy with that one transaction. So it wasn't $7 billion.

speaker
David Minkoff

Right, I know. So it's somewhat of an aberration then because of that one large transaction. Is that right?

speaker
Wayne

Yeah, well, I have in front of me what our market funnel looked like. So for the quarter, we looked at total $27 billion 20 pools for $2.7 billion. And then out of those, that means those are transactions that we came across. We took a more in-depth look on $2 billion, which means that was 11 pools that we looked at. And we did a fair amount of work on those. And of those, we wound up bidding on $839 million. And we wound up closing on $807 million, which is a very high rate. It's not typically that high, the rate, but a lot of those were negotiated transactions. And so, you know, the likelihood of closing was higher.

speaker
David Minkoff

Understood. So it's a good number, and it should translate into better earnings, I guess, going forward. You first announced this, you pre-announced this, I guess you might say, on September 24th when you came out and said you purchased $805 million, I think the number was. $805 million, right? That was the number. And the next day, on the 25th, Piper Sandler came out and increased your target price from $82 to $95 a share. Yeah. So that was a pretty hefty increase. What was the earnings estimate that they have for the ensuing year, for the year ending June 2025 that gave them that $95 price target? I didn't see the report in depth.

speaker
Wayne

Oh, for the fiscal year we're in now?

speaker
David Minkoff

The fiscal year that just began, yeah, that ends next in June, June 25.

speaker
Wayne

You know, it's in the range of $10.

speaker
David Minkoff

$10, okay.

speaker
Wayne

I don't have it exactly in front of me, David. Right. Give or take a little bit, it's in that range.

speaker
David Minkoff

Right, okay.

speaker
Wayne

We did 211 this quarter, and that does not include the spread on all of the loans that we booked late in September. Well, you said it. You'll see that in the ensuing quarters.

speaker
David Minkoff

Right. So, in other words, hypothetically, you might say that had you increased those on July 1st, the earnings for the quarter might have been in the $250 range or something like that, $260. And that would stand to reason when Piper has an estimate of $10 a share. So, I guess, okay, we'll see that as things go forward. You don't usually give projections, so I'm not going to ask you to comment on that. So, again, congratulations on a great quarter, and we're looking forward to this to continue.

speaker
Wayne

David, before you go, I would say you were a legend for your comments on the last call.

speaker
David Minkoff

Well, is there anyone in the queue? I have another quick story for you if you have the time.

speaker
Wayne

We may have some others. You can call me afterwards and tell me.

speaker
David Minkoff

We'll set that for another time. Congratulations on a great quarter, and I'm glad to be a legend. Okay. Thank you.

speaker
Wayne

Thank you, David.

speaker
David Minkoff

Bye.

speaker
Operator

Thank you. Our next caller is Adam Wilkie of Pacific Ridge Capital. Your line is now open.

speaker
Adam Wilkie

Yeah, good morning. I think I was one of those folks that mentioned David's comments earlier.

speaker
David

Yeah. Hey, good morning, Adam.

speaker
Adam Wilkie

Yeah. Yeah. You know, great job, guys. You know, happy to see the loan purchase. I was going to ask actually about the 7A business. How big would you like to grow that on your balance sheet? I know it's pretty small right now. And what should we expect the charge-off rate to be on the total originated loan balance on average through the cycle and then maybe at the peak?

speaker
Wayne

So just to remind everyone else, you probably know this. So the guaranteed portion has been roughly, unguaranteed portion has been roughly 18%. And the reason for that is loans under $150,000 have an 85% guarantee. And over 150 is a 75% guarantee. We're doing a lot of small ones. And so, you know, we have 18% on our, we wound up putting on our balance sheet. The, you know, from the business perspective, you know, it's very profitable because you can sell off the guaranteed portion, you know, for premiums now between 10 and a half and 11%. you know, roughly we think that, and so therefore I think, you know, we'll keep running with this on our balance sheet. Our balance sheet is getting much bigger and it's not a lot that we're, you know, that we're putting on. I think the real, you know, question as to that is how comfortable are we with the credit quality around these? And to answer part of your question, There's a lot of data from the SBA about charge-offs for these kinds of loans. And we think that, you know, if you look at historically over a lot of information in this category, it would be about 3% on the unguaranteed portion. But so far, probably we may have a tighter credit box than, you know, those averages have been using. of everything we've booked, we've had something like $150,000 of charge-offs on a couple hundred million of originations. That's $100,000, not much, much less than 3%, but we now have a 3% reserve against our SBA loans. We increased it by about a million dollars or so this quarter, so now our unguaranteed SBA portfolio is a little bit less than $50 million, and we have 3% of that in the allowance, which we believe will be – is the appropriate coverage. As to your question, what are the peaks and the – and, you know, it's knowable. I don't know that offhand, though.

speaker
Adam Wilkie

All right. That's fine. If I understand correctly, on the purchase business, a lot of potential opportunities right now. You might do something, you might not. If you do, the ATM is there to fund it and you would probably... Sorry, the ATM is there for the capital if necessary. and then you would do probably again some sort of laddered activity to help fund it if those possibilities come through is that fair to say yes well well well said all right um that's all i have and uh keep up the great work thank you thank you very much adam

speaker
Operator

Thank you. We have no further questions at this time. Now I will turn the call over to Rick Wayne for closing remarks.

speaker
Wayne

Thank you. Thank you all for listening and those that asked questions for your questions. It'd be interesting, you know, when we have our next call to see how some of these things play out that we've discussed today. If you have any suggestions on ways we can provide more relevant information on our slides and the information we provide. Let us know if we can do it. We will. And with that, I thank you, and we will sign off now.

speaker
Operator

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. This concludes today's conference.

Disclaimer

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