Ameris Bancorp (NASDAQ:ABCB) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Nicole Stokes: Sure, so our gain on sale this quarter was a 1.26, and we certainly don’t feel like that’s–we feel like that’s definitely going up and that that should stabilize. We’ve said–we originally said about 2.75 to 3 – don’t know when we’ll get there, but I do have some interesting little details I wanted to mention on mortgage. There’s been so much noise between 2019, ’20 and ’21, and so when you kind of go back and look at fourth quarter ’19, which is post Fidelity but it’s also a fourth quarter, it’s a really good comparison quarter in that it’s post Fidelity, it’s pre-COVID, pre-boon, and it’s a fourth quarter, so you’ve got the cyclicality of that fourth quarter. When you look at that, our production is down about 40% this quarter over–I’m sorry, 30% this quarter over fourth quarter ’19, but our profitability is greatly improved, and a lot of that has to do with all of the things that the mortgage group learned and did because they had to during that refi boon, so they’ve definitely become more efficient.

Then when you look at their contribution to the company in ’19, they were about 19% of our net income, and this quarter they’re about 13% of our net income, so they continue to be efficient and they continue to monitor all of that, and so if they can stay on that projection and be able to kind of make up for that loss of gain on sale, when gain on sale comes back, it’s just going to be gravy for us. When we think about production for next year, I would model about mid-$4.5 billion to $5 billion of production, that’s probably $1 billion in the first quarter and fourth quarter and then about $1.5 billion in the second and third, so that gets you to about–between $4.5 billion and $5 billion in production. I would hate to tell you to model a 1.26 gain.

I would hope that it would come back a little bit and that we would see that come back this year, but I really don’t see it coming back into that 2.75, 3 range until the market really stabilizes. But I think it would be safe to project kind of in that 2% for next year.

Brady Gailey: Okay, all right. That’s helpful. Then there’s a lot of focus on commercial real estate, and specifically in office. I know you guys give some good stats about your office investor-free portfolio, which is a little over $1.2 billion. Any other things you can talk about that – is that Class A, Class B, are you seeing any weakness there? Any updates you can give us on office CRE?

Jon Edwards: Yes, I can give you a little bit. Our office portfolio is primarily–we kind of mentioned it on the slide, but really three categories, I guess you’d call them: essential use, meaning that a company needs that facility for a call center or a headquarter building or something along those lines, medical office, and/or credit tenant. We really don’t have kind of CBD offices and really not a lot of just sort of the generic, two or three storey kind of stuff. We really try to focus on those three categories for that portfolio. As you can see on that slide, there is a level of NPAs of 70 basis points, but I would tell you that that is really in one loan that we are continuing. It kind of broke in the second quarter of 2022 and we’re continuing to work out strategy on that, but there’s not been anything sort of widespread as far as any cracks that have developed thus far in that portfolio.