Banc of California, Inc. (NYSE:BANC) Q1 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Thanks. Thanks for the color. Switching to credit with the charge off you had this quarter, can you provide any color as to what composed those charge offs? And as we kind of look ahead in a normalizing credit environment, what would you view as a normalized level of charge offs? Would it be similar to this 20-ish basis point you had here? Any puts or takes would be helpful.Jared Wolff Yeah, I think if I remember correctly, it was like $500 was the charge off. It was a small event that we had prepared for. We did put aside 2.5% and so the net number was 2%. It was just based on what we saw. It was kind of basically cautious outlook. I don’t see anything specific that I’m concerned about. We have, obviously we disclosed our very, very low levels of office exposure.I think talking about CRE is too general because multi-family is technically CRE and so we like to break that up and so as it relates to CRE office, general office is a very, very small number for us.

And so that’s why we lead out those numbers. So, I’m not predicting any credit problems going forward. And I think our reserve levels are adequate and relative to others, they’re actually pretty high who have similar portfolios to us, but we, from a modelling and we follow our model and from a model perspective this quarter, we felt that this amount was appropriate.Kelly Motta Thanks for that. Can you expand upon just like the composition of that multi-family portfolio? Just, what a typical credit looks like size why you feel confident there just because we are feeling questions lot on CRE. So just any color on…Jared Wolff On multi-family or office,Kelly Motta Multi-family since you mentioned it.Jared Wolff Yeah, our multi-family portfolio, has held up extremely well over all cycles.

And, we are lending primarily in California to infill housing that is in some of the densest demographic areas in the country with a huge housing shortage like San Diego for example, I’ve mentioned this before. They’re approximately 300,000 units short and they’re only bringing online about 10,000 units a year.So, the catch up is not looking very good. And I’m sitting across the street in my office in Brentwood from a building that’s going up, that’s going to be sold out really quickly. We don’t have a single non-performing multi-family loan and I don’t expect it to happen. A lot of the conversation has been around how do you stress multi-family for rate changes and let’s say you have a loan that’s at 3.4% or 4% that’s, that’s maturing over the next 12 months.

And the rate for that loan today might be 7%, might be 7.5% depending on the loan.Well, most of these buildings are fully stabilized and if they are, there’s a whole bunch of options. If for some reason rents have not caught up and kept up with where rates are going from an interest rate perspective over those four or five years that that loan has been outstanding, then the borrower is likely going to have to come up with equity. There are a whole bunch of people say, I mentioned I was at this real estate dinner the other night. There are all these people sitting on the sidelines that are willing to put in GP equity next to somebody if they don’t have the liquidity to put in the — to put in to bring down the loan. Most of them do.They could sell the property.

They’d be able to sell it pretty easily. Also the bank technically doesn’t need to bring the loan up to 7.5%. If the loan’s on at 4% and we bring it up to 6%, 6.5%, we still have a better loan than we did before from a rate perspective. But we wouldn’t do that. We would bring it up to market rates.And then the other thing is Fannie and Freddy are very, very active. So Fannie and Freddy are letting right now on multi-family properties in the mid to low fives. So, the reason people don’t go there is because they lose some flexibility in terms of the timing of the loan and you have a defeasance and you have to leave the loan outstanding longer. So you lose some flexibility.So for all those reasons, I don’t, don’t see any problems to multifamily, but starting with just the tight demographics and the lack of the high demand for housing and the shortage of housing in our market, but there were all these other reasons why I don’t think multifamily will have stressors.Those same conditions don’t exist for office, which is why, I think there is a potential problem with office and that’s why I’m glad that we have such low exposure.

Our loans are recourse. They’re performing very well to people with high liquidity and we put some of the stats in there and we have just such low exposure to general office, and I have a list on my desk.We only have about $80 million of office that is maturing in the next through the end of next year, which is that 17 months, 16 months. So, I have a list on my desk of those loans and I don’t see one that’s a problem.Kelly Motta I really appreciate all the color. I’ll step back. Thank you.Operator Our next question comes from Tim Coffey from Janney. Please go ahead.Tim Coffey Hey, if I can just follow up on the CRE commentary there. So, good details in the deck on the different property breakdowns. I’m wondering of the general office, how much of that is in a central business district?Jared Wolff Well, there’s no central business district in Los Angeles.

We have Downtown, we got Brentwood, we got Westwood, we got Century City, we got Woodland Hills, we got Santa Monica, we got Culver City. There are pockets throughout. There’s no — none of these buildings are sitting like in a desert.Some of these buildings are in San Diego, like they’re just all pocketed in where you would — when we underwrite loans and we look at what we want to lend on, that’s part of the understanding is that we have to do is look at what is the aptitude and the attitude for possible tendencies based on the turnover that we would, might foresee during the duration of our loan and are they going to be able to get rents that would and find tenants and that’s all part of the appraisal process and the evaluation of the loan.So, we believe that they’re sufficiently well located to hold up to the extent that office is going to hold up at all.

That’s not going to be the reason why these properties don’t do well. It’s going to be because of a transition away from office. But again, our loans are recourse. We hold our borrowers. We get frequent monitoring and we’ve just had a loan where we didn’t like the occupancy. We went to the borrower and he put up all bunch of money and paid down the loan. So, that’s why we we’re a recourse lender where we — our loans are guaranteed by people that have the wherewithal to carry the loans.Tim Coffey Okay. And then I want to get your thoughts on the CLOs. Part of Western Alliance is de-risking is that they’ve considered selling some of their CLO holdings. And I was wondering what your thoughts were on continuing to hold the CLO portfolio?Jared Wolff Well, we’re in a very different position than Western Alliance, I think from in a number of perspectives.

I don’t know the size of their portfolio. When I joined the bank, Tim, as you remember, I think our portfolio was over $1.5 billion of CLOs. We are sitting now, I believe at under $500 million. And so it’s kind of self-liquidating.It’s obviously was tested through COVID and as you know, they trade on credit spreads and so that’s something that we monitor very carefully, but we’re in double A and triple A CLOs. It’s one of — it’s part of our asset sensitivity. It’s something that’s more asset sensitive because they’re short term and so we don’t have any plans to sell it right now. I think it’s gotten down to a reasonable level of our overall securities portfolio and it’s performing well.We’ve had offers to buy it because we’ve had offers to buy it — but it’s got a pretty low unrealized loss position right now and I think we wouldn’t certain — we certainly wouldn’t sell it at a loss because there’s no reason to do that.

If it was trading at a gain and we could trade into something else that was equivalently short term, would we look at it potentially, but, I wouldn’t sell any — I certainly wouldn’t sell it at the loss.Tim Coffey Okay. All right. Those are my questions. I appreciate the time. Thank you.Jared Wolff Yeah, I guess I should also say never say never, but that’s at least the way I feel today.Operator [Operator instructions] Our next question comes from Andrew Terrell from Stephens. Please go ahead.Andrew Terrell Most of might have been asked and answered already. I did have a couple just going back to the office commercial real estate book. I understand it’s a low portion of loans for you guys and the underwriting looks solid at a 54% LTV. I’m just curious, have you seen Jared, any office properties either within your book or across your markets get recently reappraised and what the value change was on the property?