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

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Just trying to get a sense of kind of incremental comfortability here with how low leverage or how low the leverage points are across your portfolio.Jared Wolff Yeah, So, ours are — so ours are recently appraised recent numbers. We do it annually and these are relatively recently done. So I feel very good about our portfolio. So I wouldn’t take away from our numbers that, well it’s 55% loan to value, but that was based on appraisal two years ago and it’s really 85%. That’s not the position of our portfolio. But I will tell you that generally, yes, office properties have gone way down in value and it has to do with the size of the property primarily and the location and kind of a whole bunch of other factors.Large office buildings are under tremendous stress.

We don’t have any of those. We got B and C low rise buildings and where, you got the CPA working there because it doesn’t want to work from home or she doesn’t want to work from home and you got somebody else, they’re kind of suite based buildings that are not very large. Large office buildings under tremendous amount of pressure unless they have long-term anchor tenants.And so, they’re, I think that the Wells Fargo building in San Francisco just traded for $200 a square foot in Downtown, which was crazy given what it would cost to replace that building. Most of these large buildings are selling for well below replacement cost and smaller buildings less so.Andrew Terrell Yes. Okay. And then similar thing on the debt service coverage; do you get, like how recently is that debt service number refreshes?

Is it similar as to how often you get appraisals on properties?Jared Wolff No, it’s more frequent because yeah, we’re looking at this stuff almost quarterly in terms of understanding rent roles and cash flow of buildings and things like that. It depends on each loan, but we obviously things that have low debt service coverage. We’re looking at and are in constant conversations, things that are higher that have been performing with good rent roles and stable tenants, There’s not as much need to look at it.Andrew Terrell And then on the three credits for $90 million or so that were sold this quarter or exited I think it’s good to see some balance sheet kind of pruning where it makes sense. Do you feel like there’s, as you look out kind of anything else across the loan portfolio that might be legacy in nature that you could be looking to trim up over the next couple of quarters?Jared Wolff Yeah, there’s a whole bunch of stuff where the deposit relationship just is not there for the size of the loan and so as this stuff comes up, we’re sizing and saying, look, you got to put more compensating balances in our company, or you’re going to have to go borrow from somebody else.

And there were loans that were made before I got here that just didn’t have deposits associated with them and, we’ve tried to bring in deposits from those relationships over time, but you can’t necessarily cause somebody to bring them over with you unless they have a new request.And so once the loans are made, we’re committed on the loan and so I think that’s the easiest opportunity is rather is looking at any of those relationships where we haven’t been able to bring in deposits for whatever reason on that specific loan. We just won’t renew it. Everybody here knows that we are not making any loans without a deposit relationship period. And that’s been the way it’s been since I’ve been here but, it’s even more true today.Andrew Terrell Yes.

Okay. And apologies, I might have missed this. Can you talk to non-interest bearing deposit flows, since quarter ran? Have you seen a slowdown in the cadence of NIB outflows? Does it feel like that’s improved so far? Just trying to get a sense of as we work into 2Q kind of the level of stability for the NIBs?Jared Wolff Yeah. No, 36%, where we sit today, where we sat at quarter end, that feels right and we expect it to grow from there. It’s just, we had some early outflow in the beginning of the quarter that we knew was coming. There was some acceleration of outflow, but not in size, but in terms of kind of numbers that happened, when the meltdown happened and then a lot of it came back.And then we have a pipeline now where we’ve got some really good opportunities in front of us that I feel good about.

And so, I think our NIBs is going to be stable and growing. It’s hard as I mentioned at the beginning of the — I’ve been saying this for a while, that the economy’s been shrinking and deposits are — I think of it, Banc of America had 2% decline in deposits.And so it’s not an unusual number given the way the economy is shrinking, but we are competing pretty hard right now and I think our team’s doing a really good job and it’s a big focus of ours. And so I’m optimistic, I don’t know what the answer is. I don’t know where the number’s going to be. Right now it feels like 36% is pretty stable and I see the opportunity to grow it from there. But, if something else happens and there’s another little shrink in the armor and there’s something else happens, then you could, all banks could see some outflow and then we’ll be down and we’ll bring it back up.

But NIB is really using services at our company and it’s kind of the last money to kind of want to leave.Andrew Terrell Right. Okay. Well very good. Thank you for taking the questions. I appreciate it.Jared Wolff Yeah. Thank you, Andrew.Operator This concludes our question-and-answer session. The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today’s presentation. You may now disconnect.

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