Bank OZK (NASDAQ:OZK) Q1 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

I’m going to throw that to Brannon and see if we can harmonize an answer for you on that.Brannon Hamblen Yeah. I mean, George, it’s right. Of course, Catherine, there are sales that are occurring as well as refis, and I would say what’s paying off is fairly even across the board. I mean, you’ve got — I think in terms of number of loans this past quarter, actually, condo was the biggest in terms of actual number of loans that’s fully paid off, and that’s not counting all the condo loans that you actually had pay downs on.In this environment, you might think with rates where they are, you wouldn’t see that. But of course, a lot of our condo loans are secured by collateral in the southern Miami market. And those are typically presold with very high buyer deposits and those guys tend to follow through on those transactions versus other markets that might not have such a big buyer deposit and a little slower there.But behind that, I’d say, multifamily tends to still be the most liquid.

Of course, their cap rates are up, but they’re still on a historical basis, pretty reasonable. And I’ve seen some refis and heard some sizing around some agency type lenders that was pretty compelling. So overall, again, it’s slower, but they’re still — we’re still seeing some stuff pay off.We had — it’s not — it was a big life science loan that that was a refi, some in industrial, we had a hotel refi as well. So our — the sensitivity of our assets is one thing that if our buyer or our borrowers can improve on that, that rate they’re paying us at all, it’s a consideration. So not an ideal market, but still seeing transactions come off.Catherine Mealor That’s helpful. Thank you.George Gleason Thank you.Operator Thank you. One moment. Our next question comes from Brody Preston with UBS.

Your line is open.Brody Preston Hey, I just had one follow-up on the office for the RESG projects that are office. They’re obviously, Class A in nature. And I know that some of those buildings when they’re under construction or at least I’ve read that they can have a pre-leasing that occurs. I wanted to ask if any of your office buildings that are under construction have pre-leasing in place. And if you could give us a sense for how much or how often that occurs?Brannon Hamblen Absolutely, Brody. Good question, and the answer in short is yes. We do some that are spec and we do some that have pre-leasing of late, more of it has material pre-leasing in place or a requirement that it’d be in place before we fund. And the other thing to point out, I mean, well, you’re starting at, on average, I think our office projects are at a 53% loan-to-cost, right?

And in addition to that, you’ve got typically sequential funding, which means we’re asked to start funding.And then on top of that, you’ve got the fact that as leasing does occur, it has leasing commissions and tenant improvement dollars are funded only at that point in time. So there’s — I would tell you that probably, call it, a third of our commitments are actually funded on office. So that in combination with, in certain cases, a pre-leasing requirement, and in other cases, leasing taking place we feel good about the ultimate loan-to-cost and loan-to-value and the way that, that actually happens with future deliveries and TI and LC good news money we call it. So we feel good about our office portfolio, as George alluded to in detail earlier.Brody Preston Great.

Thank you for that. And then just my last quick one was the 8% kind of rate for that loan, George, and I think Catherine referenced it, but is that a good rate to assume for the — for what funding currently, like what funded this quarter? And just remind us that those come on at floors, right, so that interest rate should be relatively sticky if we were to get a Fed cut at any point over the next three to nine months?George Gleason Brannon, do you want to take a shot at that one?Brannon Hamblen Yes. And I don’t know exactly, as I said, what that rate was, but it’s a good proxy. And I want to say our non-purchased yield was 8% and change. And the floors, we’ve talked about the fact that we are — as we’re closing loans today and as we did, and obviously, we closed a lot of loans last year, those floors are typically going in at SOFR on the day of closing.

Now SOFR has moved a lot quickly as we all know. So those floors have moved up quickly as well.You really — we have a good loan vintage chart, I forget what — I think that was figure 11, that sort of gives you the vintage of our loans, but even maybe more so and more granular basis, figure nine where you see the quarterly originations. And so you sort of follow the movement of SOFR through those quarters that I’ll sort of tell you where the floors are being set. But not only on the originations side, but George mentioned the asset management group being busy with interest reserves and allocations and things of that nature. They’re also busy as we’re extending loans.I mentioned before, sort of natural around three to — on average three years, there will be a maturity and a possible extension at that point in time or any other point in time that the borrowers ask for any sort of modification that we feel like we can do and be in the same sort of safe place we were, we’ll be looking at that rate, we’ll be looking at that floor rate and attempting to move that up to increase the stickiness that you alluded to in the legacy portfolio as well.

So it’s an important part of what we do. We work hard at it every day. And — but again, a lot of it has to do with the speed and magnitude of the SOFR changes over the last, especially six, nine months.Brody Preston Got it. Thank you very much for taking my questions, everyone. I appreciate it.Operator Thank you. One moment. And our next question comes from the line of Timur Braziler with Wells Fargo. Your line is now open.Timur Braziler Hey, guys. Thanks for the follow-up. Just a couple of quick ones. First, on the allowance ratio, it looks like over the last two quarters, the incremental build to the allowance ratio has all been from the unfunded commitments. We started to see some incremental charge-off activity happening outside of RESG.

I’m just wondering, as we enter into this period of incremental uncertainty, how you’re feeling about the overall 1.01% allowance ratio and what that could trend like in the back end of the year?Tim Hicks Yes, Timur, this is Tim. Obviously, we feel really good about that ratio and the overall ratio. And you’ve seen us build the overall ratio the last couple of quarters. Clearly, our provision has been impacted in the last couple of quarters by growth in our funded balance. It all depends on the Moody’s macro scenarios and how we view those compared to our own view. There’s been — there continues to be a lot of uncertainties in the current environment, and that’s reflected in our viewpoint on our scenario selections, our scenario weightings.But Timur, we’ve got a really low net charge-off ratio, historically, a range that we’ve given is still on the low end.