CapStar Financial Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ:CSTR) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Tim Schools: Our teammate, Glen Rhodes is here I believe it was around $1.5 million, is that approximate approximately $1.5 million Graham. And again – I think our gentleman that runs that he is tremendous. I think this was the lowest gain on sale, he may have had in history and he’s a real pro and it’s just that’s an issue as I’m sure you’re hearing from other banks, they’re just limited to no volume. And fortunately the spreads came back – for the volume you get, but there is additional, we’re actually interviewing a person we’ve interviewed her twice this week from another mortgage company that got laid-off in town. The big companies are doing that and there is a potential – of maybe some further reductions. We did reduce about $400,000 on operating expense, but it’s a balance of again.

We really have an outstanding mortgage company, it’s not a monoline that we blew up for the – when I say blew up expand we didn’t expand it for the refi environment it’s really a purchase money high-quality shop in metro Nashville. And hate to damage that for short-term earnings, but we’ll continue to monitor it with Hart Weatherford and with Chris Tietz.

Chris Tietz: Yes and Graham, I’ll point out that we view March and April as being important kind of watershed periods to gauge where we see the rest of the year going we are seeing a pickup in applications, of course, rates have come down margins on the gain on sale have gone up at this point, we’re encouraged by the application volumes, the declining rates. The resilience incumbent in the quality and quantity of housing demand in our markets particularly Middle Tennessee, where we’re really – have historically been a top five kind of mortgage originator for the market.

Graham Dick: Okay, great, that’s all very helpful, thanks guys.

Tim Schools: Okay, thank you.

Operator: And thank you. And one moment for our next question. And our next question comes from Kevin Fitzsimmons from D.A. Davidson. Your line is now open.

Kevin Fitzsimmons: Hi, good afternoon, everyone.

Tim Schools: Hi Kevin.

Kevin Fitzsimmons: So appreciate all the information here and we’ve talked a lot about margin, but if we look at dollars of NII are we likely in the first half of the year if loan growth is more limited. So overall balance sheet growth is more limited and the margins under pressure is that likely – that dollars of NII will be flat to down in the first half of the year and maybe – and are you hopeful it goes from goes to flat to up in the back half of the year?

Mike Fowler: Well, definitely on the backside and on the first side. I’d like to see that you know I think one issue, is just managing just overall liquidity and the quality of the balance sheet. You know the – in the fourth quarter Mike mentioned our correspondent division, other banks are having the same issue. So there is, pros and cons to correspondent balances because they are having issues too with customers. And so our correspondent balance is we’re about half the decline. We had some customer decline CapStar historically had some really large metro Nashville. I don’t want to call it hot money, but more rate sensitive money and that’s some of what has been leaving. So I would say, Kevin from Tim’s perspective, what I would love to happened as I hope the correspondent sort of settles down, one strategy, I didn’t mention when I listed them as we do have a new correspondent banker that – I announced previously.