Chris Myers – President & Chief Executive Officer
Prepayment fees, it’s a great question because we’ve been anticipating that prepayment fees are going to go down quarter over quarter, but with interest rates dropping, they actually went up from the third quarter to fourth quarter. They were $742,000 in the third quarter and they were $866,000 for the fourth quarter. So, a lot of these loans have been prepaid over the last few years because of the ongoing low interest rate cycle, but with the dip down in the loan interest rates we’ve seen actually more refinancings going on. A lot of that stuff we’re keeping on our books but some of that we’re seeing, some of these properties we’re seeing sold, so even though our loan pipeline is pretty solid we’re seeing some runoff of loans due to either refinancings which we hope to keep or property sales.
Rich Thomas – Executive Vice President & Chief Financial Officer
Generally we lose the loan and that happens.
Julianna Balicka – KBW
Right, ok, that makes sense and then since you’ve brought up energy and oil in your remarks, could you quantify what is CVBF’s exposure to the energy industry in general?
Chris Myers – President & Chief Executive Officer
Well, I mean in terms of direct exposure, we have a low eight figure exposure in terms of our total loans to companies that are oil or gas or fit into those SIC codes so to speak. So it’s not, I mean its maybe $10 million to $20 million somewhere in that range. So we’re not really concerned about that and we’ve already gone through and looked at those different companies and are tracking them very closely, but peripherally that’s going to affect the central values of economy if oil prices stay low for an extended period of time and that could have effect on other businesses that are not directly in the oil and gas business but are related in some fashion. So we’re watching that carefully. So far we really haven’t seen anything dramatic, but we’ll see as oil prices continue.
Julianna Balicka – KBW
And I will step back but the follow up to that, are you seeing any areas where you might see a benefit from the lower oils, I mean like the transportation in the [inaudible] Empire etcetera are there any verticals where you see potential for stronger loan growth as a result?
Chris Myers – President & Chief Executive Officer
I don’t know if we’ve seen that yet, because the oil prices haven’t been down for long enough to really get financials and start to see that transportation costs are going, are down and that’s contributing to greater profitability from some of our transportation companies that we bank and those related industries which could be very positive.
But I would also say that the, as we look at those prices, at oil and gas prices, I think we’re pretty well positioned from a defensive standpoint. I do think consumer spending is going to be bolstered. We are hearing from our car dealers that we’re getting more and more demand for bigger vehicles, which is kind of interesting. It’s like hey gas prices go down and now everybody wants to get a big deal going again, it’s interesting.
Julianna Balicka – KBW
Ok, interesting. Very good. Thank you very much.
Operator
The next question we have comes from Aaron Deer, Sandler O’Neill.
Aaron Deer – Sandler O’Neill
Just a quick follow up question on something you mentioned Chris about the structure and pricing getting tougher in the market, can you maybe give us some specifics on what you’re seeing other banks do that that you guys are seeking to avoid?
