Eric Zwick – Sterne Agee
Ok, great. And secondly, you obviously had a busy year in 2014 with three acquisitions. Just your thoughts on the market today. The pace or activity in terms of discussions and your thoughts in terms of whether you are looking at more bank acquisitions or something more along the lines of the leasing? I’m just curious what you are seeing today?
Mike Scudder – President & Chief Executive Officer
Well, consistent with what I talked about strategically what we’ve been doing is positioning ourselves to grow. Certainly in the low-interest rate environment where you’re operating in today, the opportunities that are there to leverage both your infrastructure from an expense standpoint and your capital base through any M&A opportunity that fits kind of your strategic needs makes sense. I mean there is the ability for us to continue to do that.
The dialogue, it’s always hard to gauge the difference between what is serious dialogue and just general dialogue. It’s kind of I would say those kind of things tend to look like an EKG chart when you’re still alive. So, as you move through that, it tends to bounce around quite a bit. Comparatively, I would say it’s a little more active this year in terms of dialogue than what it was last year. And part of that’s the reality of certainly expectations around us both having a willingness and an ability to partner to be able to do that.
Eric Zwick – Sterne Agee
That’s helpful, thank you.
Operator
And our next question comes from Stephen Geyen of D.A. Davidson. Please go ahead.
Stephen Geyen – D.A. Davidson
Hey, good morning. I was just curious about maybe just a little more clarification. On the Popular bank, you had talked about some of the pay downs. Do you expect those to have a level off going forward? And you had mentioned also the commercial real estate just the legacy portfolio, the uncertainty but just a little more clarification if you could.
Paul Clemens – Executive Vice President & Chief Financial Officer
Sure. In two pieces, the first one is a short answer which is yes. Most of the pay downs that we anticipated that would happen over a period of time happened, have already happened in the Popular. So we would expect that portfolio to grow from here like the rest of our portfolio.
Growth of the commercial real estate, I would say the pay downs are still going to happen Stephen, so we still see a number of those, but our new volume there is quite strong. So we can more than offset it and have net growth, but I do still think there are a fair amount of pay downs coming in our commercial real estate. Fortunately, our pipeline there is really strong that we can, as I say more than offset it.
Stephen Geyen – D.A. Davidson
Ok. And comments about the margin, just curious the level of accretion that you saw adjusted for the quarter, do you kind of expect that to continue through 2015?
Mark Sander – Senior Executive Vice President & Chief Operating Officer
That’s a great question, Stephen. I would say yes. Short answer, right now, the answer is yes. We have been $1.6 million. We will add a little bit more for Great Lakes as we finalize the marks on Great Lakes, but we will just have to manage it. These are small, homogeneous loans that are, we don’t think will provide us the volatility that we had with our covered portfolio. So the answer is, for the time being I would say 1.6, maybe closer to 2 x 4, but we will have more guidance on that as the next quarters go.
