Heritage Financial Corporation (NASDAQ:HFWA) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

And it almost always comes back to some significant leases that had some potential rollover in the next 12 months. We just want to keep looking at that to see if that causes a problem with debt service coverage.

Andrew Terrell : Understood. And do you have average occupancy across those 52?

Anthony Chalfant : We didn’t calculate that. And we’re looking kind of at a more one-off each loan on a kind of a standalone basis.

Andrew Terrell : Got it. Okay. And sorry, I might have missed this earlier in the prepared remarks, but an estimated tax rate moving forward?

Donald Hinson : Yes, that was 16.3%.

Operator: We now turn to Kelly Motta with KBW.

Kelly Motta : Most of might have been asked and answered already. I appreciate all the color across multiple items. I guess turning back to the loan growth and kind of what you’ve done with your expansion to Idaho and your Eugene. Maybe if you could provide how much of the incremental growth is coming from kind of newer open branches and how those are tracking relative to what you’ve laid out in terms of your expectations?

Bryan McDonald : Kelly, this is Bryan. Slide 10 of the deck has detail on a couple of the MSAs, Seattle at the top and then the one at the bottom Oregon, includes all of the new teams, excluding Boise, which just opened here this year. So you can see there that in 2022 and then the quarterly numbers after that. So you can see the growth since those teams started reflected there in that. Of course, we have some existing teams down there in the market as well. But we put the slide in there just trying to show a picture of how the market’s changing with those new teams. And then to your other question in terms of how the loan growth is performing relative to the targets that we set out, we’re at those targets or above them versus what we had originally anticipated.

Kelly Motta : Great. That’s super helpful. Maybe last for me and then I’ll step back. There’s obviously been a lot of focus on several markets out West, Seattle, Portland. Can you give us an update on kind of what you’re seeing and any relative differences across your markets that we should be aware about?

Jeffrey Deuel : I think, Kelly, we continue to see the major metro areas improve. Just as an example, if you use — we typically use the level of road traffic as the example. And this morning, I just heard more than one person complaining about how bad the traffic is, which is an indicator of vitality in the region. But the downtown areas are coming back slowly. Seattle is looking better and better. Bellevue has always looked great through the whole pandemic. Portland is a little bit slower to come back, but they are making progress. I’ve been down there a few times over the last couple of months. And I can — there’s more activity on the street during the day. There’s more restaurants open, and it — none of the downtown areas have that flawless feeling that we felt during the depths of the pandemic. It’s also a summertime here, so the sun is out every single day. It makes it a lot nicer too. So things are looking up.

Kelly Motta : I’ll step back. I appreciate the color and never thought we’d be cheering traffic, but good to hear.

Jeffrey Deuel : Yes. It is an odd ball, irony. But we’re happy to see it too and lots of trucks moving things around as well.

Operator: [Operator Instructions] We now turn to Tim Coffey with Janney.

Timothy Coffey : Jeff, I want to see if I can put some context around your comment at the beginning of the call about deposit pressures remaining through year-end. Are you talking about the expectation that deposit rates could increase materially from where they are now or that they would remain in kind of the range of where they’re at right now?