Okay. Thanks. And just one final one in terms of you responding to John’s — Cary’s earlier question. This hybrid account for commercial customers, which is paying interest reads non-interest-bearing, but you’re paying some interest. What was the balance in that account? And how much are you paying? Thanks.Chris Gorman Yes. We’ll have to follow-up. I don’t have that specific number in front of me. But we’ll follow-up with you, Steve.Steven Alexopoulos Okay. Sounds good. Thanks for taking the questions.Chris Gorman Yes.Operator And next, we go to the line of Gerard Cassidy with RBC. Please go ahead.Gerard Cassidy Good morning Chris. Good morning Clark.Chris Gorman Good morning Gerard.Gerard Cassidy Chris, you touched on in your opening remarks about the third-party company that services commercial loans and it gives you an insight into pipelines of what may be coming down the pipe, so to speak.Can you share with us — is that company — the one that obviously you own, are they seeing an increase in activity from commercial mortgages that are in — commercial mortgage-backed security products that they’re the special service they’re on.
Has that started to pick up yet? And if not, what are they seeing?Chris Gorman Well, thanks for your question. So, basically, you have servicing then you have special servicing, where you’re the named special servicer and then it goes into active special servicing. So, think of active special servicing as being the workout agent for off-us loans, whether they’re CMBS or whatever.We have seen a huge surge in active servicing. And what was the number one just a quarter ago, the biggest category was retail and the fastest growing was office. And what’s happened is that’s flipped. Now, office is both the fastest growing and it’s the largest by a significant factor. So, we do have a pretty good insight. We have an insight by class.And just so you know, office is first and then retail is second.
And then we also, of course, have a geographic breakdown because real estate is always geographic. So, it does give us great insights and it is very dynamic and kind of the trends that we — some time ago, we said we thought we’d see a lot of B and C class office buildings in central business districts. And although we, for our own book only have like $127 million of that exposure, we are seeing that play out and now office is the number one category in active special servicing.Gerard Cassidy And can you remind us — I don’t know if you have this number in active special servicing, I know the fees are greater than your regular servicing. By what factor? Is it a two times higher fee, four times higher fee?Chris Gorman It’s much higher than four times because you go from getting really kind of just sort of a ticking fee you’re actively working on it.
So, it is multiples of what the regular fees are as you go into special servicing.And when you look at our financials, you can see the bump in that line item.Gerard Cassidy Which is in the commercial mortgage servicing fee, is that correct?Chris Gorman Exactly. Correct.Gerard Cassidy And then as a follow-up, Clark, you identified that the provision was hired to build up reserves due to CECL accounting. Can you share with us some of the metrics maybe I don’t know if you’re going to use the HPI and the housing price index or unemployment — the unemployment rate, what were your assumptions in the fourth quarter? And how did they change in the first quarter to support the increase in the provision for loan losses.Clark Khayat Yes. So, let me just start with HPI because that’s where you started.
The — as I think we may have talked about Moody’s, which we use the Moody’s consensus, they put out an HPI model in Q4 that was updated. They still produced their old one. We were comfortable with the old one. Now it’s just the new one, which I would say is fairly draconian and sort of by — their HPI, Clark, went from 4.6% in November to 8.8% as of February under the Moody’s consensus — so that would be the Draconian part of Draconian Yes. So that’s a big mover and largely unemployment went from 4.5% to 5%. So those would be sort of the two big impacted areas.Gerard Cassidy Thank you.Operator And ladies and gentlemen, we will now be turning the conference for closing remarks back to the CEO, Chris Gorman.Chris Gorman Well, I want to thank everyone for joining us today.
This concludes our first quarter call. If you have any questions, please, as always, reach out to Vern Patterson. Thank you so much. Have a good day. Goodbye.Operator Ladies and gentlemen, that does conclude your conference for today. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.
