OceanFirst Financial Corp. (NASDAQ:OCFC) Q1 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Pat Barrett: I guess they’re focused on everything right now, we do not understand why, right. Given the events of the last couple of months we’re getting questions on all sorts of things about the business, whether it’s liquidity or concentration, or the rollover risk or –. So I would say, yes, they’re focused on it, but they’re not to any different degree than they are focused on liquidity and capital plans and stress tests and all that other stuff, so no special focus. And I would point out that our commercial real estate position has not changed dramatically over the last couple of years, it inched up. But we’ve had the conversation with our regulator for quite some time about the management of that asset classes.

Matthew Breese: Okay. And then on page 11, the stress test were 90% of the maturing book maintains a debt service coverage ratio greater than one. I feel like a huge point here is that, you stress it at the originally underwritten rents. Could you just give me some sense for maybe the asset classes where are you seeing the most amount of rent increase and the asset classes where you seeing the least? And then what is the average kind of rent increase from 2018, 2019, to today?

Pat Barrett: We’d expect it kind of varies a little bit by geography and property type. But multifamily, as Joe said earlier is consistently strong across the entirety of the market. That’s why we’re comfortable. And I should note we didn’t call this out in the slides to any special degree. We’ve never really operated to any degree in the rent stabilized multifamily. So this is market rent product that we’re in. So multifamily is probably the strongest where you see flattish, and Joe mentioned, this is industrial warehouse, some pullback and concern about do we need all this capacity. You’ve seen the headlines about Target and Walmart and Amazon pulling back their needs for warehouse space. Nothing of great concern there, but softer than it was, softer than it was a year ago.

The central business district office is an open question, because I don’t think anyone knows exactly what the real vacancy is. And I wouldn’t even look at the rates that are out there today is being indicative. I would tell you that the suburban office has done surprisingly strong and maybe Joe may comment a little bit on that, because it’s unusual to us and retail has held up better than we would have thought.

Joe Lebel: Yeah. I mean, if you think about it a year, year and a half ago, we were all worried about retail, given what has gone on. But Matt, we’ve taken the extra step, I mentioned, we’re heavily suburban and then heavily granularity average loan under $2 million. And then, of course, geographically diversified. We’ve also taken the extra steps in addition to doing the math stress-test, we’re sending folks out and we’re actually doing site visits as you should and we are doing site visits couple days a week. So you are not really just looking at it, you’re looking at parking lots, obviously, where people actually back-in offices, but they can walk-in buildings as well and however they maintaining. So we’re doing all the prudent things you need to be doing in this environment, just because we don’t want to be surprised and so-far the signs are good.

Pat Barrett: Just one more color comment on suburban office lease in our markets. It’s been almost no creation of suburban office for maybe 15 years, because the class had been under pressure for a long-time with all the migration into urban markets. So what we have here is not necessarily there is exceptional demand in the suburbs, there’s just far less product and there is some demand and some of the demand is interesting. The stuff we did up in Boston is life sciences repurposing of kind of those office park situations. Those are rock-solid properties. And so, it’s been a really interesting time. We were more concerned about suburban office probably a year, year and a half ago and we have been pleasantly surprised by the amount of absorption in many of our markets.

Matthew Breese: Great. Okay, last one from me. You show the amount of these loans that hold greater than 1.0 debt service coverage on a rate reset. I’m just curious, what is the average pre and post? I think you show weighted-average debt service coverage on page 11, again at 1.7. Under the stress-test, where does kind of the portfolio average reset at?

Pat Barrett: I think 170 is a good number that comes from. I don’t have an average on what it came out to. We’ll get that .

Matthew Breese: Okay. All right, I’ll leave it there. Thanks for taking my question.

Pat Barrett: Thank you, Matt.

Operator: Our next question is from Manuel Navas from D.A. Davidson. Manuel, your line is now open. Please go ahead.

Manuel Navas: Hey, good morning. It seems like you are successfully — it seems like you’re successfully keeping like a core legacy deposit beta that 12% versus 20% for the whole book. And you’re doing everything around the edges to kind of maintain that lower deposit beta on the legacy deposit base. Is that two-level data, how we should think about things going-forward? How are you targeting them?

Pat Barrett: Yeah. Exactly our strategy is not all that complicated. What we’ve done is, tried to separate the price pressure on our existing base versus the price pressure of deposits we need to acquire and not to kind of let the contagion go from one to the other. Our existing customers that we are doing a tremendous amount of transactions for, they value being with us because we’re moving their money around for them a lot every day and they’re not looking for a giant rate. So we want to kind of keep that where it is, we’re providing good service. They’re happy with it. But, I do think it weighs on our incremental deposit growth, the marginal cost of that growth is higher. So we have to reflect in our loan rates and think about that carefully.

Christopher Maher: I think a lot of it pretty well-articulated on this slide where we talk about the transaction volume and the number of times, our deposit base turns. When you have DDA and checking account concentrations like we do and people are using those to pay bills and to pay employees and to pay other things, they’re not looking for yield and so our non-interest bearing has held up pretty well. It’s still 20% of our base and excluding brokered CDs and retail CDs, we’re absolutely thrilled with a fairly low levels of repricing that we needed to do. I’d say with the exception of maybe the government and municipal accounts which have tended to behave more as a group and are expecting kind of broad-based repricing and we’ve had to do that.