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East West Bancorp, Inc. (EWBC)

Q2 2009 Earnings Call· Thu, Jul 16, 2009

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Welcome to the second quarter 2009 East West Bancorp earnings conference call. My name is [Shaquana] and I will be your coordinator for today. At this time all participants are in a listen only mode. We will facilitate a question and answer session towards the end of this conference. (Operator Instructions) I would now like to turn the presentation over to your host for today’s call, Ms. Irene Oh, Senior Vice President.

Irene Oh

Management

Thank you for joining us today to review the financial results of the East West Bancorp for the second quarter of 2009. In a moment Dominique Ng, our Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer will provide highlights for the quarter. Then Tom Tolda, our Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer will review the financials. We will then open the call for questions. First, I would like to caution participants that during the course of the conference call today management may make projections or other forward-looking statements regarding events or future financial performance of the company within the meaning of the Safe Harbor provision of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. We wish to caution you that these forward-looking statements may differ materially from actual results due to a number of risks and uncertainties. For a more detailed description of factors that affect the company’s operating results we refer you to our filings with the Securities & Exchange Commission including our annual report on Form 10K for the year ended December 31, 2008. Today’s call is also being recorded and will be available in replay format at www.EastWestBank.com and www.StreetEvents.com. I will now turn the call over to Dominique.

Dominique Ng

Management

Yesterday afternoon we reported a net loss of $92.1 million and the loss for the quarter was primarily driven by the $151.4 million provision for loan losses and the $37.4 million write down on our trust preferred securities. The increased provision was a result of our combined and continued aggressive efforts to identify, resolve and sell the problem assets. While the provision is substantial, we made great progress in reducing our credit risk profile which I will discuss in more detail later. During the quarter we completed our own comprehensive stress test. We have been conducting stress tests for our loan portfolio regularly for the past two years but with the public release of the [SCAB] Guidelines we tailored our stress test to conform to [SCAB]. The result showed that with an additional $101 million we would have sufficient tangible common equity to maintain a tangible common equity to risk weighted assets ratio of 4% under the more adverse economic scenario as required for the 19 stress test banks. As such, we took immediate steps to boost tangible common equity by securitizing loans and exchanging preferred stock in to common stock. These actions raised our tangible common equity level today by [$102.9] million and in addition to this we raised another $27.5 million in capital through a private placement of common stock two days ago. In total we increased capital by $148.4 million, $47.4 million above the cushion recommend under the stress test. With this capital cushion we believe we are well positioned to withstand this prolonged economic downturn and challenging credit environment. For all these other regulatory capital ratio even under the more adverse situation we are still substantial above the minimum requirement. Now, I would like to provide you with more details regarding the great strides we have…

Thomas J. Tolda

Management

I’d like to start with a summary of the results for the second quarter. The loss for the second quarter was $92.1 million largely driven by the $151.4 million provision for loan loss and the $37.4 million non-cash charge for other than temporary impairment on our pool trust preferred securities. Also negatively impacting earnings of a onetime nature was a charge for FDIC’s industry wide deposit insurance special assessment for $5.7 million. The elevated provision for loan losses was largely driven by $133.9 million in net charge offs during the quarter. As the net charge offs were substantial to second quarter I’d like to spend a few minutes drilling down on some specifics that may not be so readily apparent from the press release tables. During the quarter we charged off $14.1 million for single family loans, a $10.2 million increase from first quarter. This entire increase in the single family charge offs of $10.2 million in the second quarter was driven by a large onetime bulk sale of single family loans. Although we have not utilized bulk sales in the past, in the second quarter we decided to take a more aggressive approach to reducing problem loans. Moving to the multifamily portfolio, overall credit quality and charge offs on multifamily loans remain high. I’d like to note that the increase in non-performing multifamily loans was solely due to the AB notes which are reported as non-performing loans. I would like to reiterate that for 100% of these AB loans which were originally construction loans that we have reclassified as multifamily loans, the borrowers were current and had been showing strong payment performance for many months. In some situations construction was completed in early 2008 and operator had been current since then. Aside from the AB notes classified as non-performing…

Dominique Ng

Management

Again, I would like to thank everyone for joining the call today and for your continued interest in East West. I will now open the call to questions.

Operator

Operator

(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from Dave Rochester – FBR Capital Markets. Dave Rochester – FBR Capital Markets: As you’ve seen appraisals come in on troubled CRE or commercial construction loans, could you ballpark a rough range for what you’re seeing in terms of collateral value deflation on average? And, if you can break the land component out of there that would be great.

Dominique Ng

Management

In terms of the current appraisal value versus the original value and how much in duration and so forth? Dave Rochester – FBR Capital Markets: Exactly, just for the commercial construction projects and CRE.

Dominique Ng

Management

In commercial construction and CRE we have not see too big of a decline. I think it varies obviously, I think for commercial construction often times it depends on the projects. Most of the construction that we have on the commercial side they have anchor tenants, strong credit tenants and when these leases are still going forward – the appraisal have come back in not really reduced in value much at all. I think usually what we will find is that if there is any commercial project that if they initially intended to have certain tenants and those certain tenants are not coming in and now it goes from a supposed to be fully leased tenant type of project has turned in to maybe a half empty type of project then I think the appraisal value drops substantially. Dave Rochester – FBR Capital Markets: Could you also give some color on the losses in the commercial construction book as to product type and region and possibly what the severities were on those?

Dominique Ng

Management

Are you again, looking at just commercial construction and commercial real estate? Dave Rochester – FBR Capital Markets: Exactly, I’m just trying to figure out is that primarily retail on the commercial construction book and then as to location if that’s in Inland Empire, LA County?

Dominique Ng

Management

I think again, Inland Empire has a little bit more stress than do the rest of – specifically, we had a couple of projects in Sacramento that we had some issues then in Inland Empire we have some issues. So far, in LA still holding up pretty good. Now, we have taken losses due to unusual circumstances as we mentioned earlier. We may have a property that even today appraised at a value substantially better than the loan balance but just because of a bankruptcy issue and we do not want to sort of like prolong this NPA on our books and we decided to sell this loan at a discount. So we have kind of artificially taken a charge off when in fact based on most current appraisal values we still see that they’re holding up pretty good. So, I would say that for the commercial real estate and also the commercial construction is still somewhat to a certain degree mirror the land and residential construction that is that Inland Empire or maybe certain area in Northern California, Nevada, those places tend to be more distressed then Los Angeles County. Dave Rochester – FBR Capital Markets: What would be your expectation and I know it’s virtually impossible to predict this, for the provision going forward I know you’re going to continue to be aggressive to get the NPAs and delinquencies off of the balance sheet which is great but are you expecting to see another number north of $100 million or so in terms of provision for the third quarter as you guys try to clean up any other areas of weakness?

Dominique Ng

Management

At this moment I would say it is possible, it depends on what strategy that we would take when it comes down to dealing with non-performing assets. One good example is sort of like to put it in to perspective, our total delinquencies is only $290 million. Obviously, most of those loans that are delinquent they eventually come back to current however, what we see right now is that we have opportunities that we can sell loans, even if they are not yet distressed in terms of chronic delinquency or maybe have collateral value below the loan balance and so forth but if we see that there’s a type of properties that potentially in the future that may still cause us harm and then we have interested buyers that would be willing to strike a deal with us, we may still sell some of those loans. Because of the willingness and aggressiveness to charge off or move potential problem loans and problem loans off the balance sheet there is a likelihood that we may have another repeat of $100 million. But if we just look at existing current NPA delinquency and then just look at it in terms of okay what is the potential losses that may incur, I think obviously it looks hard. The reason is that we always every quarter charge down or maybe provide full reserve to all of these existing loans that we have on the books. So, every single non-performing loans that are on our books that if there are collateral deficiencies, we have already provided a specific reserve or may have provided a charge off to it. So, under that circumstances I think it will be challenging but I think as we have done in the second quarter, that one particular borrower that had over $55 million of loans with us with a total of 11 loans and 23 pieces of collateral that the LTV was much lower than the loan balance but we have taken the approach that it is better than boot them out then spending the time dealing with their legal proceeding for the next year or two. When we take this kind of action I think we can have some more additional charge offs. So, we are taking a position that we will be actively looking out for this type of scenario and take the charge off, move these potential problem loans off the balance sheet. However, at this stage I think it’s too early for us to tell one way or another what we will end up getting at the end of the third quarter.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from Aaron Deer – Sandler O’Neil & Partners. Aaron Deer – Sandler O’Neil & Partners: Dominique, you seem more comfortable with your capital levels following the actions that you’ve taken recently here. If you could raise more capital at say the 550 price that the private placement was done, would you do more? And, if so, how much would you be willing to take on at that level?

Dominique Ng

Management

It’s possible. I think that at this stage right now I think that for one we just started the conversion of the convertible preferred and we’re fortunate in the way that we have a few large holders that basically help a big percentage so when they approach us about interest in conversion it makes life easier that we can just talk to only a few of them when they come talk to us and then we get that taken care of. I would imagine that there will be more once now that we filed the 8K, I would imagine that there will be more to come so we would expect that we might be able to pick up even more convertible preferred to exchange to common, that’s one part. Then, whether we will do some more common stock raise and I think that depends as obviously we want to take a look and see what the market is today. Secondly, we want to sort of look at what we’re going to do with the stock that we raise. Now, there are quite a bit of good opportunities out there right now in terms of potentially originating higher yield much safer loans in today’s less competitive environment. So, in that regard I think it makes it attractive to go ahead and raise some more capital so that we can be even more aggressive in building up our core profitability which is now going pretty strong. So, in that regard I think that makes sense. Secondly, more capital more cushion is only going to help us even more to put these problem loans behind us. So there are good opportunities there and we’re definitely looking to potentially what makes sense, what’s available. What we try to do is do a balance between what’s best for our shareholders and also what’s best for our strategy in terms of going forward in the future. We will continue to actively evaluate these opportunities to see what we need to do. The nice thing about it right now is that we’ve got enough through the stress test, all these other regulatory capitals, we’re substantially above the most adverse situation and even with the tangible common equity ratio we now have $48 million of cushion so we are already in pretty good shape but we will continue to evaluate this opportunity and see what we can do. Aaron Deer – Sandler O’Neil & Partners: Tom, I was wondering if you could give a little bit more color behind the AB note structures? With the A notes what is the minimum debt service coverage and the max LTV on those that you guys target?

Thomas J. Tolda

Management

Irene do you want to take that?

Irene Oh

Management

It varies on the property but obviously for the loans that were residential construction loans that we converted in to apartment loans it’s got a debt service upwards of one. We also we found in these situations it’s interesting where often times even if the original loan amount the property would have debt serviced it’s just we’re in this environment where the LTV is upwards of 100. There are other situations too, the residential construction loans that was the bulk of it, there are other situations where we did the AB notes where we actually got full interest reserves from the borrowers.

Dominique Ng

Management

Just to give you a little bit more color, when the borrower completed his condos due to the market conditions they decided to lease these condos out instead of like selling them. Why did they do that? Because they can afford to do so. Frankly, at the time they were leasing these condos out obviously, when they do one condo lease at a time their insufficient cash flow from the income to service the debt, these borrowers have been paying out of pocket. They have been paying out of pocket so these loans have always been current but through borrower paying out of pocket. Then eventually, these properties were fully leased and obviously with the fully leased rental payment there is enough cash flow to service the debt at that point. If we wanted to we could have just renewed the loans and based on the ability to service the debt from the net operating income of these rentals and also knowing the borrowers have full guarantees and have demonstrated the ability to pay while the property is not in cash flow, I think all of them are good characteristics for us to justify renewing the loan. However, in today’s environment now we go an order an appraisal when we do the renewal and instead of appraising it as a condo we appraise it as an apartment and clearly the property value for a condo, the kinds of material being used and all that kind of stuff, it would cause the apartment value to be substantially less and in that regard it would create a situation that while everything looks perfect but we have about 100% loan-to-value. So, in order to ensure that we are not every going to be criticized in terms of are we lending to a borrower with a collateral value that is underwater that we should debate about whether this should be accrual or non-accrual, we created these AB notes. The A side now have loan-to-value that is meeting our regular underwriting guidelines and have common market interest rate, etc., etc. Then, for the B portion while the customer still is obligated and still paying, we charge off the entire B portion proceeds. That’s what we have been doing on these AB notes. We think that once we’re past this calendar year they should all be no longer classified as troubled debt restructures.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from Ken Zerbe – Morgan Stanley. Ken Zerbe – Morgan Stanley: Don, just on the loans that you’re selling are you finding that you’re selling more I guess half built or what’s called vertical properties, or land, or some combination thereof or are you trying to hold more of the land because of the lower bids that you’re seeing out there.

Dominique Ng

Management

No, we’re selling everything. Basically, it takes a little bit of time to also sell these properties. Anything that is no good on the books we try to sell. Now, we have obviously a much harder time to sell participation loans. Throughout the years we bought one small bank a year and usually smaller community banks like to be participating banks of other community bank deals. So, when we are these small minority participant of let’s say a syndicated loan – let’s just say a syndicate loan of $20 million with East West holding $4 or $5 million. A classic example would be from Desert Community Bank which has a lot of participation loans, they’d be holding like $4 million on a loan from another community bank or maybe a $3 million loan on another community bank, or a $6 million loan on another community bank. These types of situation, since we’re the minority participating bank we cannot call the shots. Often times when you have the other banks who do not want to make a move or do not want to take losses or do not want to recognize the current appraised value or so forth we sometimes get stuck. It’s harder to sell our own portion. But, everything that we are in control, which is most of the loans, that we are in control that we’re trying to sell them. We pretty much whether they are unfinished condo project or land in San Bernardino, whatever we can sell we sell. Now, whatever we haven’t been able to sell for the second quarter we will continue to sell in the third quarter. What we’re trying to do is write down the amount as much as we can when we see it but we will continue the effort to sell. In a way it’s kind of making it easier to sell in the next quarter because when you see that it’s not selling and you think despite the most current appraisal we got we just say, “Well, just write it down a little bit more because it’s not selling.” Then the next quarter, finally we got it sold. So, we hope that in the third quarter we get some great results again in terms of getting out of these REO and problem loans. Ken Zerbe – Morgan Stanley: The last thing, can you just remind us where you’re carrying the TruPS at as a percentage of original par value?

Thomas J. Tolda

Management

Ken, current we’ve got a market value on these of $15.8 million and that was versus a original book value of $122 million. That’s I guess about $0.16 on the dollar.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from Lana Chan – BMO Capital Markets. Lana Chan – BMO Capital Markets: Just a couple of quick questions on the credit quality, I might have missed it but what were the write downs on the OREO sales this quarter?

Irene Oh

Management

Lana, the total write down on OREO sales were about $8.5 million so roughly 15%. Lana Chan – BMO Capital Markets: You usually provide this in your 10Qs but do you have the net inflows in to non-performers this quarter?

Irene Oh

Management

I do have that information. We have found [inaudible] this quarter we are very fortunate in the fact that the net inflows dollar wise were substantially lower but overall it has remained relatively consistent in that fact that net inflows are about 60% and the other ones are remaining and we’re moving them off fairly quickly. Lana Chan – BMO Capital Markets: Do you have the dollar amount because I think it was $177 million last quarter?

Irene Oh

Management

Of the $162 that we had at the end of June 41% were there from the end of March and that was about $66 million and the remaining were net inflows. Lana Chan – BMO Capital Markets: When was your last regulatory exam for safety and soundness and your credit exam?

Thomas J. Tolda

Management

The full scope fed exam is conducted in August, August of ’08 and we’re anticipating another one shortly. Lana Chan – BMO Capital Markets: My last question is about the just overall California state budget and the crisis there, what is your exposure to the muni and state in California whether on your securities portfolio or on the lending side?

Thomas J. Tolda

Management

Lana, we don’t have much in the way of exposure to California in terms of the security portfolio but I don’t have that amount quantified at the moment but I can get back to you.

Dominique Ng

Management

We have a very minimal amount of muni and then they also are just not in California so it’s going to be very, very, very immaterial from an investment securities standpoint. In terms of IOU we’ve actually been receiving them but our customers just don’t have a lot of business with the government except a couple of them in the Desert Community Bank area. As of today I think we have total just less of $1 million. Every day we are taking IOU from our customers but cumulatively even – as of yesterday, still just shy of $1 million.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from Joe Morford – RBC Capital Markets. Joe Morford – RBC Capital Markets: A lot of my questions have been asked but I guess I’ll just follow up on a few different things. First, just following up on Lana’s question, with the new inflows that you saw were there any kind of notable trends with any spread of deterioration by geography or loan type or anything like that?

Dominique Ng

Management

Not really. I mean, we have not found anything that I call new trends that cause us to have to redirect our focus. In fact, the problem loans that we identified in June in 2008, these land constructions that during that time when we looked at the appraised value many of them were still quite sufficient but as time has gone by and one-by-one when the values just keep dropping, and dropping, and dropping so some of them that were doing fine at the moment in 2008 when we do a full complete examination and review of these loans there are some of them we consider to be okay but now not too okay because the value have continued to drop. So, we have that. We also have loans that we identified that have sort of like certain characteristics of likelihood of default but the loan was either paying as agreed because customers just kept carrying it for an extended period of time and now becomes a problem. But, it’s not something that out of the blue that gave us some shock. It was something that we were hoping, “Wow, gee, if the economy does not go any worse things are going to be really good.” However, the economy went much worse so those kind of like on the borderline, pretty much everything on the borderline all went bad. That’s the reason why despite the fact that we have taken some pretty aggressive provision and charge off last year in terms of making sure that these loan are fully reserved or charged off, etc. we still end up having to do more. So now, we’re taking the approach of just getting rid of them. Now, we do have what you’ll find is that on the construction and land loans despite…

Dominique Ng

Management

Yes, that’s pretty much the case. Joe Morford – RBC Capital Markets: Then one last quick follow up, with the AB notes, did you essentially this quarter capture all of the kind of most eligible credits for that or should we expect to see a new slug of these kind of restructurings each quarter?

Dominique Ng

Management

I think that we have enough what I call forced confused NPAs that we created and that we will just most likely stop right around here because on one hand while we think that this is the best solution, we end up taking – even though we took the charge off we know that the recovery will be substantial. See, we have two choices, we could have just take those condos and sold it to another potential investor. The danger of doing that is we usually do not get a better price than when the loan performs, we may even get a worse price because the investor who buys – In fact, by the way most investor who bought from us are our customers. The investor who bought on these projects they want to do something with the projects. There’s nothing more frustrating than for them to buy a performing loan because they don’t know what to do with them. It makes it very hard for them to foreclose or whatever because if they ever have to go to the judge it also becomes more challenging. So, we may end up getting just the same kind of discount despite the collateral value is good and the customer is paying as agreed so because of that reason we end up not selling these types of projects and do the AB note. But, on the other hand we also need to recognize that if we keep doing more of that we will keep piling of NPAs and we send a confusing signal to the market. So, what we did is sort of like one quarter we go in there and just look at all of this stuff and get it all taken care of. The good news is that even if we…

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from Julianna Balicka – Keefe, Bruyette & Woods. Julianna Balicka – Keefe, Bruyette & Woods: I have a few quick questions, on the deposit growth, the $200 million deposit growth was nice to see, could you elaborate a little bit like roughly where it was coming from? Were you getting customers from other banks? What was driving the good growth in core deposits?

Dominique Ng

Management

Substantially coming from the branches. We have a promotion of bonus money market and we have basically brought in – in fact, in total now over close to $500 million between two quarters of these money market accounts. They come from both existing customers and also a substantial amount from new customers. Julianna Balicka – Keefe, Bruyette & Woods: Do you have a sense of where the new customers are coming from or are they just new customers at the branch?

Dominique Ng

Management

You mean a sense of where they are coming from?4 Julianna Balicka – Keefe, Bruyette & Woods: Yes, are they like leaving the large banks?

Dominique Ng

Management

Basically all over the place. There are banks that failed, I shouldn’t say banks failed, sometimes large banks have taken over, some very, very large banks in California and when that change happens there are more and more of these disenchanted customers of those acquired banks that decided to move on to other financial institutions. I think that we are a little bit more visible now in California and particularly in Southern California. I shouldn’t say particularly Southern because in Northern California nine branches are doing an incredible job in terms of bringing in new deposits so for that regard I would say it’s not actually the visibility that we have in Southern California that’s making a difference because Northern California are bringing some big time growth. So in that regard, I think that we are getting deposits just pretty much from large banks, small banks, any kind of size and then shape. I do feel that one of the reasons is that this campaign that we started in fact in the latter part of 2008 have one feature. That is that we always in the past say that when we get this rate if you put in an amount that is at least let’s say $50,000 or something like that, by putting that threshold I think we dramatically reduced smaller customers to come in to enjoy a decent rate. We have taken that off since the beginning of the campaign and ever sense then I think more and more customers are coming to our bank because now you have smaller customers who never sort of get any kind of decent treatment from banks because most banks like to put in these high thresholds of dollars enough for them to enjoy the campaign rate. We are giving them the luxury of, “Hey, as long as you bring the deposit in you get the same rate.” That has worked really well. For that reason I think that has also contributed to the retail banking pretty nice growth. Beyond that, our commercial banking, the cash management team and the commercial banking officers have scored pretty big for the last few months from getting new commercial customers that are not credit drive. I think one of the advantages that we have is when we have less focus on working on credit in terms of bringing new loans the account officers who are somewhat idle today because of a difficult credit environment allow them to put more focus on deposits. Now, all-in-all the commercial lending team has not had much luck in increasing the overall deposits because as much as they made a substantial amount of gain of new customers that are not credit driven they also lost deposits from many of the existing customers who are in the real estate business. So, all-in-all there is an offset, new deposits offset against old deposits that decreased due to the very stressful economic environment. But, from a retail banking standpoint it’s just growth, growth, growth.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from Jennifer Demba – Suntrust Robinson Humphrey. Jennifer Demba – Suntrust Robinson Humphrey: The $166 million of sold loans, I just wanted to clarify what was your loss on those versus the original loan amount?

Irene Oh

Management

As Dominique mentioned in the prepared remarks, the loss at the time of sale was roughly about 20% to 22%. From the original loan amount, the loss was $50 million or about 32%. Jennifer Demba – Suntrust Robinson Humphrey: Those loans you sold were all non-performing, correct?

Dominique Ng

Management

No, not all of them are non-performing. I would say that the vast majority of them are non-performing. So, we have loans that we just see the characteristics does not fit in to what we think our credit profile in the long run and when we had the opportunity we unload them. We also have loans that are 30 days, 60 days delinquent that we feel that it is better to get them off the books before it becomes NPA so it’s a combination. But clearly, definitely more than 50% of them are NPA.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from Jeannette Daroosh – JMP Securities. Jeannette Daroosh – JMP Securities: I have just a couple of clarifying questions, the first relates to the AB notes and I was wondering if you could provide a little bit of detail in terms of where these properties might be located? Then also, if you have a sense for what the absorption rate is in terms of making these fully leased up or getting to some lease up level?

Dominique Ng

Management

In fact, the vast majority are three borrowers. In fact, they have multiple loans with us and in fact, I would say both borrowers have similar characteristics that is that these are condo projects that are in Los Angeles County, they vary from city-to-city in Los Angeles County. None of these are what I call very distressed neighborhoods. I would say that even today they are all in decent zip code areas. These are condos, apartments that they owned and they we just collectively do a restructure with them. One particular borrower may have maybe nine or 10 loans and another borrower may have nine or 10 loans and all of that we put together a restructure that makes sure that everyone of these loans that they have, the A note have good collateral value, good debt coverage ratio and market rate interest, regular terms, that we can underwrite it as a new loan today and then with the remaining B note, we charge them off. The customer still has the obligation to pay both A and B but we just want to set it up in such as way so that to ensure that come January 1, 2010 these loans will be on the books as current loans since the B is already charged off any ways. That I would say is the vast majority of AB note.

Irene Oh

Management

Just to clarify, these notes, the residential construction loans, they have been utilized as apartment loans for a significant period of time now it wasn’t that it just happened. So, as far as the lease up, most of them are fully leased, fully rented out. That’s why we have the cash flow.

Dominique Ng

Management

That’s why they had been sort of stumbling along. While they are always current, at times in 2008 I think the concern was they were current because the borrowers continuation of paying out of pocket to subsidize for the difference between the rent payment and the interest requirement. So, we looked at it as we feel it is only appropriate that we wanted to once and for all and get these things clear and not put the customer and the borrowers at stress because they [inaudible] to continue to make payments even out of pocket. So, one good way of doing that is instead of just setting up six month renewal and every six months we watch them again we feel why not we just do a once and for all permanent loan. But, the only way you can do a permanent loan is the LTV has to be appropriate and within in our guidelines, the debt coverage ratio within our guidelines and that is why these AB loans were constructed. But, at the time we did this AB note in the second quarter, many of these projects have already not only fully leased but have been fully leased for months and getting the kind of cash flow that is needed. Jeannette Daroosh – JMP Securities: With respect to the REO that you sold in the quarter the almost $56 million, can you provide a little bit of detail in terms of the types of properties that were sold? Then also, who were some of the investors that acquired these?

Dominique Ng

Management

We did a bulk sale for a bunch of single family mortgages. I’m sorry – only REO, Irene do you want to talk about it?

Irene Oh

Management

For REO sales here I’m looking at the list here, it runs the gamut, all types of properties, all types of buyers. A lot of buyers of our loans and our REOs or problem assets are actually existing customers of East West also. Jeannette Daroosh – JMP Securities: Then the $166 million, that was the bulk sale of the single family residential?

Dominique Ng

Management

Only $20 million were bulk sales for single families. The other $140 million are land, construction and a little bit of CRE and all kinds of different stuff.

Operator

Operator

At this time there are no further questions. I would now like to turn the call over to East West Bancorp management for closing remarks.

Dominique Ng

Management

Again, thank you for joining us for this call today. We look forward to speaking to you again after the closing of the third quarter.

Operator

Operator

Thank you for your participation in today’s conference. This concludes the presentation. You may now disconnect. Have a good day.