Mark Mason
Analyst · D.A. Davidson. Please go ahead
Thank you, John. I am very proud of what we accomplished at HomeStreet during the second quarter. Strong mortgage banking profitability, significantly lower cost of deposits, and the impact of our focus on cost efficiency contributed to solid financial performance. I would like to thank all of our employees for their hard work, delivering these exceptional results under very difficult circumstances. This pandemic illustrates the need for community banks, such as HomeStreet. Consumers and small businesses have struggled to access and understand federal aid programs, such as the Paycheck Protection Program. These customers have been best served in the crisis by the level of customer service community banks provide. Many of our larger competitors were unable to provide this needed support, given the breadth of the crisis. As a consequence, we've welcomed many new individual and small business customers to HomeStreet during this crisis. Although the effects of the global pandemic continue and the long-term impacts are yet to be fully realized, we are encouraged by the performance of our loan portfolio to this point. Our commercial business loan portfolio, which contains lines of credit and term loans, has by design limited concentrations by industry in order to help limit our risk of exposure to any one part of the market. Additionally, we have generally avoided lending to riskier industries, like hospitality and leisure, travel, food service, fitness, energy and entertainment. This conservatism has served us well in the pandemic. The remainder of our loan portfolio is secured by conservatively underwritten, high-quality real estate and some of the strongest and previously fastest-growing economies in the nation. As a result, our loan portfolio is performing well relative to peers. As of June 30, our commercial business loans granted forbearance. 88% of them have completed their forbearance period and have resumed regular payments and only 3% of these borrowers have requested a second forbearance period. Commercial business and CRE owner-occupied loans in forbearance have declined by 91% and 77% to only $4.5 million and $21.3 million respectively as of June 30. Based on our survey of commercial business loan borrowers, nearly all of them have reopened their businesses at some level. And approximately 80% do not currently foresee the potential need for additional forbearing. Of the 137 commercial business and CRE owner-occupied real estate loans that have completed their forbearances, only four are past due or on non-accrual. The forbearance periods for the majority of loans granted forbearance that were not completed as of June 30, are scheduled to be completed in the third quarter. Our investor deck, published this morning, contains good data on our underwriting standards and portfolio composition. We have also added a few slides further disaggregating the information and providing additional detail on the parts of our portfolio most at risk today. You will note that our non-accrual loans increased slightly this quarter. This increase is the result of downgrading of a few commercial business loans that were recently acquired that were experiencing problems before the pandemic. Unfortunately, these loans have underwriting deficiencies and irregularities that were not identified in our due diligence prior to our acquisition. Fortunately, at this time, we feel our potential loss exposure is adequately addressed in our allowance for credit losses. It is clear to us today that our risk concentrations are well-defined and we believe manageable with current reserves, capital and earnings. Given our current performance and customer outlook, we believe we may not need any significant loan loss provisions, additional loan loss provisions to address credit risk rising from the pandemic. Of course, there exists significant uncertainty as to the impact of the pandemic and its effect on the length and depth of the recession and the ultimate impact on our loan portfolio. Adding to our confidence level is the fact that much of the team that initially came to HomeStreet to guide the bank out of the credit challenges of the Great Recession including me, remain at the company today in key positions. This experience and capability have been and will be invaluable as we continue to navigate the current crisis. We are working hard to support our communities and our customers while also protecting our employees. We like our peers have devoted significant time and resources to processing loans backed by the small business administration under the Paycheck Protection Program. We've again taken applications for these loans on April 3rd. And through June 30th, we approved and registered 1,781 loans, which total net of fees approximately $296 million. As I mentioned earlier, we welcomed many new customers to the bank and increased core deposits result. Our website has many testimonials from new and existing customers that speak highly of the quality of service and the care they received from our wonderful employees during the crisis. Today we have a strong capital base with consolidated Tier 1 at risk-based capital ratios of 9.3% and 13.48%. And bank-level Tier 1 at risk-based capital ratios of 9.79% and 14.08%, respectively. Beyond our strong capital base and increased allowance for credit losses, our current earnings provide meaningful additional capacity to absorb future credit losses. We have ample on-balance sheet liquidity and access to more from our contingent sources. Today our total borrowing capacity from the Federal Reserve and the Federal Home Loan Bank including existing lines an additional unpledged collateral is $4 billion. These conditions gave us the confidence in the second quarter to resume our previously suspended share repurchase program. Since restarting the program through June 30th, we repurchased a total of 396,795 shares of our common stock at an average price of $24.17. Yesterday, we also announced that the Board has approved an additional $25 million of stock repurchases subject to regulatory non-objection. Reflecting our very strong second quarter results, including the positive trends in our loan portfolio, the Board of Directors also declared a $0.15 per share common stock dividend to shareholders of record on August 7, 2020 and payable on August 24th. Finally on a governance note in June, we welcomed Jeffrey D. Green to our Board of Directors. Jeff is a former audit partner at Moss Adams and prior head of their banking practice group. Jeff is a Certified Public Accountant and has significant financial institutions and accounting experience and he will make a great addition to our Board of Directors. He's actually already contributed to this release. Looking forward for the third and fourth quarters of this year, we expect our average loans held for investment to increase moderately as commercial real estate, construction, and commercial lending pipelines are rebuilt. This growth will be offset some -- by continuing high levels of prepayments and the forgiveness of Paycheck Protection Program loans beginning in the fourth quarter. We expect average deposits to also increase during this period increases in both consumer and business deposits from new customer relationships and consumers continuing to increase the personal liquidity are expected to contribute to this growth. Any growth will be offset somewhat by the outflow of Paycheck Protection Program related funds as businesses use the loan proceeds for their intended purposes. We expect our net interest margin to continue increasing, assuming the current low level of market interest rates and shape of the yield curve. Our cost of deposits continues to decline. As of June 30th, our cost of deposits had declined to 51 basis points and we expect further declines as certificates of deposit mature and reprice. Lower deposit costs are expected to be somewhat offset by lower interest-earning asset yields, due to the ongoing repricing of variable rate loans. And originate new loans at current market interest rates. We expect the level of non-interest income to be stable to somewhat decreasing, through the end of 2020. While uncertain of the timing, we expect some decline in the volume and profit margin of single-family mortgage loans, from these cyclically high levels during the first and second quarters of this year. While volume and profit margins of mortgages should at some point return to historical levels, when interest rates rise or the capacity of the mortgage industry to process the surge in volume increases, we have not yet, seen any weakness. We expect non-interest expense levels to remain generally stable during this period. Elevated loan commission levels are expected to continue as long as loan volume is elevated. In fact we are currently adding a few mortgage originations personnel to assist, with the high volume. This will result in a slight increase in the number of FTE. We are carefully watching productivity and efficiency levels as we increase headcount. Overall, we continue to benefit from our profitability and efficiency initiatives. And we continue to work on further efficiencies. For example, we now expect meaningful reductions in information technology contracts to begin, in January of next year. The current environment has helped our expectation of the timing. And value of real estate-related cost efficiencies, due to the pandemic's impact on subleasing of commercial office space. We'd like to take a moment and comment, on our just-completed second quarter results. I'm very happy to report that we earned core pre-provision pre-tax income of $32 million, core return on average tangible equity of 12.2%, core return on average assets of 112 basis points and an efficiency ratio of 62.6%. I would add that, with these results we exceeded each of our profitability and efficiency targets, which we set prior to in which we previously withdrew, due to the pandemic. We've not only attained our goals earlier than forecast, but we have done so, even while adding $6.5 million to our allowance for credit losses during the quarter. And remember that our targets were originally set without any expectation, for loan loss provisions. For those of you who are able to listen to our conference call last quarter, my following remarks will sound familiar. We must acknowledge that there are a few factors to consider, as we look to both sustain and build upon, our current strong financial performance. Chiefly, our single-family mortgage business is clearly benefiting, from a very robust environment, for both volume and margin. Interest rate lock volume remained elevated during the second quarter, compared to the first quarter. And our composite profit margin increased substantially to 546 basis points, during the quarter. While history tells us that such favorable environments for mortgage banking do not continue forever. As I alluded to earlier, we see no disruption in the current strength in the cycle at this time. Next, the absolute lower level of interest rates, which has been a factor in our favorable mortgage banking performance, has also been instrumental to our achieving lower funding costs and a higher net interest margin. The current interest rate environment continues to be conducive towards further modest improvements in both measures, into the third quarter. Lastly, one of the most obvious opportunities to improve, our near-term bottom line results, is with our credit provision expense. I mentioned earlier, that we believe that we may not need significant additional loan loss provisions to address credit risk arising from the pandemic. To grasp how meaningful this could be to our earnings one, just needs to consider that the $6.5 million provision expense for the second quarter, if taxed at 20% for simplicity would equate to $0.22 per share. I would like to close my prepared remarks today. By bringing to your attention something that we've always given a great deal of attention to here at HomeStreet. That being capital allocation and growth in tangible book value per share. Fairly muted balance sheet growth at this time, combined with strong capital generation from our operations has provided us the opportunity to return capital to shareholders in a very efficient manner. We're pleased to have returned substantial excess capital to our shareholders over the past year. In addition to a new regular quarterly common dividend of $0.15 per share, which we initiated in the first quarter of this year, we have collectively repurchased over 3 million common shares during the prior 12 months, representing over 12% of total common shares outstanding. At $28.73 per share, as of June 30, our tangible book value per share has grown by 7%, since January 1st of this year, notwithstanding the economic and financial effects to date of the pandemic and the introduction of our common dividend. As evidenced by our additional $25 million share repurchase authorization announced yesterday, we are encouraged by our current operating performance and cautiously optimistic – to our foreseeable future prospects. With that, this concludes our prepared comments. Thank you for your attention today. John and I would be happy to answer any questions you have at this time.