Scott Wylie
Analyst · Piper Sandler
All right. Thanks, Tony, and good morning, everybody. Our first quarter results reflect the continuation of the significant increase in profitability that we began generating last year. Our net income was $6 million and earnings per share of $0.74 are both more than 300% increases over our financial results in the first quarter of 2020.
We're also seeing substantial improvement in our level of returns with our ROA coming in at 1.16% for the quarter, our ROE at just about 15%, and our ROTCE coming in at 17.5%. We're still operating in far from a normalized environment, we continue to make exceptional progress on our path to becoming a high-performing institution.
Our new client acquisition activity remains very strong, which is resulting in strong inflows of low-cost deposits and further improvement in our deposit mix. Given our business model and the types of clients we target, we often get large deposit accounts that sit on our balance sheet temporarily until some of the funds are placed in investment management accounts, and we saw quite a bit of that activity in the first quarter.
Well, this creates excess liquidity that's negatively impacting our net interest margin in the short term. We believe the addition of these clients and low-cost deposits they provide and fee income they generate significantly enhanced long-term value of the franchise.
In the fourth quarter of last year, we had the highest level of loan production in our history, which left our loan pipeline relatively small to start the year. So we spent the first quarter rebuilding the pipeline as well as focusing on helping our clients access the second round of PPP funding.
Over the last few quarters, we made some adjustments in our loan pricing to try and improve our average yield on new production. However, as the first quarter progressed, we realized that other banks were continuing to be very aggressive in their pricing in order to put their excess liquidity to work.
This also ended up impacting our loan production in the first quarter. While we're going to continue to be disciplined in our underwriting, we have made some adjustments in our pricing requirements to be more competitive. We aren't going to win deals by being the lowest priced offer, but we're now in a range where our pricing is more in line with the market, and this should help enable our loan production to get back on track.
In our last earnings call, we talked about some processing constraints in our mortgage business that limited our loan production in the fourth quarter. We were able to resolve those constraints and our processing times have now returned to normal. As a result, we were able to capitalize on the continued strong demand we're seeing for residential mortgages, and this business continues to make a significant contribution to our profitability.
Our net gain on mortgage loans for the quarter was $5.2 million, which was up 20% from the prior quarter and up 109% from the first quarter of last year. From an asset quality perspective, we also continue to see very good trends.
All the COVID-19 loan mods we made last year have now returned to regularly scheduled payments and our nonperforming assets have continued to decline. And once again, we had 0 net charge-offs, which continues our long history of exceptionally low credit losses.
Moving to Slide 4. Our improved financial performance is not only driving significant earnings growth but also strong increases in our book value and our tangible book value. During the first quarter, our book value per share increased 4.1%, while our tangible book value per share increased 4.9%.
Turning to Slide 5. We've recently entered a new slide to our deck that shows our pretax earnings per share, excluding the mortgage segment. This reflects the performance of our private banking, commercial banking, trust and investment management businesses. Obviously, last year was an extraordinary year for the mortgage business, but we don't want that to overshadow the progress we've been making in the other areas. So this slide provides a better sense for the foundation that we've built that's producing a sustainable path to higher earnings and profitability. In the first quarter, our pretax earnings per share in the non-mortgage segment increased 9% from the prior quarter and was the highest level in our history.
Turning to Slide 6. We'll look at the trends in our loan portfolio. On a period end basis, the total loans held for investment increased $12.6 million from the prior -- end of the prior quarter and up $504 million or 48% year-over-year. On an average basis, including mortgage loans held for sale, our loans were up $87.4 million or 5.3% from the prior quarter. Including PPP loans, we had loan production of $144.6 million, which was the third highest quarter ever but down from a very high level that we had in the fourth quarter.
Payoffs remained higher than we've historically seen and totaled $122.6 million in the quarter. The payoffs included one $50 million payoff of a low-yielding cash secured loan that occurred right at the end of the quarter and brought down our period end balances. During the quarter, we saw the strongest growth in our non owner-occupied commercial real estate lending portfolio, while our construction loan balances were down following the payoff of projects that were recently completed.
Moving to Slide 7. We'll take a closer look at our deposit trends. Our total deposits increased to $187.9 million or 11.6% from the end of the prior quarter. As I mentioned earlier, the primary driver of deposit growth was new client relationships. We continue to see significant improvement in our deposit mix with noninterest-bearing deposits increasing to 32.8% of total deposits from 23% a year ago.
Moving to Slide 8. We'll look at our progress in building our commercial banking platform, which is providing more loan diversification and improving our deposit base by adding low-cost transaction deposits. Due to the payoffs and pay downs we saw in the quarter, commercial loans were down a bit from the end of the prior quarter, but up 45% from a year ago. Commercial deposit inflows continue to be very strong, partially related to PPP funding, and increased $236 million or 24% from the end of the prior quarter.
Turning to trust and investment management on Slide 9. Our total assets under management increased $230.3 million from the end of the prior quarter. The increase was due to a combination of improved market conditions, new client accounts and additional contributions made to existing client accounts.
Now I'll turn the call over to Julie for further discussion of our financial results. Julie?