George Gleason
Analyst · Wells Fargo. Your line is now open.
Yes. Timur, let me answer that. And since Brannon has already answered it, let me answer it and provide reinforcement, I think, to what Brannon said. And number one, as Brannon observed, we're always in a very competitive environment, except for times when everybody else pulls back from the market as we saw in the like first quarter and second quarter and early third quarters last year when everyone else sort of disappeared. For the most part, we were still out there and very reminiscent of the experiences in the Great Recession when everyone disappeared from the space, except us pretty much. So barring those exceptional times, where all the visitors leave, and we are here in the space all the time are still out there. We see a lot of competition and this comes and goes and it's from different competitors, from different angles of attack at different times. So the competition is nothing new. And as Brannon pointed out, our guys are doing a great job of finding transactions that meet our standards as evidenced from the fact we closed about twice as many loans in RESG in Q1 of this year as we did in Q1 of last year, they were just 60% smaller more or less than the loans we closed on average last year. So the guys are doing a really good job. Competition is part of our business. And as Brannon said, our expertise and ability to execute are always the distinguishing attributes that seem to win the business for us and certainly, we're going to be leaning heavily on those relationships. Our proven track record of being reliable and executing well and having expertise in the space to win business going forward. And those distinguishing characteristics have been invaluable to us in the past and winning business, and we think that they will be in the future. We do see a healthy pipeline emerging for the second-half of this year and next year and that is the source of our optimism and our experience in the space. And you asked question, was it competition based on credit or is it competition based on pricing? And I would say yes and yes to that. And you guys, we've said this multiple times over many years is we will not give on credit, we'll not sacrifice our credit quality to get business, that's absolutely non-negotiable. We will negotiate some on pricing. And as long as that achieves our minimum return standards. So yes, we are seeing some pricing pressure, and we're certainly not getting as good a yield on loans originated this year. And in the quarter we're in now, as we probably did on loans originated in the second quarter of last year when everyone was absent from this space, but they're still going to meet our return standards. And if they don't, we're not going to do them.